Abandoned house

Title: The House on Blackfern Hill

There was a house on the edge of town that nobody dared go near.
It wasn’t haunted, not exactly. Not with ghosts that wailed or doors that slammed shut in the night.
No, the house on Blackfern Hill was… quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that made your skin prickle and your thoughts wander into places they didn’t belong.

For years, kids dared each other to touch the rusted gate. Most just peeked through its twisted bars, eyes wide, hearts racing. Some claimed the windows blinked. Others swore the trees around it whispered in languages no one could understand.

No one had lived there for over thirty years.

Or so people said.

Chapter One: The Letter

Seventeen-year-old Nora Bell didn’t believe in ghost stories.

Her parents had recently passed in a car accident, and she had been sent to live with an aunt she barely knew in the quiet town of Elmridge. It was a town of whispers and sideways glances, where nothing really happened—and if it did, no one talked about it directly.

Nora was unpacking a box of her mother’s old journals when she found a strange letter.

It was addressed to no one. The envelope was pale blue, sealed with dark red wax. Inside was a single sentence in delicate handwriting:

“Find me in the house where the walls remember.”

There was no name. No return address.

But written faintly in pencil on the back was something else: Blackfern Hill.

Chapter Two: Through the Gate

The next evening, Nora stood in front of the house.

The gate creaked open with surprising ease. The path leading up was overgrown with black ferns, tall and dry, curling like old parchment. The house itself stood three stories tall, with boarded windows and a slanted roof covered in moss.

She stepped inside.

The air smelled of dust, old wood, and something sweeter underneath—like forgotten perfume. Cobwebs clung to the corners. The floorboards creaked under her boots, not in warning, but in welcome.

As she walked deeper, something strange happened. The dust on the floor parted ahead of her, like it knew where she was going.

She followed it.

Chapter Three: The Living Room That Breathed

The house wasn’t abandoned. Not really.

It was asleep.

The moment she entered the living room, the fireplace sparked to life on its own. A grandfather clock in the corner ticked, even though its hands didn’t move. The wallpaper shimmered in the firelight, and the shadows on the walls shifted. Not randomly—but deliberately.

They were forming pictures.

A woman in a red coat. A little girl with curly hair. A man holding a map. Over and over, flickering scenes that felt familiar.

Nora froze when one shadow looked exactly like her.

She turned. No one was behind her.

But on the coffee table sat a photograph. It was old, the edges curling, but unmistakably real. In it was her mother—just a teenager—standing in front of this very house.

Nora had never seen her mother look so… frightened.

Chapter Four: The Attic

She found the attic stairs hidden behind a false panel in the hallway. The air grew colder with every step. Cobwebs hung like curtains, and the roof groaned above her like it was trying to speak.

In the attic, she found trunks. Dozens of them. Each one labeled in the same handwriting from the letter: For the Lost.

She opened one.

Inside were drawings—charcoal sketches of the house, its rooms, the fireplace, the ferns outside. Some were of people with their faces scratched out. Others were of creatures: tall and thin, with twisted limbs and no eyes.

Nora’s hands trembled as she reached the last page. It was a letter:

“To my daughter,
If you’ve found this, it means I failed. The house is not just a place—it is a memory. It collects those who are forgotten, those who belong nowhere else. I came here once, and I left a part of myself behind.
Do not stay too long. If the house remembers you, it won’t let go.”

It was signed: Eleanor Bell—her mother.

Chapter Five: The Man in the Mirror

She tried to leave. Truly, she did.

But the front door led to the kitchen. The back door led to a hallway she didn’t remember walking through. The windows showed rooms instead of the outside world. The house shifted, always gently, as if it were breathing her in.

Then she saw him.

In the ornate mirror at the end of the hall stood a tall man in a black suit, with pale, sunken eyes and a mouth that didn’t move when he spoke.

“You don’t belong here yet,” he said.

“Then let me go,” Nora whispered.

The man tilted his head. “The house remembers you. The house wants you to remember it.”

The mirror cracked.

Chapter Six: The Heart of the House

Nora realized the house wasn’t trying to hurt her—it was trying to show her something. A truth. Something her mother had buried deep.

In the basement, behind a hidden panel, she found it.

A nursery. Abandoned. Dusty toys, a cradle. A name painted on the wall: Lillian.

Then came the memories. Not hers, but her mother’s. Visions surged through her: her mother’s cries, a child taken, a deal struck with something inside the house to forget the pain.

Nora saw her mother walking away from Blackfern Hill, memory erased, leaving her sister—Nora’s aunt—behind to keep the secret.

She wasn’t just here by fate.
She was here because the house wanted to return what was lost.

Chapter Seven: The Key and the Lock

The next morning, Nora woke on the porch with the sun rising behind her.

In her hand was a small iron key and a new letter:

“The house forgets nothing.
But now it remembers the truth.
You are the last to know. You are the first to set it free.”

The house on Blackfern Hill stood behind her, no longer menacing, but peaceful.

Nora didn’t look back as she walked down the path.

Epilogue: The House Sleeps Again

Years later, no one spoke of the house. Ivy grew over the gates once more. The black ferns withered. The whispers faded.

But some nights, if you walk past Blackfern Hill just as the moon rises, you might hear soft laughter echoing from behind the bricks. Or see a light flicker in the attic window.

Some say it’s a ghost.

Others say it’s memory.

But Nora knows better.

It’s a house that remembers.

And now, it dreams.