So I bought a house…
When I started working when I was 21, I didn’t think it would take me 11 years before buying my first house. I started saving for it immediately and thought finding a partner to share a house and life with would come as easy. Only it didn’t. Several failed attempts at finding ‘the one’ and 11 years later, I finally decided to buy my own dream house. Or well… The closest thing to it on a one person budget.
That’s how I became the proud owner of your typical ‘haunted’ house. In reality it’s just a little Victorian house that’s been sitting empty the last couple of years. The previous owners, a couple with a small child, disappeared one day. A search team was put together to sweep the surrounding woods and the entire house was checked for marks of a struggle or any signs that there may have been something suspicious going on. Neither brought something up.
The couple with child didn’t take any of their stuff, nothing in their rooms had been tampered with as it all stood in their usual place and they had locked the door behind them when leaving. There was no forced entry as all doors and windows were intact. It looked like the family just left and never came back. What made the search harder, was that the couple didn’t have any close relatives that could be questioned for information. It was even only after the kid hadn’t shown up for school that their disappearance got noticed and the emergency services were alerted. After 5 years of not having found any track of the family they were declared deceased by law and the house that had been neglected for the last years because of the lack of any relatives had been put on public sale for almost close to nothing.
Okay I have to admit the circumstances in which the family disappeared were rather mysteriously, but they hadn’t had any real connection to the house, did they? I even went to the city hall to check the public records of the estate and did some googling as well to make sure nothing fishy was going on with the house. My search came up completely empty, there hadn’t been any other people go missing in the neighbourhood, the 3 other houses in the street were very well kept, there hadn’t been any deaths in the house and there was not even a graveyard anywhere near the place. (Don’t judge me, I watched too many horror movies and double checked even though I don’t even really believe in ghosts or spirits) The house was built in 1872 and had once had been the property of a rather wealthy family that regularly threw parties for the entire town. The husband and father had some political engagements in town, but apart from that there wasn’t any information about the house itself. After having found out more about the house and the neighbourhood, I felt save enough to buy it and go live there alone as a single woman.
Even though the house was a fixer-upper, since the previous family had left everything, it came furnished. Having bought the house for very little money and not having to spend anything on furniture, it left me with a big budget to do some renovations.
After having removed all of the clutter and obsolete belongings and appliances, I did a deep clean of the house. After a week I had a clean house to start living in while I was doing the actual renovations. While the house had been furnished and the furniture had actually held up rather well against time, the cellar proved a little more difficult as the previous owners had stuffed a lot of their belongings there that weren’t worth anything to me together with a lot of foods that had gone way over their expiration dates. It was not the hardest work, but it was a dirty job. Luckily the attic made up for it since there had been few possessions on it and the ones that were, proved to be worth some money. After a couple of weeks of hard work and booking some progress, I still hadn’t stumbled upon weird or creepy situations in my house, so I guessed it really wasn’t going to be a haunted house.
I started seeing the 3 other neighbours now and then while bringing construction waste to the big container outside or when I went on trips to the supermarket or construction store, although that didn’t happen too often since all of them were rather reserved. Two of the three other houses on the street laid a few hundred meters away from mine, so it was not like we saw much of each other anyway. In the first one lived a 50 year old man whose kids had moved away to the other half of the world. So he spent most of his time in the local pub in town, drinking away his time. In the second lived a retired couple that didn’t get much outside time and I mostly got to know about them because of the home care employee that came over every morning and evening to help them with their daily needs. The third house was the only one close to mine and belongs to an elderly but very active and very pleasant lady named Mildred and her less active husband George. They’re the only neighbours I know by name, although I have only seen Mildred in the flesh. She tells me a lot about her husband George, but sadly his health isn’t what it was and most of the days he’s bedridden. Luckily he has Mildred to take care of him and they seem like a very happy couple that have had a very jolly life together. Because of that Mildred doesn’t come out as often as she did when they were younger, but she doesn’t seem to mind.
After almost a year of renovations, it was finally completely ready. I threw a big housewarming party for all my friends and family that I had missed the past year because I put most of my time and energy in the house. It was so good to see everyone and they all complimented me on a job well done. I invited the other neighbours but the ones further down the street couldn’t make it. Mildred was another case though…
She didn’t only come to the housewarming party and chatted up all my guests, she also prepared some fresh beef stew for all of them. George must’ve had a better day I thought, because he had helped her prepare it, Mildred said. It must hurt seeing your partner, that you have spend a lifetime with, deteriorate and turn into an empty shell of the man he once was. It was in moments like this, watching Mildred talk about her husband with both love and hurt written in her eyes at the same time, that I was not jealous of the people that had found their forever love. But when she started talking about how she had enjoyed cooking together and that it made up for all the lost time and all the things they couldn’t do together anymore, that feeling quickly disappeared as she seemed genuinely happy and content with her life, while I was still stuck in a perfect house without anyone romantically interested in me to share it with.
It’s true when they say that food prepared with love tastes better, because we had quickly ran out of the delicious stew with the softest buttery pieces of beef and even though Mildred denies it, I suspect some pieces of smoked bacon as well. She even offered to get some more, but I felt bad depriving her of the entire batch of stew she and George must have put a lot of work into. My cousins thought differently because when Mildred offered to get some more, they volunteered to help her carry. I followed them to her house because I wanted to make sure the savages didn’t help her out of her entire stock. She opened her front door, which was still unlocked. I remember feeling worried about Mildred because even though we live in a quiet and calm neighbourhood, it’s not safe to keep your doors unlocked nowadays. I mean, it’s 2018 not the 1800’s…. Certainly not as an old fragile lady living with a man that can’t defend himself. I made a mental note to warn her about her vulnerability later as I didn’t want to ruin the light mood.
It’s then when she stepped inside and took a very thick heavy iron key out of her pocket to unlock her basement where she had put the stew, that it struck me as an odd thing. Who leaves their front door unlocked, but then locks their cellar? She opened the door to the cellar, which was made out of uneven concrete walls and a low ceiling, with no natural light and little to no artificial light and a moisty feel. It made it look and feel like a cave a bit. Only this cave actually smelled like the heavenly bacon beef stew we had just been served. She prompted my two cousins and me to go down there, but it didn’t feel right to do so. I hesitated to enter the house while my cousins were making their way over towards the stairs. Mildred must’ve sensed my dubious feeling and tried to encourage me by saying “Oh, no worries honey, George is just down there taking care of the stew and stirring the pot, he’ll give you guys a generous portion.” It was like my cousins were in a trance because they blindly followed her instruction and started to descend the stairs with the empty pot.
It was like there were physical alarms going off, but it must’ve been just in my head because I was the only one feeling the uneasy feeling of something being completely off about this situation. Didn’t Mildred just unlock the door to the cellar? Why would she do that if George had been there maintaining the bacon beef stew? How would an old man that could barely leave his bed even suddenly be able to take some very crooked, narrow, wet steps downstairs? And if he had been having such a good, active day, why hadn’t he come with Mildred to the party? I tried warning my cousins by yelling at them to get out, but before a sound could escape my mouth, Mildred just slammed the door in my face. Through the pane of glass beside the front door, I saw my cousins descend the stairs without even looking back to what had just happened and Mildred staring at me with a wicked smile on her face.
I couldn’t believe what was happening and started to hyperventilate. In the few seconds I still had some sort of a sane mind, I called emergency services. How long it took for the police and the ambulance to arrive, I have no clue because I spent the entire time having a panic attack while constantly running around the house looking for other ways to enter, without any result. When the police arrived they took over and forcefully entered the house when Mildred didn’t give any attention to their warnings.
I often think of that moment as the last moment I was able to think like a sane person. Because what happened just a few minutes later has completely paralysed me and made me rethink everything I ever believed to be true about this world. The police officers searched the entire house but found no persons, not my cousins, not Mildred or George. What’s even worse is they didn’t find any sign of anyone actually having lived there recently, neither was the house furnished, there were no appliances and there hadn’t been any pots of stew in the cellar or anywhere else in the house for that matter. What they told me was impossible to process because I had just seen my cousins go in with my neighbour that I had talked to multiple times and had seen busy in and around her house. I had been circling the property to check for other entries, so they couldn’t have gotten out without me noticing. One of the police officers turned out to be a local who knew the estate belonged to some old rich guy who thought the estate was beneath his status but had kept to it all the same because it was the house he grew up into with his mother. Since his mother had passed around 7 years earlier, he didn’t have the heart to sell the house so he had kept it well preserved and looked after even though he never had any intention to sell or rent the place.
The paramedics took me to the hospital for a mental check and drug test and submitted me for observation. It was only when the other guests at the party had confirmed seeing Mildred, hearing her talk about her husband George, having eaten the bacon beef stew and seeing me and my cousins leave to her place to get some more, that they released me from the hospital and started to investigate the situation. I described Mildred as best as I could, but apart from what I remember her looking like, I didn’t have anything to go from. I never got her last name, neither did they have family that ever visited or a caregiver checking in on them. The other neighbours couldn’t describe her either as they had never even really known who lived there and hadn’t seen the inhabitant of the house outside in all that time. The police put up a local warrant but no one recognised the woman, neither did she get spotted in the months after that.
I tried living with what had happened that day but everything I thought or did had the event bleeding through it. I couldn’t just let it go and I had to try to make sense of it. The searching stopped after a week and the missing posters and warrants disappeared 3 months later. After 6 months had passed they released the estate from being a crime scene. For some reason I had to see the space my cousins went into for myself and found myself on the porch of the house later that evening. Just as the day of my party, the front door was unlocked so I pushed it open. I was hoping not to run into any trouble, be it encountering Mildred or stumbling upon a locked up cellar just like that day.
I tried the door of the cellar. It didn’t open, it was stuck. Just my luck, the door being locked… After realising this meant I wouldn’t be able to see the space where my cousins had disappeared, I tried to make peace with this information. A small part of me wanted to return home and come back with a crowbar, but the police hadn’t found anything 6 months earlier just after everything happened, so it was stupid of me for having had hoped that I would find anything today. I turned back towards the front door and was halfway through the doorframe when something caught my eye. On the ground, there was lying a thick heavy iron key…
I didn’t know if it had been there just seconds before and if it hadn’t, if this meant anything bad was about to happen. Against better judgement I took the key and unlocked to door to the cellar. It looked exactly like I remembered with the crooked concrete steps and glistering uneven walls. A cold, wet, musky breeze passed me and it wasn’t anything like the nice warm brothy smell of bacon beef stew that had been lingering in the air that day. The cave cellar was completely dark and I didn’t find any light switch, so I turned on the torch on my phone. It didn’t really give me a clear view of the entire room, but I could see where I was putting my feet and that was enough. After descending the stairs, while still having to crouch a bit because of the low ceiling, I gathered my surroundings. I almost dropped my phone once I realised what I was seeing.
The room was filled with big sterilised glass jars of stew similar to the beef stew we had eaten half a year earlier. I felt bad that my first instinctive thought was about how buttery that smoked bacon had tasted in the stew. The mouth-watering memory didn’t last long as the feeling was replaced with the eerie feeling that something was not right at all. What was going on? These jars hadn’t been here when the police searched the property, why where they here now? I had the feeling a mouse must have the moment a trap slaps shut. I had the feeling I wasn’t getting out of this house anymore and the only thing I could do was try to run back out of the house, towards safety. I grabbed the nearest jar of stew as proof since I wasn’t going to leave this place empty-handed and ran back towards the stairs. It felt like a force was pulling me back in, but I fought against it and put all the power I had in my muscles to keep me going forward.
Once I reached the top of the stairs the force felt weaker but was still there. It was only when I made my way out of the house that I felt the force fall away completely. I took the jar to my place and called the police once again. When they searched the house it was once again completely empty and deserted. They took the jar and had the contents analysed. Another case was opened a few days later as it turned out that the soup had contained human meat. They still had to check the DNA against missing people cases but so far they had discovered some of the remains to belong to both of my cousins, 5 other people from missing people cases in the past 10 years all over the country and even the remains of a guy called George Oldwin Owens who had disappeared over 20 years ago. I started to feel unwell… Not only did my cousins turned out to be killed or did George turned out to have never existed as Mildreds husband, we had actually consumed the beef stew and lots of it as well. My stomach turned inside out thinking about how the buttery smoked meat had never been bacon after all… I threw up.
The case got some national attention and was branded the ‘Bacon beef stew murder case’ although there was much debate to whether it could be called murder when all the evidence had disappeared twice under seemingly paranormal concurrences. After a few days another hit had come up in the missing persons database based on the human remains in the stew. It turned out to be mother of the family that had previously lived in the house I currently owned and lived in.
A few months later the case blew up and it got the official paranormal stamp when a police officer of a few towns south had found articles about a witch-hunt dating back to the 1600’s. There had been several disappearances throughout the ages and multiple of them could be traced back to a woman who went by the name of Mildred. When the officer had found an estimated look of this witch Mildred, it looked a disturbingly lot like the sketch I had made by describing my neighbour.
There were some sources who described the witch Mildred, who was put up for trial by being burned at the stake. Only she didn’t seem to die. She did burn alright, and the town square supposedly smelled like smoked pig’s meat but she didn’t die. When the fire went out the next morning, she had completely disappeared without leaving a trace. The town didn’t escape her wrath and the entire town was burned down a week later.
After that she didn’t seem to have made any appearances in the neighbouring villages. She was forgotten for a while. People started to disappear but often without leaving any traces, as so many still do, be it by Mildred’s doing, because of some freak accident, or any other creepy weirdo. The few times a women called Mildred was mentioned, they didn’t link it with the witch Mildred a few hundred years before. The only article written that mentions both the disappearances, the woman Mildred and link them to the witch Mildred was written by a man that was admitted to the mental hospital a month later and didn’t get any credibility, while he should’ve.
I’m sitting here a year later, writing all of this down because I’m trying to make sense of all of this. I wouldn’t have thought to start to believe in immortal witches by the age of 33, yet here we are. I still don’t know how all of it worked, how she disappeared with my cousins in the blink of an eye, without leaving any trace, or how the jars were back there 6 months later, but also weren’t there anymore barely 20 minutes later when the police checked. It still feels like the front door was unlocked on purpose, as was the door to the cellar locked on purpose, the key to it planted there on purpose, all to lure me in. I don’t know if she meant for me to see all of it and escape it, or if she meant for me to get trapped down there at the time. I don’t know how this world works, but I what I do know is that it’s not to be understood by us mortals. I’m sorry if I’m sounding a bit melancholic. It’s just that my own cellar has been starting to smell like buttery smoked bacon and I suspect I won’t outrun it this time.