The Yellow House on the Hill

Have you seen it? The yellow house on the hill?

It’s a simple house. The old Cape Cod style of house, with yellow siding that gleams with dew early in the morning and a gravelly, grass-green roof. Compared to today’s McMansions, it’s small, but to those who once lived there, it was more than enough room. The yard is huge, filled with old toys and wild flowers; by now, it’s been overgrown by weeds and roses. So many roses.

They say there used to be other houses by it, but there aren’t anymore. They’ve all been knocked down as they were scheduled to be. The yellow house has not, despite it being condemned. The contractors refuse to look at it. The demolishers won’t go near it. Realtors pretend it doesn’t exist. There’s many rumors surrounding it, and many theories as to why nobody will go there.

But I know the truth.

Long ago, a happy family lived there. Two kids, a girl and a boy. A dog, a cat, and happy parents. An altogether normal family, despite some….quirks. They lived there happily for many years.

Until the oldest child, the girl, reached thirteen. Mid-March, two months after her birthday, she committed suicide, taking as many pills as she could. Her family didn’t find out until the next day.

After that, it was like a curse had fallen over the family. The mother didn’t last long; she stabbed herself in the heart after slitting both of her wrists. The dog went next, being hit by a car. The cat died of natural causes. The boy contracted Ebola and died despite getting treatment.

The father was the last. He lasted a good thirty years longer than the rest of the family, dying of old age when he was around seventy years old.

After that, the rumors started. No person would buy the old house, though many looked at it. All of them reported feeling unwelcome there, as if some force wanted them out. Others refused it because of the strange figures they saw lurking outside of doorways and in closets. Yet others refused because of the mold everywhere, which is actually a very good reason to not buy a house.

Eventually, the town investigated the house. They found corpses in the basement rafters, hanging from the ceiling by their backs. Not only was the entire family’s bodies there (minus the father and including the by-now-mummified pets), but several missing children, a few women who had been reported missing a few months back, and a corpse that was so decayed and mutilated that the police didn’t know who it was until they did DNA testing, proving it was the father’s at the time fifty year old brother.

The house was condemned not too long after that, to no one’s surprise.

It was not too long after the house being condemned that teens from around that area started disappearing. Most of them were in the thirteen to fifteen age range and female, but a rare few were older and even fewer were male. At the same time, boys in the eight to ten range were going missing at an increasingly rapid rate, to the point that one was being abducted every other week.

The police were baffled. The kidnapper left almost no clues, and the clues they did leave all led in different directions. The only coherent clue was a piece of paper with GPS coordinates on it; the coordinates led straight to the yellow house.

The police dismissed it as another false clue at first. However, the piece of paper started popping up in the other cases as well, and the coordinates were all the same. They eventually checked out the house, and guess what they found on the upper floor?

They found the missing kids. Or what was left of them, anyway. Most of them were dead, strung up in a way that was very similar to how the bodies were strung up in the basement. The most recent missing teen was laid out on the bed, a book propped up on her head and chains wrapped around her body. An autopsy revealed that she’d died of a drug overdose, and several pill bottles were found in the bathroom.

In the other bedroom on that floor, the police found a still living six-year-old boy, also chained to the bed. He was surrounded by stuffed animals and parts of dead bodies, and had several infected cuts. On the ceiling was a macabre painting of a fallen angel with a stake through its heart, painted entirely with red paint. Further investigation of the painting revealed that it was painted in blood.

The police did catch the kidnapper, an Asian male of about thirty with spiky hair. The kidnapper was sentenced to several life sentences in prison with no chance of parole, ever.

If you go visit the house nowadays, you can catch sight of many a ghost or demon. Some of the strangest ones are also the least mutilated; for example, the cat ghost that reportedly rubs up against people, giving them cold shivers, all while yowling ‘NO’ at the top of its lungs. Or maybe the dog that has been seen wandering around the hillside, occasionally barking at nothing. Or the dark figure that stalks all who enter the house, sharp claws ready to tear apart flesh, but unable to touch living things.

The most disturbing, however, is the ghost girl who simply stands in the doorway of the room where the girl once slept. She is blurry, and you can barely see her, but she whispers things that you can’t catch. The whispers imbed themselves in your mind, until you go mad.

Others have reported that occasionally, the entire house disappears, vanishing like it never even existed. The old, withered fence is still up, and the toys are still scattered around the large yard, but the house is gone. There’s not even a hole where it was.

It’s said that if a teen or child enters the house, they will never exit again. It does indeed seem like it is so, as teens and children who enter the house are later reported missing. Some say they can hear tortured screams shortly after the teen or child enters. Others say that they’ve seen blood splattered on the windows or seeping under the door.

So, traveller, I ask you once more.

Have you seen it? The yellow house on the hill?