The Echo House

Lila and Sam had been looking for an escape from the city's noise. And when they caught sight of the weathered Victorian farmhouse out in the country, it was idyllic. Wide windows flooded the rooms with light, birds sang in the distance, and the only neighbors were trees. The real estate agent had called it a "fixer-upper," but to Lila, it was a tabula rasa.

They came in early autumn, when the leaves were just starting to fall and the wind had that crisp, sleepy hush. The first couple of days were peaceful. Then the echoes began.

It started with small things—footsteps sounding twice as loud in the hallway, their laughter ringing faintly off the walls. "This house has some weird acoustics," Sam shrugged. Lila agreed. She even joked that the house was echoing them, like a giant wooden parrot.

But it became stranger.

It was one evening, as Lila washed dishes, she sang an old nursery lullaby from her childhood. As she turned off the water, she heard it again, this same tune wafting back to her down the hall. "Did you hear that?" she called up to Sam, but he was upstairs. He hadn't heard it.

The next night, Sam muttered something while he was sleeping. Lila turned over and asked, "What did you say?"

She listened to her own voice repeating the question from the back of the room.

But it got stranger.

She leaned forward. "Sam?

Silence.

The house grew colder.

They tried to shake it off, to explain it away as tiredness, tension, fantasy. And then the echoes started happening before they were ever made. Lila stepped into a room and heard a voice call her name seconds ahead of time, before she would have said anything. Sam heard a whole sentence from his own voice echoing him through the living room—and caught on that he hadn't actually said it yet. When he did, eventually, it exactly matched the echo.

This house is… wrong," Lila gasped one night, grasping Sam's hand.

They started taping their conversations, trying to record the strange things happening. Sometimes, the tapes picked up things they had never remembered saying. Voices—sometimes twisted versions of them—speaking in riddles or whispering softly. At one point, a tape started with Lila's voice faintly whispering, "Get out before it knows you.".

Sam insisted it had to be a defective machine. "Maybe it's picking up radio waves or something."

But Lila wasn't so sure anymore. The house felt alive—like it was listening. Learning.

And then there were the dreams.

Lila had dreamed of a woman in the mirror, with her face and a smile too big. Sam had dreamed of a staircase under floorboards that curved downwards and descended deeper than the house could possibly descend. Each morning, they woke up with nosebleeds, bruises, or memories that weren't exactly their own.at last did, it was an exact fit.

One morning, Lila walked past a mirror and saw herself pause—except she hadn’t paused. Her reflection had. It smiled, even though her lips were still.

That was the final straw.

“We’re leaving,” Sam said. “Today.”

They packed in silence, the house creaking around them like it knew. When they reached the front door, it wouldn’t open. Not stuck—just locked, from the inside. Every window slammed shut on its own. The walls groaned.

And then the house itself began to speak.

Not in English, not in growls or whispers—but in their own voices. Lila's voice echoed from the upstairs hall. Sam's voice echoed from the kitchen. They were repeating things they'd said in the past weeks, but changed, distorted, rearranged. Words of fear, doubt, frustration. As if the house had taped their worst and was playing it back to trap them.

Sam pulled a chair and smashed a window. It shattered. Fresh air rushed in. They ran away.

Behind them, the house made one final sound: the same laughter Lila had used the first day they'd inhabited it.

Weeks passed.

They moved in with Sam's other sister on the other side of town, too traumatized to describe what had actually happened. They said the house had mold. Foundation issues. But they knew better. Something had been in that house—something that imitated them, learned from them, perhaps even desired to become them.

That night, when they were in bed, Lila took Sam's hand.

Do you ever think about it? she asked.

About what? he replied.

She had no opportunity to answer, for her own voice whispered softly from the closet:

About going back.