New Zealand Ghosts & Other Haunts

Stauf Stevens

When you got right down to it, no one really liked Doctor Emmerson Brawn. It wasn't that he was a bad person. He never spoke ill of anyone, nor did he treat anyone unfairly. His skills were efficient and his practice clean and cheap. But there was something unmistakable about him;
perhaps it was just that people felt uncomfortable in his presence.

The doctor ran a small practice out of his home, and for a long time was the only practice around town. As time wore on, the towns grew and eventually became incorporated into the greater nearby city. Yet Dr. Brawn's practice continued. As his age and the times wore on, he began to
lose clientele to the hospitals and clinics of the city. His prices stayed cheap, he survived off of a stream of steady clientele. Made up of the older folks of his neighbourhood, people who were too old to make the long drive to the city and for whom the doctor's inexpensive and careful treatments were sufficient to cure the aches and ills of the elderly.

The doctor was near to retirement when John and Elizabeth Mayer moved to the neighbourhood. A young couple from the mid-west, they were big city folk who had moved to the town to try their luck. As most young couples are, they had arrived with little more than the wishes of their family and a few pieces of furniture to their name. Being poorer folk, they welcomed the
services of Doctor Brawn for his inexpensive treatments.

John was an educated man who had studied law at university and who was hoping to make a name for himself here in a smaller town than Boston, where he'd grown up. His wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter of a local artist who'd hardly given his blessings to the couple. Elizabeth's father had wanted her to marry a rich, social man rather than a poor; however well educated,
dreamer like John Mayer. Nevertheless, the couple wed and moved out of Boston as soon as possible to try and make a future for themselves.

Doctor Brawn was near to seventy at the time the couple moved to town. His elderly composure and gentlemanly bearing did not change the couple's opinion of him. Like the others in town, they too felt a little uncomfortable around him, but unlike the more polite townsfolk, who had
lived with the good doctor all their lives, the newcomers did not feel themselves held back. They gossiped openly about the doctor and how he made them and others feel so cold. John ridiculed him for his age among the neighbours and was disdainful of him in his presence. Being educated and from the city, John felt himself above the workings of a small-town doctor.
Elizabeth admonished her husband to leave the poor man alone, but John merely laughed. Little of this, of course, fell on the doctor's ears.
Elizabeth was worried about what the doctor, who had done no one any harm, would think, and John was too careful of his reputation. He was arrogant, but polite, whenever he went to the doctor's home.

For a while, it seemed that all would be well. The newcomers settled in as best they could and John took a job in town. But the couple did not realise their dreams so quickly. Money was hard to come by. John had settled them into a house in the doctor's neighbourhood, an enjoyable old
house that was certainly well beyond their means. In time, they found themselves at odds to pay the bills. In order to keep on living, they took loans, and established accounts at the local stores, promising on credit to pay when money came in. Most were agreeable with that, feeling that the
young man's talents would soon come to use in the city. The only person who did not agree to the idea of accepting payment at a later date was the doctor. He maintained that his practice relied on his customers paying right away, else he could not afford to purchase new supplies.

John was not quite as bright a man as people thought. He felt himself far above the doctor. This would prove to be his undoing. He decided that his credit was as good as his word, and that if the doctor could not accept that, then he would simply not pay until he was ready. When they went for medicine or a check-up, they wrote checks that immediately bounced. They promised to rectify the situation, but never paid. The doctor was becoming angry. Elizabeth urged her husband to pay, but John assured her that the old doctor would eventually comply and offer the couple credit. What the doctor did instead was declare that he would no longer treat the Mayers in his practice. He also sent their names to other doctors in town with the news that the Mayers were bad creditors and should not be treated without cash up front.

John was furious at this declaration. Despite Elizabeth's protests, he stormed to the doctor's office and yelled at him. Neighbours said they could hear John's voice loudly in the house for over two hours. John was in a rage, obsessed with the idea that the doctor was incompetent and that his age had brought senility. He went to the press with the story that the doctor had rendered bad practice due to his advanced age. There was, of course, no founding to the story. The locals were as quiet as ever, and the press had nothing to report. The doctor said nothing throughout the
proceedings.

Finally John quieted down and got over his rage. Despite his problems, his obvious talents were gaining him prestige in his field and money began to flow more frequently. John consoled Elizabeth that they could pay for medical service when they needed it.
That happened more often than they had expected.

Elizabeth became pregnant, and John lamented the expenses this was to bring. By then, Elizabeth had begun to re-think her decision to marry John Mayer. He no longer seemed the young dreamer that she had known. However, she was pregnant and in her family, divorce was out of the question. Still, she loved John and was certain that all would turn out for the best.
John sought out a doctor to help counsel his wife through the birthing process, but most had been warned of their tendency to not pay and at the very least, respected the old doctor more than the upstart newcomers. Upset that John's rashness would hurt her physically, Elizabeth went to see doctor Brawn to apologise. She promised him that she would pay right away if he would help her. She had never given birth before, of course, and was worried that because of her very petite frame, that complications might arise in the birth. Reluctantly, the doctor agreed.

When John found out, of course, he was furious. He told Elizabeth not to go to Dr. Brawn. He told her they would find someone else. Elizabeth reminded him that there *was* no one else, and that at least for her sake, they should pay him. John tried to suggest that they didn't need a doctor
for the birth, but Elizabeth was too scared. She knew that John only suggested that because he himself wasn't the one at risk. She did not feel like having her life or her health, or that of the baby's endangered because of her husband's hard-headedness. She conspired to take the money
when John was at work and go to the doctor herself.

The day of the birth arrived and Elizabeth arranged to meet the doctor that evening. He told her sternly to remember to bring what she owed. She arrived at the doctor's late that evening and already in contractions.
Neighbours told what happened after.
John arrived at the house shortly after nine, having gone home and expecting his wife there and waiting for him to take her to hospital, where he had decided that if she were obviously in labour, they would deliver the baby and care for it and her without question. When he got home, he
realised where she had gone. Neighbours said that they saw John entering the doctor's house with a knife in his hand.

There is little mention of what happened next. The papers told only of a murder, but spoke nothing of the details. They were afraid of alarming the townspeople of the truth, and of attracting a horde of media-types in from the big cities to their small town. The police chief's story, however, eventually made the rounds in the pubs and street corner gossip.

The police arrived at the doctor's home two hours later, after the neighbours reported what they had seen of John. The doctor stood at his table. Elizabeth was on it. John was on the floor. Neither of the couple was alive. The doctor had apparently shot John in the stomach and left him there. While he lay dying on the floor, his blood pooling all over the room, the doctor had methodically tortured and killed Elizabeth, carving her and the baby inside her to pieces with his surgical tools. The doctor had thrown her carved organs at John, smacking him in the face with them and forcing them down his throat as he lay dying. The police spoke of the doctor, as a man possessed, with eyes wider than the skull would seem to permit. He held his surgical knife in his hand with grim and surreal strength as the police battered down the door, finding him with Elizabeth's heart in his hand.

The police had shot the doctor dead on sight.

The story was described over and over and eventually all manner of lore crept into the tale. People began to suggest that the doctor was never human at all, but a devil in disguise. Others say that John had killed his wife and that the doctor had been trying to save her but had been mistaken for the murderer. We may never really know. But for many, the dark feeling
that everyone seemed to have had for the doctor in life made more sense now that this ghastly tragedy had taken place.

The doctor's house was destroyed and a generation came and went, and the youth of the city a generation beyond that forgot about the doctor.

As the city grew, all manner of people came to live there. Odd things began to be reported, but in a large city, odd things are the norm. The place where the doctor's house once stood now formed part of a public garden which extended back to a park through which people strolled day and night.
In this park, odd things began to be reported. Couples strolling through the park at night reported hearing voices in their heads. Never anything clear just voices arguing and screaming in distant, far-off tones.
Sometimes it would be scarcely louder than a whisper. Other people reported hearing a sound that followed them through the park. They would hear a sound as of a knife cutting through flesh and bone, and then nothing. They would stop and turn, but there would be no one around. But the most feared thing that people saw there was something that came to be called the Red Mist.

What the Mist was, no one knew. It has only appeared a few times, and people die when it does. The park is a large place. Muggings do happen. Not at all often, but violence is no stranger to that, or any other large park of the city. The first time the mist came, onlookers reported a man "fleeing on foot from what seemed like a pink fog". The man, a local native of the city, was found later in his home, having slashed his own throat.

The second time it appeared it was to a couple from in town. The woman screamed and fled the Red Mist. Her lover cowered on the ground and said that he lay there while the Red Mist, like a roving red fog, dissipated.
The woman had fled in terror and had run out in front of a moving car. The man was held in custody, for more people believed that he had chased her than his story that she had been pursued by an ethereal evil. The man stayed silent the whole time charges and accusations were laid against him. When he was allowed to go home, he silently left. Police later found him at home dead, where he'd hanged himself.

In all, the Red Mist has appeared over twenty times, though no stories of it have appeared recently. The town in question in the story is alternately told as being in either England or one of the Eastern States of America, lending an air of suspicion to the tale that no exact places can be named. Those who study folklore claim that the residents who know merely wish to keep the secret of the true location of the Mist sightings hidden, lest they frighten people away. Newspapers can do no more than report a suicide, a slaying, or an accident. It is difficult to trace such deaths to a supernatural evil. The exact nature of the Red Mist is unknown, merely that death and madness always follow its arrival. It is, perhaps, the one supernatural phenomenon on earth that no one tries too hard to find! People who have heard the stories have, over time, mixed up the story of the Mist and the doctor with all sorts of fairy tales and lore. For the most part, such confusion was encouraged, perhaps to keep the truth shrouded in romanticism and speculation, perhaps to keep would-be ghost seekers safe from the folly of encountering the malevolence. Whether the Red Mist is the spirit of the mad doctor or a vengeful John or a tortured Elizabeth, or something else entirely, no one knows.

And no one wants to find out.
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Shanachie