The Last Tenant of Mulberry House

I was sixteen when my mother’s second husband, Marcus, decided we needed to move back to his hometown to care for his aging grandmother, Eleanor. We left our cramped apartment in the city and drove eight hours to a small, dying town where the main street had more boarded-up windows than open ones. Eleanor’s house, Mulberry House, sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, a sprawling Victorian with peeling paint and a sagging porch. It had been in Marcus’s family for generations, and Eleanor was the last of her line, a frail woman with a sharp mind and a collection of old photographs she’d sometimes speak to.

My step-sister, Chloe, and I were given rooms on the second floor. Mine was at the back, overlooking the overgrown garden and the rusted swing set that hadn’t been used in decades. The room smelled of mothballs and dust, and the floorboards creaked even when no one walked on them. I didn’t mind. I’d never had a room to myself before, and I’d always been sensitive to atmosphere, but Mulberry House felt… heavy. Not dangerous, exactly, but watchful, like the walls were aware of every breath I took.

Within a week, I started noticing things. A perfume smell, lilac and old paper, would drift through my room at night. The wardrobe door would slowly open by itself, even though I’d shut it tight. And sometimes, in the corner of my eye, I’d see a small figure standing by the window – a girl about my age, with dark braids and a faded dress. She was always gone when I turned to look, but the sensation of being watched never left me.

Chloe, who had always scoffed at my ‘overactive imagination,’ started refusing to come upstairs after dark. She claimed the landing light flickered and went out, and that she heard someone humming in my room when I was downstairs. I tried to laugh it off, but one night, I woke to find the girl standing right beside my bed. Her eyes were hollow pits, and her mouth moved silently, forming words I couldn’t hear. I screamed, but when my step-dad burst in, the room was empty. He accused me of having a nightmare, but Eleanor, who had shuffled to my doorway, gave me a strange, knowing look.

The next morning, Eleanor took me aside. She told me that the house had a ‘guest’ – a child who had died there long ago, before the house was even built. That child was the land’s true owner, and she demanded a tenant. She would let us stay, but only if we paid tribute – a small token of blood each month, left under the floorboards in my room. I thought she was rambling, a dementia patient’s story, but then she showed me a scar on her wrist, old and crescent-shaped, and said, ‘We all did it. It’s the only way to keep her calm.’

Marcus dismissed it as superstition, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the girl wanted something more. That night, I decided to investigate the floorboards in my room. With Chloe’s help, I pried up a loose plank and found a space filled with dusty trinkets – a child’s hair ribbon, a tin soldier, and a brittle photograph of a smiling girl with dark braids, standing in front of a house that wasn’t Mulberry House. In the photo, she was holding hands with a woman who looked a lot like Eleanor.

I confronted Eleanor. She broke down and confessed. The girl, Abigail, had been her sister. They had been playing near a well on the property that had since been covered, and Abigail had fallen in. Eleanor, just a child herself, had been too scared to tell anyone. Her family moved the well and built the house over it, and Eleanor had carried the guilt for sixty years. But Abigail’s spirit had never left. She wanted her story told, and she wanted someone to remember her. The ‘tribute’ was just Eleanor’s way of keeping the secret buried.

That night, I had another dream. Abigail stood at the foot of my bed, no longer hollow-eyed, but crying. She pointed to the garden, to a spot where the grass never grew. When I woke, I dug there and found the remains of an old well, just beneath the soil. I called the town council, and they excavated, finding Abigail’s bones. The story made the local news. Eleanor, overwhelmed, finally admitted everything.

With the bones properly buried in a cemetery, and Abigail’s name engraved on a small headstone, the house changed. The heaviness lifted. The perfume faded. And the girl never appeared again. I still live in Mulberry House, now renamed ‘Abigail’s Rest’ by the town. Eleanor passed a year later, at peace. And I know, in my heart, that the last tenant of that land was never Marcus or I – it was Abigail, and she finally moved out.”