Winter Horror Stories

My family has a tiny vacation property in Colorado. My parents are avid skiers, which was the motivating factor behind that purchase. The home has been in the family since before I was born. It's definitely showing its age in a lot of ways, but it's also like 40 years old. It's not going to look new. My dad's had to do a lot of upkeep on the place over the years. It's still in our family today, and it's really on its way out at this point. My dad talks about knocking it down and putting up a new place, but I don't really get involved in his

decision This story takes place like 15 years ago when I was 8 and my brother was 8 up in Colorado. During a blizzard, the snowfall was insane, and of course, my brother and I had to go out and play in it. The great thing about going up there when we were kids was the sheer amount of space. The property has a huge opening with woods surrounding in all directions. There's a dead-end road that goes downhill, which leads to a few more almost equally big properties. It's the perfect pattern for hide-and-seek or snowball fights or any number of games.

Like that, my brother Josh and I went out in our snow gear to play our snowball fight game with our own little custom rules. Basically, we'd set up two forts; we could pick our forts to be anywhere, but we had to tell each other where we were picking. We would then make one giant snowball as the so-called Jewel that we'd have to successfully steal from the other base and bring back to ours. Josh chose to make his base on the nearest neighboring property. There was almost never a car, like nine times out of 10, that we'd go there, so we'd often play.

games on their property too since they were never there. What we do is build little walls to emulate a fort and then put the big snowball behind the walls so to get to each other's bases in this game we could either cut through the woods or take the road up or down to get to the opposite fort. Once Josh ran down the road and disappeared, I was supposed to wait for him to blow the whistle to signal that the game began. I waited for a while, like a long while, over 5 minutes. He had already set up his fort by then, so all

he had to do was run back down there and blow the whistle when it hit at maybe the 10-minute Mark is when I concluded I probably just couldn't hear the whistle from there, so I started strategizing my path. Was it better to travel through the trees or along the road? I opted for the road since, honestly, trekking through the woods during a blizzard at 8 years old was a scary concept. I started trudging through the unplowed snow on the ground as flakes of snow drifted into my face with the amount of clothes my mom made me put on, though I

wasn't cold at all as I approached the driveway to the neighboring property. I looked through the trees and didn't see Josh over there with all the brush and trees bare in the winter; it was quite easy to see through the woods, so I cut into the property through the trees to kind of sneak in, but Josh was literally nowhere in sight. I saw his fort, so I looked around, and when I could confirm he wasn't anywhere in sight, I approached his fort to grab the jewel. Before I could, I heard a woman's voice yelling out, Excuse me, are you looking for your

brother I turned in the direction it came from, and it was an older woman at the front door of the neighbor's house. I called back that we were playing a game. She responded with, Your brother isn't here. I was very confused. I started walking towards the front steps of the house, and as I got closer, the woman's face got clearer to my 8-year-old mind. She looked a lot older than she probably was. As I got closer to the house, I noticed that one of the upstairs windows had someone looking out at me for a second. I actually thought it was Josh.

It was someone with half their face covered, likely by a black beanie, and the bottom part of their face was concealed under the bottom of the window. I also spotted another trail of tracks coming to the front door; they had to be Josh's. The woman was giving me a very disturbing smile. I remember that feeling of my heart plummeting; for some reason, she waved me inside to come in and get out of the cold. I stopped dead in my tracks and yelled, Josh! but there was no response. The woman stopped smiling; she didn't expect me to do that. I also

noticed that the other trail of footprints was doubled over; if it was Josh, his footprints turned around and headed back towards the woods. I then heard heavy footsteps from inside the house; they sounded like they were upstairs coming down. I started to run, and the woman screamed something at me or someone else that I didn't understand. I looked back once at the house, and that face that was upstairs at the window before was no longer there. I ran off the property back on the road, running through my previous footsteps. I

started to hear my dad's whistling from up the hill, the whistling he'd use to get my brother and me home at dinner time. When I made it back to our driveway, my dad and Josh were there already, having been on their way to get me before I could even try to explain what just occurred. Josh was already telling me that there were people at the neighbor's house begging him to come inside. I said the same exact thing happened to me, so my dad walked down there with some type of weapon in his hand while we waited in the home with our mom.

He came back after a long while and said that the front door was locked and no one was answering, so we went to another neighbor's house, and they knew the owners of the house, and they called them. This part still gives me chills. Whenever my dad mentioned what he was told, the owners of that house were not there that weekend; nobody was supposed to be in the house. The cops were called and everything, and my brother and I did have to speak to one of the officers on scene to describe the woman. After that, we were

no longer involved According to my dad, the back door was unlocked, and the house was investigated, which turned up nothing. For this reason, my parents took home any extra valuable things in fear of a break-in while we were gone. After that day, we steered clear of playing on that property just from the creepiness factor of that memory alone. Thank God we didn't go in that house.