People say the old boardinghouse is harmless. Just stories. Just superstition.
Lila Carr doesn’t believe in ghosts… until her first night inside.
Footsteps follow her down empty halls.
Shadows linger in the mirror after she’s already turned away.
Something in the house knows her name—and waits for her to speak back.
She came to write about the haunting.
Now she’s part of it.
Because the house doesn’t want visitors.
It wants attention.
And once it notices you… it never stops watching.
By the time Lila Carr found the house, the fog had swallowed the road behind her.
She slowed the car to a crawl, squinting through the windshield. Headlights smeared against the gray, catching the warped silhouette of trees and the faint gleam of rain-slick pavement. Her GPS had lost signal ten miles back; her phone sat on the passenger seat, the route frozen, the screen stubbornly insisting she turn left onto a road she could no longer see.
The sign had appeared like a ghost: BRIAR HOLLOW — 3 MILES. The arrow pointed down a narrow lane that seemed more suggestion than street.
“Three miles,” she muttered, fingers tight on the wheel. “Just three miles, then bed, then tomorrow… ghost stories.”
She almost laughed at the irony. Almost.
The lane curved like something alive, coiling through dense trees and over uneven dips. Branches scraped the roof, fingers on a coffin lid. When the first lights appeared ahead, they were so faint she thought her mind had invented them.
Then the trees broke.
A town huddled in the valley below, small and old, made of brick and wood and secrets. Lantern-style streetlights glowed in the mist, casting halos over puddles. The single main street held a gas station, a diner, a post office with peeling paint, and a brick building with barred windows that might have been a bank or might have been something else once.
Her inn sat at the far end of the street—a three-story Victorian with a sagging wraparound porch and a hand-painted sign hanging askew: Briar Hollow House — Rooms & Breakfast.
Lila parked out front and listened to the engine tick. Rain tapped gently on the windshield. She could have turned around right then, backed out, found another town with a newer motel and fluorescent lights. But the editor had loved the pitch: Haunted America: One Writer’s Journey into the Dark Places. Stay in allegedly haunted houses, write about the history and the stories, feed the podcast, keep the book deal alive.
She needed this.
She killed the engine and stepped out. The fog breathed around her ankles, cold and damp. The inn’s windows glowed with warm light, but the house itself seemed to lean over the street, watching.
She told herself she had imagined it.
