There's a strange house on my block

There's an old house across the street from my mother's place, so old in fact that some years ago it was turned into a museum - a souvenir of colonial Nova Scotia. One of the stories told about the place was that a servant who had worked for the master of the household was murdered one early nineteenth century evening. The killer(s) then sunk his body into the pond that lies just inside the iron gates, which at the time had skirted the property. Evidentally, so it goes, the spirit or whatever life remained of the murdered man was not at all pleased with his fate and he grew quite restless and since his physical death has continued to torment late night visitors to the property, whether they were welcome or not.

From my mother's living room window you can see right into the pond, however this time of year the pond itself indiscernible from the surrounding hills - it's all a vacant white. So one night my sister and I had stayed up retelling the various versions of the story we had heard in our childhood, and one of the versions my sister had told me sounded unmistably similar to the legend of sleepy hollow, when I had pointed this out to her she took to calling the murdered man the hessian. And, he remained the hessian for us.

Once our allegedly factual stories had run dry we then started creating our own mythology about this ancient individual. And at some point during these fictional renditions of the hessian's life and after life my sister began associating the stories with reality. By the time it came for her to nod off, she was legitimately concerned that the hessian might come to haunt her in her sleep. So when she did fade away for the night her boyfriend and I had rolled out the snowman, with the hope that he might serve as her's, as our, watchful protector.