Hetta

They say every house in North Thistlewood has its ghost, but the Branning House has something worse. Ghosts moan, maybe rattle the windows, and if you’re lucky, float through walls in their sad little sheets. But the Branning House? It breathes. It watches. And if you're not careful, it remembers you.

Now, the Branning place wasn’t always cursed. That took some effort. Some planning. Some teenage spite twisted into something old and mean. That brings us to Hetta.

Hetta Fairmoor was the kind of girl you didn’t want staring at you too long. Not because she was ugly. She was the opposite, which made it worse. Too still, too composed. Her smile never made it all the way to her eyes, and she never blinked when she should. There was a smug calculation behind her expressions, like she’d already written your eulogy and was just waiting for you to do something that justified it.

She was sixteen when she moved into the Branning House. The family had money, though nobody quite knew where it came from. Her father, Cyril, claimed it was shipping. Her mother, Lenora, didn’t claim anything. She just stared out windows and smoked clove cigarettes in rooms where no one ever saw her enter.

They arrived on a fog-choked morning in June, which set the tone pretty well. The previous owners had fled the property a month before, leaving behind furniture, pets, and a half-finished jigsaw puzzle that had been set into the dining room table like some sort of cryptic offering. Hetta, of course, loved it.

"It’s as if they left it just for me," she’d said, smoothing the edges with one long pale finger.

The townsfolk gave them a few weeks of polite distance before the stories began to crawl back out of the ground. They started with the dog, naturally. Hetta had brought a little white terrier named Buttons, who stopped barking three days after they moved in. After that, he simply sat by the foot of the ivy-covered wall in the garden, staring up at the window where Hetta liked to sit and write in a black notebook. Sometimes she’d whisper down to him, and though nobody ever heard what she said, the dog’s ears would twitch like he was being scolded by God himself.

By mid-July, Buttons disappeared. Hetta claimed he’d run off, but the gardener, old Mr. Winslow, swore he’d seen something moving in the ivy. Not something climbing. Something opening. Like a hand parting the vines and pulling something inside.

Mr. Winslow quit the next day. Claimed he was too old to be crawling around cursed gardens, and honestly, he was right.

It didn’t stop there. Cats refused to cross the property line. Milk soured faster inside the house than it did on the porch. And there was that smell. Faint at first. Roses and rot. Sweet and wrong. Hetta always wore a sprig of ivy in her hair. Said it kept her calm.

There were boys, too. They followed her like moths to a bonfire. First was Jeb Carter, whose teeth started falling out one by one after he tried to kiss her. Then Oliver Rooks, who spent a single afternoon with her and ended up wandering naked into the church, ranting about doorways in the hedges and whispers in the attic.

Hetta just smiled. Like she’d won something.

By fall, even the pastor was warning folks to keep their kids away from the Branning place. And that’s when it happened. The disappearance. Hetta’s mother, Lenora, vanished during a storm in late October. Cyril told the constable she’d gone to visit her sister in Waverly, but no one believed it. Mostly because Lenora didn’t have a sister. Or at least, no one could find one. Not even the church registry had a record. And Hetta? She didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. In fact, she seemed freer. Lighter. Like someone who had just gotten a long-delayed promotion.

Then came the letters.

Handwritten notes began appearing in the library’s return chute. Always unsigned, always in the same spidery ink. They weren’t stories, not really. More like instructions. Riddles. Lists of ingredients that made no sense. "Gravedirt. Honeysuckle. A lock of regret." That sort of thing. The librarian, Mrs. Penwell, showed them to the constable after one included a drawing of a figure hanging from the belfry by their own hair. That same week, Hetta was seen plucking ivy from the garden and humming the same tune the drawing showed in its margins.

A few brave souls tried to confront her. They didn’t last long.

Mrs. Penwell fell down her stairs, broke every bone on her left side. Father Ames developed some kind of palsy in his hands and had to leave the parish. And Cyril? He went blind overnight. Claimed it was from staring too long at the wall outside Hetta’s room. "It blinked," he said. "I swear to Christ, it blinked."

By Christmas, Hetta lived alone in the house. No one had seen Cyril in weeks, and no one wanted to go ask. She still walked into town now and then, but fewer and fewer people made eye contact. She seemed pleased by that. Thrived on it.

And that brings us to the fire.

It started in the basement, though nobody knows what set it off. The flames went high and fast, but somehow didn’t touch the garden. The ivy-covered wall was left standing. Hetta was not.

Or so they thought.

They found a body. Charred, feminine, small. Too small. Ten, maybe twelve. Not sixteen. Certainly not Hetta. Her room was untouched. Her notebook was missing. So was her hat.

The house sat empty for years, though the ivy grew thick over the ruin, climbing higher than it should have, curling over broken stone and framing the empty windows like invitations. Kids dared each other to touch it. Some did. Most never did it twice.

And then, one foggy morning in June, just like before, a new family moved in. Fresh money. Big plans.

And their daughter?

She wears a wide-brimmed hat. And she talks to the ivy.

They say the house remembers.

But maybe it’s not the house at all.

Maybe it’s Hetta.

Still plotting.

Still waiting.