Haunted Rural Settings / Family Homes

We hadn’t spoken of the house in thirteen years.

Not since the night it swallowed our mother’s voice.

It stood at the edge of a forgotten road, nestled between skeletal trees that leaned in like gossiping neighbors. The air around it always seemed slightly colder, slightly older, like it remembered more than it should. A farmhouse, built by hand and held together by grief.

When the call came—about the will, about returning—my brother didn’t answer. But I did.

Something in me needed to see it again. Maybe to prove it was only a house after all. That childhood fears rot like old wood, and ghosts, like memories, fade.

But the house remembered me.

It was just as we left it.

The red paint blistered and peeled like sunburned skin. The front steps sagged. The porch light—still somehow working—flickered like an eyelid twitch. It blinked once when I stepped onto the porch.

Once, and then again.

I told myself it was a trick of bad wiring.

But it had always blinked when it wanted to say hello.

Inside, it smelled of cedar, dust, and something else I couldn’t place—like wilted lilies or the air right before rain. The hallway groaned when I stepped on it, same spot as before.

Pictures still hung crooked on the wall, their faces too quiet.

In the kitchen, the radio was on. Static. Just static.

No one had lived here in over a decade. No electricity should be running. But the house, like everything else in my family, never liked being told what was gone.

I wandered upstairs. The light didn’t follow.

I passed my brother’s room—door still scratched from the time he’d tried to lock himself in and mom had clawed her way through.

My own room was untouched.

Posters on the wall. Diary in the drawer. A pair of sneakers that hadn’t fit me since I was thirteen.

I sat on the bed and it exhaled. A sigh of memory.

That’s when I saw it. The handprint on the windowpane.

Small. Familiar. Pressed from the inside.

At night, the house spoke louder.

It creaked not with the wind, but between the wind. Timed, deliberate. Whispers stitched through the vents. My name, I thought. Or maybe hers.

I didn’t sleep. I sat with a flashlight and a memory.

The night mom disappeared, she had gone into the cellar.

Said she heard dad’s voice down there.

Dad had died two winters before.

The police found nothing in the cellar. No signs of forced entry, no blood. Just a family recipe book open to a page for molasses bread, and her shoes neatly by the door.

We never went back.

Not until now.

On the second night, the cellar door was open. I didn’t remember leaving it that way.

I went down with my breath caught between ribs.

The steps were still slick, worn smooth by decades of footsteps and something else. It smelled… wet. And warm.

At the bottom: darkness.

I shone the flashlight across the walls.

That’s when I saw them.

Names. Carved deep. Overlapping.

Generations of them. My great-grandfather’s. My uncle’s. My mother’s. My own.

And beneath mine… freshly etched…

my brother’s.

He hadn’t come back.

But the house knew he would.

I turned, heart hammering.

There was no one there. And yet the cellar felt crowded.

I whispered, “Mom?”

And the lights went out.

I don’t remember climbing the steps. I only remember the sound of bare feet behind me. Soft. Wet.

When I reached the top, the door slammed shut behind me.

I didn’t try to open it. I just ran. Into the night. Into the forest. Into a version of myself that didn’t believe in haunted houses anymore.

The house didn’t follow.

But the porch light blinked once, twice, as I passed.

Like a heartbeat.

Like goodbye.

I didn’t tell anyone what happened. What could I say?

That a house remembered us too well?

That it didn’t like being alone?

Months passed.

I got a letter.

No return address. Inside: one photograph.

My brother. Standing on the porch.

Behind him, the porch light blinking.

Just once.