The Trouble at Pinelands

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. At Fort House, the gloomy old McGregor mansion shadowed by pines, a sleepless visitor is first rattled by what sounds like chains, crashing dishes, and a shrill scream in the night. The household insists these are the doings of a "poltergeist," but the eerie disturbances only deepen the sense that something far stranger than a prank is at work. Dorothy McGregor, outwardly composed yet privately strained, reveals that the manifestations have plagued the family for over a year, since her mother's death and Aunt Mary's arrival. As the morning unfolds, the haunting gives way to family friction, comic domestic chaos, and mounting fear. Aunt Mary, a paralyzed spiritualist with saintly manners and a manipulative streak, turns every inconvenience into a moral burden, while Dorothy longs to escape the house through marriage to Lewis Parker. But Lewis's confinement and a suspected murder plunge the story into a sharper mystery. Enter Doctor Somers, a coolly brilliant physician-lawyer who begins dissecting the town's false stories, doubting the constable's account, and probing the possible role of Ralph Satterfield. What begins as a ghost story becomes a tense blend of supernatural unease, family melodrama, and courtroom suspense.