The Mimic of Hollow Creek

I never thought I’d be writing this down, but after what happened last fall, I need to get it out before I lose my mind. My family moved into a house in the middle of nowhere, near a place called Hollow Creek. The house was a fixer-upper, but it had a strange history. The realtor told us it was over a hundred years old, but he didn’t mention the previous owners had all left abruptly. We thought it was a steal, but we soon learned why.

My mom, Sarah, was the first to notice something wrong. She’d go out to the garden to pick vegetables, and while she was gone, we’d hear her voice calling from the woods behind our property. It was her voice, but twisted, angry, calling our names like she was furious. We’d run to the back door, expecting to see her, but she’d still be in the garden, looking at us with confusion. ‘I didn’t call you,’ she’d say, and we’d all feel a chill. At first, we thought it was a prank, but it kept happening.

My dad, Tom, thought it was just the wind or some animal mimicking sounds, but he changed his mind when it started happening to him. He was in the barn fixing a tractor, and he heard my mom screaming his name from the house. He dropped his tools and ran, only to find the house empty. Mom was at the neighbor’s place. He said the voice was so real, so desperate, that his heart was pounding for hours.

Then the phone calls started. Dead rings, static, and then a low, guttural version of my mom’s voice saying, ‘Come outside, I need to show you something.’ We’d look out, and there’d be nothing but the dark trees swaying. I remember one night, my brother Jake and I were in our rooms. The house was quiet, and then we heard our mom calling from the kitchen, ‘Jake, come here, it’s important.’ Jake walked down the hallway, but I heard the real mom in her room, calling him too. He froze between two doors, hearing his name from both sides. The kitchen voice got more insistent, angry, and the bedroom voice was pleading. I ran to get my dad, and when we came back, Jake was white as a ghost, clutching the doorframe. He said the kitchen voice had started to sound like a growl, and the bedroom voice was crying.

It culminated one night when mom was home alone. She heard a noise outside, and when she looked out the kitchen window, she saw herself standing at the edge of the woods, smiling and waving. She knew it wasn’t her, but it wore her face, her clothes, everything. It beckoned her to come closer. She slammed the shutters and called my dad, who was at a bar with friends. By the time he got home, she was crouched in the corner of the pantry, shaking. She said it had started whispering her deepest secrets, things she had never told anyone, and then it had smiled and disappeared into the trees.

We tried to explain it away, but then we found the old well in the backyard. It was covered with rotting wood, and inside, we found a child’s toys and a tarnished locket with a photo of a woman who looked exactly like my mom. The locket had a date on the back: September 23, 1887. That was the day our house was built. Weird, right? But it gets creepier. We compared the photo to our mom, and aside from the old-fashioned clothes, it was like a mirror image. The woman in the photo had the same eyes, the same mole on her left cheek.

That night, the phone rang. It was my mom’s voice, but it was singing a lullaby I’d never heard before. She was asleep in her room, we checked. The voice on the phone said, ‘You have something of mine. Give it back, or I will take something of yours.’ We realized it wanted the locket. We burned the locket in the fireplace, hoping to destroy whatever was attached to it. But as the flames consumed it, the phone rang again, and this time, it was my mom’s voice, but distorted, laughing, and it said, ‘You can’t burn a soul.’

That was three months ago. We sold the house for a loss and moved to the city. But last week, I was walking down a busy street, and I heard my mom’s voice call my name from an alley. I turned, and there was no one. Then my phone buzzed. It was a text from my mom: ‘Don’t come home tonight.’ I called her, and she said she hadn’t sent it. But the number was hers. And the phone in my hand was cold, like it had been sitting in the freezer. I’m writing this not because you might have answers, but because I need to leave a record. Whatever is out there is not done with us. It knows our names, it wears our faces, and it is patient.