Hell House - Revisited

A spooky story for spooky season

I’d like to offer this event from my childhood to you. I think my memories are half made up of dreams that I randomly cataloged at some point. Thankfully, I’m not the only one to remember this one. I originally wrote this down a year ago, and my friend just shared her catalog of photographs with me. The dissonance between what I remembered and reality is shocking, and I’ll preserve that here as well. Some of these images were taken on subsequent trips that I wasn’t there for.

Pretend we’re trading stories around a campfire, that should give the right ambience.

-

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. Four 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 at night. 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. Like, in my ear. 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. Most of the places we visited didn’t have stories we knew 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.

It was late summer when we heard about it, the nights were still warm enough to not need a jacket. 

–

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. Like most people in the forest, they were quiet and kept to themselves. They looked like a normal family and that’s all that mattered. 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. BATHE. LET OUT. BEAT. FEED. 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 transplanted directly from the suburbs. On the other corner stood a towering barn, 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 if I just remember it that way. There was a swing-set built 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.

Or maybe what was under the stairs had its own gravity.

I remembered it as a more modern house.

The front door was open, the windows smashed in. 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.

More brick than in my memory.

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 was just one small room devoid of furniture. 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 on the other side were steel bars set too close to squeeze between.

Much smaller than I remember it. Somehow, I didn’t remember there being a gate. It seems more horrific now.

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. It felt wrong. Like we were being disrespectful, 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. 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. I wondered if there were more diaries in there, more atrocities hidden and waiting to be plucked from the trash. 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. We all lived in the same neighborhood. A suburban story through and through. I rushed to her house, and when I saw the first image I recoiled.

What the FUCK are those. 

The two of us in the dark.

In all the photos orbs danced around. Sometimes more of them, sometimes just a few. I’d never seen anything like it. This was before the infinite ghost shows on TV, before talk of orbs and lights were common knowledge. This was the early days of the internet. It felt like magic. 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.

I remembered this face at the bottom of a well. It’s still creepy as hell.

–

Ultimately, there’s 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. 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. And on some level, it doesn't matter if it was real.

If nothing else, it was our confirmation that brutality did exist in the world, even in the safety of suburban existence. As an adult these stories are more common. I remember they found bodies stuffed into a crawlspace a dozen miles away when I left college. It didn’t shock me then.

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. I’d moved out of town, but I still felt the weight of that night. 

I still feel it now.

---

All photo credits go to my very best friend, Emma Kisiel Jones. Our childhoods are this interlinked chain of events, and I value that so much. We grew up at each other’s side. We joke that she’s my 95% recall, because I remember everything wrong, and she remembers too much. Here’s her work. She’s reprinting her At Rest series right now, and she’s done a ton of great work since.

Subscribe below, more fiction next week.