Our lives weren’t that different in most ways than if we had grown up in a suburban neighborhood or in the middle of a large city. We had children to play with, we spent time with our families, and while we were home schooled, I found out when I transitioned to the public school system five years ago that I was well-ahead of most of the other students. I say all this to explain that despite some of the strangeness of our upbringing, we didn’t have a bad life and Jeffery wasn’t a bad person. In fact, the only real complaint we had as children is that we got bored sometimes.

Boredom is what led to us going exploring most days when the weather was nice. We’d started going off into the woods hiking when we were eight or nine, and by the time we were thirteen we knew the ten mile area of wilderness around us like it was a giant backyard. But of course, familiarity breeds boredom, and so we kept going farther and farther out.

It was on one of these trips that we saw a large, stately house sitting in the middle of the woods. It was in good shape, but we saw no signs of anyone living there from the overgrown yard or barely visible driveway, and when we crept up closer to the house and looked in the window, all the furniture looked intact but untouched. The strangest part was that everything looked very old-fashioned but new, as though we were somehow looking into the living room of the house but seeing it as it was sixty or eighty years earlier. We told Papa that over dinner.

“You said it was northeast? That sounds like the Ricter house.” He raised an eyebrow as he looked between me and Jeffery. “Place has been abandoned for years. It was abandoned when I was a child here. In fact,” he leaned forward, giving us a conspiratorial glance before making sure our mother was out of earshot, “We always heard it was haunted.”

That was all we needed to hear. The next day we planned a trip to explore the inside of the supposed haunted house. I remember being nervous because Jeffery had brought a screwdriver in case the door was locked, and I wasn’t comfortable with damaging anything to get inside. As it turned out, the front door was unlocked and we walked right in.

We were in the house for about an hour, exploring the first floor and then the second. At first we were making jokes and trying to scare each other, but with each room the oddness of the place seemed to draw us in more and more. It really did feel like a lived-in home from another time, or like some picture-perfect museum that managed to replicate the imagined feel of such a place. There wasn’t even dust on the tables or dead bugs in the windowsills.