Martha Hill was pretty certain she was a ghost. She really couldn’t tell time anymore. But the dreams had begun and they had never stopped. It seemed she knew everybody but no one knew her. She would have to do something about that.

Often in the haze of Time, Martha felt her being fall into place like the last piece of a puzzle suddenly pictured but in that same moment felt the danger of the pieces drifting apart. Time could unravel like a kitten’s ball of yarn. History needed something to be tied to. As she pulled at her thoughts and placed Mystery next to Riddle, it was a sensation of rough scraping, like a phantom blade and the strange teasing touch of something like wind or a feather near her cheek that made Martha Hill realize where she was this Time . . .

She was sitting on the edge of a square dirt hole the size of a privy pit and half as deep. The Great Willow Oak kept watch by the side of King James’ River, shading this new human excavation just as it had shaded it’s burial some two hundred seventy five years earlier. The Oak had been a wild sapling in the weeds when the English came crashing onshore, kicking their way out of the river onto the banks of what one man would begin to call West and Shirley Hundred.

The man was Sir Thomas West, Investor and Adventurer of The Virginia Company of London. His best man, Captain Isaac Madson and twenty- five indentured servants pulled themselves up the steep bank and peered fearfully into the dark green forest. It was 1613, only four years and thirty miles upstream from the grim memories of Jamestown’s Winter of Starvation. To a man, they longed to be somewhere else.

Martha Hill Pratt, the Ghost of West and Shirley Hundred, amused herself trying to cast her shadow down into the hole, the archeological dig called SHIRLEY NORTHYARD FEATURE #50. Hard as she tried, her shadow would not show. Only in moonlight, only in the silver night could the ghost’s shadow shape prove her presence. She spent all night sometimes, telling shadow stories to herself when the moon was white and the big flat stones on the Portico floor outside the Great House finally told her she was actually there. . . moving . . . posing. . . studying herself. . . wondering what she had looked like to her Family, her Sisters, her Poor Brother, her Husband, the Others.

There was that creepy portrait in the bedroom that the Visitors loved, but it looked nothing like her, or did it?

So strange, not to know what you looked like. Ghost stuff. So far, she hadn’t slipped all the way back to the time when it had been painted. Missing memories were resting everywhere in the Great House. The smell of the artists’ paint pots, the silence of the room while she and the artist stared at each other.

But stringing memories together like a charm bracelet of wild berries had become Martha Hill Pratt’s odd hobby. Later you could taste them, one by one.

Tour guides told the story of Aunt Pratt’s Portrait. Once they had x-rayed the portrait of Aunt Pratt as they called her . . . She loved the idea of trying to x-ray a ghost. . . But the letter came back from the laboratory. . . “You see two eyes we see four, someone is painted behind her.” She knew why one had been painted over, but history always held certain secrets under others.

The story went that she was impossible to keep hung on a wall, that every night she would come loose and fall and every morning the Family would find her face down on the hard pine floor or stunned and leaning against the chair rail. She would never stay hung where they nailed her. She slipped the knot or drew out the hook. She was the Family’s odd torment. . .the mess in the morning.

But in that moment, when someone picked her up and held her at arms length as if by her framed shoulders, like a sister or a daughter, they had to look involuntarily into her strange averted eyes. While they debated which wall they should hang her to next, they never suspected that she had led them about the house by the accident of gravity.

Finally someone hung her high on a bedroom wall, facing out a window looking south . . . direct line of sight to the graves of her parents. She had gotten to the wall she needed to see the old stones leaning together in the harvest moonlight. But now she was loose from the legend’s hook . . . now she was loose in Time.

In the early afternoon’s glare, at the Archaeology Site, exactly where Martha’s shadow should have been, Ditch Witch crouched low like a cat in the corner of the hole and focused on a different shade of clay. Ditch Witch was Katya, the Archaeologist’s Assistant. She began pulling her trowel lightly over the same spot in the corner, over and over and then she stopped. It was bone.

Her first afternoon on the Plantation, hired on as Assistant Archaeologist to Stillbrook, the 1st Shovel, she prowled around the barn that was again to be the Arch Lab at Shirley.

Katya loved the smell of hot dust and oil in old barns but this one would be her new life, a laboratory to sort out the history of a Family that had lived on the land since the Days of the King.

Poking around the shelves, Katya had found racks of old maps and survey instruments. Then she pulled away a curtain of cobwebs and there it was . . . Katya had found a baseball cap still wrapped in plastic. Along with the hat, hidden in the cubby holes where old farm tools, stacks of instruction manuals and yellowed warranty papers had lain for forgotten years was the salesman’s thank-you note for the farm’s purchase of the ditching machine. The headpiece and the business card stuck in it were untouched by the squirrel and the field mouse that had pillaged everything else suitable for nesting . . . ”HOPE YOU GET A LOT OF WORK OUT OF YOUR NEW DITCH WITCH.”

Katya gave a little triumphant giggle as she looked at her first important discovery of the new job. She pulled the cap over her Russian red hair and tugged the ponytail out the back. Her new nickname was stitched in big black letters above her forehead . . . ”DITCH WITCH’. The tired ole trenching machine that usually dug up phone lines and busted water pipe never had such style.

Those were the early days. By the time Katya had booted up her computer and taken out her favorite archaeology tools everyone would grin at her hat . . . Perhaps they should have read closer. With a trowel and a hawk’s feather brush she whisked away the Dust of Time, her touch like wind from the strokes of a huntresses wing.

Martha felt as if she had seen a Ghost. She wanted to jump in the hole and help “Ditch Witch” dig. But she knew what they would find . . . she always knew. At West and Shirley Hundred, Martha Hill Pratt moved through Time one Dream into the other, eyes shifting but never blind, digging her own way through Times’ debris.

“Hey look at this! . . . a girl’s folding bone fan!” Ditch Witch stood up, pointing at broken carved bone fragments. Stillbrook, the 1st archaeologist stepped right through Martha Hill’s body, rushing to the edge of their dig. ”Get the camera out here and map it . . .We’re in the right place. . . I’m sure of it now,” he said

Martha was certain as well. A warm river breeze twisted the Old Willow Oak leaves against each other like thousands of whispered secrets and séances the Old Tree had heard and these were murmured back to anyone near its shadow.

Ditch Witch’s discovery of the bone fan. . . the teasing of the trowel she scraped with and the tickling of the hawks-feather duster she brushed with. . . had brought Martha Hill Pratt, the Ghost of West and Shirley Hundred down from the wall to walk the house and the yards again forever. Startled awake, she stared into her past, watching the care that Katya gave to someone else’s old Memory.

She felt her Family call to her from Ditch Witch’s hole. The rest of the day she watched the Visitors circle the yard.

Standing among them, unseen, as they wandered with the Fore Court map and a tour ticket, she would observe their lives, perched above them on the Portico rail or brushing against their sleeves in the yard. Once in a while there would be another Spirit that had come unknown on the trip to Shirley with them. Martha would regard the Other with a girl’s cautious curiosity, wondering what a Ghost would be charged to tour the Great House. Martha Hill Pratt would listen to the Visitors speak. If one was from England, she would rise from her perch at the first landing and slip down the stairs to join them as they shifted into the Parlor, moving in that curious halting step of the ticketed voyeur.

Martha Hill Pratt always stood closest to her sister Elizabeth’s portrait, resting over the fireplace in the Parlor. Her sister was so pretty. The oil was dried and flaking. Light, air, heat and Time were doing their slow work. Those who cleaned the house seldom saw the tiny paint chips that fell from her sister’s hair, her cheek, her bouquet.

Martha followed the English Visitors about the Great House. . . Listening to their strange new accents, hoping for someone to let slip a comment about her Family maybe somewhere still in England.

The power of memories gathered in the corners of the Old House, guarded by the spider and his web. Martha Hill passed her days sifting through rumors and recollection, watching the Generations climb and descend the Great Flying Staircase.

Moving about the minds of Family, the Staff, the, Visitors, and the River’s Soul itself, Martha Hill Pratt. . . the Ghost of West and Shirley Hundred, looked to the secrets no one had imagined. Free to drift into the Dreams and days of the Family, the Staff, the Visitors and all of the Farm’s Life.

For each of them the moment would come when Something was different about the day, Something had changed about the old place and Something was there, hinting about history that hadn’t been written.

Her fan, the broken bones, were already down in the Arch Lab, spread out in front of Ditch Witch’s computer. As she recorded the day’s treasure, the hard drive buzzed and whined. Martha Hill Pratt, the Ghost of West and Shirley Hundred stood at Katya’s shoulder, just inches behind her, leaning in, sensing the data streaming from the Young Archaeologist’s fingers. Ditch Witch’s eyes stayed fixed on the monitor, unaware, as on the counter, Martha Hill’s bone fan began to spread open in Time . . .

Ditch Witch didn’t sleep well that night. In her dream she was back in the archaeology pit. . . a Small Voice, childlike, whispered into her ear, “No . . . No . . . Dig here!’



So Began The Undiscovered Journals of Martha Hill Pratt . . . The Ghost of West and Shirley Hundred. In Time, each of the Staff, the Visitors, the Family and even the Smaller Ones there, would carry away a chapter that would come to them in the Dream State . . . like the stories in a Journal no one had found yet. . .


To Be Continued.