In the Shadow of the White Rose

“I am losing my mind!” Amanda Farris whispered. But not even insanity could explain how she had dreamed, or imagined, three children playing in the creek whose names she later discovered on a gravestone in a nearby country churchyard. Stranger still, they were the children of the people who had once owned the land she and her husband, Tom, had bought and on which they were building a house. Or perhaps rebuilding would be a better term for it, since Amanda insisted the plans for her new house exactly follow the image of a weathered gray house she had seen the day she discovered this remote site on Deserter’s Creek. The county clerk insisted that the house she had envisioned had burned to the ground over fifty years ago, but Amanda knew she had seen it, and it had beckoned to her, the homeless orphan, as no house ever had.
Amanda came to believe the former owner of the house was showing her scenes from the past, all the way back to the time of the Civil War. Was the spirit of Lucretia Adams also trying to possess Amanda’s body? What ungodly deed of revenge did she want Amanda to complete for her? And how could Amanda defeat this restless spirit that should have found peace one hundred years ago?

What lay in the shadow of the white rose? A dream house or a house of horrors?