Richard Kauffman
Screaming staircases! Skeletons in the basement! Mysterious apparitions that appear, vanish then reappear! Things that go bump in the night! Hijacked stagecoaches! Dancing miners, and escaping into the past are just SOME of the things contained in the first three books involving a group of adventurous youngsters, ages eleven to thirteen, and spans almost fifteen months. The children share adventures that culminate with Book Four, where the old mansion, the center of all three preceding novels, is dealt a fate similar to that of the house in Edgar Allen Poe's work, The Fall of the House of Usher. In Book #3, Barbara is transported through a time portal back to 1945. While there, she changes an event, and as a consequence exposes a concurrent history that is far worse than anyone can imagine. Upon her return to her real time she finds she must go back to 1945 and reverse her actions. But in doing so, she discovers she cannot calmly change what she did and return to 1972, the year of our story. First she must travel back in time to 1863, to Gettysburg, and undo an event that caused this skewed history to first develop. Find out about these mysteries and discover what secret lies behind the Mason's Door. Book #1-The Mystery of the Silver Bottles Book #2-The Mystery of Skeleton Cave Book #3-The Mystery of the Screaming Staircase Book #4-The Secret Behind the Mason's Door Biographical Sketch Rich's first memory was living in South Fork, a small burg along the south fork of the Eel River in Northern California which, because of the disastrous winter rains of 1963-64, now exists only in those memories. Sometime before South Fork was wiped from the maps the family moved to Fairfax where they lived until the summer of '52. From there they moved to Atwater where certain job opportunities afforded a better way of life. After a six year obligation to the US Army, and attending college, he along with his wife started teaching in Christian Schools in California; the first being Valley Christian Academy in Santa Maria. That was 1972. It was then these mysteries first took shape, and he owes it all to eight little second graders who somehow found their way into the pages of these stories where four of them became main characters. These 'little ones' are now in their late forties and have probably forgotten their second grade teacher, but he will never forget them. It is to those funny little kids these stories are dedicated.
