#hauntedhouse — Public Fediverse posts

ROOMS is horror audio micro-fiction.
Written & produced by W. Keith Tims.
Cecile: Rae Witte
Photos: Elljay & Artturi Mantys Aari / Overlay: Saadelm & IMGMIDI
Made by humans using original and Creative Commons materials.
Headphones recommended.

#audiofiction #audiodrama #fiction #noai #hauntedhouse #supernatural #ghosts

Listen for free on my Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/wkeithtims/posts/rooms-v-165831627

Trump’s Secret Flight: Did the President Jeopardize Lives for a Risky Decoy Plan?

https://bluepress.blog/2026/08/12/trumps-secret-flight-did-the-president-jeopardize-lives-for-a-risky-decoy-plan/

My friends and I have made movies most our lives. Sadly, "GHOST FIRE" was one that never passed the planning stage. 1984. #art #artwork #movies #makingmovies #super8mm #reg8mm #regular8mm #8mm #homemovies #creativity #writing #directing #acting #actors #horror #scary #horrors #horrormovie #horrormovies #scarymovie #scarymovies #ghost #ghosts #crazy #haunted #hauntings #hauntedhouse #hauntedhouses #video #videorecording #putupon #heroine #terror #terrorizing #1980s #twentiethcentury

ROOMS is #horror audio #microfiction.
Explore more ROOMS at my Patreon. Available at the free level! (Paid patrons get early access.)
Cecile: Rae Witte
Photo: Klimkin / Overlay: Saadelm
Headphones recommended.
#audiofiction #audiodrama #fiction #noai #hauntedhouse #supernatural #ghosts #rooms

ROOMS IV - Maze

https://www.patreon.com/wkeithtims/posts/rooms-iv-maze-165168307

Just re-watched this great Classic Movie last night. The full movie is on YouTube!

🎥 https://youtu.be/LEcmWDuyET0

Haunted House Gothic Ghost Story “A Place of One’s Own” (1945)

#Black&White #Classic #Movie #British #Film #Ghost #Spirit #Possession #Haunting #Haunted #HauntedHouse #Story #Piano

ROOMS is #horror audio #microfiction.
Explore more ROOMS at https://patreon.com/wkeithtims (free).
Cecile: Rae Witte
Photo: Couleur / Overlay: Saadelm
Headphones recommended.
#audiofiction #audiodrama #fiction #noai #hauntedhouse #supernatural #ghosts #rooms

ROOMS III - Fountain

https://www.patreon.com/wkeithtims/posts/rooms-iii-164556364

Every cut has a purpose. Every piece tells a story.

The only question is…

Who’s next? 👀

🎟️ Get your tickets now:
http://link.ofterror.com/TTsCbM

#trailofterror #sparkyourfear #connecticut #hauntedhouse #halloween #hauntseason #wallingford #fearawaits

ROOMS is #horror audio #microfiction.
Explore more ROOMS at patreon.com/wkeithtims (free).
Cecile: Rae Witte
Photo: Stafinka / Overlay: Gooseflats
Headphones recommended.
#audiofiction #audiodrama #fiction #noai #hauntedhouse #supernatural #ghosts

https://www.patreon.com/wkeithtims/posts/rooms-ii-door-164556118?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

Avarice

A big red-lettered sign outside the house pronounced it CONDEMNED, and still I ventured across the creaky porch into the dark abyss that lay beyond the doorway.

The sign should have been enough.

The sagging roof should have been enough. The busted windows, the weeds grown waist-high against the steps, the porch boards soft beneath my feet like wet bread. Even the silence should have warned me, that heavy silence of a place no longer waiting to be lived in, but waiting to fall.

Still, I entered.

At first, I told myself I only wanted to look.

I stepped carefully through the doorway, one hand out before me, the other trailing along the wall, my fingers gathering dust as thick as ash. The air inside was stale and sweet with rot. Somewhere in the walls, something skittered. Somewhere above me, a loose shutter tapped in the wind, though no wind seemed able to reach that far into the house.

I walked slowly, carefully, among the rooms, savoring the cobwebbed pleasures each one offered.

In the parlor hung a beautiful chandelier, dimmed by dust but still glittering faintly where the sunlight found it. I stood beneath it for a long moment, imagining it cleaned and lit, imagining its crystals throwing stars across a ceiling that was already splitting.

In the dining room, half-buried beneath a fallen curtain, I found a gold-embossed vase. I turned it in my hands, brushing away the grime with my sleeve. There were cracks in it, but not enough to ruin its beauty. Not enough to keep me from wanting it.

In the kitchen, beside a rusted sink, I found a silver spoon.

I slipped it into my pocket.

That was the first thing I took.

It was so small it hardly seemed to matter. A spoon from a dead house. A little rescued thing. A little reward for courage. No one would miss it. No one could want it now.

And yet, once it was in my pocket, I began to see more.

A brass candlestick. A framed miniature. A blue glass bottle on a windowsill. A cracked mirror whose tarnished edge still caught my reflection and gave it back to me in fragments. Every room offered something. Every corner whispered, take this too.

The house, for all its ruin, was rich with forgotten beauty.

I forgot the sign.

I forgot the porch beneath me, the warning in red letters, the dark mouth of the doorway through which I had entered. I forgot the sky outside and the field beyond and the clean air I had left behind.

There was only the next room.

And the next thing.

And the next.

I began to move faster, less carefully now, my pockets heavy, my arms full. I no longer savored the rooms. I searched them. I pulled open drawers swollen shut with damp. I kicked aside fallen plaster. I tore through the dust as if the house owed me what it had hidden.

Then the house gave a lurch.

It was not a sound at first, but a movement, a deep shudder traveling up through the floorboards and into my bones. The chandelier trembled. The walls groaned. Somewhere above me, a beam cracked like a rifle shot.

I froze.

For one foolish second, I clutched the vase tighter.

Then years of rot began to cascade down around me.

Plaster fell in pale sheets. Wood split. A rain of dust poured from the ceiling, thick and choking. The rooms that had seemed so full of treasure became suddenly full of teeth. The beautiful chandelier swung once, twice, then tore free and crashed behind me in a glittering explosion.

I began to run back through the rooms, oblivious to their ancient beauty in my haste to reach the spot of sunlight that spoke of the doorway and safety.

The vase fell from my hands and shattered.

I did not stop.

The brass candlestick dropped from beneath my arm and rolled away into darkness.

I did not turn.

The spoon in my pocket struck against my thigh with each step, a small, hard reminder of what had first persuaded me that stealing from ruin was not theft.

Beams landed beside me with thundering crashes as I ran, sending up clouds of choking dust. I began to cough uncontrollably, each breath tearing at my throat. My eyes watered. The doorway vanished in a smoky haze.

For a moment I could not see anything.

I stumbled into a wall, felt old nails bite into my palm, and cried out. Something sharp tore across the top of my foot. I kept moving. There was no thought left in me but air, light, escape.

The house groaned again, deeper this time, like some enormous animal folding in upon itself.

I ran toward where I believed the door had been.

Or where I prayed it had been.

Suddenly I burst through its frame and out into the field as the house fell with a great crash behind me.

The sound rolled through the ground and up into my chest. Dust billowed outward, swallowing the porch, the windows, the red-lettered sign, the rooms, the chandelier, the vase, the mirror, the bottle, all the small treasures that had called to me from the dark.

I fell to my knees in the grass and coughed until my ribs ached.

For a long while I could only kneel there, bent over, my hands pressed into the dirt, breathing the open air like a man newly born.

I had escaped certain demise with few scars, save the bloody scratches from nails on my hands and feet.

But they would soon heal.

I told myself that as I stood.

I told myself that as I brushed the dust from my clothes.

I told myself that as I looked once more at the heap of timber and plaster and ruin that had almost become my grave.

Then I felt the weight still in my pocket.

My fingers went to it before I could stop them.

The silver spoon was bent now, scratched and blackened, but it was still there.

I drew it out and held it in my bleeding hand.

Behind me, the condemned house settled into silence.

Before me, the field opened wide and clean beneath the sun.

I should have thrown the spoon into the wreckage.

I should have left it there with the rot and the dust and the red-lettered warning.

Instead, I wiped it on my sleeve and slipped it back into my pocket.

After all, it was only a small thing.

Originally written June 16, 1987, expanded June 2026

Well I guess I’m never coming here again
•
#china #shenzhen #spooky #hauntedhouse #hellno

CHUCKY Creator Don Mancini Expands With New Haunted House Movie

Don Mancini shared that he is working on Don Mancini new horror projects: a new Chucky film, an original haunted‑house movie, and a TV series starring Jennifer Tilly. The updates came during his appearance at Steel City Con....

#Chucky #DonMancini #HauntedHouse #JenniferTily

CHUCKY Creator Don Mancini Expands With New Haunted House Movie

Don Mancini shared that he is working on Don Mancini new horror projects: a new Chucky film, an original haunted‑house movie, and a TV series starring Jennifer Tilly. The updates came during his appearance at Steel City Con....

#Chucky #DonMancini #HauntedHouse #JenniferTily

CHUCKY Creator Don Mancini Expands With New Haunted House Movie

Don Mancini shared that he is working on Don Mancini new horror projects: a new Chucky film, an original haunted‑house movie, and a TV series starring Jennifer Tilly. The updates came during his appearance at Steel City Con....

#Chucky #DonMancini #HauntedHouse #JenniferTily

Seven Sisters "A haunted mansion. A forgotten family secret. A dreamwalker with the gift to see what the living can’t" Sale: $2.99 to FREE by M. L. Bullock Rating: 4.0/5 (7,192 Reviews) #books #booksky #kindle #southerngothic #ghoststory #paranormal #mystery #fiction #hauntedhouse

Seven Sisters

My childhood brushes with ghost lore

Despite writing about supernatural folklore, I rarely think about my childhood brushes with ghostly stories. I thought I might rectify that here—by reflecting on two examples of ghost lore I was exposed to in my youth.

Before I begin, I should point out that children’s folklore is just as vital and dynamic a phenomenon as its adult equivalent. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book (1999) is one example of a text that documents the folkloric creativity of children (as opposed to their passive receptivity). The book shows that wherever children come together, they form what folklorists call “folk groups.” The only criteria for the existence of such a group is that “two or more people. . . share something in common—language, occupation, religion, residence”; that they “share ‘traditions'”; and that they have the opportunity to meet face to face.

The Grey Lady

I’ll start with my childhood experience of belonging to a large “folk group” at my prep school, Tockington Manor, in South Gloucestershire. Every child in the school belonged to this folk group, because everyone, at some point, learned about the Grey Lady who haunted the manor’s halls. The boarders at the school were terrified of this lady: they said she wandered the manor at night—the spirit of a nurse who’d fallen from a skylight when the building served as a hospital during the First World War. I don’t remember much about this nighttime revenant, but she’s clearly a variant of a folkloric figure found at boarding schools everywhere: the Grey, White, Black, or Brown Lady.

In my school, older students, already initiated into the ghostly mystery, passed on stories about the drab-colored lady to the younger children, who did the same for the incoming class. I can only assume that telling stories about the Grey Lady allowed us to share anxieties in a fixed, personified form, which helped us adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. It also mythologized the building’s space, especially for boarders—those who couldn’t leave. Separated from their family homes, they created bonds and associations through the emotions that ghost stories evoke.

The story of the Grey Lady may have been one of the most memorable aspects of our folk group. But one story doesn’t create a culture. We also played games like marbles and conkers and had a shared language (words like cave—Latin for “beware”—were used to signal that a teacher was coming). Sometimes we sneaked out of school to gather in an old stone quarry, a place now dense with ivy-covered trees. The aura of this place—which we called simply “Quarry”—will forever remind me of the childhood capacity to create mythological worlds in spaces dominated by adults.

The Yellow Lady

The second example of supernatural storytelling from my childhood occurred during a trip to a Catholic boys’ camp in the summer of 1991. There too the sharing of ghostly legends created belonging among the boys. Despite sharing a tent with my brother, a cousin, and members of my cousin’s family, I felt unsettled in my new surroundings, and I remember how powerfully the nighttime telling of ghost stories allowed us to bond through fear. 

The only story I remember clearly (because it terrified me) was inspired by a local landmark. Visible from the camp was a house that glowed an eerie yellow at night. The sight of this building alone would be enough to inspire a haunted house tale. But in our case, the color became detached from the building, and we gave it to a supernatural figure who roamed the grounds at night. Apparently, a mysterious revenant called the Yellow Lady haunted that house, and she visited the meadow where we slept. Pricking up her disturbingly large ears to listen for wakeful boys, the Yellow Lady prowled the rows of tents, determined to steal a child. 

Although I remember thinking at the time that the Yellow Lady must have been a ghost, she differs in one important way from the Grey Lady mentioned earlier. While the latter was merely a scary presence that never interacted with students, the Yellow Lady was relational, embodying the discipline of the adult world (“no talking after lights out”). Her eerie color and super-sensory abilities—a result of her inhumanly large ears—suggest that she was a kind of supernatural bogeywoman, perhaps even close to a fairy.

The extreme effectiveness of this Yellow Lady legend meant that all of us had trouble sleeping that night. The next day we rushed to mass, hoping to find protection in proximity to a sacred ritual. The impulse was in keeping with much ghost lore, where holy symbols ward off supernatural threats.

Interestingly, while researching “Yellow Lady” stories (to see how commonplace they are), I came across a blog post in which the writer talks about a Yellow Lady story he learned at a camp run by monks. He then turns the tale into a literary short story—an embellishment, perhaps, of a fragmentary tale like mine. It seems to me that the writer’s camp may even have been the one I attended. Either that or the Yellow Lady haunts a number of such camps.

Haunted houses and witch houses

Besides my encounters with the Grey and Yellow Ladies, the only other ghost lore I can remember from my childhood are stories about haunted houses. These were always abandoned homes in the neighborhood, their shattered windows revealing darkness inside, the absence of family life. Repeating things we’d heard or inventing stories on the spot, we called these houses “haunted” or the former resort of “witches”—words that described the rupture in our sense of what a home should look like. One of these houses sat at the corner of Charborough Road and Dunkeld Avenue in Filton, Bristol (I can still picture its dilapidated state). Another was on a road branching off from Charborough Road: they said that if you looked into its broken, upstairs window, you might see a witch looking back. (The latter is a vague memory that may even have been my own thought.)

Considering all this lore, it seems to me that ghosts fill the gaps where social meaning decays, whether through separation from home, abandonment of a home, or maladjustment in a place that’s not yet fully home. When I consider these crucial functions, I understand why empirical approaches to ghostly “phenomena” bore me: they arguably fail to understand ghosts at all.

Read about more ghost lore here.

Today the ghosts are playing hide and seek with my socks. #HauntedHouse

Discusses the connection between haunted houses and environmental factors, particularly mold. It suggests that toxic mold, commonly found in older buildings, can produce mycotoxins that lead to hallucinations and feelings of dread. #mold #hauntedhouse https://connectparanormal.net/2026/04/13/why-haunted-houses-may-be-full-of-mold-the-science-explained/