It was a cool night in the early spring of 1897 when Lavinia Harrow rose in a panic.
A yellow, sickly light, filtered through the leaves of the old mulberry just outside her window, flirted with shadow in a chaotic dance across the walls and rumpled bed linens of her room. Everything felt tight—somehow constricted—as if the moths congregating around the streetlamp had conspired with the Devil himself to bind her within the confines of her own domestic refuge.
Her ears buzzed—almost sizzled—at the slightest breath of wind, the tiniest creak of settling wood. Her eyes, now opened impossibly wide, darted about the room, as though prepared for the very hordes of Hell to spring out from between the worn floorboards. The sudden clanging burp of the old radiator against the far wall came sudden and sharp, as though it had sensed its moment for an impertinent interjection had arrived. Lavinia, tiny rivulets of sweat beading along her clammy forehead, allowed herself to sink slowly back into the pillow, still watchful, as though retreating from an imagined foe. Slowly, she sank into dream.
The next morning, Cousin Petunia found poor Lavinia’s lifeless body, skin ashen and cold, curled around the bedpost. Rotting mulberry leaves poured from between her bluish lips, and two moths—also dead—perched above each of Lavinia’s now-glassy, sightless eyes, frozen in horror and completing the ghastly tableau.
It has now been over a century since the events of that 1897 night. The Harrow House had been turned into a museum sometime in the 1960s, but had long since closed. Now, commercial development encroached upon the old house from all sides. The roof was mostly gone, graffiti peeling from weathered clapboard sides, and the roots of the old mulberry now lifting the pavement of the parking lot belonging to the chain pharmacy next door.
They come at dusk, laughing too loudly to mask their nerves. Four of them, with backpacks rattling with energy drinks, vape clouds, and camera rigs. They call themselves SpookTube Nation, and their plan is simple: livestream a night in the “Cursed Museum of Lavinia Harrow.”
The house looks smaller than the stories made it seem. But the mulberry remains, crooked and sprawling, its roots cracking the pavement of the old walkways. As one of them drones for the opening shot, another points:
“Yo, the radiator’s still in there.”
The chat floods with laughing emojis, moth gifs, and dares. Touch it. Kick it. Sleep next to it.
The explorers stomp through rooms gutted of glass cases, stripped of exhibits. Their footsteps scatter moths that shouldn’t still be there—pale, powdery, sluggish in the dust.
They find the bedroom. The bedpost remains, scarred by a century of retellings. The radiator crouches against the wall, rusted through in patches. Its pipes lead nowhere, cut long ago.
One explorer runs a hand over the bedpost, smirking for the camera. “This the famous prop?” he says, and laughs—until the radiator bangs.
The sound is not sharp, not metallic, but heavy, hollow, like fists pounding from the inside. The camera mic overloads, the chat explodes: Scripted? Soundboard? OMG WTF.
The explorers lose control of the narrative. Leaves begin to pour—literally pour—from the holes in the radiator, brittle and stinking, carpeting the floor. The air fills with dust that isn’t dust at all, but wing powder, yellow and cloying. The chat cuts from mockery to confusion: Is this an effect? Guys? Are you okay?
One explorer coughs into the camera, leaves spilling wet from her mouth. Another swats at moths clustering on his eyes. The feed pixelates, fuzzes, as though the connection itself can’t bear what’s happening.
And then: silence.
The stream ends mid-scream.
In the morning, the video has already gone viral. Clips circulate: the radiator bang, the leaves pouring, the moment the moths swarm. Commenters fight over whether it’s ARG marketing, CGI, or “real footage.”
Police cordon off the house, but there are no bodies, no backpacks, no cameras—only a thicker carpet of leaves in the bedroom and a faint smell of burnt iron.
The building stands fenced off now, waiting. But the mulberry keeps growing, its roots pushing up the sidewalk, cracking the asphalt of the pharmacy lot. And sometimes, when the night is yellow with streetlamp glow, the abandoned stream restarts by itself. The chat fills with names you don’t recognize, usernames that vanish when clicked, all saying the same thing:
come inside. come inside. come inside.
No one saw him come. The house had stood boarded and broken for decades, the mulberry roots chewing through asphalt, the radiator left to rust. Then, one autumn morning, townsfolk saw a man on the roof, hammering shingles into place as though he’d always been there. By sundown, panes of glass glinted in the empty windows, and a faint lamplight burned in Lavinia’s room.
He was old—white beard down to his chest, back bent, gait uneven. No car, no moving van, no family. When asked his name, he only smiled and said, “I’m the caretaker.” No one pressed him. Something in his voice made it hard to.
Then the pharmacy reported the first leaves. Curled, brown mulberry leaves—wet and rotting—sealed inside bottles of spring water, floating like drowned things. At first they blamed the supplier, then the distributor, then the factory. But no one else found leaves in their shipments.
Soon it wasn’t just water bottles. Leaves turned up in pill vials, in sealed cartons of milk, in shrink-wrapped packages of bread. Always mulberry, always damp, always stinking of earth and iron.
By winter, the yellow powder had spread. It sifted across sidewalks like pollen, coated the shelves of the convenience store, smeared faintly across windshields each morning. People sneezed, coughed, scratched at their eyes. No amount of cleaning held it back. It seemed to come from nowhere, yet clung to everything.
Children whispered that if you licked the powder, you’d hear buzzing in your ears. A teenager tried it on a dare and was found the next day standing barefoot in the snow, leaves spilling steadily from her open mouth. She lived, but never spoke again.
Meanwhile, the Harrow house thrummed with life. The roof held fast. The lights burned steadily. Sometimes, at night, shadows moved in the windows—more than one figure, though no visitors were ever seen.
Neighbors swore they heard the radiator banging, though the man had no plumbing. And the mulberry, hacked back so many times before, grew fuller, greener, hungrier than ever—its branches shading three properties deep.
Some say the old man is Lavinia’s descendant, come to keep the curse in check. Others insist he is no man at all, but the embodiment of the house itself—a custodian born of rot and powder. A few whisper that he is Lavinia’s father, brother, or suitor, returned from the grave to reclaim her.
But the most common belief is simpler, older, and far worse: that the house never wanted to be empty, that the museum and the ruins were insults, and now, with its caretaker, it can at last begin to spread.
She was the sort of neighbor who always looked out the window after midnight—part habit, part spite. And so she saw it: a van, not the boxy white kind with Amazon logos, but something out of time. Long, black, with lantern-shaped headlights. Its paint was dulled, its wheels iron-rimmed. No license plate, no sound but the low growl of an ancient engine that should not still run.
The caretaker came down from the front porch first. Then the driver—a man even taller, face swallowed in shadow, left the van to meet him behind it. They moved with a patience that chilled her, not rushing, not whispering, simply working.
From the back of the van, they slid out lengths of cast-iron pipe. Heavy, jointed, greasy with age. Mrs. Hibbert swore the pipes were still damp, slick with condensation as though freshly torn from the walls of some other house. She counted at least a dozen sections, long as coffins, before she realized she was holding her breath.
The two men carried them inside, through the sagging front door of the Harrow house. And with each section set across the threshold, the mulberry shivered. Its branches rattled though the night was still.
Mrs. Hibbert told no one until morning, and even then, her account wavered. She insisted she heard the clang of pipe against pipe deep into the night—measured, steady, like the rebuilding of something familiar. By dawn, she swore she smelled heat: the acrid tang of warmed iron drifting on the breeze.
The pharmacy next door opened to find its refrigerators dead, their shelves empty but for a drift of yellow powder. The staff quit before noon.
And that evening, children playing in the street swore they heard banging from the house—low, metallic, but rhythmic, as though a radiator were being bled of trapped air. The sound made their ears buzz and their vision flicker yellow.
The townsfolk notice first by the sound: the old van again, groaning through midnight streets, but this time with its suspension sagging under an even heavier load. Mrs. Hibbert, awake as always, swears she hears iron scraping on iron as the caretaker and his driver unload a black beast of machinery. A boiler, coal-fed, riveted and monstrous. She watches it vanish through the sagging front door, brick dust puffing from the threshold as though the house itself were swallowing it whole.
In the morning, the house exhales smoke. Not woodsmoke, not oil, but coal: thick, greasy, soot-black plumes curling from a stovepipe that no one recalls ever being there. The smell settles across the commercial block like a fog, clinging to clothing, seeping into produce aisles, staining the pharmacy’s bright signage with soot.
Why coal? Why now? The town mutters. Natural gas lines run beneath every street. Electric heat is cheap enough. No one uses coal anymore—except the Harrow House, which now gulps down bags of it like a starving animal.
Delivery trucks arrive weekly, but no driver remembers the order. Bags appear stacked by the gate, stamped with logos of companies that went bankrupt decades ago. The caretaker hauls them inside himself, one by one, never breaking stride, his beard white against the black dust.
The pharmacy reports yellow powder inside sealed blister packs of aspirin now. The grocery finds rotting leaves drifting in the glass doors of its freezers. A bank teller swears the vault smelled of coal smoke one morning, though no one else smelled it.
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