Haunted Diary from an Abandoned House
Clara had never enjoyed staying in one place for too long.
Running her small outdoor equipment business only took a few hours every morning. She managed online orders, answered customers' messages, and packed shipments before noon. Once everything was finished, her real life began.
Adventure.
Mountains, abandoned villages, forgotten trails, ancient forests, mysterious caves—those places made her feel alive.
"Done already?" her best friend Emily asked through a video call.
Clara smiled while zipping her hiking backpack.
"Business is finished. Time to disappear into the wild again."
"I found somewhere interesting."
"Tell me."
"An abandoned village in the northern valley."
Emily frowned.
"The one nobody talks about?"
"Exactly."
"Perfect."
Emily laughed nervously.
"You're impossible."
Within two days, Clara and four of her closest friends—Emily, Sarah, Nina, and Rachel—were driving toward the forgotten valley.
The deeper they traveled, the fewer signs of civilization remained.
No gas stations.
No restaurants.
No signal.
Only endless forests surrounding a narrow cracked road.
"GPS stopped working," Sarah muttered.
"Mine too," Nina added.
Clara looked ahead.
"Good."
"Good?" Rachel blinked.
"Means nobody comes here."
"That's exactly what worries me."
The old road finally ended at a rusty wooden sign.
The faded letters could barely be read.
Black Hollow Village.
Someone had scratched deep claw marks across the name.
"Looks welcoming," Emily joked.
No one laughed.
The village stretched silently before them.
Rows of empty wooden houses.
Collapsed fences.
A dried-up well.
Broken lanterns swinging gently despite the complete absence of wind.
"Strange..." Clara whispered.
"What?"
"Listen."
Everyone stopped walking.
Nothing.
No birds.
No insects.
No leaves moving.
Nature itself seemed unwilling to make a sound.
"Let's set camp before dark," Clara suggested.
They found an open grassy square in what had once been the center of the village.
It looked like an abandoned town plaza.
Old stone benches surrounded the area.
A cracked fountain stood in the middle.
Perfect for camping.
Within an hour, two large tents were standing.
Sarah started cooking dinner while Emily prepared a campfire.
"This place gives me chills," Rachel admitted.
"It's only abandoned."
"You don't believe that."
Clara looked toward the houses.
One window reflected the orange light of sunset.
For a split second...
She thought someone was watching them.
When she looked again...
The window was empty.
"Probably my imagination."
Night arrived much faster than expected.
The temperature dropped sharply.
The fire crackled softly.
Everyone gathered around eating hot soup.
"Tomorrow we explore the forest behind the village."
"Then the old church?" Emily asked.
"Sure."
"And that huge mansion?"
Clara turned toward the far end of the village.
Even in darkness, the silhouette of the enormous building dominated everything. It almost resembled a haunted hotel that had been abandoned for decades.
Three stories tall.
Broken balconies.
Black windows.
Its roof leaned dangerously to one side.
"We'll check it tomorrow."
As if answering her...
Someone screamed.
It wasn't close.
It echoed from inside the mansion.
A woman's scream.
Long.
Painful.
Impossible.
Everyone froze.
"Did... did you hear that?" Rachel whispered.
Another scream.
Closer.
"Someone needs help!" Sarah stood up.
Clara grabbed her flashlight.
"Come on."
"Are you serious?" Emily asked.
"If someone is trapped, we can't ignore it."
Five flashlights pierced the darkness as they approached the mansion.
The closer they walked...
The colder the air became.
The front gate stood open.
It slowly creaked although no wind blew.
"This isn't normal," Nina whispered.
"Stay together."
The front door opened with a loud groan.
Dust filled the entrance hall.
Spider webs hung from every corner.
Portraits covered with mold lined the walls.
Most disturbing of all...
The house smelled fresh.
Not rotten.
Not abandoned.
Fresh.
Like someone had cleaned it yesterday.
"Who's there?" Clara shouted.
Silence.
Another scream came from upstairs.
"Second floor."
They climbed the staircase.
Each step groaned beneath their boots.
Halfway up...
The screaming stopped.
Complete silence returned.
They reached a hallway filled with closed doors.
One door at the very end slowly opened by itself.
"Did someone push it?" Emily whispered.
"No..."
Clara walked forward.
Every instinct told her to leave.
Instead...
She reached for the doorknob.
The room inside looked untouched.
An old vanity mirror.
A wooden wardrobe.
A rocking chair.
And a small writing desk.
"Nobody's here."
Rachel pointed toward the mirror.
"Clara..."
Everyone looked.
The mirror reflected all five women.
But...
There was another figure.
Standing behind Clara.
A woman wearing an old white dress.
Long black hair covered her face.
Her hands hung unnaturally low.
Almost touching the floor.
"Don't move..." Emily whispered.
"Why?"
"Because she's behind you."
Clara's heart nearly stopped.
Slowly...
Very slowly...
She turned around.
Nobody.
The room was empty.
"She's gone..." Sarah breathed.
Then...
The rocking chair began moving.
Back...
Forward...
Back...
Forward...
On its own.
Creeeeak...
Creeeeak...
Creeeeak...
"Run!" Rachel screamed.
Suddenly every door in the hallway slammed shut.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
The mansion shook violently.
The lights from their flashlights flickered.
"Move!" Clara yelled.
They sprinted toward the staircase.
Something laughed behind them.
Not a woman's laugh.
Not a man's.
Something else.
Deep.
Wet.
Inhuman.
"Don't look back!" Emily cried.
Clara ignored her.
She glanced over her shoulder.
The woman in white now stood at the end of the hallway.
Her hair slowly lifted by itself.
Underneath...
There was no face.
Only complete darkness.
Hundreds of tiny pale hands reached out from inside the darkness where her face should have been.
They stretched toward Clara.
"GO!" Clara shouted.
The five women burst through the front door.
As soon as they reached the yard...
The mansion became silent again.
Almost peaceful.
Everyone collapsed onto the grass, gasping for breath.
"We're leaving right now!" Rachel yelled.
"No."
Everyone stared at Clara.
"It's too dark to drive through those mountain roads."
"After what we just saw?"
"We'll stay until sunrise."
"You're insane."
Clara looked at something inside her jacket.
"What's that?" Emily asked.
Clara slowly pulled out an old leather-bound book.
Covered in dust.
Tied shut with faded black string.
"When did you take that?"
"From the writing desk."
"ARE YOU CRAZY?" Sarah shouted.
"It looked important."
"Put it back!"
"Tomorrow."
"Clara..."
"Tomorrow."
No one argued anymore.
They returned to camp.
The fire had almost gone out.
Everyone silently crawled into their tents.
Clara placed the mysterious book beside her sleeping bag.
She stared at it for several minutes.
The leather cover felt strangely warm.
Almost alive.
As sleep slowly claimed her...
She heard a soft whisper beside her ear.
Not from outside.
Inside the tent.
"...thank...you..."
Clara opened her eyes instantly.
The tent was empty.
Only the diary remained beside her.
Its black string had somehow untied itself.
The first page was now slightly open.
Even though Clara clearly remembered never opening it.
She reached toward the ancient diary.
Just before her fingers touched the yellowed paper...
Something gently breathed on the back of her neck.
Clara froze.
Warm breath brushed against the back of her neck, slow and unmistakably human.
Her heart pounded so loudly she could barely hear anything else.
"Emily...?" she whispered.
No answer.
She turned around in one swift motion, aiming her flashlight behind her.
The tent was empty.
Nothing stood behind her.
Only darkness.
She looked back toward the diary.
The ancient book was closed again.
The black string had somehow tied itself into a perfect knot.
"I... I must be dreaming."
Unable to calm herself, Clara remained awake until the first rays of sunlight entered the tent.
Outside, the atmosphere felt completely different.
Birds were singing again.
A gentle breeze flowed through the abandoned village.
It was almost impossible to believe that only hours earlier they had fled from the haunted mansion.
"We're leaving," Rachel said immediately after breakfast.
No one objected.
Within thirty minutes, the camp had disappeared.
The women drove away without looking back.
Yet Clara couldn't shake the feeling that someone was standing in one of the mansion's upstairs windows, silently watching their vehicle disappear into the forest.
...
Two days later, everyone gathered at Clara's house.
The mysterious diary lay on the dining table.
"Ready?" Clara asked.
"Honestly?" Emily sighed.
"No."
Clara untied the black string.
The pages smelled of damp wood and old ink.
Instead of ordinary writing, the first pages were filled with incredibly detailed illustrations.
Mountains split open beneath a blood-red sky.
Forests made of black trees whose branches resembled human arms.
Lakes where pale faces floated just beneath the surface.
"Who would draw something like this?" Sarah murmured.
As they turned more pages, the drawings became increasingly disturbing.
Grotesque creatures with dozens of eyes.
Towering demons wearing crowns of bones.
Strange flowers growing from skulls.
Unknown symbols carefully drawn in circles.
Pages describing poisonous plants that no one had ever heard of.
Maps leading to places that didn't exist on any modern atlas.
"Look at this," Nina whispered.
One page showed the very mansion they had visited.
Below the illustration was a handwritten sentence.
The house remembers every visitor.
Emily swallowed hard.
"That's impossible."
Then Clara noticed something even stranger.
The next page contained five sketches.
Five women.
Each one looked exactly like them.
The ink looked decades old.
"No..." Rachel backed away.
"This was drawn long before we were born."
Silence filled the room.
Then...
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
Three slow knocks echoed from the living room window.
Everyone looked.
There was no one outside.
Emily forced herself to walk toward the curtains.
She pulled them aside.
The garden was empty.
"See?" she said nervously.
Suddenly, a pale woman's face slammed against the outside of the glass.
THUD!
Emily screamed.
The face vanished before anyone else reached the window.
"Did you see her?!" Emily shouted.
"There was nothing there," Sarah replied.
"She was there!"
That night, everyone went home.
None of them slept.
At exactly 3:13 a.m., Clara's phone began ringing.
Emily.
"Clara..." Emily sobbed.
"Something is inside my house."
"What happened?"
"I keep hearing footsteps upstairs."
"Stay where you are."
Before Clara could answer again, the call ended.
Seconds later, Sarah called.
"Someone keeps standing outside my bedroom."
"Lock the door."
"The door is already locked."
"Then don't open it."
"Clara..."
"Yes?"
"I can hear breathing... from under my bed."
The line went dead.
Within the next hour, Rachel and Nina reported similar experiences.
Each of them had seen different apparitions.
A headless priest.
A child without eyes.
A woman crawling across the ceiling.
Yet every haunting began shortly after they looked through the diary.
By sunrise, Clara realized one terrifying truth.
The diary wasn't haunted by one ghost.
It contained many.
Over the following week, the hauntings grew worse.
Mirrors reflected strangers.
Doors opened on their own.
Shadowy figures stood outside windows every night.
One evening, Clara noticed fresh writing appearing inside the diary.
No one was touching it.
The ink simply formed by itself.
Return me.
A few seconds later...
Before the seventh night.
Another sentence appeared.
Or all doors will open.
"We have to go back," Clara whispered.
None of her friends wanted to.
But they knew they had no choice.
...
They returned to Black Hollow Village on the sixth day.
This time, heavy fog covered everything.
The village looked even older than before.
Several houses that had stood during their first visit had completely disappeared.
"Were those buildings always gone?" Rachel asked.
"No..." Clara replied quietly.
"The village is changing."
They entered the mansion once more.
Unlike before, the front door stood wide open.
Every room was silent.
No screams.
No laughter.
Only endless stillness.
The writing desk remained in the upstairs bedroom.
"Put it back," Emily urged.
Clara carefully placed the diary where she had found it.
Nothing happened.
"That's it?" Sarah asked.
The room suddenly shook.
The mirror cracked from top to bottom.
A woman's voice echoed through the mansion.
"...too...late..."
The diary flipped open by itself.
Page after page turned violently.
Until it reached the final page.
Unlike the others, this page contained no drawings.
Only a portrait.
It was the woman in the white dress.
Below it were words written in faded ink.
I was never the one they should fear.
The floor beneath them split open.
A deafening roar rose from the darkness below.
Thousands of pale hands reached upward.
The same hands Clara had seen inside the ghost's face.
Except now they were attached to enormous creatures buried beneath the mansion.
"RUN!" Clara screamed.
The woman in white suddenly appeared between them and the abyss.
For the first time, her face was visible.
She looked completely human.
She wasn't angry.
She was terrified.
"Leave..." she whispered.
"They're awake."
"Who?" Clara asked.
Tears rolled down the ghost's face.
"The ones I imprisoned."
She raised both hands.
The mansion trembled violently.
Massive wooden beams collapsed behind the women, blocking the creatures from reaching them.
"GO!" the ghost cried.
The five friends sprinted downstairs.
Behind them came hundreds of inhuman screams.
They burst through the front entrance just as the entire mansion began collapsing into itself.
The ground shook for nearly a minute.
Dust filled the air.
When everything settled...
The mansion was gone.
Nothing remained except an empty crater.
The ghost had vanished.
So had the diary.
"Is it over?" Emily asked.
Clara nodded slowly.
"I think..."
Months passed.
The hauntings stopped.
Life gradually returned to normal.
One rainy evening, Clara received a package without a sender's name.
Inside was an old photograph.
It showed the five women standing in front of the mansion.
They had never taken such a picture.
What froze Clara's blood was not the photograph itself.
It was what stood behind them.
The woman in white was smiling.
But surrounding her...
Were dozens of towering black figures with glowing eyes.
On the back of the photograph, fresh ink slowly appeared as Clara watched.
You closed one door.
A second sentence followed.
There are twelve more.
The lights inside Clara's house suddenly went out.
In the darkness, twelve slow knocks echoed from twelve different walls at exactly the same time.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
Clara realized the haunted house had never been the prison.
It had been a lock.
And someone—or something—had just begun searching for the remaining eleven.
The End.
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