The Twin House: A Scary Story

When I was a kid, I would spend summers at my grandparents house. I have a lot of good memories from those months. My brother and I would spend practically whole days exploring the woods that were part of the property. They owned a couple miles of woodland around their house, a large Victorian style home that was a little out of place in the rural farming community they were a part of.

When I say rural I mean very rural. There home was several miles away from the nearest neighbor. Because of this, there weren’t many other kids around for us to play with. My brother and I were mostly on our own when we played. We didn’t mind though. In fact, the open woods and the lack of people really allowed our imaginations to run wild.

 One summer, when I was ten and my brother was around eight we headed off to a portion of the woods that we had always avoided before. For as far back as we could remember, our grandparents had warned us that this particular area of their property was off limits. It was marked by a creek that was almost always dry in the summer and by several piles of rocks that were spaced out every five feet or so. These piles were made of smooth round stones taken from the creek bed.

While it might seem a little strange in hindsight, as kids we didn’t really question these stone piles or why this part of the woods was considered off limits. When we wandered, my brother and I usually stayed pretty close to the house and my grandma or grandpa were almost always somewhere nearby keeping an eye on us.

But that day, our grandparents were working on some home repair projects and were busying supervising the men they had hired to paint their house. This meant my brother and I could slip away.

For the first time we went down into the dry creek bed and climbed up the other side. I remember we paused just at the edge of one of the stone piles. We briefly hesitated at crossing this threshold but we were both too curious to head back.

Since I was the oldest, I went ahead of my little brother keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. Our grandparents had always told us that this part of their property was more wild than the other parts and that was definitely true.

The further and further we went beyond the stones, the more dense the trees and vegetation became. The branches were so thick that only a few slivers of sunlight could get in.

We were both used to the woods though so we didn’t feel scared. That was, until we found the other house.

At first all I could see in the distance was some faded wood paneling, but as we got closer the trees began to get less tight and the full shape of the structure came into view

We came into a clearing and I finally saw the structure in its entirety. The building was a house but not just any house. It was an exact replica of my grandparents house. Same Victorian design, same layout.

This twin house though had clearly been abandoned for years. The windows were broken and the wood was flaking and the structure inside and out was rotting and falling apart. Moss and ivy had also started growing on the outside.

This was not the creepy part of it though. As we took in the site of this large Victorian house sitting abandoned in the middle of the forest my brother said: ‘Dave, there are scratches.’

He pointed and I followed his finger to the outside of the open front door. Sure enough, there were scratches all over the doorway and not just random claw marks but odd pictographs. Eyes and triangles and what looked like stick figures.

We must have looked at these weird carvings for a few minutes before I said: ‘Alright, let’s go in.’

‘No!’ Dave said. ‘I’m staying here!’

Deep down I was as scared as my little brother but I’ve always been a curious type. Sometimes too curious for my own good.

‘Ok, you stay here.’ I said. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

Even though he was scared, my brother nodded and stood where he was. I took several baby steps up the steps that led to the house’s veranda. The boards held my weight alright, so I kept going.

The first thing that struck me as I entered was the layout. Inside, the house was the same as my grandparent’s home. There was an entry room with a staircase leading to the next floor. The kitchen was on my right and the living room on my left.

But that was where the similarities to the other house ended. The paint was faded and chipped and many of the floorboards were rotting and torn up. There was no furniture in either the kitchen or living room and the whole house had a very eerie feeling to it.

After testing the first few steps on the stairway, I decided it was stable enough and slowly made my way up to the second floor. It took a while as I was constantly trying to make sure I didn’t make a wrong step and go flying through the boards.

When I finally reached the upstairs, I felt a sudden chill come through me. There were three rooms; again, just like my grandparent’s house they were laid out in the same way. In their house our bedrooms were all on the second level.

Like the first level though, the second floor of this house seemed completely empty. The room that was in the same place as my grandparent’s bedroom was empty so was the smaller room to the left of the stairs that was the our shared bathroom. Then, there was the third room. In our house, this was where my brother and I slept. And, just like at my grandparents’ place, the third room had a bright sky blue door. It was the exact same color.

I stared in shock at the bright blue door. It was the only door I had seen in the doppelganger house. It was also perfectly clean. The paint was fresh and unchipped.

I might have turned back then but something pushed me to step forward and put my hands on the door and I slowly opened it.

What I found inside is hard to describe to this day. Inside was a bed, a chair an old dollhouse and bookshelves. It was a fully furnished bedroom and it was entirely intact and clean. Like someone had come inside that day and dusted everything off. It looked like someone’s, a child’s bedroom. Unlike every other room in the house it was pristine. It was like I had crossed into a completely different realm.

I stepped inside and took a closer look at everything. There were vintage books and toys. Stuff that looked like it was from the 1930s or 40s.

None of this however was in the room I shared with Dave back at my grandparents house. The room might have had the same antiquated style but our room had two beds and there were no toys. I wanted to explore more but just as I was about to sit down on the bed, I heard a scream. I ran to a window on the second floor and looked down outside to see my brother hiding behind one of the nearby trees.

‘What the hell happened?!’ I yelled from the window.

‘I I don’t know.’ Dave cried. ‘Just come down and let’s get out of here!’

So we did. We ran from those woods and didn’t stop until we were well back behind the stone piles and the dry creek bed.

We didn’t tell our grandparents about what had happened, and it took a while, almost another two days before Dave told me what had happened to him.

It turned out that while I was in the room, he felt a shiver and he went completely cold. Despite the sun shining and it being a hot summer day, Dave said that he felt as if he was inside a freezer. And as he started to shake from the cold suddenly something picked him up from behind and spun him around in a circle. He said it felt like when our dad would pick us up and spin us around when we were really little. Only, after he was let go there was nothing there.

It was never clear to us what happened because the next year when we returned to our grandparents’ home for our summer visit I went back and the stones and the house were completely gone. No trace of them left.  When I couldn’t find the dilapidated home I asked my grandpa that night about it and he said scolded me pretty harshly. Saying, ‘That part of the woods, is no good. Just trust me and never go back there again.’

I never did and eventually my grandparents sold their property and moved to a new place. Their land was turned into a cattle ranch and the woods cut down. To this day I don’t know what happened to us or why but every time I think back to that blue door, I can’t help but feel cold all over.