The Secret of Blossom Rise: A Ghost Story

By A L Butcher

When a young nurse accepts a job at a former military hospital she unearths a family secret and finds the spectral occupants a little too familiar.

A short ghost story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A L Butcher
• Release date: Sep 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386472513

A L Butcher

British-born Alexandra Butcher (a/k/a  A. L. Butcher) is an avid reader and creator of worlds, a poet, and a dreamer, a lover of science, natural history, history, and monkeys. Her prose has been described as ‘dark and gritty’ and her poetry as evocative.  She writes with a sure and sometimes erotic sensibility of things that might have been, never were, but could be.

Book preview

The Secret of Blossom Rise

A Ghost Story

By A. L. Butcher

All rights reserved.

A.L. Butcher ©2018, 2019, 2020

The right of A. L. Butcher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The world and the characters herein are the property of the author. Any similarity to actual persons is purely coincidental.

Base cover art © Albund | Dreamstime.com

Adapted by JM Ney-Grimm

Table of Contents

August 2015

October 1943

October 2015

Also by this Author

August 2015

RAIN FELL FOR THE THIRTIETH consecutive day on paving that had needed repairing several decades ago and the sky was iron-grey. Smoke rose around two women sheltered beneath a large red umbrella. When will it end? I’m sick of it, Georgina asked, grumbling as she looked around the rather tumbled-down buildings, and behind them, the remnants of a stone bunker now bedecked with Creeping Virginia and home to birds, and it was said a ghost or two. It was everyone knew – out of bounds. Unsafe. The ‘Keep Out’ sign was rotten and unsteady, and the dark doorway used as an occasional haunt for the smokers. But most people avoided it. With the tumbling plants, with large leaves of blood-red the place had an eerie presence, yet strangely compelling Georgina thought. Something about it made her wish to know more. In fact, that was the case with the whole hospital. Crater Hospital did not sound the most reassuring place in which to convalesce, but it gave good experience, and besides Georgina’s friend was here. The nurse had found the bustle of the city hospital very draining, very demanding. She was a quiet spirit at heart, and Arabella had told her about the intriguing place.

You’d love it, Georgie – quiet, easy-going and apparently it’s haunted. I know you like that sort of rubbish. There are a couple of positions here, the turn-over is high – but don’t let that stop you. I know how unhappy you’ve been at Central. The emails between the two were regular, and Georgina found herself lonely and in need of a change since her long-time friend had moved to the country with her husband. She’d always felt rather rootless, and though a piece of her was missing, but never why. Places called to her, often the overgrown, or remote and unloved or forgotten places and the city simply did not.

Google had told her the Crater Hospital was