I pulled it out and cradled it in my lap. It was thick and dusty. The cover read: Attica Falls. I opened it, my excitement mounting as I flipped through the pages. It had a full chapter on Gottfried Academy, which was more information than I had ever seen on the school, and it had pictures. It must have been shelved in the wrong section accidentally. Satisfied, I tucked it under my arm and brought it to the register.

Mr. Porley coughed into his arm. “Interesting choice,” he said in a gruff smoker’s voice.

“I’m new to the East Coast.”

“Up at the Academy, I’m guessing?” he asked, taking me in. He had large hairy hands and wore suspenders, as if he had been either a fisherman or lumberjack in some former life.

I nodded.

He opened the book cover and charged me ten dollars, half of the price asked. “Seems you have some luck about you. This one’s out of print,” he said, before putting it in a paper bag.

I thanked him and left with Nathaniel at my heels.

With nothing better to do, we walked to the end of the street until we reached an abandoned house. It was white and crooked, with a wraparound porch and pillars that looked half eaten by termites. I tested the steps with my foot to make sure they wouldn’t collapse before Nathaniel and I sat down. A few groups of students ambled past us, chatting and sipping cups of something hot and steaming. Down the street, Professor Bliss was smoking a cigarette outside the general store. I opened the book and flipped through it, skipping over the chapters on the history of Maine, the founding of Attica Falls, and the natural wonders of the White Mountains, until I found what I was looking for. Chapter 7: Gottfried Academy.

I began to read while Nathaniel looked over my shoulder. Some of it I already knew—the Academy’s role in the Revolutionary War, its transformation from a religious to a secular school...but just when I was beginning to accept that there was nothing more to Gottfried than a superficial history, one page caught my eye. On the bottom right was a photograph, a normal black-and-white image of Gottfried Academy, and one that I normally wouldn’t have glanced at twice if it hadn’t been for the familiar face staring back at me.

“That’s...that’s my grandfather,” I said in awe.

Nathaniel pushed his glasses closer to his face and squinted. “Which one?”

I pointed to a tall broad-faced man in a suit and vest. His hair was darker then, his glasses thinner. He was standing in front of the Gottfried gates with a school scarf draped around his neck, smiling and looking almost nothing like the dry curmudgeon I’d encountered last summer. The caption read: Headmaster Brownell Winters, 1974. Below it was a newspaper article, reprinted in the book from The Portland Herald.

The Gottfried Curse

July 7, 1989

By Jacqueline Brookmeyer

After nearly one hundred calamity-free years, a fire ravaged the forest surrounding Gottfried Academy, the preparatory school located near Attica Falls. The school is known not only for its stringent classical academics, but for its proclivity for disaster. Since its founding in 1735, Gottfried Academy has been plagued by a horrific and unexplainable chain of tragedies, including disease, natural catastrophe, and a string of accidents of the most perverse and bizarre nature. These recurring events have brought attention to Gottfried Academy, attracting a series of enigmatologists who have attempted to understand the causes and patterns behind the disasters. All of them died under suspicious circumstances, until 1789, when the disasters stopped. But has this phenomenon, coined locally as “the Gottfried Curse,” truly been buried?

It began in 1736 with an outbreak of the measles and mumps. The school was originally founded as a children’s hospital by Doctor Bertrand Gottfried, who attempted to ward off the epidemic. Despite his efforts, more than one hundred children perished. Rumor has it that the doctor built catacombs beneath the hospital grounds to bury the children and contain the infection. Three years later, Bertrand Gottfried mysteriously died. His body was found in the lake by a groundskeeper, his death apparently caused by heart failure.

I paused and stared at the words. Heart failure. “It can’t be,” I murmured. “What?” Nathaniel asked over my shoulder.

“Bertrand Gottfried died of a heart attack. Just like my parents.”

“He was old,” Nathaniel said. “It’s not the most bizarre way to die.”

“It is if they find you in a lake.”

“Maybe he was swimming when he had the heart attack,” Nathaniel offered.

“Or maybe it wasn’t a heart attack.”

“Turn the page.”

Though none of the catacombs were ever discovered, they are purported to have been the beginnings of the subterranean tunnels that still run beneath the premises. All previous headmasters, including the newly incumbent Headmistress Calysta Von Laark, have refused to comment on this matter.

After the death of Bertrand Gottfried, the hospital stopped accepting new patients and closed its doors to the outside world. For a decade, no one came in or out, save for a weekly groundskeeper, who delivered groceries and supplies from the local general store. Yet, just as suddenly as the hospital closed, it reopened. This time, as a school. The head nurse at the time, Ophelia Hart, ascended as the first headmistress. She named it “Gottfried Academy,” after its founder.

Over time, the infirmary’s tragic history was forgotten, and students began to filter in. The disasters continued like clockwork. The unexpected collapse of the building that is now the theater, in 1751; the nor’easter of 1754; the tuberculosis epidemic of 1759; and the food-poisoning incident in 1767. Ten years later, the school was partially destroyed during the Revolutionary War, which was followed by a series of disasters culminating in the chemistry lab accident of 1789.

But what was origin of the curse, and is it really over? Some believe that it’s the area itself. Others believe it was Bertrand Gottfried. “Everything started to happen after he died,” local Esther Bancroft said. “He wasn’t a doctor, he was a sinner. Lord knows what he did to those children. And then they killed him, and his soul is trying to tell people to stay away. Stay away.” But others blame the curse on Gottfried’s first headmistress.

“It was that woman,” local Hazel Bamberger, 84, claims. “That nurse that started the whole god-damn school. Ophelia. She was with that Doctor Bertrand, not like normal doctors and nurses are, but closer. After he died, she became the first headmistress, and that’s when everything started. That’s why it’s always couples that die. She’s seeking her revenge on people in love.”