Short Thriller Stories

10. Woodvale

People often say that family comes first. They say that it's always family above everything else. And while that may be true, the Woodvales had a different opinion. From the outside looking in, they were the perfect, all-American family. But the darkest secrets are always the ones hidden in plain sight.

The Woodvales owned a hotel on the outskirts of the small town of Lakeshore Ridge, a town riddled with gossip. Built in 1820, the Woodvale Inn was previously an asylum that housed the criminally insane. But over the next two decades, it was renovated into a luxurious five-star hotel, where the residents of Lakeshore Ridge could come and go as they pleased. But it wasn't until the week before Halloween that the inn had taken a deadly turn.

On October 24, 1884, William Woodvale killed his daughter, Katie, by pushing her out of a window. Her room had been on the 15th floor, so there was no way she would survive the "accidental fall." After the death of his daughter, William Woodvale hung himself from the bell tower of the hotel. His wife, Charlotte, who found William's body, receded into a state of depression and despair. On the fifth anniversary of his death, she drove her car off of a cliff, landing into water and ending her life. Rumor has it that their ghosts still haunt Woodvale Inn.

Emma Hawthorne had never believed in the supernatural. She wasn't the type of kid that slept with a nightlight or asked her parents to check under her bed and in her closet for monsters. She did, however, believe gossip. Whatever it was that people were saying, Emma believed it. So although she didn't believe the chilling urban legend that William, Katie, and Charlotte's ghosts haunted the infamous hotel, she did believe that William Woodvale had murdered his daughter. Standing outside the hotel, however, she started to believe if maybe, just maybe, the rumors were wrong. The exterior of the hotel was beaten down, the neon sign that glowed at night was broken, and the downstairs windows were boarded up with wooden planks. It was hard to believe that a place like this was once an extravagant hotel. Nevertheless, she ventured in. If there was one thing that Emma considered more important than gossip was secrets. And Woodvale Inn was full of them.

The inside of the hotel was just as big as the outside. The main room was grandiose, lined with floor-to-ceiling redwood bookshelves and a hanging golden chandelier. The walls were lined with paintings of every member of the Woodvales, and the paint was slowly chipping. A dusty red carpet was draped across the grand staircase, and Emma went up all fifty stairs to the only part of the inn unaffected by time.

The paint on the walls were fresh, almost as if it had been recently done. There were a total of five rooms upstairs: William and Charlotte's room, Katie's room, two guestrooms, and William's office. Emma went into the office first and at first glance, everything seemed normal. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Paperwork was strewn about the desk, his planner was open, and his calendar was booked with important business meetings, almost as if William was gone and would be coming back any minute. But places like these were deceiving. They were notorious for luring people in, and revealing their darkest secrets to them. When Emma opened William's desk drawer, she found the secret. A leatherbound notebook and polaroids of the family taken just three days before the murder.

Emma took the notebook and went to Katie's room. The room where William Woodvale murdered his daughter. Her room was more macabre, more melancholy. The curtains were a deep shade of maroon, there was a small dresser next to the bed, and the dark oak headboard of the bed had scratch marks etched into them. But the most unsettling part was the windows. They were boarded up, but not with wood like the ones downstairs. These windows were boarded up with metal bars, almost like a jail cell. When Emma opened the door to enter the room, she noticed that the room only locked from the outside. Her heart began to race slightly and her breathing grew labored as it dawned on her that Katie's parents were keeping her as a prisoner in her own room.