Hell House

TW: Child Abuse

This isn’t so much a story, as a real thing that happened to me. The more time that passes since though, it feels like fiction. I’ve never been the most honest story-teller either; I would embellish details shamelessly if it added to the drama. Couple that with a memory that’s half as good as it should be at my age, and I don’t always trust what I remember. So year after year I’d search the internet to see if I could find another version of the story out there, find someone else that had been to that abandoned house in the middle of the woods and seen what we saw. Three years ago I found one, and it chilled me.

I told this story to a new group of people around a campfire in 2020. It’s always been the scariest story I know, and since that year seemed like the end of the world there really wasn’t a better time to tell it. Is it a ghost story? I don’t know, I tell myself I don’t believe in that shit these days. But I believe in what we saw that night; we touched something uncanny and I think it very nearly touched back.

My best friend was a photographer, she still is my best friend and a photographer, and back then she loved abandoned places. So a group of us would sneak into them some nights, she’d snap photos and we’d all spitball what had happened to the place. Usually we’d wind up scaring ourselves shitless and begging her to leave. Once, I walked into a completely dark bedroom of an abandoned farm house and a cow mooed right next to me; I’ve never jumped like that before or since. It had broken down the front door and was just standing in the dark.

I still see the places sometimes now, 15 years later. They’re more run down, maybe there’s some new fencing around them to keep kids like me out. That old farmhouse was leveled to create a better thoroughfare for traffic, too bad for the cows. They all had stories, but none of those stories were as cruel, violent, and disturbing as Hell House.

It was late summer when we heard about it, the nights were still warm enough to not need a jacket. Most of the places we visited didn’t have stories attached to them, but this one had a pile of rumors. Maybe that’s what made me nervous from the start, we were in someone else’s story here.

I was always the nervous one anyways, my brother was the family fuck-off and I didn’t want to wind up in the back seat of a cop car too; I didn’t want something worse than that either. We’d heard that some users had camped at Hell House for a while, and threatened a classmate off with a gun. It was probably just some bullshit posturing, but as we drove to the house I couldn’t get it out of my head. I couldn’t get any of the stories out of my head. I think there were four of us that night; we loaded up in my friend’s Volvo, perpetually blasting Morrissey, and drove deep into the forest outside of town. My stomach was in knots.

–

The background story sets the tone, so here’s what we heard from a friend, who heard it from his friend, before our trip out there. The house was lived in by a young couple with a daughter. They were quiet and, like most people in the forest, kept to themselves. Minding your own business is a way of life out there.

And then comes the Grade-A, fucked up shit. This family, nice and normal on the outside, was imprisoning their daughter in the basement. Not just that, she was beaten, starved, the whole Hollywood movie gamut of horror. It ends when the daughter dies, and the family flees town.

This friend of a friend found a journal on the property that sent him into serious therapy. It was a daily planner where they wrote down a time-stamped chronology of what happened to this poor girl, captured in sparse one or two word capital letters next to the time of day. BATH. LET OUT. BEAT. FED. Years of it, just like that.

He found it leafing through some mundane stuff they had left in the garage.

–

Hell House was in the middle of the forest, there was a long driveway that led to it but we’d been told to stay clear of it, or we’d risk attracting attention. We parked in a ditch on the side of the road, and hiked into the forest with our flashlights.

The woods were sparsely planted pine, it was easy enough to navigate but still covered us from view from the main road. My friend was snapping flash photographs the whole time. In a quarter mile we broke through the woods and out onto the property; it was massive. On one corner there was a huge, multi-floor home with an attached two car garage, it looked lifted straight from the suburbs. On the other corner stood a towering barn; it was far enough away so that we could only see a black outline. In the middle of the property was a stone well. It must have been abandoned recently, the cleared field was only starting to be overgrown.  

We walked the property first. The well was uncovered and empty; I don’t know if it actually howled in the wind, or I just remember it that way. There was a swing-set built in the yard nearby in disrepair. The barn was locked, impenetrable like its stature. The focus had always been the house, and it was like the rest of the property was pushing us there.

The front door was open, the windows were smashed in, and some animals had been through. It felt profoundly normal though; a house layout similar to each of ours, plush carpeted floors and modern fixtures. It felt like this could have been any of us.

There were two bedrooms upstairs, and thankfully there was no one pointing any guns. There was a kitchen on the main level, tied to a spacious living room. We all explored these like it wasn’t the basement that was pulling us. In the horror of what we might find, we were all quiet and subdued. But we had to go down there eventually, we couldn’t ignore it.

So as a group, we walked down the carpeted stairs and into the bedroom in the basement. There were no other rooms down there, just a small room that looked like any of our bedrooms. And a closet. One of those long closets with the shitty, sheet metal doors that always fall off the tracks. I don’t remember who pushed it open, but we were immediately greeted by round steel bars on the other side.

The base of the floor was uncarpeted, bare concrete, and the steel bars enclosed the entire closet. Three feet deep, and maybe nine feet long. Concrete and steel, backed by drywall. Part of me wanted to figure out where the door was to get behind those bars, but the other part of me wanted to get the fuck out. I felt sick.

We took a few photos, but it felt wrong. Like we were being disrespectful, or degrading it somehow with our voyeurism. Up until I saw that cage, I figured the story we’d heard was bullshit. Afterwards, well I’m writing this story 15 years later so I think that speaks to the impact. Before we left, we went into the garage. It was crammed with moving boxes, full of stuff left behind, and rummaged through by the people who went to the house before us. Whoever lived there, they definitely left in a hurry.

–

The next day, my friend called me about the photographs she’d taken. She said I had to see them immediately.

I rushed to her house, and when I saw the first image I said; What the fuck are those. In all of the photos, orbs danced all around us. Sometimes more of them, sometimes just a few; I’d never seen anything like it. And at the bottom of the well, shifting and moving through a series of photographs, was a malformed face with its mouth open in a scream.

–

Ultimately, there is no moral to find in a real horror story. They exist, they’re real, and that’s enough. Was that poor girl there with us when we visited? Was that her face in the bottom of the well? Or was it all dust in the air and obscured images from a camera flash?

I’ll never know if the story we were told of Hell House was true, and I certainly never saw the journal that we heard about. I know others went there, and I know some of them had similar experiences to ours. But I saw the cage, I held the bars, and there was some horror there.

Hell House burned to the ground three years after we went there. The house, the barn, the whole property. I think the police blamed it on some people doing drugs there. I’d moved out of town by then, but I felt the weight of that night still. I still feel it.