We Called It Spooky
By Anonymous
Originally published in The Front Porch Magazine, Spring–Summer 2026 (April 2026), page 54.
The old house sat back from the road like it was thinking its own thoughts. Two stories. A wide porch. Hallways so broad a kid could run full speed and still feel small. If you asked my family, it was “just an old farmhouse.” If you asked my brothers, it was something else entirely.
Grandad bought the field years before I was born, and folks said the land had been used for burials long before there were deed books and fence lines. He could point to places where the soil changed, where the ground looked different, as if it remembered. We laughed when he talked like that. We were children. We believed in flashlights and bravado.
Then my grandmother died, and the house seemed to grow louder at night.
My youngest brother was practically raised by Grandad and stayed over there more than any of us. He swore you could hear footsteps in the attic after dark, slow and steady, back and forth, like someone pacing with a purpose. Nobody was ever up there. That was the trouble. When you climbed the stairs and pushed open the attic door, there was only dust, rafters, and silence. But the silence never stayed.
One afternoon my sister came home and found our older brother sitting under a tree with a shotgun across his lap. He looked pale, like he had sprinted a mile. He told her he had walked into the kitchen and seen a plate of food sitting on the stove. Then, without warning, it lifted and flew across the room. Not slid. Not toppled. Flew. He did not try to explain it. He grabbed his gun and ran outside like the house had chased him into daylight.
You might say he was messing with her. You might say kids exaggerate. But if you were alone in that house long enough, something unusual happened. It was not always evil. It was just… wrong-footing. Like reality had loosened its grip on the ordinary.
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The worst moment for me came on a night I promised my mother I would wake her at ten. She worked nights. She leaned in the doorway and made me swear it. I said, “No problem.” Of course I fell asleep.
Then my bed shook hard, as if someone had grabbed the frame and rattled it once, fierce and sudden. I sat straight up. I stared at the clock.
10:00 exactly.
And in the glass insert of the porch door, directly in front of me, there was a shape. Not a face. Not a person I could name. Just a presence where no presence should have been. I did not scream. I could not. I watched until it was gone, and then I lay there wide-eyed, trying to argue myself back into a world that made sense.
Years later, the telephone started ringing in that same house. I would pick up and hear nothing. Hang up. It would ring again. Nothing. After the third time, I got my keys, walked out, and left.
We call it spooky. We call it haunted. But maybe the better word is unsettling. And that is why it belongs in an issue themed Stop the Insanity. Because the hardest kind of insanity is not just what happens out there in the world. It is what happens inside us when fear takes the wheel, when we stop trusting what is good, when we start living like the dark gets the final word.
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