The Mansion: Overview

The Mansion is a much-historied and just as un-documented place of ill respute. Seemingly built on cursed, but fertile lands, what was once a lonely hermitage on the hill has grown through successive owners into a huge, sprawling complex. And still, it’s hunger grows. Called “Strawcliff Point” by the official history books, those that live in it’s shadow prefer to call it “The Manor”, or, more benevolently, “The Mansion of Lanterns”.

The Grounds:

The grounds consist of over six hundred acres, spreading up and down a rocky coastline truncated by a large cliffy mesa. On one rather large abutment into the frothing waters below sits a huge, Gothic mansion. Three stories high along the two wings, and five stories high in the center building. It chevrons out towards the ocean, a great arrow leading away from the mainland.  A meandering driveway creeps out from it, through the grassy lawn and to the outer perimeter of the estate proper, where it passes through the one, and only break in a magnificently structured stone and masonry wall two stone high. After that, the road disappears through teh thick, old-growth forest, passing past the occasional foundation or well head, what was once a small bustling village now just bones and rocks. 

The forested areas, and indeed, the manor itself, seem plagued by a particularly phosphorous fungus, that glows at night. Whole trees have been swaddles in it, and at certain times of the year, on a clear, windy night, it seems as if the cliff side is swarming with lanterns. Though the manor itself is no longer  in active use, ships at sea have grounded on the outcroppings below the cliff, claiming to have been directed in by the light house. However, no light house has ever existed* on that site, and certainly there is none there today. 

History of the Mansion

Up to the late 1600s.

	It should be noted that the entire area (referred to as “The Crescent”) south of the Crackspine Crags was shunned by the local Equany’va Indian tribes in the times leading up to colonization by the European countries and species. 

The peninsula that the Manor now lays on was settled in originally in the late fifteen hundreds. Situated on the northern part of North America’s eastern seaboard, the area is fairly isolated. The rocky abuttment that sinks down into the ocean jsut after where the Manor is located, rises steeply further back, forming a crescent that is hard to navigate over, around, or through. While towns only ten or twenty miles away on the other side of the crags prospered and flourished from their ability to network and communicate with each other, the small villages on the southern side were not quite as lucky. 

	The first known name of the house was the “House of Dauthaz”. While there is no official record of how Dauthaz came to the area, as the entire region had been up until very recently been inhabited only by ‘natives’, there is a record from another colony, much much further to the south, of a badger family consisting of a father, mother, and two children. It was reported that the mother and father had been stoned to death in 1599, and there is no mention of any other badgers in the area until 1626 in Jamestown, Virginia. 

	Dauthaz is reported to have been seen once, and only once, viewed by a Miss Horpenthia Nursewillows, a young filly who had seen “A great and gnarled brock” leaving the house of Joseph Winthrop in the nearby town of Gaithwillows. 

	It is rumored that the first ‘settlement’ of the wooded crescent just south of the crags was because of this very meeting. Archeology digs at the abandoned and overgrown cemetary have revealed skulls that match, skull for skull, the list of citizens banned, excommunicated, or sentenced to death from that town. Perhaps Dauthuz and Winthrop came to an agreement in that house that fateful day? It seems certain now that Dauthuz was smuggled or given those souls deemd unfit for ‘modern society’. In turn, Dauthuz would guide boats and ships around the crag, walking the same path through fog and darkness, a single bright light held aloft. The light could be seen far out onto the water, glowing, it is said, with supernatural clarity. When safe, boats would be led to the north, towards the nearest town. At night, they would be led south, to where the crescent beach formed a cove from stormy waters. Wether it was Dauthuz, or one of his ‘given men’, for he only took in men, is not sure. 

	The fate of Dauthuz, and those doomed souls, remains unclear. A particularly stormy night had given a fisherdog named Boxfitz a boat teeming with fish. Rowing back to land, he reported that there was no lantern to be seen. His boat run aground of some rocks, and he had watched “in great consternation” as his catch slithered from the gash in his boat, back into the dark waters of the ocean. It was only the next morning that he was picked up by a fellow fisherdog, and the two of them rowed south to investigate. The huts and shanties that were presumably lived in by the ‘given men’ were empty, crushed as if under a great weight. Dauthuz’s house, too, stood empty. According to the men, standing in the house, they could feel a trembling in their bones, and could hear the earth beneath them “low and growl like a hungry beast”.	

During the King Borok War in the late 1600s, where Colonists and Indians in that region were fighting quite bloodily, the House of Dauthuz was found to be inhabited once more. Gaithwillows, being vulnerable to attack from land and being important to the area because of it’s port, was attacked several times in 1675, and was eventually abandoned. Several of the colonist’s houses were found marked with a symbol of a crescent moon. The local indians’ aversion to the area was probably well known, and it is thought that the houses were marked by the residents shortly before they fled to the “Sanctuary” of the Crescent. Perhaps a ship was there to board them and take them somewhere safer, or perhaps they were killed before they made it. A group of twenty men, armed with muskets, went to the Crescent to bring back any of the fledded Gaithwillowians.

There was no trace of them in the main Crescent, but, as according to the lone survivor of the ambush, there was a light glowing in the house of Dauthuz. However, on the way up the trail, the men were attacked by ‘unseen forces’ that could not be traced, taken away and not found again. The top of the hill ‘smelt of brimstone’, and the perpetrator of the entire war,  the chief of the Ekkiny’va, nicknamed King Borok,  was “found in a bloody trance, laying inside the damned hut of Dauthuz”. He was summarily shot, and a roar came up from the ground, a roar so great that the teller of the tale, a wolf named Wallingford, was struck deaf for three weeks afterwards. The body of the fallen chief, and the men carrying it, were ‘swallowed by the earth’, and Wallingford fled, alone, to the boat. 

1700s: Kasteel van Slechtebuur

By the late 1600s, the Crescent was being repopulated again. Europe had changed some laws around to make the free practice of religion harder to accompolish, and the Americas were a fresh start. Perhaps by happenstance, perhaps by intent, a small Dutch vessel landed on the isolated Crescent, and forty men and women got busy making a small village for themselves. They named this village Jerrick. There was only one scribe in Jerrick, who kept a fastidious log of the goings on of the village. First of all, it seemed that only male children could be conceived on the soil, and only male children born on it. The town’s sole midwife was sent away after the fourth female child had been stillborn. The male children grew strong and sturdy, though,a fact reflected in the architecture of the town. Perhaps due to the cheap and easy labor,  most of the houses in the town were nearly professionally made, with stone foundations, well heads, and functional chimneys. Boats were once again helped to the north by the running, skipping youths of the town, and fish harvests were just as good. 
  
	Soon the town elected a leader, Counsel James Everwort. The bull took up residence in the Dauthuz house, and a second floor was added, as well as two more rooms in the back, and a porch beyond that. It was revealed to the scribe during the housewarming party that the Counsel had, that the bull had discovered during the construction of the house that the original parlour of the original house had had a false floor, that could be pulled up. Below is a passage of the scribe’s transcriptions:
	
	“Below the houfe, Cnfl Everwort faid, were wonderf
	 beyound our kin of underftanding.
	He faid that we would all be wealthy, one day, and 
	that the Crefcent we lived in would be the Jewel of
	the new empire. 
	When I afked what he meant, we were interrupted by
	Mrf Jonaf Brackberry, who’f hufband went miffing
	juft laft week.”

After this date, the town of Jerrick came under increasingly hard times. A spate of disappearances of the original colonists of the town led to suspicion and confusion. Instead of adressing the disappearances, the Counsel seemed intent on exploring the caves beneath his house. The youth were put to work, expanding the house. More of the townsfolk disappeared, including the pastor of the village. The last excerpt of the scribe’s writings indicated that on June 7th, 1745, the men of the town awoke to find not a single female among them, and that they planned to take “The Keep” en masse. It is not known what state of building the Dauthuz house was in at this point, or if the attack on the keep was successful. As the scribe had no further entries, it can be assumed that he did not survive the attack.

(It is said that the scribe himself had a son who had kept a second set of scribes from his father, detailing his work in the house, but no record of these scriptions have ever been reported to have been found.)

No records of trade with the Crescent can be found after this point, in any records of the local towns, for over a century.

The 1800s: The Robber Baron
 
It was 1862 before the Crescent was again used by any recorded members of society. A shipping tycoon and robber baron by the name of Phillip Longrudder purchased the land from the government under the Morrill Act. Presumably the land was to be used for a college, and construction was immediately begun to build the structure found at the top of the hill into the “Longrudder Nautical School”. The crescent of beach was stripped and built back up into a proper dock, and designs were laid out for a lighthouse to be built at the apex of the cliff the house was perched on. Many of the smaller houses used by the town of Jekket were refurbished and re-inhabited by the ‘students’ of the school, as dorm rooms. Longrudder’s accounting books were never able to be studied, however there is no sign that the college used any teachers or employers. Many of the ships that docked unloaded building supplies from further up or down the coast, and it was reported that many of the students had, under the stress of Academic Life, impulsive dropped out of the college to join the crews of the ship. Regardless, the college had an exorbitant turn over rate, with over thirty percent of the students leaving,
 dropping out, or graduating, never to be found again. Still, though, more of them showed up, ushered to the ‘elite’ school by newly-wealthy New England colonists hopeful to see their sons grow into captains and merchants. With those new students, came new money, money which helped fund the Baron’s exploits.

At this point the “College” consisted of over a hundred separate rooms, spread out along two great wings in a grand Chevron pointing due south east, towards where the sun rose each morning from the Atlantic. These rooms consisted of everything from Banquet halls to Ballrooms. Cigar rooms jostled for space between wine cellars  underneath, and above, grand libraries and studies, billiards rooms and studies and dens. .At this point the manor had three floors, and the entire upper floor consisted of bedrooms, some single, and others interlaced together with bridges, passageways, or open walls.  Whether or not the previous building(s) had been destroyed, refurbished, or integrated into the main building was not disclosed, but no visible trace of them remained.

This is also the time that the stone wall that seperated the manor from the rest of the Crescent was erected. Much discussion continues today as to the reason behind one part of a small, isolated community would try to wall itself off from another. Unfortunately, Baron Longrudder never explained. His college was shut down in 1902, after his strange disappearance. The most common explanation for his disappearance at the time was vengeance at the hands of an impoverished farming family that had lost not one but five proud stallions to the activities that went on within those great stone walls. While the family has never been able to account for their presence that night, April 13th 1902, it could also be said that after reports from the surviving students revealed what had gone on, there was not any significant inquiry into it.

Investigation into the subterranean levels of the school revealed a great network of caverns, naturally formed, that would flood and drain with the ocean’s tide. The force of the water was great enough to pull several of the investigating policemen into the caverns below, leaving no trace of them. It would seem, at last, that the disappearances over the last century or so had been revealed. 

The 1900s: The Railroad

After the college proper was shut down, the local populace reclaimed the land for their own. The Manor itself was ignored, shunned, and a no trespassing ordinance was put into effect for entire top of the abutment. The docks down below, however, were being used very frequently, and the small village became a sort of alcove of artists and poets, a sort of rennaissance. While the Crescent itself enjoyed this prosperity, the Manor was quietly being reinhabitted. 

By 1921, Dr. Jonas Pittridge had moved to the house, with his four sons, as recorded in the family bible left in the servants’ bedroom in the south-west wing of the house. Left behind was his ailing wife, who had stayed with her two sisters in Boston, Massachusetts. Using his own rowboat, his four sons would fetch supplies for him from the nearby town of Berkwitch (Formerly Gaithwillows). Dr. Pittridge was attempting to turn a former sun room in the southern wing into a room that his sickly wife could stay, peacefully, to fight off her affliction of the Consumption. His journal recorded the events, giving some insight into the structure of the house back then, but it is generally considered to be inconsistent with the Manor as it is built today. The journal discusses things in the Manor; noises and smells that seem off place, and the disappearance of first one, and then another of his sons. A third son was wounded during the final refurbishment of the room, which the doctor seems to imply is the ‘final payment’ that he agreed to on entering the house. While the nature of the wound is not discussed, it should be noted that the third son, Cameron Blake, is not reported as ever having sired children. When the doctor’s wife, Lady Tessa Pittridge, finally came to stay, the journal reports a remarkable healing effect that the sun-room seemed to have on her. All went well for three years, until the fourth son, who had been staying and tending to the by-now elderly parents, also disappeared. The journal ends at that. Wether the journal is real or counterfeit can not be proven. There is a Dr. Jonas Pittridge who held practice until 1918, but all records indicate that he stopped practicing due to his wife’s death in 1917. 

There has been no official activity on the house since then. It is currently owned by the Crescent Land Preservation Historical Society, which is in charge of one, and exactly one property, which is this one.