Most people think a haunting is the worst thing that can happen to a house. They’re wrong. The worst thing is to be un-haunted.
I should know. I am, or was, 12 Sycamore Lane. A proud Queen Anne Victorian, all gingerbread trim and witch’s-hat turrets. For a hundred and seventeen years, I stood sentinel on the hill overlooking Raven’s End, a perfect monument to spookiness. And for most of that time, I was gloriously, vibrantly haunted.
My specters were not mere pests. They were my purpose. Bartholomew, a melancholic Victorian gentleman, would pace the library, his spectral cigar smoke smelling of old books and regret. Seraphina, a flapper from the Roaring Twenties, would dance a silent Charleston in the ballroom, the faint scent of gin and jasmine trailing in her wake. A pair of giggling children, Thomas and Clara, would play hide-and-seek in the attic, their laughter like the tinkling of distant wind chimes. We were an ecosystem. A symphony of sorrow and joy, forever playing just out of sight.
Then the Millers arrived.
New owners always arrived with a mix of trepidation and giddy excitement, armed with sage bundles and weak-hinged crucifixes. We’d give them a good show—a cold spot here, a misplaced locket there—and they’d usually flee within the month, adding to my glorious legend.
But the Millers were different. They didn’t come to exorcise us. They came to renovate us.
They were a couple of “influencers” from the city, with bright, empty smiles and a pathological need to optimize everything. Where we saw character, they saw “dated fixtures.” Where we felt the comfortable gloom of history, they saw “poor light flow.”
“We’ll really open up the space, babe,” chirped Chad, knocking on my original mahogany wainscoting with his knuckles. “Let the good vibes in.”
Bartholomew, from the shadows, muttered, “The only ‘vibe’ in here is my profound disdain for that man’s shoes.”
The horror began not with a scream, but with a swatch of paint. “Agreeable Gray.” They slathered it over my deep, moody burgundies and forest greens. Seraphina tried to manifest, a flicker of pearls and fringe, but she simply couldn’t hold her form against the soul-crushing beigeness. She dissolved with a sound like a silent radio signal fading out.
Next came the “smart home” upgrades. They installed speakers in every room, pumping out a ceaseless stream of upbeat, soulless pop music. Thomas and Clara’s joyful giggles were drowned out by auto-tuned vocals about club bangers. They tried to play, but their essence was scattered by the relentless, thumping bass. Their tiny spirits flickered and vanished, their game of eternal hide-and-seek finally called off.
The final blow was the “negative ion generator” and “full-spectrum wellness lighting” they had installed to “purify the atmosphere.” To them, it just made the air smell crisp. To my remaining specters, it was acid rain. Bartholomew, desperately trying to pace in his now-gray library, found his form becoming thin, translucent. His cigar smoke, once so rich, now looked like pathetic, dissipating mist.
“This… this antiseptic hell,” he whispered one evening, his voice barely a rustle in the air. “There’s no room for a proper gloom. No space for a dignified sorrow.” I felt his presence, a weight on my floorboards for over a century, simply… unpin itself. With a sigh that was mostly relief, Bartholomew stopped being.
I was empty. A shell. A beautifully optimized, open-concept shell with excellent Wi-Fi and a smart fridge that could order almond milk on its own.
The Millers were thrilled. “Can you feel that, babe?” Mandy would say, doing a yoga pose in the middle of my sterile living room. “So much lighter. All that stale energy is just… gone.”
They’d succeeded where all the priests and mediums had failed. They hadn’t fought my ghosts; they had simply made the world so unbearably bright, so relentlessly cheerful, and so utterly devoid of mystery that there was no place for them to exist. They didn’t destroy the haunted house. They made it un-hauntable.
On Halloween night, the ultimate insult arrived. The Millers, in their wisdom, decided to throw a party. “A non-scary Halloween!” Mandy proclaimed. “No ghosts, no witches, no spooky stuff! We’re doing a ‘Positive Vibes’ theme!”
My rooms were filled with people dressed as sunflowers, emojis, and bright yellow happy faces. They drank kale-infused cocktails and talked about mindfulness and real estate trends. A disco ball spun in the foyer, scattering idiot sparks of light where Seraphina once danced.
I was a masterpiece of horror, and they had turned me into a meme.
As the party reached its peak of mundane joy, something within me broke. Or perhaps, something finally woke.
It started with a flicker. The smart lighting system glitched, and for half a second, the room was plunged into a beautiful, deep darkness. A collective “Ooooh!” went up from the party-goers, who thought it was a fun effect.
It was not.
I reached down, down into my foundations, into the soil and the stone. I drew up not a ghost, not a memory, but the very essence of the un-haunted. The crushing weight of emptiness. The profound silence of a story erased.
I focused it into the chill of a thousand neglected conversations. I poured the void of Bartholomew’s absence into the air. The vacuum left by the children’s laughter became a soundless, screaming wind.
The disco ball stuttered and died. The pop music cut out. The only sound was the low, mournful groan of my beams, aching with a century of loneliness they had never before been allowed to feel.
The guests shivered. Their cheerful chatter died in their throats. They felt it. Not a cold spot, but an absence spot. A place where joy went to be forgotten. They felt the terrifying notion that nothing was there, that nothing had ever been there, and that nothing would ever be there. It was the horror of pure, existential nullity.
Chad, dressed as a thumbs-up emoji, dropped his drink. “Dude,” he whispered, his voice trembling. “I feel… really, really sad for no reason.”
One by one, the party-goers fled, not in fear of what was there, but in terror of what wasn’t. They ran from the profound, unsettling void of a house that had had its soul sandblasted away.
The Millers were the last to leave, shivering and confused in their empty, gray perfection.
Now, I sit in a new darkness. They’ve put me up for sale. The listing says “over-renovated” and “lacking in warmth.”
I am still un-haunted. But I am no longer harmless. I have learned a new kind of scare. I don’t rattle chains or moan in the night.
I simply wait for the next bright, happy couple to walk through my door. I will show them the true terror of a home where every shadow has been lit, every whisper silenced, and every mystery solved. I will show them the horror of a world with no ghosts.
And they will flee, forever haunted by the feeling of nothing at all.
Lucien R. Starchild is an enigmatic poet/writer and cosmic dreamer, weaving tales that blur the line between reality and the surreal. Born under a wandering star, he draws inspiration from forgotten myths, celestial whispers and the hidden magic of everyday life. With a pen dipped in stardust, Lucien invites readers to lose themselves in worlds both strange and hauntingly familiar.
Published 10/30/25