Creepypasta

Stony Cottage

I used to live in a house in England that we, for some reason, always called Stony Cottage. Well, Stony Cottage was haunted. I am not a religious person, and I am pretty much the definition of a skeptic. I will always default to empiricism for an explanation to a tough question, but things happened in that house that, while rather mundane as far as ghost stories tend to go, are completely inexplicable by any reasoning I can come up with, and I have had 10 years to think about it. I swear I am not making up a word of this.

Firstly, there was a fireplace in the living room. The odd part, and the first thing we noticed about the house that was out of the ordinary, was that regardless of flu status, kindling present, temperature, or any of the other possible variables present, fires could and would not burn inside of the threshold. Lighters would not burn inside of the fireplace. Matches would go out before hitting the ground, without fail. Newspapers, set on fire outside the fireplace, would instantly extinguish once they crossed the threshold. Acetylene torch, same thing. Instantly extinguished. Never once was a fire successfully started, with myself and both parents trying to the best of our ability.

Also, there was a basement which had the whole "evil presence" thing going on. My mother flat out refused to go in there after the first time she did, and that was during broad daylight. My father only did with the door open and every light in the vicinity on. I remember vividly the feeling of abject terror I felt the one time, to my memory, that I went in there, not the kind of scared you feel when you're a kid and your mom turns the light out and shuts your room door, but the kind of scared you feel when every horror movie you've ever seen comes to life and coagulates in the form of suffocating, total darkness punctuated by a hundred eyes all staring at you with a deep burning hatred. The temperature in there was always about 50 F regardless of season/time of day.

The other thing I can remember was that, every time it snowed, without fail, there was a set of shod footprints going in a complete circle around the house, without any going to or from in any direction, and with no indication of where they may have started or stopped. It was just a perfect circle, as if somebody had tried consciously to meet up perfectly in step with their own tracks where they had begun walking. Again, there were never once any tracks leading to or from the circle, and this happened *every time* it snowed.

This one could be considered rather easily explicable, think what you will. I had woken up to use the bathroom, down the hall from all the bedrooms which were all next to each other in one end of the house. So I was there doing my number 2 thing, and I hear footsteps coming down the hallway, and then an oddly abrasive knock at the closed and locked door. Now, my parents and I both used this bathroom so I didn't think to much of it, just looked up from my reading material and said "be out in a sec." I finish up, and walk back down the hall to my parents room, taking a moment to notice how extremely cold it has become in this hallway. I open my parents room door and subsequently lose an entire night of sleep, when neither of my parents have any idea what I'm talking about when I wake them up to say that I'm done with the toilet. My parents were both sound asleep, snoring, lights off, no sign of having been active at any point in the last 5 hours. They both deny having been up at all, much less having knocked on the bathroom door. My mother and I both spent the rest of the night awake, watching TV with the light on.