“Hellooo?”
My voice sounded strangely hollow as it echoed through the deserted house. This had to be the place! It was definitely our meeting point, after all, there was no other house far and wide that fit Julia’s description. She had said, “The door’s missing, so you can just walk in. Once you’re inside, you’ll immediately realize why I chose this house. I’ll probably already be busy setting up.”
Even before I had noticed the gaping door-hole, it felt like I was approaching something unholy. A presence that spread through the air like a bitter taste in the mouth. The house stood apart from the rest of the next village on a rarely traveled street and presented a sad sight. Most of the windows were either smashed or already boarded up with plywood. Amateurishly smeared graffiti covered all the walls without exception, and on the sloping roof, the remaining tiles fought against the encroaching moss. The property had a small front garden beside the building, overgrown with thorny shrubs, and a dilapidated waist-high fence bordered it on all sides with an apparently long-ago kicked-out opening at the front. From a particularly dense thorn bush, the remnants of a metal swing protruded, its once colorful paint mostly peeled off. On the left side of the house stretched a hilly meadow, through which a few overgrown field paths ran, and on the other side, the first trees of a deeply running forest lined up at a stone’s throw distance. Apart from the summery chirping of crickets and the irregular cry of an owl, it was remarkably quiet. Julia’s little red Opel Corsa had looked oddly out of place when I entered the building.
“Julia?”,
I called, trying to banish the rapidly emerging discomfort from my voice, which only half succeeded. For a moment, I listened tensely to the dull silence of the house and flinched when a response came:
“Yeess, I’m up here! Watch out, the stairs are a bit crooked!”
While I breathed a sigh of relief, I turned on my cell phone flashlight and went deeper into the house, straight to a narrow wooden staircase that indeed hung a bit crooked in places. The steps creaked under my feet louder than I had expected. For a moment, I had the unpleasant feeling that the whole house was pausing to listen reproachfully to this annoying noise that broke its thundering silence.
As soon as my gaze passed over the top step, I already saw a faint glimmer shining from a door on the right side of the adjoining corridor. In strong contrast to the stairs, the floor here swallowed the tapping of my steps. A thin fibrous carpet was laid out on every inch of it, showing some scratches. When I reached the door, I saw about what I had expected: Julia had already lit several long-stemmed candles and distributed them in the spacious bedroom. The light came from the floor, the windowsill, a small adjoining room - probably a bathroom - and the bed, on which lay a musty board, which she had probably found somewhere in the house. She squatted and was just typing on her laptop, which lay next to two more candles also on the board. I knocked twice on the already open door and said:
“Well, someone’s motivated! How long have you been here?”
Julia typed for a few more seconds, then paused and turned around while standing up with her typical grin on her face.
“Good question! It was definitely still bright outside. Glad you’re here!”
We hugged as always in greeting, and I couldn’t help but admire her for her fearlessness. She was about a head and a half shorter than me and slender with long, thin, brown hair and had been alone in this ominous old ruin of a house for at least an hour. I, a moderately trained young man, would never have voluntarily entered a place like this alone.
We broke the embrace, and Julia waved me over to the bed:
“Come, you have to see this! I can hardly believe it myself!”
She squatted again in front of the laptop and opened a browser window. I took an angular stool that had stood next to the bed, which was empty except for a stained mattress, and sat down next to her. An apparently old newspaper article now appeared on the laptop, with Julia scrolling back up to the title. As the whitish light of the monitor reflected in her glasses, she said:
“Honestly, if I had found all this earlier… Just look!”
At her last words, she pointed to a black-and-white picture directly under the title. I took the laptop with both hands and turned it slightly towards me to see it better. In the picture, you could see the house we were in, but in daylight and apparently at a time when someone still lived here. First, I noticed a policeman being interviewed by a reporter. He had a grim expression and seemed to be pointing at something on the ground. My gaze followed his outstretched finger, and when I saw it, my breath caught. Five bodies lined up, covered with white sheets. Two of them were about twice as long as the rest. Now my gaze fell on the title, which said:
MYSTERIOUS DEATH CASE! FIVE-MEMBER FAMILY FOUND DEAD!
I quickly skimmed the first lines. They reported that all members of the Niermann family, who had lived in this house, had succumbed to a sudden and very unusual death. According to the medical analysis, all five had died overnight from similar cardiovascular events, to which the article quoted the responsible medical examiner: “One gets the impression that their hearts simply stopped one after the other. Extreme fear and panic are possible reasons for such a case. The expressions on the children’s faces give additional cause for such a theory.”
My eyes had widened more and more while reading, and with a strangely dry mouth, I turned to Julia. She beamed at me enthusiastically.
“Isn’t that crazy? They also apparently found no explanation for the case for a long time and OBVIOUSLY no one wanted to buy the house afterward. It’s been standing here virtually unchanged at the edge of the town for over 20 years and is shunned by almost everyone! Simon, I checked, NO ONE ELSE has ever filmed here! We’ll be the first! How many clicks do you think we’ll get for this?”
I looked at her and tried to mirror her enthusiasm in my expression. Since she started uploading videos about supposedly ghost-haunted places on YouTube a few months ago, we had spent more time together than ever before. It was probably quickly visible to outsiders that there was a friendship between us that was led on this level from her side. I couldn’t banish a certain dreaminess from my gaze when I looked at her. At first, she had asked me for help with editing, but from there, I quickly became the cameraman who accompanied her everywhere. “For protection,” she had said with a laugh and because, according to her, I had a good feel for shots.
Now she looked at me smiling and had raised her eyebrows as high as possible. In the candlelight, she was picture-perfect.
“Well, first of all, that’s a pretty awful story,” I said, pointing at the screen. “Aren’t you afraid of what might have killed them?” She twisted her mouth in a snobbish grin and waved it off. “Okay,” I continued, “but what exactly do you want to film here? There’s no murder scene and no… blood on the walls or anything. Sure, the house itself is super creepy, but we don’t even know what actually happened here.”
“I’ve already thought about that,” she said, raising her finger. “We’ll present the whole thing as a previously unreleased documentary, where we’ll just fill in the gaps in the Niermanns’ story ourselves. No one knows except us,” she added with a wink. “I thought of a vengeful spirit that scares anyone who lives in this house so much that their heart stops! What do you think?”
I couldn’t help but grin. As cliché as this invented backstory might sound, Julia’s enthusiasm was contagious. It was the second reason why I had even ended up here this Friday night – the first reason being my hidden feelings for her.
“Can do,” I said with a broad grin. “Knowing you, you’ve already written a script, so I’ll just go to the car and get my camera. Give me a minute.”
With these words, I got up, moved the stool closer to the rickety bed frame, and walked back through the corridor and the crooked stairs. Without the light of my cell phone flashlight, I would have certainly tripped, and so I reached the non-existent door in no time. Now that I was motivated by the upcoming project, the house seemed less eerie, but still, I felt an indescribable pressure fall from me as I stepped out into the clear summer night. My car was parked next to Julia’s. I opened the trunk and rummaged my camera out of its case, not without checking if I had really charged it. As I slammed the trunk shut with a loud bang, I turned back to the house and was about to walk towards the entrance when I paused. Something was not right. I stood there for a moment of strained thought… and then I heard it, or rather: I heard nothing. The chirping of the crickets, the nightly noises of the birds and animals from the forest… It was as if the invisible pressure from the house had followed me and laid itself over my ears. I swallowed and listened inwardly to see if that would relieve the pressure when a loud crack followed by a dull thud in the grass made me jump. A smaller beam that had been nailed over one of the windows from the outside had apparently just fallen off. I felt the goosebumps that had formed on my arms and legs and was ashamed to be so jumpy. My thoughts returned to Julia, and I hurried toward the entrance. Back with her, she looked up from the laptop smiling and I asked her:
“Was that you just now?”
She was still smiling: “What do you mean?”
“The little board that came loose from the window. Did you move that somehow?”
She pursed her lips and shrugged: “I’m sitting here just like before when you went out.”
I looked at her intently, then returned the smile and said: “Man, you know what a scaredy-cat I can be.”
We both laughed. That was our dynamic: She: Petite but fearless and determined and I: Tall, but jumpy and easily persuaded. As opposites, we fit well together as a team. Why couldn’t she see that it would fit for more too?…
“Okay, I’m not quite done here,” she said, pointing to her laptop, “but you can already make a few shots of the rooms in the whole house. We’ll blend them into the video later.”
“Anything you say, boss,” I said and saluted. She grinned and turned back to her script.
I started with the small bathroom, which was directly adjacent to this room. It had only a toilet and a sink, both in dusty and partially cracked condition. The light of the candles was not enough to illuminate the whole room, so I switched my camera to night vision mode. In the greenish light, the room looked even more run-down. I went back to the corridor, filming all the doors and the stair landing with slow pans and longer moment shots.
When I entered one of the rooms, I lowered the camera for a moment and raised my cell phone flashlight. An icy shiver crawled from the tip of my head like a drop of water down my neck and finally down my back. It was a children’s room, apparently shared by two of the children. The beds stood on opposite walls and consisted only of metal frames. My thoughts wandered to the shrouded bodies on the black-and-white photo. These children had lived here, played, argued, done homework, and slept. Now I stood here with my camera, recording the bleak emptiness they had left behind.
I shook off the thought as best I could, filmed the room slowly from left to right, and left the room. A spontaneous impulse led me to close the door behind me. Touching the knob made me think of the parents who must have also closed this door after putting their children to bed. My gaze went blank, and I must have stood there for a while with my hand on the knob because suddenly I heard:
“Simon? What are you doing?”
I looked up and saw Julia at the other end of the corridor, throwing me a puzzled look. The candlelight mixed with the moonlight, which came from several cracks between the boarded-up windows, cast strange shadows on her face, and for a brief moment, I didn’t recognize her. Then I took a sharp breath and said:
“Sorry, I was just lost in thought. Hey, don’t you think it smells weird here?”
Actually, I hadn’t smelled anything, but I wanted to distract as best as possible from my embarrassing behavior.
“I only smell the musty furniture,” she said, “and by the way, I’m done. If you’re ready, we can start outside!”
“Sure,” I said and walked toward her. I noticed that I still had one hand on the doorknob and let go of it in surprise. With a suspicious sideways glance from Julia, we went downstairs and out through the entrance. The chirping of the crickets was clearly audible again, and I wondered if I had just imagined the strange silence earlier. Julia stood with her hands on her hips in front of the house and studied the script, which she had now sent to her phone.
“Okay, just start filming already, we’ll do a few takes and then go through the rooms inside. Later I want to use the Ouija board in the parents’ bedroom and maybe sprinkle some salt or something. We’ll see how it feels while shooting.”
With these words, Julia began her typical intro, welcoming her viewers and inviting them on another joint adventure. I did my best to capture her chocolate side, although that wasn’t particularly difficult. She simply looked enchanting from every angle.
” … do you hear that? Old Niermann is already waiting for us inside. Maybe we’ll die of fright tonight too!”
I followed Julia inside and hid my disapproving expression behind the camera. Her over-the-top manner as soon as we started filming was something I was still getting used to. Also, I thought it was a bit disrespectful to portray the father of the family as the perpetrator, even though she knew he was one of the victims.
Inside the house, we went to the left into the kitchen, where Julia continued to talk about the family’s normal daily routine, pointing at furniture and furnishings. She illuminated herself from below with her cell phone, which she kept turning around in between to look at her script.
“… and here the family gathered for dinner together. Were the children so loud and annoying that the father harbored thoughts of murder?” She stretched a hand dramatically toward the camera and wiggled her fingers.
“Stop for a sec,” I said, “Why is the father suddenly behind everything?” I asked, frowning.
“Oh Simon, that doesn’t matter at all!” she said, a bit heatedly. “I meant earlier that I would embellish the story a bit!”
I already knew her quickly irritated manner and also knew that she didn’t like it when I brought her out of her role.
“Sorry, I just wanted to ask,” I said and demonstratively held the camera in front of my face to show her that I wanted to continue.
“Where was I now?” she said, still irritated, and scrolled around on her phone.
Bang. A door above us slammed shut with a noise. We both flinched, and Julia let out a soft gasp.
“Did you leave a window open?” I asked immediately, looking at her worriedly.
“How, they’re all nailed shut?” she replied in a slightly higher voice than before.
While we talked, I noticed how cold it actually was in the house. We were both dressed in shorts and t-shirts, and suddenly I had the urge to dress warmer. A slight goosebump spread over my exposed arms and legs.
“Should I check what that was?” I asked, with the faint hope that she would accompany me.
“Yes, but I’m coming with you, and please film me while doing it. Damn, we should have filmed that just now too!” She clenched her fists and stomped frustratedly toward the stairs.
“It’s all on tape, don’t worry,” I said, following her quickly.
Together, the stairs were even louder, and when we got upstairs, we looked around tensely, only to find that nothing had changed. The door to the parents’ bedroom was still open, and the one I had closed earlier was still closed. Since it was the only door in the entire corridor that was closed, I suspected that the noise had come from it.
Julia apparently had the same thought, for she waved me over and said, “Look at this, this must be the door we just heard! What do you think will happen when I open it again?”
But it was still closed, I thought, while I filmed Julia opening the door to the children’s room. Now we both stood in the sad remnants of memories of a long-forgotten time, and Julia found her way back into her role:
“This must have been the children’s room, just look here,” she said, pointing to a dusty teddy bear sitting on a low shelf.
“I bet the spirits of the children are still here. They must be bored and just want someone to play wi-“
A loud crash sounded, this time much louder, and it came from below.