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the-hedgerow-house · 2 months

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Chapter 1: Ad Terminum

Autumn.

While all the seasons had their charms, it was autumn that you always held a slight preference for compared to the others. Perhaps it was the fiery colors of the leaves or the warming cinnamon drinks that came out for you to enjoy when the weather turned, or maybe the release of the heat and humidity of summer that let you delve into your vast collection of sweaters and long pants at your leisure. Though it hadn’t always been the case, you had come to appreciate the comfort of the mild chill and falling leaves in your late youth, as once upon a time the idea of returning to school made you detest this season long before winter could suck the remaining light and warmth from the world.

Alas, even these small things had a limit, each as fleeting as the season itself. Leaves would run out and become soggy, brown clumps under the damp morning dew, drinks would rotate away to the next holiday-appropriate flavor–ugh, peppermint–the chill would turn to frost, frost beget sleet and sleet inevitably became snow. Like everything in your life, this brief moment of perfection–perfect weather, perfect trees, perfect stillness–would end and you’d be left waiting for the next one to find you. Perhaps in late winter when the sun was coming back and you caught that ideal, windless morning where the snow was powdery and pristine so the cold didn’t make you hate existing on the material plane.

Anymore than normal that is.

That was one reason you’d decided it was worth it to go for a walk at all, hunkered into your favorite worn-out sweater with headphones thrumming away to whichever random track the shuffle dictated. This time of day was calm; the midday rush of drivers going to work was over, kids were in school, and the denizens remaining were too busy raking leaves or getting ‘one last grill in’ to be out to bother you. Any remaining locals were probably busy getting ready for the only truly important part of the season–the thing you secretly looked forward to every year, even if you always ended up going alone.

Eerie Fest.

Small towns being what they were, it was rare to have anything to look forward to that didn’t involve sports, school or the local clergy hosting some event or another, but there was always one thing that each place had that was unique in only the way small towns could manage: quirky local traditions. In this case, your favorite event–the thing you waited for every year without fail–was Eerie Fest. The one community event that wasn’t coordinated by tired high schoolers or overly-friendly church moms, it was open for any and all to participate in, sponsored by the town itself to keep local flavor alive.

Or something like that.

At one time, it was a standard farming-town-produce-market type thing but after a particularly heavy frost pushed the showcase back and ruined the crops somewhat, some of the townsfolk had the idea to make up for the losses by having autumn themed games to turn over some revenue. Next thing anyone knew, kiosks of food and drink popped up, local Halloween enthusiasts put on shows and walked around in costume, and then it became indistinguishable from Halloween itself. Each year a theme was voted on and adhered to, volunteers would help set up and assign jobs to prepare for the event in early October, and the neighboring towns flocked in for food, booze and scares. Actual scares. Eerie Fest was not for kids, they always said.

Kind of bullshit, you knew, but the effort was appreciated. That was the true reason you had even wanted to go out for a walk in the first place, the weather being a nice bonus that motivated you out of your comfy hovel of blankets and Disney movies to brave the outdoors and the chance it was crispy and windy as all get-out. While not paid work, volunteers could get tips, and you’d hoped for a chance to prove yourself as a force to be reckoned with in costume and creep by preparing a bizarre creature sewn together in a fevered rush of creativity once you’d woken from an oddly vivid dream of the thing. It’s not as if you had a job at the moment, much to your dismay, but this! This could be the nudge you needed to start something, to make things!

With any luck, your fabric-and-plastic quadruped critter would earn you just enough attention to start sewing and crafting full-time. You just needed to get to the sign up before it got full. The venue location was, supposedly, in a new place this year; someone had convinced the city library to permit them to host in the forest behind the building as it was a decent bit of walking space rife with trees that really fulfilled the ‘fall festival’ aesthetic quota. Of course it would be a small town library that took up shop in an old, run down house–a ‘historical landmark’ site–that had an estate attached to it that put the local parks to shame. None of those fancy new buildings with free wifi and vending machines here.

You knew it well enough, though, having spent many an afternoon picking through the old books covered in dust and leather at the very back of the collection. Convincing the librarian to let a 16-year-old handle such old volumes was a chore paid in volunteer hours for the summer so if anything happened to them, the insurance would cover it, but you felt it was worth it. Then again, part of you felt that those long afternoons and evenings and weekends tending to creaking shelves and inventory rotations did you no favors in befriending your classmates.

The other part of you doubted that feeling altogether just on principle. There were no sleepovers, no after-school snacks at a friend’s house, no riding bikes to the gas station to buy cheap candy with the change you fished out of the couch cushions–not with company anyway. No, there was nothing you were missing out on that the library was getting in the way of. It had spared you the embarrassment of being rejected if you’d dared ask to join in.

The library was a good place.

Though it loomed overhead like it had been peeled from a classic horror movie and slapped into a suburban neighborhood, all iron gates and black trimming in desperate need of a paint job, it was familiar to you. Welcoming. Close for the day–it was Sunday after all–but even so you felt a bit happier just coming by, wrapping your fingers around the chilly twisted fence while popping an earbud out to listen. “Long time no see,” you said quietly, almost anticipating the house to respond in some way even though you knew it couldn't. Despite your aptitude for the Dewey Decimal System, the library could only allow volunteers that were under the age of 18 to work there for some sort of confounded legal reason; once you were of-age, you had to be employed properly and there was ‘simply no budget’ for another librarian in such a small town. After that, your visits became less frequent, the old librarian–Mrs. Thompson–retiring not long after you graduated only to be replaced by the study para from your school of all people.

You didn’t much care for that para, and she didn’t much care for you either. Especially when you corrected her filing method in passing after she’d taken over the desk that should have had your dear Mrs. Thompson behind it. The library had grown uncomfortable after that, so your visits diminished until they stopped altogether, this being the first time you’d even been in the area in well over a year. You hoped the old house didn’t hold a grudge for your disappearance, but there was to way to know unless it had somehow taken up English in the last few years.

It had not.

After a long moment of glancing around the front of the property, seeing the peeling gray-white paint and black trimming that had come apart along the porch’s front molding, the pots that you knew had once held real plants–you watered them diligently over the summer–long dead and replaced by fake plastic and silk ficuses, the patches of dead grass in a weedy lawn and the dark windows drawn closed with heavy curtains you could only faintly make out, you felt a kind of sorrow. In some way, the library wasn’t there. Asleep. It didn’t notice you, didn’t hear you, too consumed by the neglect of the caretaker who couldn’t be bothered to dust the shelves if it didn’t hold whatever new YA romance novels and New York Times nonsense paperbacks were popular at the time.

What I wouldn't give to get in there and just clean it up a bit, you thought, hand falling from the rail as you followed the cement and iron wall that surrounded the yard to the walkway that would lead to the private wood. Willing as you were with the time to do it, cleaning up would require talking to the new librarian–’new’ being a relative term by now, it had been a good six years or so since the changing of the guard–and you simply couldn’t bring yourself to do it.

The walkway darted straight along the wall, inclined slightly to follow the hill the forest sat on that would give you a clear view of the house, which was partly built into the hill itself in the back. Assuming it was the same as you remembered, you knew there was a room in that part of the house that held the very old, rare books that needed special permission to use as the room was always cool and dark and dry. For a moment, the dead leaves and cold air scent that had been your company for the walk was replaced by the faint memory of old paper, dust and bourbon. Mrs. Thompson swore up and down that the smell was due to the original owner using that room to store their liquor collection but you were never 100% sure after finding a flask tucked into a drawer of the desk in the corner of the storeroom with the letters MT engraved on it. Part of you wondered if, by some miracle, it might still be there waiting for a swig to be taken after a long night of cataloging and inventory. A wry smile turned your lips at the idea but like all of your thoughts at the moment, you pushed it aside, as it necessitated talking to the librarian.

Sarah Duhrn was not getting the satisfaction of your curiosity.

Leaves crunched and crumpled as you hiked the mild incline, the solid thud of boot-to-ground changing from cement to dirt as you moved off the regulated path onto the worn down trail formed by years of feet coming through and forging their own way, sidewalks be damned. Eventually it would level out and lead to a flattened portion of land where the fest was being held but that would still take a bit of walking to reach, your knees already aching as the leaves, now wet and matted with mud that never dried beneath the canopy, slid around underfoot. Banging your shins and getting soggy were not part of the game plan, but the sliding and stopping that jerked your body around like some kind of stringless puppet was almost worse in a way.

I don’t need to roll my ankle again, you told yourself, nails digging into the bark of a sturdy maple while you caught your breath.

With a not-insignificant amount of effort, you managed to drag your way to more stable ground at the top of the hill. At least here there was some semblance of a hiking path still etched into the ground, flattening the rise enough to allow you to balance on your own two feet properly. Begrudgingly, you took the time to scrape mud and detritus from your shoes against an upturned root, losing precious minutes of walking time simply to ensure you didn’t slip any more than the autumn ground already intended for you. Hopefully there would be positions open by the time you arrived at the fairgrounds that wouldn’t involve interacting with attendees sans costume, but none of it mattered if you busted your face or ankles up before then by being careless.

Satisfied with what you did manage to scour off your worn tennis shoes, you took a look around for an indicator of where the festival was going to be; vaguely, you recalled someone in the cafe where you’d heard about the sign up saying it was up in the old campgrounds, deep in the woods where the town’s lights wouldn’t interrupt the ambiance, but where that actually was you had no idea. “Summer camp” wasn’t really your thing growing up, even if it was technically just a four day weekend behind the library. Too many kids from school you didn’t feel like being in close quarters with, uninterrupted, for days at a time to make it worthwhile.

Taking a guess you weren't up far enough, you pointed your toes uphill and began to march, pondering the other details of the event you remembered from the cafe poster. Any other year, you might have passed up on the endeavor simply because the effort wasn’t worth it, but upon seeing the theme that had been voted on, you felt a glimmer of true excitement. For the first time in five years, they’d passed on the milquetoast ‘harvest’ and ‘pumpkin patch’ themes and dove back to the true root of Eerie Fest: actually being scary.

This year, they picked The Hedgerow House.

More of an urban legend than a scary story, there was hardly a teen or college freshman in the county who didn’t know about that macabre place–it was the main reason the campground had been so sought after this year. There was an old multi-story lodge on the property that was being decorated to resemble the forbidden building of legend, with the decor and spooksters–the nickname for the costumed actors given to them by well-meaning parents–being assigned a role as one of the denizens of the house itself. Supposedly, the goings-on of The Hedgerow House were the stuff of nightmares that only the most versed and prolific of horror fans would appreciate, from missing persons to mutilations, cult activity, inhuman creatures and enthusiastic cannibalism; each telling of the house was a bit different yet all claimed to be true. They couldn’t possibly water down this theme! Your excitement for a truly awful, memorable, unsettling Eerie Fest experience was all you wanted. To participate in something you actually cared about.

You were already called a monster by enough people in town, it only made sense to finally cash in on that title.

A rapid beeping struck your ear out of the blue, startling you from your thoughts. What was that? Reaching for your earbuds, you felt a bitter hand of worry grip your neck. One of them was gone! How? When?! Turning to look down the path, the worry grew into a near panic. How in the world could you find your lost headphone in this mess!?

You had to try, or that incessant beeping would continue as the paired headset tried to sync up again and again, fruitlessly. Muttering swears at your own misfortune, you trudged back to approximately where you cleaned your shoes, finding the mud scrapes relatively easily. The beeping stopped as you did, meaning the damn thing was hiding out somewhere nearby; it was bright white, so it should stand out pretty well against the dirt and leaves–right?

Even if it did, that didn’t spare you the time it took to rifle through the masses of plant matter, feeling the wet odor of decaying plant life cling to your sleeves and seep under your nails. Three–five–ten minutes later, it finally turned up, somehow nestled safely under the very root you’d used to clean your shoes. For a moment, you swore it hadn’t been there before, but you were too relieved to find it to question whether your eyes were playing tricks or if the forest had mischievous critters hiding around every bush that enjoyed your misery. Cleaning it off, you put it back in your ear–cold! Ugh.

You rose from the ground, losing hope you’d get to sign up on time at all at this rate.

The ground shifted.

Sopping leaves skid over each other, taking your foot with them with a crunch as gravel and twigs gave way. Your knee burned, taking the brunt of the slide you unwillingly found yourself having. Everything went pear-shaped as you landed with a whump on your back at the foot of the hill, staring up at the gray autumn sky between the treetops. Taking a slow breath, a guttural curse wound its way out of your throat.

“FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!”

Carefully, you sat up, wincing; the pain was mild, mostly just bumps and a wicked rug burn thanks to your jeans greeting the hillside on behalf of your thigh, but your pride hurt the most. How in blue blazes did you manage to fall down the damn hill so easily?!

Coming outside was a mistake, you decided, peeling your wet backside off the leafy ground with all the grace of a newborn horse. Home was sounding better and better by the minute, but as you peered up the way you came, you found this side to be the rear of the hill–and that it was overgrown with tall grass wherever the hillside itself hadn’t crumbled away into muddy shelves between gnarled roots. There was no way to climb back up without a ridiculous amount of struggle, enough so that you briefly contemplated just going to the campground anyway to spare yourself the hassle of walking around to managable ground.

Looking around for some indicator of what to do, your eyes glanced off of something odd hanging from a nearby tree. Picking over roots and fallen branches to keep yourself from tripping back into the mire, you approached the thingamabob as your brow creased. It was a sign–literally! Dangling from a single bolt so it swayed idly in the wind, the wooden arrow had been painted with a grayish wash and the words “The Hedgerow House” in blue, but it was chipped around the edges and worn out in places as if someone had taken a belt sander to it.

That’s probably exactly what they did, you realized, playing with it curiously. The sign was hanging upside down, pointing the opposite way from where it would if it had been secured properly.

This presented a mild dilemma. Assuming the sign was placed there on purpose by the crew to help wayward hikers like yourself find their way, that would make it a recent addition put there as part of the event. If that were the case, you had to wonder if the hanging sign effect was deliberate as a part of the horror theme, playing into the idea of worn out warning signs protagonists usually ignored or missed during their unfortunate descent into the terrors awaiting them. That being the case, the upside down arrow would be pointing in the right direction–the way you had been planning to go.

But a deep part of you felt like no one on the planning committee was that clever and the sign had simply been poorly secured, meaning it was indicating the opposite direction. The thought you’d been mistaken and had been walking off into the woods because you didn’t know where the campsite was supposed to be somehow made you both angry with yourself and almost disappointed you hadn't managed to go missing through pure stupidity. Maybe then someone would have cared enough to ask if you were safe and actually invest in your wellbeing.

Alas.

The missing headphone might have saved them the trouble, sparing you from a more embarrassing situation altogether by dropping you down the hill to see the sign in the first place. Deciding it was negligence making it hang off its support and not clever design work–honestly, how many people wouldn’t immediately think it was supposed to be read while hanging the correct way?--you turned your body toward the deeper part of the forest and started your march once again, keeping an eye and ear open for chatter and signs of human activity. Hopefully this hiccup would pan out and you could slip into one of the monster roles before someone else took the good ones.

The Hedgerow House, according to the collective zeitgeist online dedicated to sharing the stories about it, had a decent number of supposed residents in its walls. For a while, you’d been under the impression it was simply a new creepypasta based on how it reached your ear via overheard chatter between classes, but after a particularly stressful night of crap math assignments and a consideration that your English teacher was either an idiot or insane with how much they wanted your class to analyze every color choice of the cast’s clothing in… whatever book you’d been made to read at the time that you couldn't recall, you’d found yourself researching the name in an effort to amuse yourself. ‘Deep’ was not the word for the rabbit hole you found yourself in for the next few hours proceeding that google search. Only the faintest of anecdotes laced these tales together at all, making the pool of proof rather shallow, but there had certainly been enough to make one of those red string cork boards crazy people were shown having when they desperately wanted a connection to be made that supported their conspiracy.

Tidbits of information welled up as you dug through your memories to try and sort out what you wanted to be at the fair; fixation was rare for you, as it was hard to maintain interest in something when there was no one to share it with, so like many things you tried to ‘get into’ through the years the research binge had lost its spark and faded into your memory over time. That didn’t stop the occasional resurgence though, as you had alerts for that topic still saved in your phone, even to this day. If something about that house came up at all, you eventually heard about it and got a refresher of the details–just poor luck you supposed that it had been a few years since the last real ‘update’.

Surprised by the fact it was not some Slenderman-type phenomenon where a fake spooky thing got popular enough that people forgot if it was real or not, this one was a genuine urban legend. Not even the ‘made up urban legend that became popular’ self-feeding loop where no one knew if it was the story or the content that came first. By your research, The Hedgerow House was a true creepy tale, possibly an amalgam of smaller stories about murder houses and missing persons being attributed to one place by retelling-telephone; it had been around for ages with sightings and news clippings dating back to the Great Depression and turn of the century at least. Hell, at this point, you felt that if it came out to be a really elaborate hoax you’d want to shake the hand of whoever did it simply for the effort they went through to convince everyone it was a real tale.

You’d still be mad though.

According to your vague memory of research, the earliest note of the elusive house had to do with another legend of The Blank Man somewhere in Colorado’s mountains and ranch country. Supposedly, if one wandered out to pasture late at night under a full moon, they’d risk meeting The Blank Man, a tall figure dressed in the duster and hat of a cowboy from the late 1800s whose face was just a bit off. Never, ever invite a stranger met at night to the campfire, you recalled, the stories themselves sharing that the stranger would stroll up out of the dark, all manners and agreeable words, sometimes with a horse or mule that was also off in some way, though other times he was alone. If allowed to sit, the others at the fire would be engaged in conversation about this and that but slowly notice the stranger just didn’t quite feel right.

Odd movements, facial features that appeared to change location or color or shape, too many fingers or not enough; the animal with him would be too large or too skinny, sometimes lacking fur or eyes altogether, also changing slightly every time someone dared to look at it. Eventually, the campers would realize the stranger’s features had simply given up and slipped away entirely, revealing a blank face under the brim of the hat like a mannequin. At that point, the stories about this cryptid man varied based on the reactions of the group he sat with.

If they reacted negatively to this faceless man, it ended very poorly for all of them. The details for being rude to the stranger you couldn’t really remember, but most of them were only shared in news reports of missing people being found days later after going to pasture and not returning. Cattle drivers in particular were pretty concerned about the presence of The Blank Man, as he supposedly liked to follow them, which he was wont to do when treated with respect. Pointing out his facelessness without freaking out had mixed results, some saying he’d leave out of shame and others swearing they had shit luck for days afterward with animals dying or feeling sick. The interesting part to you, though, were the two snippets that featured accounts where the campers had been unbothered.

The first was told by an older ranch hand, the kind who wouldn’t be out of place in a John Wayne movie, that had seen more things than any man should see out in the wilds of the Rockies and so was unphased by the appearance of The Blank Man. Outwardly anyway. At the time, he’d been alone at his post, watching for coyotes or other trouble that had been bothering the herd while his comrades had made camp further up wind. When the stranger approached, the usual chicanery commenced, the ranch hand noting the man’s eyes would often go dark and his face warp if stared at for too long. The ranch hand offered the man coffee, keeping his eyes on the cattle, and reported the conversation was slow but interesting. By the end, when the facelessness was revealed, the hand said he’d given the stranger a long look before offering him a refill of coffee.

Having run out of words and drink, the stranger left shortly after, thanking the ranch hand for his hospitality and disappearing into the night. Thereafter, they claimed the drive went off without a hitch, as if the predators had all given up on chasing them down; at the end of the article, the man swore up and down that when he looked behind him he’d see a rider on a dark horse that he couldn't make out as one of his fellows taking up the rear position. None of them would admit to being the one down that way, so he’d taken to pouring a cup of coffee at the fire each night for ‘the helpful stranger’ covering their asses.

The second notable story like that was very similar, however it happened to a group of campers that all swore by the same note that a man with an unreadable face had ridden past them on a tall, withered horse while they were roasting hotdogs and stopped just outside the fire light. They offered him a soda and a frank but he declined, telling them a moment later to not cross the river at the bridge nearby, which had startled all of them at the time as they were all backpacking that way for their outing and had been planning to do just that but didn’t say as much. Thanking him for the warning, he rode on; none of them could agree what he looked like, but they did collectively note he was tall and seemed just a bit off, which they chalked up to a trick of the light. The next day, they found the bridge they’d been warned about and opted to hike down river to the next crossing; later it was confirmed the tresses of the bridge had given out due to intense rain in the preceding weeks, causing it to collapse when another group tried to cross. One of them drowned as a result.

You were personally fond of the cryptids that had manners and rules as they were more interesting than the ‘fuck you and die’ kind.

How did those stories tie back to The Hedgerow House though? That had been your curiosity after reading the tales of camping gone wrong. From your reading of the research, stories about people with empty faces and bizarre fae-like rules of engagement had been appended to The Blank Man over the years, regardless of where they were from or if other features made sense such as the cowboy hat and weird animal companion being noted in the story or not. This evolution of the story had The Blank Man stop his moonlit meetups in favor of welcoming travelers into his cabin, usually on long, dark and rainy nights or when the person in question was in distress. Naturally.

What occurred thereafter was roughly in line with the original stories: unusual facial features, odd behavior or body proportions, polite attitude and a general dislike of people pointing out he was ugly or had no face. Most of the house-related tales devolved into hearsay along the way with none of them having many first-hand accounts due to the victims all supposedly dying. The method of death at least remained consistent, which you felt was the reason they were attributed to the same monster at all in the end.

The quality of terror dropped off significantly when the house-related stories got more common, likely as a result of people making up things to add to the lore so to say, but The Blank Man wasn’t the only victim of this habit. While noting down the other residents attributed to the house, you’d found a vague pattern in all of them where some regional critter or killer devolved from unique local terror to a D-grade horror trope after being forced into the ‘spooky house in the woods’ role. The most bizarre part of it though was the consistent description of the house itself that was used.

Indeed, the corkboard of red string had at least one major commonality justifying its metaphorical existence, and you couldn’t for the life of you figure out if it was a coincidence or if all the fans had decided to default to the same description once they made up their minds about it. Regardless of the reason, it was certainly interesting to see each collection of stories describe the giant, paint-peeling walls, torn up yard of old fountains and sidewalks, the gothic roof and prevalent insistence of a gate bordered by dark hedges that separated the property from the surrounding woods. There was a reason it was called The Hedgerow House afterall.

Of all the things you learned about the collection of nasty things supposedly occupying this house at one time or another, it was the house itself that you kept coming back to each time you got an alert for it. Killer cryptids were great and all, but rarely did you find a literal building being called anything other than haunted, so you grew fond of the property more so than the supposed residents. While the denizens all eventually ended up assigned to the house somewhere along the way, only a few started in one right from the get-go. Most specifically, The Butcher and The Puzzlemaster–their stories strongly featured houses matching the description of the infamous residence, which you felt couldn’t be an accident given they were from opposite ends of the country and predated the internet itself.

By your own research, you would have thought The Puzzlemaster was some west coast tribute to H. H. Holmes and the Saw franchise had it not been for the shocking footnote that the original tale of the ‘house of infinite rooms’ was dated to the 1860s. Holmes had barely gotten out of diapers by then, and with some amount of conspiratorial thinking you’d wondered if he’d heard of this story growing up and if it led to his infamous murder hotel later in life. You’d been disappointed to learn Holmes was born in New Hampshire while Washington wasn’t even a state yet, making it extremely unlikely that the two were even remotely related. After your pride had recovered, you’d been able to find references to the house itself buried between the recountings of locals who claimed their own houses mysteriously acquired new rooms they didn’t recognize or remember and nurses at the hospital discussing the bizarre psychosis symptoms of some of the patients who talked about looping corridors and horrific puzzles that coincided with injuries they sustained.

All of them mentioned looking out a window and seeing a wrought iron gate framed by hedges, regardless of whether they had one or not themselves. This particular feature also appeared in the New England tale of The Butcher, who started out as a typical serial killer story until you backtraced it enough to some extremely old accounts of stories told of settlers–not by, unfortunately–who’d encounter a man in the woods wearing trapper furs and carrying an ax–more often than not they lost one of their party while fleeing. Given how old and vague these particular stories were, it was a wonder that any of them managed to cling to the idea that the manic woodsman was a miserable bloke that cut up people in his basement to use their meat for his dinner.

That basement, of course, belonging to a house with an iron gate framed by hedges in the front.

Over and over, the gate and hedges popped up eventually. Some of the details beyond that would come and go, such as the color of the house itself or the quality of the yardwork, but it always came back to the gate and the hedges without fail. Thus, The Hedgerow House.

The house that sat in the woods, alone, surrounded by dark hedges that never died, hugging an unrusting iron gate that opened only for the wayward and unlucky fools fated to walk its halls, never to return.

Or at least, most of them didn’t. The few stand alone accounts of the house that weren’t appended to other stories–the origin of the description if nothing else–all came from supposed survivors. People that had gone missing in the woods specifically, never from the same area, yet all absolutely certain they found an iron gate and hedges that let them into the yard. One of them had claimed he was let in by a man in a wide-brimmed hat with no face–in Michigan.

That was what had sparked the internet to lose their minds about the implication of a house that never stayed put full of monsters that snatched people out of the woods, tortured them, and then once in a while decided to let them go home. Any of the folks recovered from these supposed ordeals couldn’t recall details beyond the gate they first found and if someone or something had decided to come after them after they entered; beyond three days, they couldn’t remember anything at all, yet continued to carry the psychological effects of their trauma for years after. Folklore enthusiasts, ghost hunters and horror fans alike all pooled their knowledge together to determine the identity of the thing or things inside the residence based on the commonalities between stories matching the description of the house or the behavior of the monster within, resulting in the modern account of The Hedgerow House’s nine potential residents and their preferred methods of torture for the hapless victim they chose.

All of it was a fascinating case study of how scary stories evolved over time and you loved it for that, but more than anything you sought comfort in the macabre existence of the house for getting you through some rough patches growing up. Alerts seemed to come up whenever you were particularly downtrodden after something or other going on in your life that you couldn’t really control decided to mess up your plans and sense of comfort, which was rare enough as is. The idea of a house full of misfit monsters that existed outside of human rationale made you feel that somewhere out there was a place where you could fit in properly.

A laugh roused you from your thoughts as you trudged the unmarked path through the trees in the vague direction of the campground; a good amount of time had passed while you reminded yourself why you were going through the trouble of coming out this way at all simply to try and participate in an event themed around your beloved freak show collection. The sound had been your own voice as you mocked yourself for thinking there was anywhere for you to live peacefully, when you knew at its core that things like The Hedgerow House simply didn’t exist and the monsters in the stories were all made up at some point or another by people who didn’t know any better. There would be no reprieve for people like you.

You could never be so lucky.

The forest was oddly dark, you thought, peering up at the dense growth of the canopy that robbed you of the daylight. At least the setting would be decently atmospheric if it was this far into the trees. Some part of you was beginning to doubt, however. Unaware of the campground’s location or not, surely you’d have found another sign or some sort of activity by now, right? Had the sign tricked you after all??

That would be embarrassing.

To your relief, as you made your way around a large fallen log your eye strayed ahead to a collection of bushes–beyond which sat a large, worn out house. Grinning faintly, you sighed, glad to know you hadn’t managed to fuck up after all. Hopefully. Even if the house was visible, there was little else indicating whether or not anyone had even been around at all today.

With a sick chill, your heart began to pound. Had you fucked up anyway and gotten the wrong date? Was it next week? No, no, that would be short notice. No time to plan.

Maybe they’d quit early and simply went home?

Passing the bushes, you swallowed, finding your throat dry. Stuffing your earbuds into your pocket, you listened and looked, seeing no signs of tables or decorations. Not even a sign up kiosk.

Well, you decided, I can at least check out the locale.

The house was definitely in need of some TLC, but that worked out perfectly in your opinion, the walls worn and faded, showing bare wood underneath. One of the steps to the porch was pulled up at the edge, showing rusted nails and a cobweb tucked underneath; it probably creaked nicely when stepped on. Very spooky. If you did a good enough check, maybe they’d let you assist in planning the decorations? Really spruce up the hell house, take advantage of advanced warning about busted pipes and holes in the floor.

Reaching out to the dirty metal knob on the door, you felt a breeze sweep by, the leaves rustling and falling in that hissing cascade that always marked when something odd or mystical was about to happen. How fitting. You turned the knob, finding it unlocked.

Behind you, the sound of an old metal gate scraping the ground went unnoticed.

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the-hedgerow-house · 2 months

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"No one wants to see art of ocs" If I dont see art of peoples ocs at least once a day I DIE. Do you want that to happen? Do you want me to DIE? Draw your ocs.

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the-hedgerow-house · 2 months

Text

I wonder who this lovely young man is...?

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the-hedgerow-house · 2 months

Text

I wonder who this lovely young man is...?

#horror comedy #monster x y/n #creative writing #misfits #the hedgerow house #gore #here there be monsters #THH ion #THH #the craving #sisyphus

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the-hedgerow-house · 2 months

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Chapter 1: Ad Terminum

Autumn.

Anymore than normal that is.

Eerie Fest.

Or something like that.

The library was a good place.

It had not.

Sarah Duhrn was not getting the satisfaction of your curiosity.

I don’t need to roll my ankle again, you told yourself, nails digging into the bark of a sturdy maple while you caught your breath.

This year, they picked The Hedgerow House.

You were already called a monster by enough people in town, it only made sense to finally cash in on that title.

You rose from the ground, losing hope you’d get to sign up on time at all at this rate.

The ground shifted.

“FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!”

That’s probably exactly what they did, you realized, playing with it curiously. The sign was hanging upside down, pointing the opposite way from where it would if it had been secured properly.

Alas.

You’d still be mad though.

You were personally fond of the cryptids that had manners and rules as they were more interesting than the ‘fuck you and die’ kind.

That basement, of course, belonging to a house with an iron gate framed by hedges in the front.

You could never be so lucky.

That would be embarrassing.

With a sick chill, your heart began to pound. Had you fucked up anyway and gotten the wrong date? Was it next week? No, no, that would be short notice. No time to plan.

Maybe they’d quit early and simply went home?

Passing the bushes, you swallowed, finding your throat dry. Stuffing your earbuds into your pocket, you listened and looked, seeing no signs of tables or decorations. Not even a sign up kiosk.

Well, you decided, I can at least check out the locale.

Behind you, the sound of an old metal gate scraping the ground went unnoticed.

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the-hedgerow-house · 2 months

Text

News clipping from an old paper taken by a grad student c. 2003

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the-hedgerow-house · 2 months

Text

Chapter 1: Ad Terminum

Autumn.

Anymore than normal that is.

Eerie Fest.

Or something like that.

The library was a good place.

It had not.

Sarah Duhrn was not getting the satisfaction of your curiosity.

I don’t need to roll my ankle again, you told yourself, nails digging into the bark of a sturdy maple while you caught your breath.

This year, they picked The Hedgerow House.

You were already called a monster by enough people in town, it only made sense to finally cash in on that title.

You rose from the ground, losing hope you’d get to sign up on time at all at this rate.

The ground shifted.

“FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!”

That’s probably exactly what they did, you realized, playing with it curiously. The sign was hanging upside down, pointing the opposite way from where it would if it had been secured properly.

Alas.

You’d still be mad though.

You were personally fond of the cryptids that had manners and rules as they were more interesting than the ‘fuck you and die’ kind.

That basement, of course, belonging to a house with an iron gate framed by hedges in the front.

You could never be so lucky.

That would be embarrassing.

With a sick chill, your heart began to pound. Had you fucked up anyway and gotten the wrong date? Was it next week? No, no, that would be short notice. No time to plan.

Maybe they’d quit early and simply went home?

Passing the bushes, you swallowed, finding your throat dry. Stuffing your earbuds into your pocket, you listened and looked, seeing no signs of tables or decorations. Not even a sign up kiosk.

Well, you decided, I can at least check out the locale.

Behind you, the sound of an old metal gate scraping the ground went unnoticed.

#gore #here there be monsters #horror comedy #monster x y/n #creative writing #macabre #THH #the hedgerow house #y/n story #misfits #I'm sure this will go fine

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