SEATTLE, WA—After hearing of their late great-uncle Alfred Corman’s passing via his obituary in the Seattle Evening Post, siblings Andrew and Pauline Mortensen were left truly shocked: in part due to his untimely death, but more so because they had been named sole beneficiaries in his last will and testament.
“Sure, we knew old Uncle Alfred, of course,” said Andrew Mortensen in a recent interview. “But in the few times we visited him as children, there were never any signs of affection between us at all—in fact, I’d go so far as to say he didn’t much care for us.”
Their initial suspicions as to why their uncle willed them the deed to his gothic estate were not entirely unfounded: “There’s always a catch, isn’t there?” Pauline quipped, in reference to a prerequisite clause in Corman’s inheritall documents. “I knew from the start that uncle Al would pull some kind of stupid stunt with his will, probably because we sometimes pranked him as children. Nothing serious, just kid’s stuff—jumping out of a cupboard, giving a playful wedgie, balancing a bucket of boiling water over a door… harmless stuff.”
Now it seems that those childish games are being repaid in full.
Corman’s lawyer Lester Adelstein contacted Andrew and Pauline regarding the stipulatory addendum of the will, and explained it as such: “Basically party A, Andrew and Pauline Mortensen, must spend an entire nocturnal cycle within the confines of the domicile. Should they decide to, quote ‘chicken out like little bitch boys’ by vacating the property, the contract would be thereby null and void.”
When asked if such conditional circumstances were commonplace amongst inheritance cases, Adelstein responded, “I have never once seen such a condition, except in every horror movie ever, ever. These people are jackasses.”
To complicate the matter further, Corman’s estate has itself earned a reputation for being haunted, as neighboring property owners have complained of low, hideous wailing noises that could be heard clearly whenever local prostitutes visited.
“If he thinks that he can scare us with a homeless man wearing a bedsheet whom he paid in advance to knife us, then he has another thing comin’!” said Pauline. “We don’t care who thinks it’s haunted, all we know is that if we wake up dead tomorrow, it’s because of whatever Vincent Price-type traps and shenanigans he has concocted for us up there.”
Andrew, on the other hand, is more optimistic: “All in all, I think we’ll first get to bed like everything is fine; get woken up by a disturbance; reveal it as trickery; then genuinely be spooked by what appears to be an actual ghost. I don’t know, maybe someone will say something like ‘It looks as if you’ve just seen a ghost’ or some shit like that—then truly see the error of our ways whilst solving a mystery and unraveling the real story behind Alfred’s death before either ironically dying in the way Alfred did or escaping at the last minute because we learnt the true spirit of something or other.”
As of press time there has been no word of how successful their venture has been, as all phones in the surrounding area have been mysteriously unreachable. ❖
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