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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Good-Kn1ght on 2026-08-12 16:43:28+00:00.

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Most haunted houses have names and a backstory. Old man Joe’s place where a family of five were murdered in their beds, something like that. Ours was just called “the house”, and as far as we knew, everyone who had lived there had lived perfectly normal lives. The village was small enough, and rural Nottinghamshire is boring enough that everyone knew which one you meant. The detached, red-brick, Wisteria-covered Victorian house that used to be part of a street that got knocked down long ago to make place for the low-lying 70’s library, that now only opened only three days a week.

The other difference about the house – aside from the fact it had a large, fenced-in garden, where most of the old ones just had garden at the front – was that everyone knew it was dangerous. Not just the little kids or the teenagers trying to scare each other. Even the youngest in our year group remembered Molly Haines, who broke in on a dare and never came out, and my parents were always talking about the Droste siblings, who snuck in through a side-window a year before I was born and no one saw since. It’s boarded up, of course, but apparently, it’s in the centre of some legal dispute with a distant relative so they can’t knock it down. When we were kids, my older sister told my friends and I that the house was a monster, a big breathing thing that would eat anyone up should they dare cross it’s threshold. Later we thought it was haunted. The police thought it was a sad coincidence. My parents thought we should leave it alone.

This is why when Olivia got the dare we all went quiet. We’d been going back and forth with competing dares for about a month; nothing horrible, just knocking on doors and running away, or trying to smuggle Callum’s parent’s chickens into the library. Not a lot to do in semi-rural Nottinghamshire. The worst thing about the whole situation is that the dare came from me. I dared Olivia to sneak into the back garden of the house without anyone seeing and make it back alive. I didn’t actually think she’d do it, I just wanted to show her up. She was bossy and she’d been mean to my little sister about her hair. I didn’t really realise the gravity of it until after I said it out loud, the question hanging in the air.

“We’re not doing that,” said Amrit, immediately. “That’s not fair.” She was the peacekeeper in the group, or close enough to one. That left Callum as the shy one, me as the funny one, and Olivia as the leader. Or she set herself up to be.

“You think I’m scared of the pigs?” Olivia snapped. She’d seen cops called pigs in some TV show and had taken to using it whenever possible.

“There’s barbed wire on the garden fence,” Callum muttered. “And it’s, like, twenty foot high or something.”

There was silence for a moment, and I was just about to say I’d think of something else, when Olivia’s face suddenly brightened. “Ok,” she said. “I’ve got an idea. But you all have to help me.”

That was why, at eight in the evening, we found ourselves out the front of the house. It was summer, and the sun was just starting to set, casting our long shadows across the hot tarmac like creeping fingers. You could tell the house was abandoned even without the clapboard over the doors and window. The front and sides were covered from bottom to top by a gigantic wisteria plant. If you don’t know what Wisteria is, it’s a strong climbing plant with a thick trunk and purple flowers that’s hard to get going, but once it gets going, you can never get rid of it. The flowers were in bloom; the leaves and branches so thick you could barely make out the red brick or the shattered first-floor windows. I felt a stab of panic as Olivia fumbled in her bag. She wasn’t going to try and climb in through the window, was she? I asked her, trying to turn the question into half a joke.

“Obviously not, I’m not fucking thick.” Swearing was something we’d all just discovered too, in the awkward way kids do. She looked at me then, and underneath the confidence I could see she was scared, just a little, and wanted me to know it, too, to remind me that I was the one who had put her in that situation.

Out of the bag she pulled thick gloves and a large picnic blanket with plastic on one side. She started ordering us around, having Amrit and Callum holding the blanket at the base of the house, and me standing back filming it with my phone. By now we all knew what she was going to do, and the panic sent us into silence. The library was closed, and this at the very edge of the village; no one was around at this time, no one to help if it went wrong. She looked up at the towering house, looked back at us both, and grinned, quickly.

“It only gets you if you go inside, doesn’t it?”

She meant it to be snarky but there was a real question in there. We all nodded.

“Right. Watch this.”

Without hesitating, she grabbed the first branch of the wisteria and hoisted herself up. We watched, open mouthed, as she scrambled from branch to branch, squishing her fingers into the gaps between the wood, testing the weight before each step. When she got as high as the first story, Callum and Amrit stretched the blanket taught, ready to catch her if she fell, but she continued up, climbing like a monkey, like it was natural to her. At the halfway point she turned and shouted down. Amrit looked around nervously, but the streets were deserted.

“I’m going up over the roof, then down to the garden. I’ll shout out, then come back up over again. Don’t drop the blanket.”

The blanket wouldn’t do a thing to break her fall, but I didn’t stop Callumn and Amrit from holding it tighter, until it looked like the plastic would tear. Up and up she climbed, so far all we could see were the white soles of her trainers. Her head had almost reached the gutter when she yelped.

“What is it?” Amrit shouted, and Callum shushed her.

“It’s nothing, just a splinter.” She reached up to hoist herself on to the next branch, then cried out again, this time grabbing at her ankle. I could see her hand scratching near her shoe. I remember thinking immediately that it was weird. There hadn’t been any splinters on the way up, or if there were she hadn’t mentioned them. I opened my mouth to call up when she slapped her hand suddenly to the side of her face, so loudly we could hear it from the ground.

“Are you ok?” Amrit called. Callum didn’t shush her that time. He stood looking up, opened mouthed.

“It’s – there’s”- she started, but cut herself off, scratching at her neck, at her stomach where her shirt had ridden up. By this time I had stepped back from the wall, trying to get a better look.

“It must be bees, or wasps,” Callum said.

Olivia overheard. “It’s not wasps! It’s splinters! They’re… they’re coming out of the wood”-

Another yelp, and she put her hand to her left leg, behind the knee, and at the same time her arm contorted, twisting from some new pain, and for a moment she lost her place her feet shuffling, scraping against the brickwork. My heart leapt into my mouth, and Amrit and Callum pulled the blanket taut, but after what must have just been a moment she got her feet back and put her arm up. She called out my name and began to say something to me. It was going to be sarcastic, I could tell by the pause, the tone, I knew her so well. Perhaps it was about how she was nearly there, nearly at the roof, because she took a big step up onto the next knot in the branches, with just one more her hands would reach the guttering, but to do that she had to pull herself close to the wall, get a better grip, and at that moment we heard them. Not one splinter, but what must have been hundreds, impacting with flesh and clothing all at once, a sharp sound, like a dart on a dartboard, shot out at speed, I saw the sleeves of her jumper tighten to her arms as the wood embedded in. She screamed then, a proper, honest scream, and I felt myself scream to as her arms flew away from the wood, her body falling back into the air as she lost her grip entirely.

But she didn’t fall. She lay there, suspended at an angle. We’d been quiet before, but we were silent now, a different, stunned silence, Olivia too, as we saw a tangled thread of wisteria branches, thicker than the trunk itself, holding Olivia up like the back of a seat.

It’s strange what you focus on when you can’t understand what you’re looking at. Like trying to make out a shadow in the dark, you listen even as you strain to see, and as I watched, I heard the uneven drip from the thin trickle of blood falling out of her outstretched hand, dropping down to the blanket where it lay on the floor, dropped by the others.

“Come down, Olivia,” I said. Held up there, paralysed in fright, she paused, and then nodded. I can take something good from that. She wanted to come down.

Like a shot, like it had heard me, the branch tightened like a clenched fist. Olivia was thrown forward into the wall. Again there was that sharp thwacking sound, again the she screamed. Amrit grabbed at the blanket, like holding it out would help, like it would do anything at all, Callum took one look up and ran off, yelling about getting help. Only I had the full view of it, only I saw, as the branch was joined by another, and another, and another, snaking out from the trunk with the heavy creak of stairs, the bark straining at the seams until it split and shot out into new, smaller branches, joining together like fingers into a lattice behind her back, and up the back of those, like scales, formed num...

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