The Moth Room

When my grandparents bought the farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road, it had been rotting in the Pennsylvania woods for nearly a decade. The locals called it the Heisel House, after the family who’d built it in 1902, but they whispered worse things when they thought I wasn’t listening. The Heisels had all died strangely—the father hanged himself in the barn, the mother drowned in the well, and the two children simply vanished one autumn. The town had tried to burn it down twice, but the fires never caught; the wood was too damp, too old, too stubborn. My grandfather, a man who believed every house could be saved with a fresh coat of paint and a stiff drink, bought it for a song and moved us all in that summer.

My grandfather was a tinkerer, a man who saw potential in everything broken. He converted the downstairs into a workshop, where he spent his days rebuilding clocks and radios, and where he kept his hunting rifles and jars of pickled vegetables. The upstairs had three bedrooms, a parlor, and a kitchen that smelled of kerosene and mothballs. The house had no central heating, so we relied on wood stoves and thick quilts. The one room we rarely used was the northernmost bedroom, which faced the forest and never received direct sunlight. It was always cold, even in July, and the air inside felt thick, like breathing through a wool blanket. My grandmother called it the ‘moth room’ because of the way the wallpaper, patterned with faded brown and gold moths, seemed to shift in the dim light. I called it the wrong room, because every time I stood in its doorway, I felt like I was being watched from the corners.

That first week, I explored every nook and cranny of the Heisel House, from the root cellar to the attic. The attic was the worst—it was filled with old furniture, trunks, and a brass bed frame that looked like something out of a Gothic novel. But the moth room was worse. It had a single window that faced north, and the glass was so old it swirled with imperfections, casting strange shapes on the floor. The wallpaper was peeling in long strips, and beneath it, the plaster was scratched with faint, deliberate lines—like someone had drawn a map or a list. I tried to decipher them, but they made no sense. At night, I could hear things moving in the walls—a soft, skittering sound, like insects crawling behind the lath and plaster. I told my grandfather, but he just chuckled and said it was mice. He never went into the moth room, though. He said it gave him the creeps.

The first sign that something was truly wrong came when my grandmother brought out the old family albums. She was a genealogist at heart, tracing every branch of her tree back to the old country. As she turned the pages, pointing out distant relatives and wedding portraits, I noticed a recurring motif: in the background of every photograph taken inside the house, there was a shadowy shape near the moth room door. It was just a blur, a dark smudge on the film, but it was always there. When I pointed it out, my grandmother frowned and said that the camera must have been faulty. But she shut the album quickly and have me a glass of lemonade, and I saw her eyeing the moth room door for the rest of the day.

A week later, my grandfather went missing. He’d gone into the woods to hunt for deer, as he did every Saturday, but he didn’t come back. We searched for hours, calling his name until our throats were raw. The sheriff, a tired man named Billings, brought a tracking dog, but the dog refused to go past the tree line. It whined and cowered, and Billings said it was probably just a bear. We found my grandfather the next morning, sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, his eyes wide and unblinking, his lips moving soundlessly. He was catatonic, rocking back and forth as if trying to sooth himself. The doctors said he was in shock, that he’d probably stumbled into a bad patch of mushrooms. But when I looked into his eyes, I saw something else—a deep, primal fear, as if he’d seen the face of God and it had unpicked him.

My grandmother took over the household, cooking meals and tending to my grandfather, but she grew more haggard each day. She started talking to herself in the kitchen, muttering in Yiddish, her hands trembling as she kneaded dough. One afternoon, she asked me to help her clean the moth room. She said we needed to strip the wallpaper and repaint it, to ‘smarten the place up’. I agreed, but I felt a knot in my stomach. As we worked, peeling away the paper in long, sticky sheets, we uncovered more of those scratched lines. They weren’t random—they formed concentric circles, like a target, with a single word scratched over and over in some corner: ‘HESPERUS’. I asked my grandmother what it meant, but she didn’t answer. She just stared at the word, her face pale, and then she threw the scraper down and ran out of the room. I heard her weeping in the narrow hallway that night, and the skittering in the walls grew louder.

My grandfather died three days later. He stopped breathing in his sleep, his face peaceful at last. The coroner said it was a stroke, but I knew better. A stroke doesn’t turn a man’s hair white overnight. A stroke doesn’t leave claw marks on the inside of his coffin lid. I didn’t tell anyone about the marks—I was too afraid they’d think I was crazy. But I started sleeping with a hammer under my pillow, and I avoided the moth room completely.

My grandmother didn’t last much longer. She grew thinner and more erratic, refusing to leave the house. She spent her nights in the moth room, standing at the window, staring into the dark woods. I tried to talk to her, to coax her back to her bedroom, but she would just whisper, ‘They’re coming, they’re already here.’ On the last night before I was sent away to live with my aunt, I heard her singing. It was a lullaby, in a language I didn’t recognize, and it drifted through the house like smoke. I crept to the moth room and pressed my eye to the keyhole. My grandmother was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by dozens of dead moths, their wings powdered and scattered around her like a gray carpet. Her hands were covered in that same dust, and she was rocking, singing, and in front of her, the wallpaper had been scraped away to reveal the plaster, and on that plaster, the scratches had expanded into a massive, swirling pattern that seemed to shift and breathe. And in the center of that pattern, there was a face—not human, but not entirely alien—with empty eye sockets and a mouth stretched into a silent scream. I yelped and stumbled back, and the singing stopped. For a long moment, there was only silence, and then I heard my grandmother’s voice, cold and clear, right behind the door: ‘Let me out, child. Let me out and it will all be over.’

I ran. I ran out of the house and down the dirt road, not stopping until I reached the main highway. I hitched a ride to my aunt’s place, and I never went back. The house was sold to developers a few years later, and I saw a picture online of it being relocated on a flatbed truck. They moved it to a new subdivision, where it sits now, a pristine house with fresh paint and new windows. But if you look closely at the photos, at the northernmost window, you can sometimes see a faint figure, like a smudge on the lens. And if you ever find yourself near Cedar Hollow Road, don’t knock on that door. Don’t even look at it. Because some houses are not just haunted; they have a hunger, and they will take whatever you give them.