A Chapter Eleven Excerpt

Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous

A True Story of a Haunting Experience

The Upham House offered a glimpse of my life’s quest, a foreshadowing of the perilous path I faced—in that daunting frontier of fear, faith, and unseen mystery mirrored in its weary walls.

“Not far from downtown Melrose, the old Phineas Upham House loomed, its plain, two-story frame a weary sentinel, watching over a town that had long outgrown it. That looming house did not welcome visitors; it merely endured them, its silence thick with untold stories. I toured it once, and the moment I stepped inside, a suffocating unease shrouded me.

The weathered clapboards, faded to a spectral brown, clung to the structure like brittle skin, each deep crack a scar etched by time’s relentless passage. The windows—vacant eyes—stared blankly at our frenetic modern world, as if unwilling to acknowledge the present, transfixed instead by a past long vanished.

The air inside carried a musty, stagnant chill, heavy with unseen echoes from the past. Even the light filtering through the warped glass felt faded, as if time and space in me had shifted beneath my feet. The stairs groaned beneath my hesitant steps, their protests echoing into the upper corridor. Was the house haunted? I could not say. Yet its stillness unsettled me, filling me with the eerie sense of being observed … measured—perhaps even remembered—from a life I no longer recalled.

Only later did I unearth its past. Built in the early 18th century, it was a relic of an austere faith. Its first inhabitants—stern neo-Puritans—sought to carve a sacred existence from the untamed wilderness. These walls knew whispered prayers recited in fervent desperation, Scripture committed to memory in the belief that its verses would cast light upon their darkness and defend against the terrors of the night.

But genuine piety offered no guarantee against the sudden terror of an untamed frontier. By candlelight, they listened for death’s approach—hooves pounding in the night, the brittle snap of a branch betraying an ambush, the hiss of fiery arrows slicing the air. They built their homes of wood, ever aware that a single spark could consume their world in flames. They prayed for peace but had to survive a war, their bloodied hands as ready to fire a musket as open a Bible.

Some remnant of that fear clung to the Upham House, a shadow even sunlight could not dispel. History pressed heavy against its walls—scenes best left untold, prayers unfinished, confessions never heard. And as I think back now, the dread I felt as a boy did not belong to the house alone.

My own childhood felt like a frontier—bewildering, perilous, no less haunted than those timbered halls. I too lived in a world that offered no map for an old soul dropped into a modern age that had forgotten mystery. The Upham House did not just remind me of other people’s fears; it mirrored my own—an inner wilderness where I too listened for ambushes in the dark, prayed for safety, and longed for a language to make sense of the unseen. Perhaps that is why, when I first crossed its threshold, I felt as though the house was not merely tolerating me, but recognizing me … as though it knew my frontier and claimed me as its kin.

I felt the first stirrings of what would become my life quest.“

From the memoir-in-progress, nearing publication:
Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous
—a spiritual epic for truth-seekers, contemplative mystics, and all who long for God.