Luella Miller – A Chilling Classic Short Story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Don McDonald (0:13)

Welcome, I'm Don McDonald.

In this haunting story, we step into a village haunted not by ghosts, but by a woman who never raised a hand yet left a trail of death behind her.

Was it charm? Was it witchcraft?

Or something far more unsettling?

The power of a person who draws in others until they waste away.

This story's terror lies not in apparitions, but in the way ordinary people can destroy without ever seeming to try.

Here now is Luella Miller by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

Close to the village street stood a one-story house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. She had been dead for years, yet there were those in the village who, in spite of the clearer light which comes on a vantage point from a long past danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard from their childhood.

In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller.

Young people even would stare with a shudder at the old house as they passed, and children never played around it as was their want around an untenanted building.

Not a window in the old Miller house was broken. The panes reflected the morning sunlight in patches of emerald and blue, and the latch of the sagging front door was never lifted, although no bolt secured it.

Since Luella Miller had been carried out of it, the house had had no tenant except one friendless old soul who had no choice between that and the far-off shelter of the open sky.

This old woman, who had survived her kindred and friends, lived in the house one week. Then one morning no smoke came out of the chimney, and a body of neighbors a score strong entered and found her dead in her bed.

There were dark whispers as to the cause of her death, and there were those who testified to an expression of fear so exalted that it showed forth the state of the departing soul upon the dead face.

The old woman had been hale and hearty when she entered the house, and in seven days she was dead. It seemed that she had fallen a victim to some uncanny power.

The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity against the sin of superstition. Not a soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard the tale, would seek shelter beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of superstitious fear. There was only one person in the village who had actually known Luella Miller. That person was a woman well over eighty, but a marvel of vitality and un-extinct youth. Straight as an arrow with the spring of one recently let loose from the bow of life, she moved about the streets and she always went to church rain or shine. She had never married and had lived alone for years in a house across the road from Luella Miller's.

The woman had none of the garrulousness of age, but never in her life had she ever held her tongue for any will save her own, and she never spared truth when she essayed to present it. She it was who bore testimony to the life, evil though possibly wittingly or designedly so, of Luella Miller and to her personal appearance. When this old woman spoke, she had the gift of description. Although her thoughts were closed in the rude vernacular of her native village, no one could seem to see Luella Miller as she had really looked. According to this woman, Lydia Anderson by name, Luella Miller had been a beauty of a type rather unusual in New England. She had been a slight, pliant sort of creature, as ready with a strong yielding to fate and as unbreakable as a willow. She had glimmering lengths of straight fair hair which she wore softly looped round a long lovely face. She had blue eyes full of soft pleating, little slender clinging hands, and a wonderful grace of motion and attitude. Luella Miller used to sit in a way nobody else could if they set up and studied a week of Sundays, said Lydia Anderson, and it was a sight to see her walk. If one of them willows over there on the edge of the brook could start up and get its roots free of the ground and move off, it would go just the way Luella Miller used to. She had a green shot silk she used to wear, too, and a hat with green ribbon streamers and a lace veil blowing across her face and out sideways, and a green ribbon flying from a waist. That was what she came out bright in when she married Erastus Miller. Her name before she was married was Hill. There was always a sight of L's in her name, Married or Single. Erastus Miller was good-looking, too. Better-looking than Luella. Sometimes I used to think that Luella wasn't so handsome, after all. Erastus just about worshipped her. I used to know him pretty well. He lived next door to me, and we went to school together. Folks used to say he was waiting on me, but he wasn't. I never thought he was, except once or twice, when he said things that some girls might have suspected meant something. That was before Luella came here to teach at the district school.