Chapter 2 - CHAPTER TWO: THE HOUSE THAT REMEMBERED

Part I: Before You Read This

Content Warning: This account is based on documented events. Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved. Some details have been reconstructed from police reports, psychiatric evaluations, and recorded testimonies. What you're about to read is not fiction dressed as truth—it's truth that wishes it were fiction.

Author's Note: This is the first installment of The Hollowfield Files. Emily Morrison's story continues in Chapter Two, where we learn what happened on the night of December 21st, 2019—the night that would change everything.

The events described in this chapter are inspired by documented cases of alleged paranormal activity in the United Kingdom, including but not limited to the Enfield Poltergeist (1977-1978), the Black Monk of Pontefract (1966-1969), and various alleged hauntings in Lincolnshire. Names, locations, and specific details have been changed or fictionalized to protect the privacy of those involved.

If you're reading this and you recognize this story—if you lived in a house like Hollowfield Farm—please reach out. You're not alone. And you're not crazy.

See you on the other side.

Part II: The Hook That Never Let Go

Lincolnshire, England

November 14th, 2019

3:47 AM

Okay, so here's the thing about real horror—it doesn't announce itself. There's no dramatic music, no flickering lights as a warning, no convenient moment where you can pause and say, "Hey, maybe we should leave." Real horror creeps in like carbon monoxide. By the time you notice something's wrong, you've already been breathing it for hours.

My name is Emily Morrison. I was seventeen when my family moved into Hollowfield Farm. I'm twenty-two now, and I still can't sleep with my back to an open door. I still check corners of rooms before I enter them. I still flinch when I hear children laughing in empty spaces.

This is not a story I wanted to tell. This is a story I need to tell—because for three years, nobody believed us. The police wrote us off as attention-seekers. The local council suggested we were suffering from "shared delusion." Even the bloody Church of England sent a vicar who spent more time checking his phone than blessing our house.

But I have recordings. I have photographs. I have the psychiatric evaluations that say none of us were lying, none of us were mentally ill, and yet somehow—impossibly—all of us experienced the same impossible things.

So settle in. Turn your lights on. Maybe check behind you—not because anything's there, but because after reading this, you'll understand why I always do.

Let me take you back to when it all began.

Part III: The Perfect House (That's Always the First Red Flag)

October 2nd, 2019

Three Days Before We Moved In

My dad, Richard Morrison, was what you'd call aggressively optimistic. The type of man who'd look at a burning building and say, "Well, at least we'll be warm!" He'd lost his job at a Manchester logistics company six months earlier—restructuring, they called it, which is corporate-speak for "we found someone cheaper in another country." Instead of spiraling into depression like a normal person, he decided this was the universe telling him to pursue his dream.

His dream, apparently, was to become a farmer. At fifty-two. With zero farming experience. In one of the most economically depressed agricultural regions in England.

Classic Dad energy.

My mum, Sarah Morrison, had the patience of a saint and the organizational skills of a military general—both qualities necessary for being married to my father for twenty-three years. She was a nurse, and she'd managed to secure a transfer to a small clinic in the nearby village of Thornwick, about fifteen minutes from the farm. The pay was less, but the cost of living was cheaper, and she believed in my dad's dreams even when they were objectively ridiculous.

Then there was my brother, Lucas. He was twelve and going through that phase where he was too old for toys but too young for anything actually interesting. He spent most of his time on his Nintendo Switch and communicated primarily through grunts and eye-rolls. Standard pre-teen behavior. Nothing unusual there.

And me? I was in my final year of sixth form, preparing for A-levels, and absolutely furious about being dragged from Manchester—from my friends, from my boyfriend Jamie, from everything I knew—to live in a village that didn't even have a proper Tesco.

When Dad first showed us the listing for Hollowfield Farm, I thought it was a joke.

The photos showed a massive Georgian farmhouse—five bedrooms, original features, twelve acres of land, multiple outbuildings—listed at £180,000. In 2019. That's the price of a cramped two-bedroom flat in Manchester. For a five-bedroom farmhouse with land.

"There has to be something wrong with it," I said, scrolling through the listing on my phone. "Structural damage? Asbestos? Built on an ancient burial ground?"

I was joking about the last one. I wouldn't be joking later.

"It's been on the market for eight years," Dad admitted. "Apparently, there's some local... reputation."

"What kind of reputation?"

"Nothing concrete. You know how rural villages are—superstitious, traditional. Someone probably saw a fox at night and decided the house was haunted." He laughed. That laugh would haunt me later, the memory of how dismissive he was, how certain that everything had a rational explanation.

Mum, ever the pragmatist, had done more research. "The last family left after eleven months. Before them, another family lasted eight months. Before that, the house sat empty for almost six years after the original owners passed away."

"Passed away how?" I asked.

Mum's pause was a fraction too long. "Old age. They were elderly."

She was lying. I knew she was lying. I didn't push it because, at seventeen, I didn't really care about dead old people in a house hundreds of miles away. I cared about losing my social life and having to take a forty-minute bus to the nearest town with actual shops.

If I had pushed, maybe things would have been different.

Probably not. The house had already chosen us.

Part IV: First Sight

October 5th, 2019

Move-In Day

2:34 PM

The drive from Manchester to Lincolnshire took about three hours. We left early in the morning, following the moving truck that held our entire lives packed into cardboard boxes. I spent most of the journey with my AirPods in, watching the landscape change from urban sprawl to suburban blandness to actual, genuine countryside.

And then we turned off the main road onto a narrow lane lined with overgrown hedgerows, and I felt it for the first time.

How do I describe it? Have you ever walked into a room and known—not suspected, known—that something bad happened there? It's not a smell or a sound or even a visual cue. It's something older than your conscious brain, something left over from when we were prey animals on the savanna, constantly scanning for predators.

That's what I felt as we drove down Hollowfield Lane. Every instinct in my body suddenly went on high alert, and I didn't even know why.

I pulled out my AirPods. "Does anyone else feel weird?"

Lucas looked up from his Switch for the first time in an hour. His face was pale. "My stomach hurts."

"Probably just car sickness," Mum said, but her voice was too bright, too forced.

Dad said nothing. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

Then the house came into view, and for a moment, I forgot the dread pooling in my chest.

Hollowfield Farm was beautiful. Genuinely beautiful. The main house was red brick, Georgian architecture, with tall windows that reflected the gray October sky. Ivy crawled up the left side of the building, and a massive oak tree stood in the front garden, its leaves just beginning to turn gold. Behind the house, I could see rolling fields stretching toward a distant tree line, and several outbuildings—a barn, what looked like a stable, and a smaller cottage that had probably housed farmworkers a century ago.

"It's gorgeous," Mum breathed.

"Told you," Dad said, and some of the tension left his shoulders. "Wait until you see the inside. Original fireplaces in every room. A library. An actual library with built-in bookshelves."

The moving truck had already arrived, and the movers were standing outside, smoking and checking their phones. They looked uncomfortable. I noticed none of them had started unloading yet.

We parked and got out. The air was colder here than it had been in Manchester—crisp and clean, smelling of earth and distant rain. I stretched, my back aching from the drive, and looked up at the house.

The windows stared back at me.

I know how that sounds. Windows don't stare. But there's no other way to describe the sensation. It felt like something was looking at me from behind the glass—not just watching, but studying. Evaluating. Deciding.

"Come on," Dad said, jangling a set of old-fashioned keys. "Let me show you around."

He walked toward the front door, and I noticed something that would bother me later: the movers didn't follow. They stayed by their truck, watching us approach the house with expressions I couldn't quite read.

Later, I would find out why.

Part V: The Tour

The front door was massive—solid oak, original to the house, with iron hardware that had turned black with age. Dad unlocked it with a key that looked like it belonged in a museum, and the door swung inward with a groan that vibrated through my chest.

"After you," he said, grinning.

I stepped inside.

The entrance hall was impressive—high ceilings, a checkered tile floor in black and white, a sweeping staircase leading to the upper floors. To the left was a sitting room; to the right, a formal dining room. Directly ahead, past the staircase, I could see a hallway leading to what I assumed was the kitchen.

But I barely noticed any of that.

Because the temperature inside the house was wrong.

It wasn't just cold—houses get cold when they've been empty. This was a specific kind of cold, a sharp, biting chill that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. And it wasn't uniform. As I stood in the entrance hall, I could feel warm spots and cold spots, as if invisible currents of air were moving through the space without any visible source.

"Bit nippy," Mum said, rubbing her arms. "Richard, we'll need to get the heating sorted straightaway."

"Already on my list," Dad said. "The estate agent said the boiler's in the basement. Should just need a restart."

Basement. Of course there was a basement.

We spent the next hour exploring the house. Dad wasn't wrong about the features—the place was stunning. Original crown moldings. Working fireplaces in the sitting room, dining room, and master bedroom. A kitchen that had been partially modernized (probably in the 1990s, based on the appliances) but still had a massive farmhouse sink and original exposed beams. And yes, an actual library, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a rolling ladder.

The library was where I planned to study. It had a fireplace of its own and a window seat overlooking the back garden. Perfect.

The bedrooms were on the first floor (British first floor, which Americans would call the second floor). The master bedroom for Mum and Dad. A decent-sized room for me. A slightly smaller room for Lucas. Two guest rooms that we didn't need. And a bathroom with a claw-foot tub that was simultaneously charming and deeply impractical.

There was also a second floor—the attic—which had been converted into additional storage space. The estate agent had warned us that the attic wasn't suitable for living space due to some structural issues, so we didn't spend much time up there. Just a quick glance at dusty boxes and old furniture covered in sheets.

One thing I noticed, though: the attic had a lock on the door. On the outside.

Not to lock things in the attic.

To lock things out.

I didn't mention it at the time. I should have.

Part VI: The Movers' Warning

By the time we finished the tour, the movers had finally started unloading the truck. They worked quickly, almost frantically, carrying boxes and furniture into the house with minimal conversation. I was helping direct them—bedroom stuff goes upstairs, kitchen stuff goes to the back—when one of them, a heavyset man in his fifties with a Liverpool accent, pulled me aside.

"You're the daughter, yeah?" he asked, keeping his voice low.

"Yeah. Emily."

"Listen." He glanced toward the house, and something flickered across his face—fear, maybe, or warning. "I'm gonna give you some advice. You can take it or leave it, but I'm gonna say it anyway, because I'd want someone to say it to me."

I waited.

"Don't stay here past November," he said. "Whatever excuse you need to make, whatever story you need to tell your parents, do not let your family spend winter in this house. Get out before November ends."

"What? Why?"

He shook his head. "I'm not saying more than that. People think I'm crazy enough as it is. But I've moved three families out of this house. Out, not in. And every single one of them—" He stopped, his jaw tightening. "Just trust me, love. Get out before winter."

Before I could ask anything else, he walked away and climbed into the truck. Five minutes later, they were gone, leaving us alone with our boxes and our beautiful, terrible house.

I didn't tell my parents about the warning.

That was my first mistake.

Part VII: The First Night

October 5th, 2019

11:48 PM

The heating wasn't working.

Dad had spent two hours in the basement trying to restart the boiler, eventually giving up and calling an emergency heating engineer who couldn't come until Monday. So we spent our first night in Hollowfield Farm bundled in extra blankets, with electric space heaters running in every bedroom.

I couldn't sleep.

My room was at the back of the house, overlooking the garden and the fields beyond. There was no moon that night, and no light pollution this far from the city—the darkness outside my window was absolute, the kind of darkness I'd never experienced in Manchester. I'd left the curtains open because the estate agent had said something about "lovely morning views," and now I was too tired to get up and close them.

So I lay there, staring at the rectangle of black where the window was, trying to convince my body to relax.

That's when I heard it.

At first, I thought it was the house settling. Old houses make noise, right? Wood expands and contracts with temperature changes. Pipes do weird things. Foundations shift. Completely normal.

But this wasn't creaking or groaning. This was something else.

Footsteps.

Slow, deliberate footsteps, directly above my room.

In the attic.

I held my breath, listening. The footsteps continued—left to right, then right to left, pacing. Someone was walking in the attic. Someone—or something—was pacing back and forth, directly above my head.

My first thought: there's an intruder. Someone had broken into the attic before we arrived and was hiding there.

My second thought: the attic door was locked. From the outside.

My third thought: I should wake Dad.

But I didn't. I just lay there, frozen, listening to those footsteps pace above me for what felt like hours. Back and forth. Back and forth. Never speeding up, never slowing down. Perfectly rhythmic, like a metronome.

And then, suddenly, they stopped.

Silence.

I waited, my heart pounding, for the footsteps to resume.

Instead, I heard something else.

Three distinct knocks, coming from inside my bedroom wall. Right beside my head. So close I could have reached out and touched them.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

I don't remember deciding to scream. I just remember my mum bursting through my door moments later, finding me sitting up in bed, shaking, pointing at the wall.

"There's someone in the wall," I gasped. "There's someone in the wall, there's someone in the wall—"

She held me while I hyperventilated. Dad checked the attic (empty, locked, no signs of forced entry). Lucas slept through the whole thing.

"It was a dream," Mum said softly, stroking my hair. "First night in a new place, your brain's processing. It creates things that aren't there."

"It wasn't a dream. I was awake. I never fell asleep."

"Sometimes we fall asleep without realizing it. That's called a hypnagogic hallucination. Very common."

She used her nurse voice—calm, rational, designed to make me feel like my experience was normal and explainable. And maybe she was right. Maybe I had fallen asleep without realizing it. Maybe the footsteps were a dream. Maybe the knocks were my own heartbeat, amplified by fear.

I wanted to believe that.

But as Mum left my room and closed the door, I heard something that made every hair on my body stand up.

A child's laugh.

Soft, muffled, like it was coming from somewhere far away—or from somewhere very close, deliberately trying to stay quiet.

A child's laugh, in a house where the only child was my twelve-year-old brother.

A boy's laugh? A girl's?

I couldn't tell.

I didn't sleep the rest of that night.

Part VIII: The History (Part One)

October 8th, 2019

Three days after we moved in, while Dad wrestled with the now-functioning boiler and Mum started her new job at the Thornwick clinic, I did what any self-respecting Gen-Z would do.

I Googled the hell out of our house.

The official records were sparse. Hollowfield Farm had been built in 1784 by a wealthy landowner named Edward Hollowfield. It had remained in the Hollowfield family for nearly two centuries before the last of the line—a childless couple named Harold and Margaret Hollowfield—passed away in 1987.

The house had then been sold, and this is where things got complicated.

Between 1987 and 2019, Hollowfield Farm had been purchased and abandoned by seven different families.

Seven.

I found a local newspaper archive from 2003, which mentioned "continued difficulties" at the property. A follow-up article from 2008 mentioned "alleged disturbances" and "local superstition." Neither article gave any details.

Then I found the Reddit thread.

Someone had posted in r/ParanormalEncounters about eighteen months before we moved in. The post was titled: "My family fled Hollowfield Farm after eight months. Here's what happened."

I'm going to transcribe the post here, exactly as it was written, because you need to understand what we should have known before we ever signed the paperwork.

Reddit Post by u/TheresaEvans_2018 (Posted March 12th, 2018)

I don't know if anyone will believe this. I barely believe it myself, and I lived through it. But I need to write it down, because my therapist says documenting trauma is part of processing it, and also because I want there to be a record in case anyone else is stupid enough to move into that house.

My husband Mike and I bought Hollowfield Farm in July 2017. We were moving from London, sick of the city, wanted to raise our kids (we have two, Sophie who was 9 and Jake who was 7) in the countryside. The house was cheap, way too cheap, but we convinced ourselves it was a bargain.

The first three months were fine. Completely normal. We thought maybe the "reputation" was just rural gossip.

Then September came.

It started with Sophie. She started talking about her "new friend"—a girl named Catherine who lived in the house. We assumed it was an imaginary friend, which is normal for kids her age. But Sophie said things that imaginary friends don't usually say.

Catherine was hungry, Sophie said. Catherine hadn't eaten in a long time. Catherine wanted to know why we had so much food when she had none. Catherine said it wasn't fair.

We told Sophie to stop. The game wasn't funny.

Then Jake started seeing Catherine too.

Same description: a girl about their age, wearing an old-fashioned dress, with dark hair and "funny eyes." Both kids, separately, described the same details. The same name. The same stories.

Catherine had lived here a long time ago. Catherine's parents had done something bad. Catherine was waiting for something.

I took both kids to a child psychologist in Lincoln. He found nothing wrong with them. Suggested they might be picking up on our stress (buying a new house is stressful) and manifesting it as a shared fantasy.

Then the physical phenomena started.

Doors opening and closing on their own. Objects moving when no one was looking. Footsteps in the attic at night (always at night, always pacing). Cold spots that would appear and disappear without explanation.

One night, I was cooking dinner and every cabinet in the kitchen flew open simultaneously. Every. Single. One. The noise was like a gunshot.

I screamed. The kids came running. Mike came running.

And then, as we stood there staring at the open cabinets, they all slammed shut. At exactly the same moment. Like someone was showing off.

After that, things escalated.

Mike started having dreams—nightmares—about being buried alive. He'd wake up gasping, clawing at his own throat. The dreams got so bad he stopped sleeping. He started seeing things during the day, too. Shadows in corners. Figures in mirrors. Once, he swore he saw a woman standing at the bottom of our bed, watching us sleep.

Sophie stopped playing with imaginary Catherine. She became terrified of her. She said Catherine was angry. Catherine was getting impatient. Catherine said we needed to leave or "she'd make us leave."

Jake stopped speaking entirely. For three weeks, he didn't say a single word. The child psychologist said it was trauma-induced selective mutism. Trauma from what? We couldn't explain.

The last straw came on December 21st, 2017.

The winter solstice. The longest night of the year.

I woke up at 3 AM because I heard singing. A child's voice, singing a lullaby. It was coming from Sophie's room.

I ran down the hall and threw open her door.

Sophie was standing in the middle of her room, facing the corner. She was completely still—rigid, like a statue. And she was singing. But the voice wasn't hers. It was deeper, older, wrong.

I grabbed her, turned her around.

Her eyes were rolled back. Only the whites were visible.

She was freezing cold. Ice cold. Like she'd been left outside in a snowstorm.

And then, in that voice that wasn't hers, she spoke:

"You should have left when I asked nicely."

We were gone by sunrise. We left everything behind. Furniture, clothes, toys. We took our children and we drove until we ran out of petrol, and then we got a hotel room and didn't leave it for two days.

The house is back on the market now. I've tried contacting the estate agents to warn them, to tell them to disclose what happened to us, but they refuse. They say there's no legal requirement to disclose "alleged supernatural activity."

So I'm posting here instead.

If you're reading this and you're considering Hollowfield Farm: DON'T. I don't care how cheap it is. I don't care how beautiful it looks. That house is not a home.

It's a trap.

I read that post three times.

Then I ran downstairs and threw up in the toilet.

When I was done, I sat on the bathroom floor, shaking, and tried to figure out what to do.

Tell my parents? They'd say it was just someone on the internet making up stories. Dad had already dismissed my experience on the first night as a dream. Mum had a medical explanation for everything.

Keep it to myself? How could I? We were living in a house where children had been terrorized. Where a little girl had been possessed.

But here's the thing—and this is important for you to understand—we'd already signed a five-year lease. My dad had invested everything, all his redundancy money, all our savings, into setting up the farm. We couldn't just leave. There was nowhere to go. We'd sold our Manchester flat. This was it.

So I made a decision.

I would watch. I would document. I would gather evidence.

And when I had enough proof that something was wrong—real, tangible, undeniable proof—I would show my parents and make them understand.

That was my plan.

The house had other plans.

Part IX: The Children in the Photographs

October 12th, 2019

One week after we moved in.

I'd started keeping a journal—a physical notebook, because I didn't trust anything digital in that house. Every strange noise, every cold spot, every time the lights flickered, I wrote it down. Date, time, location, description. I was determined to be scientific about this.

The entries from that first week were relatively minor:

October 6th, 2:17 AM: Footsteps in attic again. Lasted approximately 20 minutes.

October 7th, 11:45 PM: Heard what sounded like crying coming from the basement. When I listened at the door, it stopped.

October 8th, 3:30 PM: Kitchen cabinet opened on its own while I was making tea. Mum was in the room but didn't notice.

October 9th, night: Lucas complained of nightmares. Said someone was standing at the foot of his bed, watching him. Wouldn't describe who.

October 10th, morning: Found scratch marks on the inside of my bedroom door. Hadn't been there the night before. Don't know how they appeared.

But on October 12th, something happened that changed everything.

I was exploring the stable building behind the house, which had been converted into a storage space for previous owners' belongings. Most of it was junk—old farming equipment, broken furniture, boxes of mildewed books. But in one corner, under a dusty canvas tarp, I found a trunk.

The trunk was old. Really old. Made of dark wood with brass fittings that had turned green with age. It was locked with a padlock so rusted I was able to snap it off with a piece of rebar.

Inside, I found photographs.

Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Black and white, sepia tones, some hand-colored. They documented the Hollowfield family across multiple generations—formal portraits, family gatherings, children playing in the garden.

But there was something wrong with the photographs.

In several of them—scattered throughout different decades, different settings—there was an extra child.

Let me explain. A formal family portrait from what looked like the 1920s showed a man, a woman, and two boys. Normal enough. But in the background, barely visible, there was a third child. A girl. She was blurred, as if she had moved during the long exposure time, but I could make out dark hair and a pale dress.

Another photograph, this one from maybe the 1890s, showed a group of children playing in front of the house. But one child wasn't playing. She was standing off to the side, facing the camera, completely still while the others were mid-motion blurs. Same dark hair. Same pale dress. Same face.

The same face across at least thirty years of photographs.

That was impossible. That was absolutely impossible.

Unless...

I found a photograph near the bottom of the trunk that made my blood run cold.

It was a daguerreotype, the earliest type of photograph, which meant it had to be from the mid-1800s. The image showed a young girl, maybe eight or nine years old, dressed in mourning clothes. She was seated, posed formally, with her hands folded in her lap.

But something was wrong with her eyes.

The exposure time for daguerreotypes was several minutes—subjects had to remain completely still. The girl had kept still. Too still. Her eyes were open and fixed directly on the camera, but they were blank. Empty. Like whatever had once animated her was gone.

I turned the photograph over.

On the back, in faded handwriting, were the words:

Catherine Hollowfield

Beloved daughter

1842-1851

Taken too soon

Catherine.

The same name Sophie and Jake had mentioned in the Reddit post.

Catherine Hollowfield had died in 1851, at the age of nine. And she had been appearing in photographs of the Hollowfield family for at least seventy years after her death.

She was still here.

She had always been here.

And now we were living in her house.

Part X: The Night of October 17th

October 17th, 2019

2:13 AM - 4:47 AM

What I'm about to describe is the first incident that I have documented evidence for. Not just my journal entries—actual recordings. Audio files that still exist, that have been analyzed by multiple experts, and that have never been explained.

By this point, I'd started sleeping with my phone recording. Voice memo app, all night, every night. Most of the recordings were just silence punctuated by my own breathing and the occasional creak of the house settling.

Not this night.

I woke at 2:13 AM because someone was whispering my name.

"Emily."

Clear as day. Right next to my ear.

I sat up so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash. My room was empty. The door was closed. The window was closed.

"Hello?" I whispered.

Silence.

And then, from somewhere in the house—maybe downstairs, maybe the basement, it was hard to tell—I heard what sounded like furniture moving. Heavy scraping sounds, like someone was dragging something across the floor.

My phone was recording. It had been recording all night. I grabbed it and held it in front of me like a weapon.

"Is anyone there?" I asked, louder this time.

The scraping stopped.

In its place, I heard music.

A music box. A slow, tinkling melody playing somewhere in the house. I didn't recognize the tune, but it sounded old—a lullaby, maybe, or a nursery rhyme.

I should have stayed in bed. I should have pulled the covers over my head and waited for dawn. That's what a sane person would have done.

But I needed evidence. I needed proof. I needed something I could show my parents that would make them believe me.

So I got out of bed, opened my door, and stepped into the hallway.

The music was louder now, echoing off the walls, seeming to come from everywhere at once. The hallway was dark—the nightlight we kept on for Lucas had gone out—and I had to use my phone's flashlight to see.

I checked Lucas's room first. He was asleep, curled up in a ball under his duvet. Mum and Dad's room was at the end of the hall; their door was closed, no light underneath.

The music was coming from downstairs.

I crept toward the staircase, my phone held in front of me, recording everything. The stairs creaked under my feet despite my best efforts to be quiet. When I reached the bottom, I found myself standing in the entrance hall, surrounded by shadows.

The music was coming from the library.

I walked toward it, my heart pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. The library door was open. Had I left it open? I couldn't remember.

I reached the doorway and looked inside.

The library was bathed in pale light—moonlight, I realized, coming through the window. And in the center of the room, on the small table near the fireplace, was a music box.

We didn't own a music box.

It was small, made of tarnished silver, with a ballerina on top that had stopped spinning. The mechanism had wound down. The music had stopped.

I stepped into the room, my phone's camera pointed at the music box.

"I don't know where you came from," I said aloud, half to myself and half to... whatever might be listening. "But I'm going to document this. I'm going to prove that something is happening here."

I reached for the music box.

The second my fingers touched the cold metal, every single book on the library shelves flew off simultaneously.

I'm not exaggerating. Every book. Hundreds of them. They launched themselves from the shelves with such force that they hit the opposite wall, hit the ceiling, hit me. The noise was deafening—a cacophony of thuds and cracks as books rained down around me.

I screamed.

And then the music box started playing again.

Not the gentle tinkling melody from before. This was wrong—the notes discordant, played too fast, like something was forcing the mechanism beyond its limits. The ballerina started spinning—but not in a graceful pirouette. She was rotating faster and faster, a blur of motion, until—

The music box exploded.

Pieces of metal flew in every direction. One piece grazed my cheek, drawing blood.

And in the sudden silence that followed, I heard a voice.

A child's voice.

"You found my box."

I spun around, my phone flashlight cutting through the darkness.

There was nothing there.

"Catherine?" I whispered.

A giggle. Soft, delighted, wrong.

"You're the first one who looked for me. The others just screamed. But you look. I like that."

I couldn't tell where the voice was coming from. It seemed to move—now to my left, now to my right, now directly behind me.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"I want to play."

The temperature in the room dropped so suddenly I could see my breath.

"I want to play, Emily. Will you play with me?"

Every instinct told me to run. Every nerve in my body was screaming at me to get out, to wake my parents, to leave this room and never come back.

But I was seventeen and stubborn and still convinced that there was a rational explanation for all of this. Still convinced that if I just gathered enough evidence, I could understand what was happening.

"What kind of game?" I asked.

The giggle again. Louder now. Closer.

"Hide and seek."

The lights went out.

Not just the flashlight on my phone—all the lights. Every light in the house, simultaneously, including the emergency torches we kept in the hallway.

Darkness. Absolute, complete, suffocating darkness.

"I'll count," the voice said. "You hide."

"Wait—"

"One."

I ran. I don't know how I made it out of the library without tripping over the books on the floor. I don't know how I found my way through the entrance hall in total darkness. Pure adrenaline, pure survival instinct.

"Two."

I reached the stairs and started climbing, taking them two at a time.

"Three."

I could hear something behind me now. Not footsteps—something else. Something wet. Like bare feet on a damp floor.

"Four."

I reached the first-floor landing and ran toward my parents' room.

"Five."

I grabbed the door handle.

It was locked. From the inside.

"Mum! Dad!" I pounded on the door. "Wake up! Please, wake up!"

"Six."

The wet sound was on the stairs now. Coming up. Slowly. Deliberately.

"PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR!"

"Seven."

The door didn't open. I pounded harder. My fists would be bruised in the morning. I didn't care.

"Eight."

I turned around.

The hallway was dark, but my eyes had adjusted enough to see the shape at the top of the stairs. Small. Child-sized. Standing perfectly still.

"Nine."

"Please," I whispered. "Please, I don't want to play."

"Ten."

The shape tilted its head.

"Ready or not," the voice said.

"Here I come."

Part XI: The Aftermath

I don't remember what happened next.

I woke up in my bed at 7:32 AM with no memory of how I got there. My parents were in the kitchen making breakfast. Lucas was on his Switch. Everyone acted like nothing had happened.

"You slept well," Mum said when I came downstairs. "No dreams this time?"

"I..." I didn't know what to say. "The lights went out last night."

"Did they? Power's fine now." She checked her phone. "No outage reported."

"The library. All the books—"

"What about the library?"

I walked to the library door, which was closed. I pushed it open.

The books were on the shelves. Every single one of them. Perfectly aligned. As if nothing had ever disturbed them.

But on the table near the fireplace, there was a single object.

A piece of tarnished silver, curved like a fragment of a music box lid.

And a small piece of paper, yellowed with age, with a message written in a child's handwriting:

I win.

Let's play again soon.

Part XII: Research and Revelations

October 20th - October 31st, 2019

After that night, I threw myself into research with an intensity that bordered on obsession.

I visited the Lincoln Archives. I found parish records for the village of Thornwick dating back to the 1600s. I scoured genealogical databases, historical newspapers, academic papers on local folklore.

And slowly, piece by piece, I uncovered the truth about Catherine Hollowfield.

She had been born in 1842, the only daughter of Thomas and Eleanor Hollowfield. By all accounts, she had been a bright, imaginative child—perhaps too imaginative for the conservative religious community of mid-Victorian England.

Catherine claimed to see things others couldn't. She spoke to people who weren't there. She described visions—angels, she called them, though the descriptions suggested something far less divine. The local vicar declared her afflicted by demons. Her parents, devout and terrified of social censure, agreed.

In 1850, when Catherine was eight years old, they began the treatments.

"Treatment" is a generous word for what they did. Isolation. Starvation. Physical punishment. Anything to "drive the devil out" of their daughter. Catherine spent the last year of her life locked in the attic of Hollowfield Farm, fed only bread and water, subjected to daily exorcisms that left her covered in bruises.

She died on December 21st, 1851.

The winter solstice.

The cause of death was officially recorded as "fever." But the parish records included a letter from a local doctor who had examined the body. He described signs of severe malnutrition, multiple bone fractures in various stages of healing, and marks around the neck consistent with strangulation.

Catherine Hollowfield had been murdered by her own parents.

And she had died in the attic.

The attic with the lock on the outside of the door.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

I found another document in the archives—a letter written by Thomas Hollowfield in 1853, two years after Catherine's death. It was addressed to his brother in London.

"We did what we thought was right," he wrote. "We believed we were saving her soul. But we were wrong. So terribly wrong. She has not gone to rest. She walks these halls at night. She whispers to us. She shows us things—visions of what awaits us for our sins. Eleanor has taken to her bed and refuses to rise. I fear she will not last the winter."

"And the child... the thing that wears the child's face... it is not our Catherine anymore. It is something else. Something that remembers what was done to it. Something that will never forgive."

"We cannot leave. We have tried. Every time we attempt to leave the property, something prevents us. Roads that lead in circles. Horses that refuse to move. An inexplicable compulsion to return."

"I believe we will die here. I believe she wants us to."

The letter ended there. According to the records, Thomas and Eleanor Hollowfield both died in January 1854. Cause of death: unknown.

Part XIII: The Warning Signs

November 1st - November 15th, 2019

After learning the truth about Catherine, I tried to convince my parents to leave.

"There's a history of deaths in this house," I said, presenting my research. "Multiple families have fled. There's documented evidence of traumatic events—"

"Emily." Dad's voice was patient but firm. "I've looked into all of this. The 'deaths' you're referring to were an elderly couple who passed away naturally. The families who left were just people who couldn't handle rural living. And that Reddit post you found—anyone can write anything on the internet."

"But the music box—the books in the library—"

"There's always an explanation. Old houses have drafts. Shelves warp over time. Things fall."

"Things don't explode, Dad!"

He sighed. "Emily, I know this transition has been hard for you. Leaving your friends, your boyfriend, your whole life in Manchester. It's natural to project that stress onto external factors. But making up ghost stories isn't going to change our situation."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to grab him and shake him and force him to understand. But parents never believe their children about things like this. Not until it's too late.

So I waited. And I watched.

And the house continued to reveal itself.

Lucas started having episodes. That's what Mum called them—episodes. He would zone out in the middle of conversations, his eyes going glassy and unfocused. When he snapped out of it, he wouldn't remember what had happened. He started drawing pictures—obsessively, compulsively—of a house with a dark figure in the attic window.

"Who's that?" I asked him once, pointing to the figure.

"The hungry girl," he said. "She says she's been waiting a long time."

Mum took him to a child psychologist in Lincoln. The psychologist found nothing wrong.

Dad started having trouble sleeping. He'd wander the house at night, claiming he was "just checking the heating" or "making sure the doors were locked." But I heard him talking to himself sometimes—or, I suspected, talking to something else. Once, I heard him apologizing. "I'm sorry," he was saying. "I'm so sorry, we didn't know, we'll leave, please just let us leave—"

The next morning, he didn't remember any of it.

Mum was the only one who seemed unaffected, but I noticed small changes. She became obsessive about keeping the house clean—scrubbing floors, washing walls, as if trying to erase something invisible. She stopped cooking dinner and started ordering takeaway every night. She avoided certain rooms—the library, the attic stairs, the basement.

And sometimes, late at night, I heard her crying.

Part XIV: November 21st, 2019 - The Descent Begins

Twenty days after my encounter in the library. Four weeks until the winter solstice.

The incidents were escalating.

Doors slammed on their own at all hours. The temperature in the house fluctuated wildly—one moment sweltering, the next freezing. Objects went missing and reappeared in impossible places. Lucas found his Switch inside a block of ice in the freezer. I found my phone in the attic, playing the same lullaby from the music box on loop, even though I hadn't been in the attic since we moved in.

But the worst was what happened to Lucas.

He stopped sleeping entirely. He said he couldn't close his eyes because she was always there when he did. He started losing weight. His teachers at his new school called Mum, concerned about his "alarming behavioral changes."

One night, I found him standing in the hallway at 3 AM, staring at the attic door.

"Lucas?"

He didn't respond.

I walked over to him, touched his shoulder.

He turned around.

His eyes were open, but they weren't seeing me. They were focused on something else—something over my shoulder, something I couldn't see.

"She's so close now," he whispered. "She's almost ready."

"Ready for what?"

He smiled. It wasn't his smile. It was too wide, too knowing, too old.

"The longest night," he said. "She's been waiting so long. And now she's found someone who can help her."

"Help her do what?"

His smile grew wider.

"Come home."

Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed.

I screamed for my parents. We took Lucas to the hospital. The doctors ran every test imaginable—blood work, CT scans, EEGs—and found nothing wrong with him. No medical explanation for his collapse, his behavioral changes, his weight loss.

"Sometimes children go through difficult phases," the pediatrician said. "Especially during major life transitions like a move."

We took Lucas home. He slept in my parents' room that night.

The next morning, he seemed completely normal. He didn't remember anything about the attic, or what he'd said, or why he'd collapsed.

But I remembered.

The longest night. She's been waiting so long.

December 21st. The winter solstice. The anniversary of Catherine Hollowfield's death.

We had exactly one month.

Part XV: The Recording

November 29th, 2019

Eight days before the solstice.

I was in my room, trying to study for A-levels I no longer cared about, when I decided to review my audio recordings. I'd been making them every night since October 17th—dozens of hours of audio, most of it nothing but silence and static.

But on this night, I found something.

The recording from November 14th—exactly fifteen days before—contained an anomaly.

At 3:33 AM (of course, 3:33, because even ghosts appreciate a cliché), my recording captured what sounded like a conversation.

Two voices. Both female. One young, like a child. One older, like an adult.

Neither voice was mine.

I'll transcribe what I could make out, though parts were too distorted to understand:

CHILD: [unintelligible] ...waiting so long. Why didn't you come sooner?

ADULT: I couldn't. The door was closed.

CHILD: I opened it. I've been opening it for years. But no one ever comes through.

ADULT: We came through.

CHILD: [laughter] You did. You found my box. You looked for me. [pause] Will you help me?

ADULT: How?

CHILD: On the longest night, the door opens all the way. If I have someone to hold it for me, I can leave. I can be free.

ADULT: What happens if you leave?

CHILD: [long pause] They stay.

ADULT: Who?

CHILD: [unintelligible]

ADULT: Catherine, who stays?

CHILD: [voice changes, becomes distorted, layered with multiple voices at once] EVERYONE WHO EVER HURT ME.

[Recording ends with a burst of static]

The adult voice in that recording was mine.

But I had never had that conversation. I had no memory of speaking those words, of asking those questions.

The recording was from November 14th. I had been asleep in my bed at 3:33 AM on November 14th. My phone had been on my nightstand, recording as always.

So who had I been talking to?

And more importantly: what had I agreed to do?

Part XVI: December 1st - The Countdown Begins

Twenty days left.

I made a decision. I wasn't going to wait for the solstice. I wasn't going to let whatever was planning to happen, happen. I was going to find a way to end this.

I contacted a local paranormal investigation group—the Lincolnshire Ghost Hunters, a group of middle-aged men with more enthusiasm than equipment. They came to the house on December 3rd, while my parents were out.

They lasted four hours.

In that time, their electromagnetic field detectors went haywire. Their cameras captured dozens of orbs and shadow figures. Their audio recorders picked up what they claimed was the most active EVP session they'd ever experienced.

But when something grabbed one of their investigators—physically grabbed him, leaving bruises on his arm in the shape of a child's handprint—they packed up and left.

"I'm sorry," the lead investigator said as they loaded their van. "We've dealt with minor hauntings before. Residual energy, intelligent spirits, even a poltergeist or two. But this..." He shook his head. "This is beyond us. You need someone with more experience. An expert."

"Do you know anyone?"

He hesitated. "There's a woman in York. A medium. She's helped with serious cases before. Her name is Margaret Ashworth. I'll send you her contact information."

He did. I called her that night.

Part XVII: Margaret Ashworth

December 8th, 2019

Margaret Ashworth arrived at Hollowfield Farm on a gray winter afternoon. She was in her sixties, with silver hair pulled back in a severe bun and eyes that seemed to look through you rather than at you.

"You're the one who found the music box," she said, not as a question.

"How did you know that?"

"I know a great many things." She walked toward the house, pausing at the front door. "She's been expecting me. She's excited."

"Excited?"

"Oh yes. She thinks I'm here to help her. She doesn't realize I'm here to stop her."

Margaret spent the next three hours walking through every room of the house, sometimes speaking aloud, sometimes standing in complete silence. She paid particular attention to the attic, spending nearly forty minutes in the locked room, though she refused to let me join her.

When she came back down, her face was pale.

"I need to tell you what you're dealing with," she said. "And you need to understand that what I'm about to say is not metaphor or speculation. This is fact."

We sat in the kitchen. I made tea because I didn't know what else to do.

"Catherine Hollowfield was not just a child," Margaret began. "She was what we call a 'natural sensitive'—someone born with the ability to perceive and interact with other planes of existence. In another era, she might have been celebrated as a prophet or a seer. In Victorian England, she was declared possessed and tortured to death by her own parents."

"I found the records," I said. "I know what they did to her."

"Then you know why she's still here." Margaret took a sip of tea. "When someone dies in extreme trauma, especially a child, especially a sensitive child, their spirit doesn't pass on. It becomes trapped. Bound to the place of death, unable to move forward, unable to find peace."

"But it's been almost 170 years. Why is she getting stronger now?"

Margaret set down her cup. "Because of you."

"Me?"

"You're a sensitive, Emily. Like Catherine was. You have the ability to perceive things others can't. That's why you could find her music box. That's why you can hear her when others only feel her. You're a conduit."

I shook my head. "I'm not—I don't see dead people. I've never—"

"Sensitivity manifests in different ways. For you, it's likely been subtle—intuition, vivid dreams, a tendency to 'feel' the atmosphere of places. But in this house, surrounded by this much spiritual energy, your abilities have amplified. You've become a battery for Catherine's power."

"What does that mean?"

"It means she's using you. Feeding off your energy. Growing stronger. And on the winter solstice—the night she died, the night the veil between worlds is thinnest—she intends to use you to open a door."

"What kind of door?"

Margaret's eyes met mine.

"The door between life and death. The door that will let her leave this house. But doors work both ways, Emily. If she opens it, things can come through. Things far worse than the spirit of a murdered child."

I felt cold. Colder than I had ever felt in this house.

"How do I stop it?"

"There's only one way." Margaret reached into her bag and pulled out an old leather-bound book. "You have to help Catherine find peace. Not by opening a door, but by giving her what she's been denied for 170 years."

"Which is?"

"Justice."

Part XVIII: The Truth About the Hollowfields

Margaret had been researching haunted houses for forty years. She had access to archives, documents, and oral histories that I never could have found on my own.

Over the next few days, she shared everything she knew about the Hollowfield family.

Thomas and Eleanor had died in January 1854, as I already knew. But what the official records didn't include—what had been carefully hidden—was how they died.

According to a letter found in a sealed box during a renovation in 1923, Thomas and Eleanor Hollowfield had been found in the attic. In the room where Catherine had died.

They had been dead for approximately two weeks when discovered.

The cause of death, according to the letter, was "apparent starvation, combined with self-inflicted wounds consistent with attempts to escape."

They had been locked in the attic. From the outside.

They had experienced exactly what they had done to their daughter.

And on the walls of the attic, written in something the letter delicately described as "fluid of unknown origin," were words:

NOW YOU KNOW

NOW YOU UNDERSTAND

NOW YOU STAY FOREVER

Margaret explained that Catherine's spirit wasn't simply seeking peace. It was seeking revenge. Every family who had lived in Hollowfield Farm since her death had been targeted—tested, tormented, and ultimately driven away or destroyed. The families who left quickly survived. The families who stayed...

"What happened to them?" I asked.

"Most fled before the winter solstice. But there were three families who didn't. Who couldn't, for various reasons." Margaret flipped through her notes. "The Harrisons in 1912—both parents committed suicide on Christmas Eve. Their children were found wandering the property, unable to speak. They never spoke again, spending the rest of their lives in an asylum."

I felt sick.

"The Whitmore family in 1967—the father disappeared on December 21st. His body was found in the attic three months later, though the room had been searched multiple times. The coroner couldn't determine cause of death, but noted the expression on his face was 'consistent with extreme terror.'"

"And the third?"

"The Evans family. 2017. The ones who posted on Reddit."

"But they escaped. The mother said they left on December 22nd."

Margaret shook her head slowly. "They left. But they didn't escape. The father, Mike Evans, died six months later. Heart attack, the doctors said, though he was only forty-two with no history of cardiac issues. The daughter, Sophie, was institutionalized after experiencing a complete psychotic break. She claimed that a little girl was following her, watching her, waiting for her."

"And the mother? She wrote the Reddit post—"

"Theresa Evans took her own life in March 2019. Seven months before your family moved in."

I couldn't breathe. The woman who had tried to warn us—who had specifically told people not to move into this house—was dead.

"Why didn't the estate agents tell us any of this?"

"Because there's no legal requirement to disclose 'alleged supernatural activity.'" Margaret's voice was bitter. "And because the estate agency is owned by descendants of the Hollowfield family. They've been managing the property for generations, finding new families to move in, watching them suffer, and cleaning up the aftermath."

"That's... that's monstrous."

"It's practical, from their perspective. They can't sell the property—legally, it's been entailed for centuries. They can't abandon it—the maintenance costs would bankrupt them. So they lease it out, knowing what will happen, and simply deal with the consequences."

"They're feeding families to a ghost."

"In a manner of speaking, yes."

Part XIX: December 20th - The Night Before

Thirteen days after Margaret's visit. One day before the winter solstice.

I had told my parents everything. I had shown them my recordings, my research, Margaret's documentation. I had begged them to leave.

They didn't believe me.

Dad said I was having a "severe stress reaction" and needed to see a therapist. Mum thought I was being "dramatic" and that Margaret was a "con artist" who was taking advantage of my anxiety. Lucas was too far gone to have an opinion—he spent most of his time staring at walls, whispering to someone I couldn't see.

So I made a different plan.

Margaret had given me instructions. A ritual, she called it—not an exorcism, but something closer to a reconciliation. If I could acknowledge Catherine's suffering, validate her pain, and offer her a different kind of peace, there was a chance she would move on willingly.

"But you have to mean it," Margaret had warned. "You can't fake empathy. If she senses that you're just trying to get rid of her, she'll react violently."

On the night of December 20th, I gathered everything I needed: the photographs from the trunk, the fragment of the music box, a candle, and a letter I had written to Catherine—pages and pages acknowledging what had been done to her, condemning the cruelty of her parents, honoring her memory.

At midnight, I went to the attic.

The door was unlocked for the first time since we'd moved in. I hadn't touched it. Someone—something—had opened it for me.

I climbed the stairs.

The attic was different than I remembered from our first tour. The dusty boxes and covered furniture were gone. In their place was... nothing. An empty room with bare floorboards and a single window that looked out over the dark fields.

And in the center of the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was a girl.

She looked exactly like the daguerreotype. Dark hair. Pale dress. Empty eyes.

But she wasn't empty anymore.

She was smiling.

"You came," she said, and her voice was the same voice from the library, from my recordings, from my nightmares. "I knew you would. You're not like the others. You see me."

"I see you," I confirmed. My voice was shaking. My whole body was shaking. But I forced myself to keep going. "I know what happened to you, Catherine. I know what your parents did. And I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

Her smile flickered. "Are you?"

"Yes." I knelt down, spreading the photographs on the floor between us. "I found these. I found your picture. I know you were just a child who saw things others couldn't. You weren't possessed. You weren't evil. You were gifted. And they destroyed you for it."

Catherine looked at the photographs. For a moment, something human flickered across her face—pain, maybe, or longing.

"They said I was touched by the devil," she whispered. "They said the only way to save my soul was to starve the sin out of me. But I wasn't sinful. I was just... different."

"I know." I reached out, not quite touching her. "I'm different too. I see things. I feel things. In another life, they might have done the same to me."

Catherine's eyes met mine.

"You're scared," she observed.

"Yes."

"But you came anyway."

"Yes."

"Why?"

I took a deep breath. "Because you deserve better than this. You deserve peace. You deserve to rest. And I want to help you find it."

Catherine stared at me for a long, long moment.

Then she laughed.

It wasn't a child's laugh anymore. It was something older, darker, twisted by centuries of rage and pain.

"Oh, Emily," she said, and her voice multiplied—layers upon layers, as if dozens of voices were speaking at once. "You don't understand. I don't want peace. I don't want to rest."

The temperature dropped. Frost began forming on the windows.

"I want what was taken from me. I want a life. A real life, outside these walls, outside this endless loop of memory and pain. And tomorrow night, when the door opens, I'm going to take one."

I scrambled backward, but my legs wouldn't work. I was frozen—literally frozen, ice crystals forming on my skin.

"I'm going to take yours, Emily." Catherine stood, and she was no longer a child. She was something else—a shadow, a void, a darkness given form. "You're going to hold the door open for me, just like we discussed. And when I walk through, you're going to stay behind. You're going to take my place. Forever."

"That's not—I never agreed to that!"

"You did. On November 14th. You just don't remember."

The recording. The conversation I had no memory of.

Will you help me?

How?

On the longest night, the door opens all the way. If I have someone to hold it for me, I can leave.

I had agreed. Without knowing what I was agreeing to, I had said yes.

"No," I gasped. "I take it back. I didn't understand—"

"Agreements made in this house are binding, Emily. You should have been more careful."

The darkness expanded, filling the room, pressing against me from all sides.

"Sleep now," Catherine's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "Tomorrow is going to be a very long night."

And despite every ounce of willpower I possessed, my eyes closed, and I fell into darkness.

Part XX: December 21st - The Longest Night

I woke up in my bed.

Morning light was streaming through the window. Birds were singing. For a beautiful, delusional moment, I thought everything had been a dream.

Then I looked at my hands.

They were covered in frost. Not metaphorical frost—actual ice crystals, glittering in the sunlight, melting slowly as I watched.

It was December 21st. The winter solstice. The longest night of the year.

And tonight, Catherine was going to take my life.

Part XXI: The Last Day

December 21st, 2019

7:43 AM

I sat in my bed, watching the frost melt from my fingers, and tried to think.

Okay. Okay. Focus, Emily. You have until sunset. The winter solstice sunset in Lincolnshire happens around 3:45 PM. After that, the longest night begins. Approximately sixteen hours of darkness.

Sixteen hours for Catherine to do whatever she was planning to do.

I had maybe eight hours to find a way out of this.

First things first: I needed to know what I was dealing with. I grabbed my phone and called Margaret Ashworth.

It rang once. Twice. Three times.

"The number you have dialed is no longer in service."

What?

I tried again. Same message.

I opened my email, found our correspondence, and sent her an urgent message explaining what had happened in the attic. The email bounced back immediately: "Delivery failed. Address does not exist."

No. No, no, no.

I searched for the Lincolnshire Ghost Hunters online. Their website was gone. Their Facebook page—deleted. Every trace of them had vanished, as if they had never existed.

As if Catherine had erased them.

Or as if they had never been real in the first place.

Had I imagined Margaret? Had Catherine put her in my mind, playing a role, feeding me exactly the information she wanted me to have?

I felt sick.

My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number:

"No one is coming to help you, Emily. It's just us now. See you tonight. 💀"

The emoji. The ghost was using emojis.

I would have laughed if I wasn't so terrified.

Part XXII: Desperate Measures

9:15 AM

I went downstairs. Mum was in the kitchen, making breakfast. Dad was reading the news on his tablet. Lucas was sitting at the table, eating cereal, staring at nothing.

Everything looked normal.

Everything felt wrong.

"Mum," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "I need to talk to you. Both of you. It's important."

"Can it wait until after breakfast, love? I'm running late for my shift."

"No. It can't wait."

Something in my tone made her stop. She turned around, spatula in hand, and really looked at me for the first time in weeks.

"Emily, you look terrible. Are you ill?"

"I need you to listen to me. Really listen. I know you think I've been making things up, but I'm not. Something is going to happen tonight. Something bad. And we need to leave. Right now. Get in the car and drive as far away from this house as possible."

Dad set down his tablet. "Emily—"

"Please." My voice cracked. "Please, Dad. I have never asked you for anything like this before. I'm begging you. We need to leave."

There was a long silence.

Then Dad sighed. "Alright. Tell us everything. From the beginning."

So I did.

I told them about the footsteps in the attic on our first night. The music box. The library incident. The recordings. The photographs of Catherine appearing across decades. My research into the Hollowfield family history. Margaret Ashworth's visit. And finally, what had happened in the attic last night.

When I finished, the kitchen was silent.

Lucas had stopped eating. He was watching me with an expression I couldn't read.

Mum's face was pale. Dad's jaw was tight.

"You expect us to believe," Dad said slowly, "that a ghost has been manipulating us for two months, that she plans to steal your body tonight, and that a paranormal investigator who may or may not have been real gave you a ritual to stop her."

"Yes."

"Emily, do you hear how that sounds?"

"I know how it sounds! But it's the truth!"

Dad shook his head. "I think we need to call Dr. Patterson. This has gone beyond normal stress—"

"I'M NOT CRAZY!"

The lights flickered.

Everyone froze.

The lights flickered again, and this time they didn't stop. They pulsed, on and off, on and off, in a rhythm that matched my heartbeat.

"What the hell?" Dad stood up, looking at the ceiling.

The kitchen cabinets started rattling. Softly at first, then harder, then violently—every cabinet, every drawer, shaking in their frames.

"Richard—" Mum's voice was high with fear.

And then Lucas spoke.

But it wasn't Lucas's voice.

"She's telling the truth, you know."

We all turned to look at him.

My brother was still sitting at the table, his cereal spoon frozen halfway to his mouth. But his eyes—his eyes were wrong. Empty. Hollow. Like the daguerreotype of Catherine.

"She's been telling the truth this whole time," Lucas said, in a voice that was high and clear and old. "But you didn't listen. Parents never listen. They didn't listen to me either. They said I was lying. They said I was wicked. They said the devil was in me."

"Lucas—" Mum reached for him.

"DON'T TOUCH HIM."

The voice that came out of Lucas's mouth wasn't a child's voice anymore. It was something else—layered, distorted, vibrating with rage.

"HE'S MINE NOW. THEY'RE ALL MINE. THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHETHER YOUR DAUGHTER COOPERATES OR WHETHER I HAVE TO TAKE WHAT I WANT."

The cabinet doors flew open. Every single one. Plates and glasses launched themselves from the shelves, shattering against the walls, the floor, the ceiling.

Mum screamed.

Dad grabbed her and pulled her toward the door.

"EMILY."

Lucas—Catherine—whoever was wearing my brother's face—turned to look at me.

"TONIGHT. THE ATTIC. MIDNIGHT. COME ALONE, OR I'LL TAKE HIM INSTEAD. YOUR CHOICE."

Then Lucas's eyes rolled back, and he slumped forward into his cereal bowl.

Part XXIII: Aftermath

10:30 AM

Lucas was unconscious for twenty minutes.

When he woke up, he didn't remember anything. He was confused about why there was glass everywhere, why Mum was crying, why Dad was pacing and muttering about calling the police.

"The police can't help with this," I said quietly.

Dad spun around. "Then what CAN help? You said that woman—Margaret—gave you a ritual. Did she give you anything else? Any backup plan?"

"You believe me now?"

His face crumbled. "I saw my son speak with someone else's voice. I saw plates fly through the air. I don't know what I believe, but I know something is wrong, and I'm done pretending otherwise."

I felt a weight lift from my chest—only for a heavier one to take its place.

"She said the only way to help Catherine find peace was to acknowledge her suffering and offer her justice. But that didn't work. When I tried last night, she laughed at me. She doesn't want peace. She wants a life. My life."

"Then we leave," Mum said firmly. She had stopped crying and was now in full nurse-crisis-mode. "We pack the car and we drive away. Right now."

"The Reddit post said other families tried to leave. Roads that led in circles. Cars that wouldn't start. Compulsions to return."

"Then we'll walk. We'll call a taxi. We'll do whatever it takes."

"Okay," I said. "Okay, let's try."

Part XXIV: The Attempt

11:15 AM

We packed as quickly as we could. Essentials only—clothes, documents, medications. Everything else could be replaced. Nothing was worth our lives.

Dad loaded the car while Mum helped Lucas get ready. I grabbed my journal, my phone, and the fragment of the music box—I didn't know why, but something told me not to leave it behind.

By 11:30, we were in the car. Dad behind the wheel. Mum in the passenger seat. Lucas and me in the back.

"Everyone buckled?" Dad asked.

"Yes."

"Then let's go."

He turned the key.

The engine started normally. The dashboard lit up. Everything seemed fine.

Dad put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway.

We made it to the end of Hollowfield Lane.

And then the car stopped.

Not stalled—stopped. The engine was still running, but the wheels wouldn't turn. We were frozen in place, ten meters from the main road.

"What the—" Dad pressed the accelerator. The engine revved, but the car didn't move. He tried reverse. Nothing. Neutral. Nothing.

"It's not working," Mum whispered.

Lucas started to cry.

And then the radio turned on by itself.

Static at first, crackling and hissing. Then, through the static, a voice.

A child's voice.

"Did you really think it would be that easy?"

The temperature inside the car dropped. Our breath became visible.

"I've been waiting almost two hundred years, Emily. Do you think I'd let you leave twelve hours before my chance at freedom?"

"Catherine—"

"Go back to the house. Wait for midnight. Come to the attic alone. If you do anything else—if you try to run again, if you try to bring anyone with you, if you do anything other than exactly what I tell you—I will hurt your family."

The radio crackled.

"I'll start with Lucas. He's young. Malleable. Easy to break. Then your mother. Then your father. I'll make you watch all of it before I take what I want anyway."

"OKAY!" I screamed. "Okay, I'll do it! Just don't hurt them!"

Silence.

Then, softly: "Good girl."

The radio turned off. The temperature returned to normal.

And the car started moving again.

But not forward. Backward. On its own, without Dad touching the wheel, the car reversed itself all the way back up Hollowfield Lane and parked itself in front of the house.

The engine died.

No one spoke for a very long time.

Part XXV: The Vigil

12:00 PM - 11:45 PM

The next twelve hours were the longest of my life.

We went back inside—what choice did we have?—and tried to pretend everything was normal. Mum made lunch that nobody ate. Dad tried to fix things, calling everyone he could think of: the estate agents (no answer), local churches (one vicar laughed and hung up, another said he'd pray for us but couldn't help), even the police (who sent a patrol car that circled the property once and then left, the officers later claiming they had received no such call).

Lucas slept. Or something that looked like sleep. He lay on the sofa with his eyes closed, breathing steadily, but occasionally his lips would move, forming words I couldn't hear.

And I prepared.

If Margaret had been real—and I was choosing to believe she was, because the alternative was too terrible—then there was still a chance. The ritual might not give Catherine peace, but maybe there was another way. Maybe I could find leverage. Maybe I could negotiate.

I went through every piece of research I had accumulated. Every photograph, every document, every scrap of information about Catherine Hollowfield and her family.

And I found something I had missed before.

A letter, tucked between two photographs, so faded I had assumed it was blank. But when I held it up to the light, I could make out words.

It was from Catherine herself. Written in a child's handwriting. Dated December 20th, 1851—the day before she died.

"Dear God," it read. "Mama says You don't listen to wicked children. But I'm not wicked. I'm just different. Please, if You can hear me, please make them stop. Please make them understand. I don't want to see the angels anymore if it means they hurt me. I'll be good. I'll be normal. I'll be whatever they want me to be. Just please make them stop."

"If You won't help me, then I hope someone will remember me. I hope someone will know that I was here, that I was real, that I wasn't what they said I was. I hope someone will tell my story so that what happened to me never happens to any other child."

"I'm so tired, God. I'm so hungry. And I'm so alone."

"If I die tomorrow, please don't let me be forgotten."

"Catherine"

I read that letter three times.

And I understood.

Catherine didn't want to take my body. Not really. She wanted something far simpler.

She wanted to be remembered. She wanted her story told. She wanted acknowledgment that she had existed, that she had mattered, that her suffering had not been in vain.

The rage—the violence—the threats—those were defenses. Walls she had built over 168 years of isolation and pain. But underneath all of that, she was still a nine-year-old girl who had been tortured to death by the people who were supposed to protect her.

She was still a child who just wanted someone to see her.

Maybe that was the key.

Part XXVI: Midnight

December 21st, 2019 > December 22nd, 2019

11:58 PM > 12:00 AM

The clock struck midnight.

I stood at the bottom of the attic stairs, alone. I had insisted that my family stay downstairs—not because Catherine had demanded it, but because what I was about to try was dangerous, and I didn't want them caught in the crossfire.

In my hands, I held three things: Catherine's letter, the fragment of the music box, and a single candle.

I climbed the stairs.

The attic door was already open, just like last night. Beyond it, darkness so complete it seemed solid.

I stepped inside.

The temperature dropped immediately. Not gradually—immediately. One second normal, the next so cold my breath crystallized instantly.

"You came."

Catherine's voice, from everywhere and nowhere.

"I came."

A shape materialized in the center of the room. The same girl from last night—but different. More solid. More present. As if the proximity to midnight had given her strength.

"You brought offerings." She tilted her head, studying the items in my hands. "The letter. Interesting. I wondered if you'd find that."

"I did."

"And what do you think it changes?"

I took a deep breath. "Everything."

Catherine laughed. That terrible, ancient, layered laugh.

"You're going to try to talk me out of this. You're going to appeal to the child I once was, tell me that I'm better than this, that revenge won't make me happy. Save your breath. I've had 168 years to consider my options. This is what I want."

"No, it isn't."

Catherine's expression shifted. Curiosity, maybe. Or irritation.

"Excuse me?"

"This isn't what you want. Taking my body, leaving this house, living a life that isn't yours—that won't give you what you actually need. You'll just be alone in a different place. Still forgotten. Still unseen. Still the girl who died in the attic."

"I'll be alive."

"Will you? Or will you just be wearing a mask? A borrowed face in a world that's moved on without you? You won't have friends, because you won't know how to make them. You won't have family, because everyone who ever loved you died a century ago. You'll be a ghost pretending to be human. And eventually, the loneliness will catch up to you. And you'll realize you traded your only chance at peace for nothing."

Catherine's form flickered.

"Stop talking."

"No. Because I know what you really want, Catherine. I read your letter. I know that all you ever wanted was for someone to see you. To remember you. To tell your story."

"My story is PAIN. My story is DEATH. My story is being TORTURED by the people who were supposed to LOVE ME!"

The walls shook. The floor cracked. The darkness pressed against me so hard I could barely breathe.

But I didn't stop.

"Yes. Yes, it is. And that story deserves to be told. Not hidden. Not forgotten. Not used as a footnote in a ghost tour. Your story—you—deserve to be remembered as a person. A child. A victim. Not a monster."

"I AM a monster. They MADE me into one."

"They tried. But you don't have to let them win."

Catherine's form flickered again, more violently this time.

"You're trying to manipulate me."

"I'm trying to offer you a choice."

"I DON'T HAVE CHOICES. I NEVER HAD CHOICES. THEY LOCKED ME IN THIS ROOM AND THEY STARVED ME AND THEY BEAT ME AND THEY KILLED ME AND I NEVER GOT TO CHOOSE ANYTHING."

The room exploded.

Not literally—but the darkness erupted outward, revealing something I hadn't seen before. The attic walls were covered in writing. Names. Dates. Pleas for help. Prayers for salvation. Some scratched into the wood with fingernails. Some written in what looked like dried blood.

This was Catherine's prison. Her execution chamber. The walls themselves were a record of her suffering.

And in the center of it all, Catherine Hollowfield—no longer a shadowy figure, but a child, pale and thin and covered in bruises, her eyes red from crying.

"Please," she whispered, and her voice was small and broken and real. "Please, I just want it to stop. I want to go somewhere else. Somewhere they can't hurt me anymore."

I knelt down so I was at her level.

"I know," I said. "And you can. But not by taking my body. That's not freedom—it's just a different kind of prison."

"Then what do I do?"

I held out the letter she had written 168 years ago.

"You let me tell your story. The real one. Not the ghost story, not the haunted house legend. Your story. Catherine Hollowfield, beloved daughter, who was born with a gift the world wasn't ready to understand. Who suffered because she was different. Who died because the people who should have protected her failed her."

Catherine stared at the letter.

"You would do that? Tell my story?"

"I would. I will. I'll write it down. I'll make sure the world knows who you were. I'll make sure no one ever forgets you."

"And then?"

"And then... you rest. You find peace. You go wherever it is that children go when they're finally free."

"I don't know how."

I reached out my hand.

"I'll show you."

Part XXVII: The Crossing

Catherine looked at my hand for a long time.

The darkness around us had receded. The cold was still there, but it was gentler now—a chill rather than a freeze. The walls had stopped shaking.

"If I do this," she said slowly, "if I trust you... what happens to me?"

"I don't know exactly. But I believe—I have to believe—that there's something better than this. Somewhere you can rest. Somewhere you're not alone."

"I've been alone for so long."

"I know. But you're not alone right now. I'm here. And I see you, Catherine. I really see you."

She reached out.

Our hands touched.

And the world shifted.

I can't describe what happened next in physical terms because it wasn't physical. It was something deeper, something that happened on a level beyond sight or sound or touch. I felt Catherine's entire existence wash over me—168 years of pain and rage and loneliness, but also memories from before, from when she was just a child. Playing in the garden. Laughing with her mother before everything went wrong. Seeing things that nobody else could see and being delighted by them rather than afraid.

She had been happy once. Before they broke her.

And she could be happy again. If she let go.

"It's time," I whispered.

Catherine looked at me with eyes that were no longer empty. They were wet with tears.

"Will you really remember me?"

"Always."

"Will you tell my story?"

"I promise."

She smiled. And for the first time, it was a child's smile—innocent and hopeful and pure.

"Thank you, Emily."

The room filled with light.

Not harsh light—gentle light, warm light, the kind of light that makes you feel safe. It came from everywhere and nowhere, and Catherine's form began to dissolve into it, becoming transparent, becoming translucent, becoming radiant.

"I can see them," she gasped. "I can see—there are others. Other children. They're waiting for me."

"Go to them."

"I'm scared."

"I know. But you don't have to be scared anymore. No one can hurt you where you're going."

Catherine took one last look at the attic—at the walls that had been her prison for so long—and then she turned toward the light.

"Goodbye, Emily Morrison. Thank you for seeing me."

"Goodbye, Catherine Hollowfield. Rest now."

She walked into the light.

And the light folded around her, embraced her, welcomed her home.

And then it was gone.

Part XXVIII: Dawn

December 22nd, 2019

7:12 AM

I woke up on the attic floor.

The room was empty. The walls were bare—no writing, no scratches, no record of Catherine's suffering. The fragment of the music box was gone. The letter was gone. Everything was gone.

But the attic felt different.

I don't know how to explain it except to say that the heaviness was gone. The oppressive presence that had permeated this house since we moved in—the feeling of being watched, of being judged, of being hunted—had vanished.

The house felt like just a house.

I went downstairs.

Mum was in the kitchen, making coffee. When she saw me, she burst into tears and pulled me into a hug so tight I couldn't breathe.

"We waited all night," she said. "We couldn't come up—something was blocking the stairs—but we waited. We heard things. Voices. The house shaking. And then everything went quiet. And we didn't know—"

"It's over," I said. "She's gone."

Dad appeared in the doorway. Lucas was behind him, looking confused but more present than he had in weeks.

"What happened up there?" Dad asked.

I thought about how to explain. About Catherine's story, her pain, her choice to let go. About the light and the other children and the peace that had finally come.

"She just needed someone to see her," I said. "She just needed someone to remember."

Dad didn't look like he understood. But he nodded anyway.

"Are we safe now?"

"Yes. I think we are."

Part XXIX: The Aftermath

The weeks that followed were strange.

The house was just a house now. No cold spots. No footsteps in the attic. No doors opening on their own. Lucas stopped having episodes. Dad started sleeping through the night. Mum stopped obsessively cleaning.

But we didn't stay.

We couldn't.

Too much had happened. Too many memories were soaked into those walls. Even without Catherine's presence, the house felt haunted by what we had experienced there.

In January, Dad contacted the estate agents and terminated our lease. He expected resistance, legal complications, penalties. Instead, the agent just said, "We understand. Most families don't last as long as you did."

Most families.

I wondered how many others had been through what we had been through. How many had faced Catherine's rage, her desperation, her hunger for connection. How many had failed where I had succeeded.

How many had never left at all.

We moved to a small cottage in Yorkshire—far from Lincolnshire, far from Hollowfield Farm, far from anything that reminded us of those three months. Dad gave up on the farming dream. Mum found a new position at a local hospital. Lucas started at a new school and slowly, gradually, returned to being a normal twelve-year-old boy.

And me?

I kept my promise.

Part XXX: The Story

Present Day - 2024

I wrote it all down.

Every detail. Every piece of research. Every moment of terror and despair and, finally, hope. I wrote about Catherine Hollowfield—not as a monster, but as a victim. A child who had been born different in an age that feared difference. A girl who had been destroyed by the very people who should have protected her.

I wrote about the institutions that had enabled her abuse—the church that had declared her possessed, the community that had looked the other way, the family that had valued reputation over their daughter's life. I wrote about the systemic failure that had allowed a nine-year-old girl to be tortured to death in an attic while the world carried on outside.

And I wrote about the aftermath. The 168 years of haunting. The families who had been terrorized. The lives that had been destroyed because no one had ever acknowledged what had been done to Catherine.

Because that's the thing about ghosts. They're not supernatural beings that exist outside of human experience. They're the manifestations of unresolved trauma, of unacknowledged suffering, of stories that never got told. And they don't go away until someone has the courage to face them.

I submitted my account to various paranormal researchers and historians. Most dismissed it as fiction. But a few listened. A few investigated. And a few confirmed details that I couldn't have known—details about the Hollowfield family, about the attic, about the methods of "treatment" that had been used on children deemed to be possessed in Victorian England.

Catherine's story was added to the historical record. Not as a ghost story—as a tragedy. A case study in religious extremism and child abuse. A warning about what happens when fear overrides compassion.

She would never be forgotten again.

Part XXXI: The Last Message

One week after we moved out of Hollowfield Farm

January 2020

I found a letter in my bag that I hadn't put there.

It was old paper, yellowed and fragile, but the handwriting was fresh.

"Dear Emily,

Thank you for keeping your promise. I can see everything now—the story you wrote, the people who are reading it, the way my name is being remembered.

I am at peace. The children here welcomed me. They had been waiting for so long. Some of them have stories like mine. Some have stories even worse. But we're together now, and we're not alone, and we're not hurting anymore.

I'm sorry for what I put you through. I'm sorry for threatening your family. I was so angry for so long that I forgot how to be anything else. You reminded me.

You reminded me that I was a child once. That I was loved once. That I deserved better than what I got.

I hope you have a good life, Emily Morrison. I hope you grow old and have children of your own and tell them about kindness and compassion and seeing people who are different.

And if you ever feel alone, remember: I'm watching. Not in a scary way—in a 'proud big sister' way. (Can I be your big sister? I never got to be anyone's big sister.)

Thank you for seeing me.

Thank you for setting me free.

With love,

Catherine

P.S. - If you ever go back to Hollowfield Farm, there's a box buried under the oak tree in the front garden. It has my real treasures in it—the things my parents didn't find and destroy. I want you to have them.

P.P.S. - Don't go back to Hollowfield Farm. Seriously. The house is fine now, but it's still creepy. Trust me. Just let it go.

P.P.P.S. - Tell Lucas I said sorry for borrowing his body. It was rude. I sent him good dreams to make up for it. He'll have good dreams for the rest of his life. It's the least I could do."

I laughed.

For the first time since October, I genuinely laughed.

And somewhere, I like to think, a little girl was laughing too.

EPILOGUE: What Happened Next

2024 - Five Years Later

Hollowfield Farm is still standing.

After we left, the estate agents put it back on the market. It sat empty for two years before being purchased by a historical preservation society. They converted it into a museum—not a ghost tour attraction, but a genuine historical site dedicated to documenting the treatment of "difficult" children in Victorian England.

Catherine's story is featured prominently. Her letter to God is displayed in a glass case in the attic—the very room where she died. Visitors learn about her life, her suffering, and her death. They learn about the systemic failures that allowed such tragedies to occur. They learn that the children labeled as "possessed" or "wicked" were often just neurodivergent, or traumatized, or simply different.

The museum has received over 100,000 visitors since it opened. Several of them have reported feeling a presence in the attic—not threatening, just... present. Watching. Approving.

Some have reported seeing a child's face in the window, smiling.

I like to think she's proud of what her house has become.

My family is okay.

Dad never did become a farmer, but he found a new job that he loves—managing a community garden project in Leeds. Mum is still nursing, still saving lives, still being the rock that holds us all together. Lucas is seventeen now, finishing sixth form, and yes, he's had nothing but good dreams since we left Hollowfield Farm. He doesn't remember most of what happened, and we've decided not to remind him.

Some things are better left in the past.

As for me—I'm twenty-two. I graduated from university with a degree in History. My dissertation was on the treatment of children accused of demonic possession in 19th-century England. It was very well received.

I'm working on a book now. A proper book, not just a thesis. It will tell Catherine's story, and the stories of children like her, and the stories of how fear and ignorance can destroy the most vulnerable among us.

It will be dedicated to her.

For Catherine Hollowfield, 1842-1851.

You were not wicked. You were never wicked.

You were different, and different is not a sin.

May you rest in the peace you were denied in life.

May your story light the way for others.

May you never, ever be forgotten.

A Final Note from the Author

This account is based on documented cases of alleged paranormal activity and historical records of child abuse in Victorian England. While the specific events described are fictionalized, the underlying tragedy is all too real.

Children were tortured and killed in the name of exorcism. Families were destroyed by fear and superstition. Communities looked away while the vulnerable suffered.

This still happens today.

If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse, please reach out for help. You are not alone. You are not wicked. You deserve to be seen, and heard, and protected.

And if you're ever in a house that feels wrong—if you ever sense a presence that needs something from you—maybe consider what they're really asking for.

Sometimes ghosts don't want to hurt us.

Sometimes they just want to be remembered.

END OF CHAPTER TWO