The Fernweh House

The house on Moth Lane was never meant to be anything more than a summer refuge, a place my father built with his own hands in 1995, using timber from the old mill and windows salvaged from a church that had burned down in ’82. We called it the Fernweh House, a name I learned much later meant a longing for distant places, because the nearest town was a two-hour drive through pine barrens, and the silence out there was so profound it felt like a held breath.

My earliest memory is of the wallpaper in the upstairs hallway, a pattern of green vines that seemed to crawl when I blinked too fast. I was four, and I remember standing at the top of the stairs, watching a moth the size of my palm skitter across the ceiling, its wings dusting the plaster with a fine grey powder. That night, I woke to the sound of something being dragged across the floorboards of the living room below, a slow, heavy scrape, like a body being pulled across a rug. My older sister, Elara, was already awake, sitting bolt upright in her bed, her eyes wide. She whispered that she heard footsteps, dozens of them, circling the table in the dark. We didn’t dare go down.

Our other sister, Maeve, claimed she saw a girl in a white dress standing in the doorway of our room one night, her hair hanging over her face like a curtain of water. Maeve said the girl was humming, but it sounded like a radio tuned to static, and when she looked closer, the girl’s bare feet didn’t quite touch the floor. We never saw her again, but we started leaving the hallway light on and propping the bedroom door open with a stone, convinced that a closed door made them angry.

When autumn came, we went back to the city, and our cousins, who were older and skeptical, agreed to stay in the Fernweh House to keep it from falling into disrepair. Our cousin Lydia, who was nineteen and studying to be an engineer, thought it was all nonsense. She laughed when we told her about the footsteps and the girl in white, and she deliberately slept on the old bench in the living room, the one with the cracked leather, just to prove a point. The first night, she said, the silence was absolute, but then, just past three in the morning, she felt a cold pressure at the foot of the bench, as if someone had sat down. She opened her eyes, but there was nothing. Then the bench began to shake, violently, like a car on a bad road, and she grabbed the armrests to keep from being thrown off. She screamed, and the shaking stopped. When she turned on the lamp, there was a single footprint of ash on the floor, too small for an adult.

The same night, her younger sister, Renata, was in the kitchen, making tea, when she saw the reflection of a woman in the window pane, standing just behind her. But when she spun around, there was nothing. The kettle had boiled over, and the water was hissing on the burner, but she hadn’t heard it. She turned off the stove and stood there, her heart pounding, and then she noticed that the small potted fern on the windowsill had been overturned, its soil scattered across the counter. The plant, which had been healthy, was now completely dead, as if all the moisture had been sucked out of it in seconds.

Our cousins fled the house that weekend, and they never returned. They refused to speak about it, except to say that the house seemed to remember them, that it ‘smelled like burnt sugar and wet earth.’ We never stayed there again, either. The Fernweh House sat empty for years, and I always wondered if it was truly abandoned, or if it was waiting for someone else to hear the footsteps, to see the girl in white, to feel the violent shaking of a bench in the dark. But I never went back. Some doors, once opened, are better left closed, even if they lead to a place you once called home.