The House on Black Hollow Road

On the outskirts of rural Bavaria lay a house the locals never mentioned. It stood on Black Hollow Road, hidden behind gnarled oaks, its roof sagging and its windows like dead eyes. Generations ago, a family lived there—until, one winter, every member disappeared without a trace. The house had been left to rot ever since. Travelers who wandered too close spoke of lights flickering in the upper windows, though no one had lived there in over a century.

Daniel Weber, a historian from Munich, did not believe in such stories. He specialized in forgotten places and was determined to document the house for his new book. With camera and recorder in hand, he set out on a fog-choked evening, ignoring the warnings of villagers who refused even to point him in the right direction. “The house finds you,” one old man muttered, and refused to say more.

The path was nearly invisible, but Daniel followed the trees until the shape of the house emerged from the mist. His breath caught—not from fear, but from the sheer weight of silence around it. No birds, no wind, only the creak of old wood as the front door swung slightly on its rusted hinges.

Inside, dust lay thick over broken furniture. Wallpaper peeled in strips, exposing blackened plaster beneath. His flashlight beam swept across a staircase sagging with rot. At the far end of the hall stood a door, locked with heavy iron. Daniel’s curiosity sharpened. He had read in a fragmentary diary about “the sealed room” of the Weber family—the same surname as his own. He wondered if there was blood tying him to this ruin.

As he set up his camera, a sound stopped him: footsteps above, slow and deliberate. His breath clouded in the air; the house was freezing though outside was mild. He called out, but the only reply was silence. Gathering his courage, he mounted the stairs. Each step groaned beneath him. At the top, the hallway stretched unnaturally long, lined with doors that should not have been there. He counted seven, though from the outside the house could not possibly contain so many.

He opened the first door—nothing but a collapsed bed. The second—dust and broken glass. But as he reached the fourth door, he froze. Behind it, someone whispered his name. “Daniel…” His flashlight flickered. His heart thundered. He forced the door open.

The room inside was not empty. Shadows clung to the walls like living things, writhing as if aware of his presence. In the center stood a mirror, taller than a man, its surface rippling like dark water. He stepped closer, and his own reflection stared back—but it was wrong. The reflection smiled when he did not. Its eyes were hollow, mouth stretched impossibly wide. When he staggered back, the mirror-face leaned forward, pressing against the glass from the inside.

Daniel ran, but the hallway shifted. Doors multiplied, stretching endlessly. He heard them all opening, one by one, each revealing something crawling, dragging itself toward him. Whispers swarmed his ears: his name, promises, screams. The locked iron door at the end of the lower hall now stood open, and though every instinct screamed to flee, he was pulled toward it.

Inside was the sealed room. Candles guttered on their own, illuminating walls covered in desperate scratch marks. In the center sat a long dining table, set for a feast that had rotted into black sludge. Around it, the Weber family still sat—skeletons in their chairs, jaws frozen in silent screams. At the head of the table was a single empty chair, waiting.

The mirror from upstairs stood behind the table, its surface alive with movement. In it, Daniel saw himself again—but this time, seated in that empty chair, grinning madly. A cold hand gripped his shoulder. He turned, but no one was there. When he looked back at the mirror, his reflection was rising from the chair, stepping out into the room.

The camera Daniel carried was later found in the road outside Black Hollow. Its final image was blurred, a flash of skeletal faces and something grinning in the dark. The villagers said the house had claimed another. And now, when night falls on the hollow, you can see a light in the upstairs window—Daniel Weber’s lantern, still searching for a way out.