The Old Cider House

In 1994, I reconnected with my high school best friend, Martha, after nearly two decades apart. Our friendship was the kind that picked up right where it left off, and our families blended together seamlessly. It wasn’t long before Martha and her husband, Leo, announced they were buying a run-down farmhouse on the outskirts of our small New England town. They wanted to fix it up, give their kids some space to run.

Martha wanted to wait until they were settled before I saw it, but within a couple of weeks I noticed she was changing. She was a nurse at the local clinic, and her shifts were demanding, but she had always been energetic. Now she looked exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes, and she’d flinch at the ring of a phone or the creak of a floorboard. She’d snap at her kids, which was unlike her. When I asked if she was okay, she brushed it off as stress from the move, especially since she was still unpacking boxes in the evenings.

One afternoon, she called me, her voice strained, and asked if I could help her with a project at the house. She said she found something ‘a little odd’ in the basement. I drove over, my own curiosity piqued. The house was a sprawling Victorian, painted a faded yellow, with a wraparound porch and windows that seemed to look at you. Inside, boxes were stacked everywhere, and the air was thick with the smell of old wood and dust.

Martha led me down steep, narrow stairs to the basement, which was damp and poorly lit. In the corner, behind an old furnace, she had found a small, locked door. After jimmying the lock, we found a tiny room, almost like a cellar, with earthen walls and a dirt floor. Hanging from a rusty hook in the ceiling was an old, glass cider jar, cloudy and cracked, containing a dark liquid and something at the bottom. As I peered closer, I realized it was a withered, mummified hand, curled as if in a final clutch.

I jumped back, my heart pounding. ‘Martha, what is that?’ I whispered. She shrugged, a hollow look in her eyes. ‘Probably some old relic from the previous owner. I’m going to have it blessed.’ But the way she said ‘blessed’ sent a chill down my spine.

Over the next weeks, Martha’s decline accelerated. She stopped sleeping altogether, claiming she’d hear a faint, gurgling sound from the basement at night, like liquid being poured. Her children said they saw a man in a long coat in the hallway, but Martha insisted it was just shadows. She became paranoid, covering all the mirrors with sheets, and I found her one evening sitting in the dark, surrounded by lit candles, mumbling something under her breath.

I tried to research the house’s history. The county records were sparse, but an old neighbor, a retired farmer named Earl, told me that the house had once belonged to a cidermaker named Josiah, who was rumored to have been a recluse and possibly insane. He was said to have made a potent cider that made people ‘see things’, and he was also suspected of kidnapping drifters and transients, never to be seen again. The house had been empty for over thirty years, and ‘no one wanted to touch it,’ Earl said, spitting tobacco on the ground.

One night, Martha’s daughter, Lily, ran into my house, hysterical. She had been home alone with Martha and Leo when she heard a scream from the basement, followed by a crash. When she went down, she found the door to the cider room open, the jar had fallen and shattered, and the hand was gone. Martha was standing in the corner, her eyes rolled back, her mouth open in a silent scream, clutching a shard of glass that had sliced her palm.

Leo arrived and we managed to get her to the hospital. She was sedated, and the doctors said she was in a state of severe psychological distress, likely from exhaustion and stress. She came home a week later, but she was a shell of herself. She refused to enter the basement, and she had taken to wearing gloves, always. She said the hand had been ‘real’, and it ‘wanted to be reunited’ with the rest of its body.

The house got worse after that. Doors would slam on their own, and the smell of sour apples and alcohol would drift through the vents. I started having nightmares of being trapped in a dark cellar, screaming for help, while a hand closed around my throat. I stopped going over as often, and Martha’s calls grew frantic, talking about ‘the cicada in the walls’ and ‘the roots that eat babies’.

One afternoon, the police called me. Martha had been found wandering the town’s outskirts, babbling about ‘the old cider house’, her hands stained with dirt and what looked like dried blood. She had dug up a shallow grave near the orchard behind the house, and in it was a skeleton with a missing hand, its bones brittle and brown. The forensics report later confirmed it was Josiah, the cidermaker, who had apparently been dead for over a century, but his body had been ‘harvested’ by someone—or something—that had kept his hand in a jar to ‘poison’ the house.

Martha was institutionalized, and Leo moved out with the kids, but the house stayed. I was asked to clear out their belongings, and as I packed, I found a small, leather-bound journal in the basement’s forgotten recess. The pages were filled with Josiah’s spidery script, describing rituals and ‘harvesting’ to keep his spirit alive. The last entry read: ‘The jar is my hand, and the hand is my will. It will always find a body to control, and when it does, the orchard will drink deep.’ I dropped the journal, and behind me, I heard a faint gurgling sound from the basement, as if the jar had been refilled.

I don’t go near that house anymore. They say it’s been condemned, but every now and then, a neighbor says they see a light in the window, and a man in a long coat moving inside. And sometimes, on quiet nights, I catch the faint smell of cider in the wind, and I know that whatever was in that jar is still waiting for another hand to hold it.