There was a house on Pinkerton Way that intimidated adults and children alike. Rumors would bloom every October about people who died in the house: a mother who drowned herself and her toddler in the bath; a pair of twins who fell off the balcony while playing a game; a teenager who shot his father before shooting himself. None of these tales held any veracity, but the stories acted like an electric fence to the public and held visitors at bay. No one truly knew if any of these people had lived in this house, and no one knew if anyone would live there again.

But that wasn’t always so.

Twenty years ago, in a house labeled 303 Pinkerton Way, there lived a lively couple with their daughter. The couple was active in society and joyful as parents. Their daughter grew up in a warm, loving household that was constantly filled wall-to-wall with cheerful socialites. Parties, campaign events, welcome wagons- if there was even the slightest reason for people to gather, they would find themselves at the open door to 303 Pinkerton Way. Life was happiest within the walls of the pretty little house.

Eventually, however, the couple began to grow impatient with their daughter. Socialite life was thrilling, but as their daughter became a teenager, they found parenthood to be an added stress to their lives. It wasn’t that their daughter was a problematic child, per se. It was that they believed that life inside their house was better than life outside of it.

They homeschooled their daughter. She wasn’t allowed to see her friends outside of house parties, away from her parents’ careful observations. She was often in trouble for being in the backyard for too many hours. The daughter began to try and escape the house, crawling out of her window at night. She would snipe and snark at her parents on a daily basis, resenting them for keeping her indoors. She wanted to leave the house.

They refused, repetitively, and soon arguments occurred every day. The couple failed to see that it was their overprotectiveness was causing her to lash out. Instead, they began to view their daughter as a burden.

“I don’t want to be a mother anymore,” the wife would whisper to her husband.

“It’s too much work,” he would agree.

“She’s too expensive.”

“She’s too feisty.”

“She always wants to leave the house. Why can’t she just stay here and behave?”

The couple began to become obsessed with keeping their daughter indoors. “If she’s completely under our influence, perhaps she’ll become more calm and quiet like us,” the wife suggested, and the husband agreed. They locked down the house in such a way that the daughter stopped being able to even get a glimpse of the outside world. There were bars on the windows, a series of locks on both doors, and locks on some of the internal doors. The husband purchased a gun, lest somebody try to steal their daughter from their grasps.House parties ceased. The couple and their daughter remained exclusively in their home, having groceries delivered to their doorstep.

It drove the teenage girl to insanity. She became unbearably restless, tearing down paintings, ripping through walls with her nails, and throwing herself against the walls, the bookcases, and the dressers. She had to get out. She had to. It took months of her confinement for her to snap, but snap she did. She waited until her parents went to bed, and then removed a painting from the wall of the dining room. Behind the painting was one of her holes, punched through and ripped nearly clean through the insolation. As she began to scratch the remainder of the insulation away, the husband heard the sound, woke up his wife, and grabbed his gun. They didn’t hesitate to descend the stairs and fire a warning shot. “Keep your hands off our daughter!” The wife declared. The husband fired another shot. They waited a moment for the smoke to clear before checking out their intruder.

Both of their bullets had missed the non-existent intruder.

They hadn’t, however, missed the teenager trying to escape.

The couple was only slightly fazed. Neither of them wept, for they had both grown silently resentful of their only child. All they remembered of her was her anger, her strange fits of destruction, and the way she interrupted their peaceful lives. “If only she hadn’t been so problematic,” the husband sighed. “This could have all been avoided.”

“It’s alright, dear,” the wife consoled him. “We weren’t suited to be parents, anyway.”

They turned their daughter to ash, incinerating her in the fireplace. Then they sealed the ashes away in the hole in the wall, the husband using his old carpentry skills to make in unnoticeable. They remained in the house, comfortable in their now-peaceful home. The couple enjoyed the few months they had without the continuous anger of their unsettled daughter.

But then the walls began to scratch themselves open.

Objects began to fall down the stairs.

Heavy objects would lounge at the residents out of nowhere.

Sometimes, they would hear their daughter yelling and trying to escape in the middle of the night.

The couple decided it was time to leave. In order to erase suspicion, the couple divorced- claiming that their missing daughter had driven them to hate each other. It wasn’t as if anyone was paying attention; their reclusivity had drawn all attention away from them years earlier. They quietly backed up whatever they treasured, and moved into the two houses alongside 303 Pinkerton Way. They conversed solely over telephone, refusing to step outside again.

Both of them kept watchful eyes on their old house, knowing that their daughter was still inside the walls.