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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Haunted_Tales_Pod on 2025-03-27 20:59:51+00:00.
First off, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who knows of such a building.
To be honest, I guess there’s a house like that everywhere. In every city, every town, hell, maybe even in every neighborhood. You might know it as well.
It’s an old house, abandoned for years, probably. You’ve never seen anyone going in there on their own, neither seen anyone coming out of it. If there ever were people who tried to buy it and move in, they changed their minds about that pretty quickly.
The lawn is overgrown, maybe there’s even garbage there.
If there’s a tree, it’s either sick and dying or dead already.
From time to time, you can even smell this strange odor wafting through the neighborhood.
Well, the one I’m talking about is at the end of the road where I live.
It’s dilapidated and abandoned, and it kinda looks haunted, to be honest.
I’ve lived here for decades, yet no one ever bought that place, no one ever visited and the only time I can remember anyone even working close to it, was when the city deemed its overgrown hedges a potential hazard. They sent someone to trim the outsides of the bushes and cut the branches of the trees growing out over the road.
It didn’t change much, I guess, since it was still an eyesore, but it definitely was less ugly, at least for a while.
When I was a kid, my friends and I would often dare each other to hop over the old, rusted fence and walk around the lawn. It was a dumb game, and I can only remember a single time when one of us even did it. Johnny, a blonde-haired boy who was two years younger than the rest of us and wanted to be part of our group so badly, actually jumped over the fence and ran to the front door.
He stumbled, fell, scraped his knee, and came running back crying. We laughed, then got concerned when we saw his leg. It looked like he had a rash, and bubbles were forming on his skin, along the small cut.
Johnny wasn’t allowed to play with us anymore from then on, and I guess the others lost interest in the house as well.
The next time I saw that kid was months later, out shopping with his mom, and I still remembered how strange it felt that he looked different. Kinda... off... sickly.
I never saw him again, but back then, people tended to come and go from time to time, so it didn’t bother me much.
We grew up, all of us, and started to stop caring about exploring the neighborhood, but I still remember looking at that damned house that seemed somehow frozen in time.
There were storms and flooding, we had neighbors that almost got their roof blown off, yet that one building at the end of the road never even lost as much as a shingle, as far as I can tell.
It was eerie, yet no one else seemed to really care about it. The most I got was a polite smile and a ‘That’s crazy.’
I finished school, went to college, then moved back a few years later. You know how life can be... Well, my parents remodeled our house while I was gone, yet this one damned place looked exactly the same when I returned.
I can’t even tell you how I felt when I saw it again. Somewhere deep down, I had hoped it would have either been bought and rebuilt as well, or that someone had finally torn it down, but that wasn’t the case.
As I stepped out of my car in my parents’ driveway, I immediately spotted it. The rotten shingles, the overgrown lawn, and even the rusted fence looked just like how I remembered. No one had touched it while I was gone, and the trees had regrown their branches, now reaching into the street again.
I asked my Dad about it, but he only shook his head.
That’s just how it is, he said, with a distant look in his eyes.
Well, my parents died four years ago, which meant that I inherited the house I grew up in. It wasn’t unexpected, which doesn’t mean I wasn’t distraught though.
Cancer is a bitch, and it got both of them.
Dad went first. He simply didn’t wake up after the last operation, and it broke my Mom’s will to live. She just fell apart and stopped eating, and not even a month later, I found her dead in her bed in the morning.
I hope wherever they are, they are happy now and not in pain.
But that’s not the reason I’m writing this today.
So, while they did leave me the house, they also left me with a ton of headaches. I never realized how much work went into keeping up a whole building. And I don’t mean just the taxes etc. Sometimes it feels like I spend the weekends cleaning just for it to be dirty again by next Friday. Every morning I dread looking in my mailbox fearing another unpaid bill I had no clue about. And then, there’s the ant problem.
This one, I noticed even before my parents had died.
It started at the kitchen window, and I don’t know how those little monsters got in, but they formed a fucking highway of ants, right to the fridge. I tried everything, from poison to cleaning to putting out paper, so I could reroute those bastards, but nothing seemed to work.
Anything I tried gave me a few hours of peace at most. I’ve even put tape all over the window frame and have closed it permanently, but they still manage to get in somehow.
Those things are big, by the way. Massive, if I think back to how the ants in my childhood looked. Some of them might be from completely different species, while others seem strangely deformed.
They almost drove me insane, to be honest. I started hating going into the kitchen at all for fear of seeing them again.
But I think I know now where they are coming from, and I shudder to imagine what will happen if I don’t do something soon.
You see, an hour ago, while drinking a couple of beers, and after I called up one of the few people I’ve known since childhood still living in this neighborhood, my curiosity got to me. The house at the end of the road came up in the conversation.
Of course, my friend hardly acknowledged it, but I got it into my head, that I could at least get a reprieve from my own problems, if I took a closer look at that eyesore, now as an adult.
Armed with my phone, a flashlight, and some liquid courage, I made my way down the road, walking briskly through the night, already feeling the same way I had as a child again.
Only this time, I wasn’t out after curfew, there was no one who would tell me to stay away, and I could feel in my bones that I would finally find out what was wrong with that place.
Well, it didn’t take me long to reach the outer perimeter and the rusted fence. Only, I didn’t hop over it, instead chose to use the gate right in the middle of the lot.
If I had thought the fence was a problem, that piece of junk was even worse. It sounded like someone screaming as I opened it up, giving me the first chills of the night.
There was a completely overgrown stone path in the middle of the lot, and I kept to it since everything in my mind told me to keep off the lawn.
It was moving with the breeze, but not in the same direction.
Of course, I took out the flashlight and slowly let the circle of light illuminate my surroundings. From the dead-yet-still-growing trees to the shrubs and weeds.
It looked off. All of it.
Like somehow, the shadows were moving even if I kept the torch pointed at a spot.
That was the second time I felt chills that night, but I reasoned that I was just imagining it all. The porch and front door were only a couple of steps away, so I forced myself to stop dawdling around and kept going.
I remember the sound the wind made when it breezed through the vegetation. The noise of stalks and stems rubbing against each other, almost sounded like thousands of small legs crawling over the ground.
That memory makes me uneasy.
But back then, bolstered by the alcohol, I just shook it off and walked up the two steps to the porch.
The old, dark wood on the side looked like it would break the moment I put my foot on it, and I think I could see termites disappearing every time the light of my torch passed over them. Not normal ones either. Those things seemed strangely elongated. Abnormal.
I took a deep breath, shook off those feelings of fear and trepidation, and turned toward the door.
Something was in there, I knew. Somehow, I could feel it.
It had been bugging me for years, and now I finally found myself in front of the door.
A breeze blew past me and carried with it an earthy smell and the sound of stalks scraping over each other. Only this time, it really did remind me of insects.
Millions of them.
Somewhere deep inside I think I hoped the door would be locked, but as I touched the handle, it swung inward without a problem.
The soft sound of tiny insects hitting the floor reached my ears, but I was too transfixed by what I was seeing to notice it at that moment. There was furniture in there, but every piece the light of my torch touched was crawling with insects. A black mass of bodies trying to escape back into the darkness. They were everywhere. On every surface, skittering about, and as I looked closer, I could see that most of the furniture had been reduced to a mere facade. All the wood and everything that wasn’t plastic had been long since devoured.
I could feel a shiver again and wanted to step back, but at that exact moment, something fell from the frame of the door above and dropped down the back of my shirt.
With a howl I shot forward, not thinking about what I was doing.
My foot touched the floorboards inside the house, and as if they were made of paper, they broke through at first contact. I screamed in shock and horror ...
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