Horror Stories

The Ruined House

I had just moved into a tiny town that was literally in the middle of nowhere and had less than 100 people in total population.

I was about 7 at the time and I had overheard my parents talking about a dog that kept barking all night long keeping them up. I wanted to help them so I went out looking for neighbors with dogs to ask if they could maybe keep their dogs from barking all night.

So this particular town had a bad track record of houses catching on fire so there were a lot of old half burned or ruined houses that had just been left to the Earth. This particular incident happened with one of these ruined houses.

As I’m walking around I hear someone call out to me and I turn to see a very beautifully kept lawn in front of a nice white 2 story house. There is a nice old couple sitting in lawn chairs out front and the woman is calling me over. I walk over to the fence.

The woman asks me what in doing walking around by myself (I had been living there for about 6 months at that point so I knew everyone and it wasn’t that weird for parents to let their kids out by themselves). I tell them about the dog and ask if they know about it.

The woman says that it is her dog and she will try and keep it quite from now on, and then offers me a full sized Snicker’s bar. I took it (I know don’t take candy from strangers but there was a fence and also like I said it was a VERY small town and I wasn’t really afraid of anything happening). Feeling like I had accomplished my goal, I went home.

At the time I REALLY wanted to eat the snickers but it had melted on my walk back some so I stuck it in the freezer to chill. Then my friend comes over and we head over to her house and I forgot about the candy.

Wondering how the ruined houses fit into this? Well when I return home from my friends house, I tell my mom about the nice couple and that they would keep their dog quiet. I tell her where the house was and she gets really confused.

“What do you mean? There isn’t a house there.”

I would have shown the candy as evidence but I had totally forgotten about it. After some back and forth we agree to go on a walk tomorrow in the daytime so I can show her which house I mean.

Next day we walk down to where the house was and… there is no house. The well kept law was just overgrown weeds and the house was nothing more than a pile of rubble. Only the fence still remained.

I ran home to show her the candy that I had just remembered about and that was gone too (disclaimer: little brother was know for stealing things so he might have taken it, but still).

I still get chills when I pass by that vacant lot to this day and I am now 20 years old.