The Treehouse

In the woods outside of Oakridge, Mississippi, just where the cotton fields gave way to whispering pine and the scent of damp earth, stood the old pecan tree.

It was a gnarled titan, thick-limbed and furrowed with age, looming over a crooked patch of wild brush not far behind the William’s old place. High in its twisting arms perched a forgotten treehouse—nothing more than a skeleton of weather-warped planks and sagging rope, but still clinging like a stubborn memory. The children of Oakridge had once called it a fort, a pirate ship, a hideout, many a day full of imagination and wonder. Several experienced their first kiss, as kids are want to do, in the hallowed wood of that decades-old treehouse. Now, no one went near it.

Not since the summer of ’97.

That was the year Jonah Marks disappeared.

He was twelve. Full of life and sass, always the first to daresay. He’d told the others he’d spend the night in the treehouse alone to prove it wasn’t haunted. If there was something challenging, where most angels feared to tread, John Marks would strap on his own wings and meet the challenge head-on. But that night was different.

They found his backpack up there the next day.

There were no signs of struggle. Other than the fact he was missing, everything looked completely as it should. His flashlight was laid to the side. A can of RC Cola was found still cold to the touch.

But no Jonah.

The ladder had been pulled up behind him. So, how did he get down? Did he jump? The scene was immaculate except for one strange thing, no pecans rested anywhere within eight feet of the tree trunk.

And from that summer on, no pecans ever grew from the tree again.

Years passed. The town aged. Oakridge lost its Walmart to the next county over and its high school football streak to a scandal no one wanted to name. Even Dollar General declined to put a store in the shrinking little town.

The woods thickened. The treehouse remained. Silent. Watching.

Until the summer of 2024.

That’s when Ellie Hollinger came home.

She was twenty-five now, freshly laid off from a Memphis editing job, back in Oakridge to help care for her ailing father. She remembered the treehouse, vaguely. She had never climbed it—her mother wouldn’t allow it after Jonah went missing—but she remembered its silhouette at sunset, the way the branches seemed to clutch it like a spider with its prey.

Ellie wasn’t a child anymore. The treehouse didn’t scare her. Not at first. As a matter of fact the treehouse was a long distant memory to almost everyone.

But something had changed in those woods that summer. Something called.

It began with the strangest dreams.

She heard a voice—not words, but a pulse, a slow, deep rhythm beneath thought. Like a heartbeat in the ground. It came every night. Louder. Closer. It was a slow thud, like a deep base drum.

That drumming came from beneath the treehouse, a dark silhouette sitting like a wooden gargoyle beneath the moonlight.

One morning she woke with dirt under her fingernails. It was odd. But in her dreams she remembered digging. This occurred the following night, and the next, each morning her hands covered in dirt. Ellie had never been a sleepwalker but something had to be going on in her sleep. Thoughts of the treehouse pulled at her, calling her.

Ellie had to find out for herself before she went mad.

She returned to the tree, insisting it was only a trick of nostalgia, or was it trauma? Her mother had died here once, the sheriff had claimed—a careless fall on slick, wet roots, a shattered neck. But Ellie had never swallowed that story, and neither had her father.

The tree loomed ominously, as if it remembered her, as if it had been waiting all these years. She hesitated just long enough to suck in a ragged breath, battling that pleading inner voice for her to turn back. But Ellie was resolute, driven by the fierce determination her mother had instilled in her.

With a trembling hand, she reached for the old rope ladder. Every fiber of the fraying rope screamed in protest under her weight, each strand threatening to snap in defiance. Yet she began to climb, her every movement a determined act of will against the encroaching fear in her mind.

Inside the treehouse, through a narrow opening at the bottom of the rotting floor, everything appeared frozen in time, unchanged since those long-ago days. Everything, except Ellie, whose presence now shattered the fragile calm. She was the interloper here.

Beneath the worn floorboards lay a concealed trapdoor that even the investigators missed. It wasn’t until she pried up a warped plank and unearthed a rusted iron ring that the secret revealed itself. Summoning every ounce of resolve, she spent two grueling hours forcing it open.

Below lay a suffocating tunnel, excavated by desperate hands into the very trunk of the tree. The wood pulp of the ancient tree had been whittled out with bare hands all the way down until it entered the ground into the root system. The earth was damp, black, and clung to her skin like a shroud of despair.

And then she sensed it—a presence that breathed in the dark below her. It caressed her skin with a warmth as unwelcome as a lover’s touch on the back of her neck. A voice, ancient and magnetic, vibrated not in her ears but deep within her bones.

“Come down, Ellie. You’re already halfway here.”

In that moment, she dropped the flashlight. It had no time to hit the ground; it simply vanished into an all-consuming silence that devoured every sound.

Panic surged. She scrambled to flee.

But the ladder had vanished. The trapdoor slammed shut with the weight of irrevocable fate.

When she awoke, she found herself in her bed, the remnants of dirt still embedded under her nails, a cracked pecan shell clenched tightly in her trembling hand.

It couldn’t be real. Still, she had kept the tunnel a secret—no one knew of what lurked beneath that cursed treehouse.

Not of what she had seen before the looming darkness claimed her: the stark outline of bones twisted with gnarled roots, curled in a fetal stillness, and eyes. Cold, human eyes, watching silently from the decaying walls.

Something primeval stirred beneath the treehouse—an ancient entity that fed voraciously on memory, loneliness, and grief.

Now, it had her scent.

Within a week, Ellie began to furiously sketch twisted, writhing roots on every scrap of paper scattered in the house. She cut herself off from everyone, even the father she was supposed to be caring for.

Within a month, she was gone. The home health nurse discovered Ellie gone, no note, no message, simple gone. And for how long she wasn’t sure but when she checked on Ellie’s dad, rigor had begun to sit in to his corpse, a look of fear and desperation etched into this rigid face.

No one heard her departure. There were no careful bags packed, only a single, haunting drawing left behind—a depiction of the old pecan tree and the monstrous mass concealed beneath it: a writhing coil of wood interlaced with bone and mouths agape in eternal anguish.

It was waiting… to speak.

Now, the children of Oakridge murmur of Ellie Hollinger in hushed, terrified tones, just as they once did of Jonah Marks. They dare each other in trembling whispers to venture into the forest, though no one ever does.

Yet, the treehouse stands.

And beneath it, that ancient thing calls relentlessly, beckoning from the depths.