Welcome to 'Ghost Hunt.' All of the caches in this series are connected to the Hall-Mills double homicide of 1922. You can learn more about the project, and listen to all of the connected audio plays, at thinkeryandverse.org/ghost_hunt.
The following excerpt is found in The Church of Saint John the Evangelist: A Parish History:
Quote: “The autumn of 1922 was a most unhappy one for the whole parish, but the Vestry went to work immediately to secure a new Rector ...” [Editors’ note: to replace the one they’d murdered]. “... By December of that year, the surviving leaders of the church were able to announce the election of the Reverend J. Mervin Pettit. Born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1888, Mr. Pettit began his career as an accountant, and then entered the Church; for the three years preceding his rectorship at St. John’s he had served several parishes in Texas, the last of which was located in Bay City, an oddly named small town located in the coastal plains and marshes between Houston and Corpus Christi.”
On November 14th, 1922, two months after the murder, J. Mervin Pettit found himself waiting for the northbound train at Sunset Station in San Antonio. With some amount of guilt and trepidation, he had decided to abandon the (straightened) stability of his parish in Bay City for the uncertainty of a possible appointment in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Apparently, he preferred working for a ‘murder church’ in the northeast to just about any church in Texas. The following monologue was reconstructed using Pettit’s travel receipts and rubbish—being a former accountant, he seems to have kept everything.