A little over 13 years ago my mom, sisters, and I moved into a house about 45 minutes from the nearest town with a grocery store. This was meant to be a fresh start after moving around time and again because we could never afford to stay in one place. The owner of this house offered my mom a deal she couldn’t pass up. He would sell the place to us on a rent to own basis for a price my mom could afford. On top of that, if she couldn’t make a payment we could do some work on his farm to pay that way instead.
The property had the house, two barns, a shed with a root cellar and roughly 3 acres of woods all on 7 acres. The house needed work. A lot of work. No one had lived in it for 14 years and none of the neighbors knew why it had stayed empty for so long. Our aunt and cousin came to help us paint the house.
It was early summer. We opened all of the windows and the doors to let the house air out. We painted the livingroom, the kitchen, and on occasion, each other. It was all in good fun, but it took a week to get all of the paint out of our hair. While we were taking a break all the kids went out to explore the barn closest to the house. There were 2 stalls and what we assumed was a tack room on the ground level. One of my cousins tried the door. It was blocked by something inside. All 5 of us took turns trying the door. It was stuck solid. We went and mentioned it to my mom. She and my aunt followed us to the barn to try the door too. My aunt found a hammer laying nearby and broke the hinges with it. The door fell and hung from the lock. It had been padlocked from the inside. The room was small. More like a closet. The remains of a dead animal lay in the corner. It’s head was missing. Checking the time, we realized it was getting late in the afternoon and my aunt had a long drive home. She and my cousins left soon after. We went about unpacking and getting rooms set up.
It wouldn’t take long for us to discover why the house had been empty. There was no central heating or air. The insulation was far outdated. The pipes leaked beneath the house. We could only ever run one appliance on a breaker at a time or risk tripping it. The water heater didn’t work and we couldn’t afford to replace it, so we boiled water to fill the bathtub. We had to cook using the grill or one of those little counter top plug into elements we found in the shed. Life on that farm wasn’t easy.
We spent our time outside playing in the woods, tending the garden, playing with the horses, or fishing out of the little pond at the back of the property. We didn’t have much else. Just the property and each other. That was enough for us. Despite the struggles of living in that house and barely having enough to feed ourselves we made the best of things. Treated it like a game. Like we were settlers on the frontier.
The driveway was long and we had to walk to the end to put out the trash and to get on the school bus. We quickly took to carrying gloves with us. Something tore the trash out every night and we were stuck picking it up while we waited for the bus. We thought maybe one of the neighbor’s dogs, but couldn’t be sure. We gathered some scrap wood and pallets to build something to keep animals out of the trash can.
That’s when our chickens started to disappear. One at a time. No carcass left behind. Only blood and feathers. Racoons, I thought. Every time a chicken disappeared we added to the coop in an attempt to keep whatever was getting in there out. It seemed like no matter what we did chickens kept being taken. We started with 2 dozen. Chickens. After just two months we were down by half and still had no idea what was taking them. I stopped going in the woods after finding a mutilated deer hanging in my favorite climbing tree. The eyes were missing and it had been carved up by something sharp. Likely, a knife.
One of the pipes to the bathtub formed a leak and a hole had to be cut in the wall for a friend of my mother’s to fix it. We couldn’t afford a proper plumber or to fix the hole. A cat found its way inside the house by making it’s way to the bathroom from the crawlspace. It’d wake us up every night when it climbed into bed with us, purring as it nestled in. Many times we put it back outside for it to come back in. We even tried closing the bathroom door at night, but the cat would come in anyways and meow all night long begging to be let in. Eventually, we gave up and accepted the little beast into our home. Grateful that at least it wasn’t a wild animal.
The nightmares started after a couple months of living there. Always the same thing. A dark figure standing over us. None of us were getting much sleep. We woke up the next morning to weird symbols written in blood all over our porch. We found our last chicken dangling from a wire left inside the coop. The head was no where to be seen. Shaken, we asked our neighbors if they’d noticed anything weird happening in the area. They deny knowing anything.
My sisters and I were terrified and begged our mom for us to move, but we couldn’t. This was our last ditch effort at having some kind of stability and we were trapped in it because we couldn’t afford to leave.
That night we went to bed, the same cat, and the same nightmares. We woke to all of the pictures in our house having been removed from their nails on the wall and neatly placed on the floor leaned against the wall. This was done while we slept. On our porch, more animal blood. Sometimes animal’s body parts or bones would be wired to the door knob. We all dreaded going home in the evenings. We hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in months. It was wearing on all of us.
In the winter, my younger sister found that her dog had been set loose and went chasing after in deep snow into the conservation property nearby. She called me begging me to come get her because she was lost and freezing. I put on my winter clothes, saddled the more sure-footed of our mares, and went to the steamer trunk at the end of my bed to retrieve the .22 rifle my grandpa had bought me the previous fall. It was gone. So was the ammo. Rather than worrying about it then I went out to find my sister. The snow was unusually deep for our area that year. It came up to my knees, which made it easy to find and follow her tracks. The tracks made me uneasy. As there should have been 2 sets. A dogs, and my sister’s. There was a 2nd larger set of human tracks. When I found her, she explained that she found the dog tied to a tree. Someone had shot the pup multiple times. We heard a gunshot come from nearby, but couldn’t tell from where. I helped her onto Sally and we rode as quickly as we safely could back to the house. Our mom called the police, but all they did was take our statements and leave. They didn’t even go out to look at the dog, which we had been unable to bring back with us. She’d frozen to the ground in a bloody heap. It was clear she’d been there for hours. I think we were in too much shock to realize exactly how much danger we were in at the time. Or maybe we were so used to living in fear of whoever or what ever was terrorizing us that new fear didn’t register. We spent most of that year just trying to survive.
That winter was so cold we had to put plastic over windows and doors that weren’t being used to keep even the tiniest bit of warmth inside. Even the hole in the bathroom would be sealed thanks to a friend’s help. Blankets were placed over doorways, a mattress was brought into the livingroom, and a space heater we borrowed from my grandparents was set up. We slept there together in the livingroom both for warmth and safety. With all entry ways blocked and the front door locked, we stopped having the nightmares. Instead, we would start hearing knocking on windows and doors at night. None of us willing to go out to look.
The following spring, the neighbor’s barn caught fire. They weren’t home and we could see the smoke from our house. Inside, the local fire fighters uncovered a scene they wouldn’t soon forget. In the back of the barn, haybales had been strategically stacked to hide what could only be an alter or maybe a trophy display. The back wall was covered in various occult symbols in both white paint and blood. Dozens of candles had been burned down to have new ones stacked on top. It was impossible to tell how many dead animals were piled or hung around the little space. Our missing rifle was propped in the corner, spray painted white. The whole barn smelled of smoke and rot. The police took pictures and statements.
They talked to my mom for a long time, getting the full story. They waited for the family to get home. It was discovered that the younger of their teenaged sons was the culprit. He was taken into custody and evaluated. We were informed after a few weeks that he was a psychopath and exhibited strong potential to be a serial killer. He was working up to trying to kill one of us. They believed he led the dog out into the woods knowing one of us would come looking, so that he could attempt his first human kill. His family moved within a couple months after the incident and we didn’t from them again.
My mom ended up meeting someone and we thankfully moved away and left that place behind. A couple years later, my younger sister received a text from an unknown number. She went white. I asked her what was wrong. She said “nothing”, deleted the text, and never mentioned it again.
Years of therapy and i’ve never been the same.