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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Ink_Wielder on 2026-05-17 23:45:53+00:00.

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{Original Post} ~ {Part List}

Content Warning: talk of child abuse

I stood nearly frozen for about a full minute while I stared at the princess in disbelief. I had no idea what I’d done to earn the glimpse through the window into whatever reality this was, but my heart was thumping with excitement. This was it—the next step forward we’d been looking for. A way to get answers without traversing inside the red door.

The little girl didn’t seem to notice me as she ran beneath the lone tree and set her basket down, laying out the blanket for her toys before meticulously setting out a tea party. Her small, innocent face was painted with a content smile as she worked, and even from so far, I could hear her humming to herself, not a care in the world.

“Um, hello?” I called out cautiously, not trying to startle her.

No response. She must not have heard me.

“Hello? Little girl?” I awkwardly tried again.

Still nothing, although at the volume I was calling there was no way she wouldn’t have heard me. I suddenly became confused; in my first instance of flashing to this place back in the halls, hadn’t she been able to hear me? Or, at the very least, she’d seen me.

Thinking back on the moment, I began to wonder if she’d been looking at me specifically at all. Maybe when she peered around the corner, she was only looking at the woman carrying the buckets.

It was that woman that gave me a different possibility, however. She hadn’t been able to see or hear me either as I stood right in front of her, and that vision had been a lot like this one; some weird approximation or memory of the past, it seemed.

Maybe the little girl couldn’t see me because this wasn’t really her, at least not her ghostly self that had been with me in the halls. Maybe right now, this was just a memory. A time before she ended up…um, trapped behind the red door.

My heart sank at the possibility, realizing my celebration had been a little premature. If this wasn’t really the ghost girl, then that meant I wasn’t going to be able to speak directly to her and ask questions like I’d hoped. Still, any sort of glimpse into the past was invaluable to us right now—it might give us more clues as to what happened here.

I moved to step closer but promptly stopped when new characters suddenly joined the scene. The front door swung open again, and from the porch stepped down three women; ones that I recognized, though I still hadn’t met any of them officially.

The first of them was the woman I’d seen in my last visit to this strange pocket dimension; the one with the long raven hair adorned with flowers and a young yet wise face. She no longer had her bucket of candle-making supplies with her, but instead a basket like the little girls, steaming with some sort of baked good that quickly overrode the smell of summer grass.

She smiled fondly at the princess and her fluffy inert subjects, then turned back to her sisters, “I’m going to join her.”

“Well hang on a second!” the woman behind her scoffed, “Don’t run off with all those cookies before we get one! Adeline, grab me out a couple, quick.”

‘Adeline’, the third woman, gave a small chuckle in the back of her throat before stepping forward and obliging, fishing out two fresh, gooey cookies from the basket before nodding the raven-haired woman away.

Of all three, she was the most familiar to me. Her wild, curly red locks were unmistakable, and the beauty mark perched above her lip was a dead giveaway. She was the woman from the portrait in the living room, the same one I’d stared at in curiosity each time I lay down on the couch to take my rest shift.

She had a movie-star familiarity about her—a face I’d seen many times before but just couldn’t place, even beyond all the times I looked at her in the painting. Among her sisters, she carried herself the highest; Strong, bold, and graceful, clearly the authority of the house. As she moved to a space just out in front of me, she stuck one of the cookies into her mouth to hold it, then passed the rest to her sister before laying out a blanket that she had tucked beneath her arm.

The women took a seat, and the last one began laying out her supplies. She was the least familiar to me, having only seen her face a single time. It was a split second in the darkness of the halls; the place where we’d lost Casey—she was also featured in the portraits hanging on the wall.

Unlike the others, her hair was short, choppy and a lighter brown, freckles dotting her face and eyes a lily-pad green. She had the same natural beauty as her friends, but hers was wilder, and she didn’t seem to be concerned about the elegance of it all.

She was barefoot and wore loose, baggy overalls that were covered in paint marks, a white T-shirt underneath. The reason for her messy clothes was apparent immediately as the supplies she was laying out were for painting. She popped a small easel up on the blanket before setting the canvas on top, then, she removed some tubes of paint from a box. They were the old, aluminum kind, and by the looks of the labels, they were quite vintage.

Like the little ghost girl, none of them acknowledged me or gave any indication that I was there.

“Alright,” the blonde woman sang jovially, taking one of the cookies from Adeline and stuffing a large part of it into her mouth, “Innish up er’ ‘ookie so I ‘an start.”

The red-haired mistress took another bite and looked down at a newspaper in her lap, unfolding it without looking up, “Give me a moment, Margret, I need to catch up on current affairs.”

Margret swallowed her bite and rolled her eyes, “You had all that time while Natellie was baking to read that thing and you chose now?”

“What’s the rush?” Adeline chuckled, “The sun is out, the day is nice, and we have nowhere to be.”

Though I’d already thought of the women as ‘sisters’ a few times, that sentiment didn’t exactly seem accurate. None of them looked the same, all having different hair and eye colors, as well as face shapes in general. While genetics were weird and it was possible that their looks didn’t portray their biological relationship, it still didn’t seem the case.

That begged the question what their relationship was to one another, living seemingly by themselves all the way out in the fancy manor on the mountain. Were they lovers of some kind? Friends who had all decided to live together? Perhaps a trio of widows who moved in to keep each other company, starting an orphanage of some kind?

That might explain the grandeur of the house, as well as its strange layout and accommodations for children. It may seem like an odd detail to get hung up on, but something important to note about the time period I currently was witnessing was that it seemed old.

In my conservative small town, three women living together in the middle of nowhere would already turn a few heads, but Stillwater in the early days, rife with misogyny and discrimination? It would most likely get you burned at the stake, and the fact only made the women all the more intriguing.

As the two set about their business, Margret getting her paints splayed onto a palette and Adeline continuing to read her paper, I realized that I had the perfect way to find the date laid out right in front of me. I stepped close to the head maiden and peered over her shoulder.

Ike Signs Bill For Highways

June 30, 1956

I can’t say why, but reading the date made my stomach sink in shock. I’d pieced together that what I was witnessing was in the past, but I hadn’t been prepared for just how far back I was seeing. It only made the Red Manor and the mysteries surrounding it feel that more ancient—that much further out of reach.

The house hadn’t seemed so old when we first encountered it; if it was 70+ years untouched, it would have been in far greater disarray than we’d already found it in, especially under the harsh Appalachian weather. That meant beyond this moment, the event that drove the women away—or perhaps spelled their demise—must have come much later.

I backed up to take in the bigger picture of the scene before me, wondering if there was still any clues in the ‘now’ that I could glean.

“She’s a sweet one,” Margret smiled fondly, looking off over the field where Natellie sat on the little girl's blanket, smiling up at her as the princess made a royal speech to her party guests. She twirled and hopped around with a giggle, pure innocent ecstasy twinkling in her eyes while her tiara clung on for dear life.

“Mhmm,” Adeline nonchalantly agreed, not looking up from her paper, “Certainly well-behaved.”

Margret smacked her lips with a grieving look and released a sigh, pressing a hand to her chest in empathy, “Aw, I know… Did Natellie tell you that she was too afraid to even try playing with any of the toys in her room without asking because she thought she might get in trouble? The poor thing—I shudder to think what her home was like…”

Adeline finally looked up from her reading to stare at her sister with an amused smirk, “Margret, I fear you’re getting attached awfully quickly.”

The painter sco...

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