REBECCA

As with any dish, presentation is everything. The Chokolate Morel Restaurant in Mason has been painted a mellow golden brown, like cocoa dusted on a truffle. From the quirky shelves of cookbooks in the back hall and wreaths of corks to the elegant gold-framed mirrors and bronzed ceilings to the gilt sign on the glass kitchen door: “Kitchen Cast Only Please,” the Chokolate Morel is by turns fresh-spirited, dramatic—and haunted.

            It was in the 90s outside, so I shouldn’t have been shivering with cold in the building. It may have had something to do with the restaurant review I’d read. It told about a woman being murdered in the house by her husband. That was all that I knew.

When I first visited, Pam Kennedy, one of the owners of the Chokolate Morel and Amanda Harbaugh, the dining room manager, were sitting at one of the copper-topped bistro tables in the front room. Pam, a porcelain-skinned blond with intense blue eyes, explained how the restaurant got its name. “I’m a pastry chef—so the ‘chokolate’ is for me. And my partner, Dave, really likes morel mushrooms. There’s something of both of us. And it’s easy to remember.”

            In August of 2002, Pam and Dave moved into the building and started renovations. “We began running our catering business out of the building while working on the rest of it. Then we opened the restaurant part.”

            The “restaurant part” is a wildly successful, dinner-only operation, with intimate private dining rooms on the second floor, and more mainstream seating in the formal first floor dining room decorated in rich burgundy and gold, whimsically accented with filled wine crates.

            After our introductions, Pam sent me off to tour the building.  I was drawn to the upstairs with its beautifully carved stair rail. The room to the left of the stairs was painted the same cocoa-powder color as the outside brick. As I took notes in this room I felt an unexpected pinch on my elbow.

            Later I was told that the ghost of a black man had been seen in this room. The staff thinks that it might be his apparition that made three wine glasses fly—one, two, three!—out of their rack there. According to rumor, there is an Underground Railroad tunnel that runs diagonally across Main Street to the bakery. Since another house once stood on this site, it is possible that the man, fleeing to freedom, died and was buried in that house, then had the current building built over him.

            I continued to the room to the right of the stairs. It was a bright, sunny room painted white. It seemed a comfortable place with its high ceiling and airy curtains. I got a sense of a man in the room—perhaps this had been the master bedroom? I found myself shivering again.

            The series of small dining rooms on the second floor was charming. But the server’s pantry at the end of the hall held a memory of misery. Someone was crying. She was a small woman, dark-haired, I think, and I never got a good image of her face. But I could see that she was exhausted with weeping, her face smeared with tears. There was something very young, very immature about her.  She sobbed and screwed her fists into her eyes, like a toddler. Over and over I repeated, “It’ll be all right. Everything will be fine. It’s OK,” until she wiped her eyes and smiled a wavery smile. She was looking wan, but brave when I went back downstairs.

            I hunted up Amanda, who took me down to the basement. The steps were a treacherous spiral. She showed me around the storage areas. The black man from the second-floor dining room has been seen here also. There is a small hatch cut between two of the basement rooms. Justina, one of the cooks, saw somebody walk past it, once, then a second time. Justina told me, “I thought, ‘When did we hire a black guy?’ Then I realized that we didn’t have any black guy on the staff. I came upstairs. That was it!”

I wandered into what seemed to be a dead-end workroom, but found a narrow hall leading into a tiny stone-lined room.

There I saw a man with his back to me holding a woman by the throat.  I watched in horror as he methodically bashed her head against the floor. I heard the soft crack of bone. I felt each blow in my teeth. Shuddering, I scurried for the door. Then I turned back.

“I don’t want to, but it’s my job,” I muttered to Amanda.  I had to at least try to get a photo. But the figures were gone.

            “Brrrrr,” I said, shaken.

We rejoined Pam and Jen, the wine rep, who had set out three bottles on the table. I did a double take: the brand was “Cockfighter’s Ghost,” an Australian wine named for the ghost of a horse drowned in quicksand on a doomed outback expedition. It seemed an omen.

            The ghost’s name was Rebecca, Pam explained. She had been murdered in the room to the right of the stairs.

“The white room?” I asked.

“It’s painted sage green,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows. When I dashed back upstairs for a second look, I saw that, although it had white trim, it was in fact, a rich green, not some pale pastel that I might have mistaken for white in the afternoon sunlight. Shaking my head over this, I asked, “How did she die?”

“She was bludgeoned to death with an ash log,” Pam said. I winced. Such a thing seemed utterly at odds with the lovely room upstairs.

            When I described the horrific vision I had seen in the basement furnace room Pam nodded. “That was where she ended up. The murder was quite brutal.”

Pam showed me a clipping about the murder from a local newspaper. I found more details at the Warren County Historical Society in Lebanon.  John and Rebecca McClung were an eccentric elderly couple living in Mason. John McClung was an irritable, jealous, moody man, always accusing Rebecca of vile things. He was fourteen years older than his wife, who was still lovely in her 60s. To anyone who knew Rebecca, accusations of immorality were ludicrous. She was an agoraphobic. She had not left the house in over 30 years, but sat in her room with its two walls of windows, watching. She knew all that went on in downtown Mason. Perhaps it was easier for her to retreat to her room rather than face her husband’s jealous rages every time she left the house.

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