🎃 “The House on Wren’s Hollow”
The locals never went near the house after dusk. Even the teenagers who dared each other on Halloween night never crossed the threshold — not after what happened to the McAllisters.
When Lila Henderson moved to the village of Greybridge, she thought the stories were quaint — small-town superstition to keep kids in line. She was a writer, and folklore was her fuel. So when she heard about the house on Wren’s Hollow — the one said to listen when you spoke inside it — she knew she had found her next story.
On the last day of October, with the fog coiling through the trees like cigarette smoke, Lila drove out to the edge of the woods. The house was a relic from another century: skeletal porch, windows like sunken eyes, ivy strangling its ribs. Her flashlight beam trembled on the front door as she whispered, “Just research.”
The lock was already broken.
Inside, the air was wrong. Not cold — but hollow, as if something had inhaled and never exhaled. Every step Lila took echoed back too late, as though the house was replying in its own time. She unpacked her recorder and began narrating her impressions.
“Entryway covered in soot… wallpaper rotted away… there’s—”
A floorboard creaked upstairs. She froze.
“Probably an animal,” she muttered.
But the recorder caught a whisper after her voice — faint but distinct.
Not an animal.
Lila rewound, played it again. The whisper came between her words this time, like the house was learning her rhythm.
She laughed it off, because that’s what rational people do when their nerves start playing tricks. She went room to room, collecting notes. A child’s shoe by the fireplace. A mirror draped in cobwebs. A diary on the kitchen counter, pages swollen with moisture.
She opened it to the last entry.
October 31st, 1973. It’s in the walls now. It knows our names.
The page ended in a smear.
From the corner of her eye, something shifted — like the wallpaper had breathed. Lila turned sharply, shining her light along the wall. For a heartbeat, she saw faces pressing through the pattern: mouths open, eyes rolling under thin paper skin. Then the wall was just a wall again.
Her pulse thundered. She started toward the front door, but it had moved. She was sure it had been on the opposite wall. Every direction she turned, the hallway stretched into new corners, unfamiliar rooms. The house was rearranging itself.
“Stop it,” she said aloud. “You’re not real.”
Then what are you, Lila?
The voice came from behind her. Not a whisper now — her own voice, perfectly echoed, but slower.
She dropped the flashlight. The beam spun across the floor, catching a reflection on the mirror — the one she’d passed before. Except now, her reflection didn’t move with her. It stood still, head tilted, eyes black and wide as cracks in the earth.
It smiled.
Write about me.
The flashlight died.
When the villagers found her car the next morning, it was still idling by the gate. The house looked empty, but anyone who passed by swore they could hear faint tapping from inside — the sound of keys on a typewriter.
And if you stand by the window long enough, you can see her in the reflection — a woman in the dark, writing, over and over again.
October 31st. It’s in the walls now. It knows my name.
