House for Sale

A few minutes later, they reached a set of open iron gates leading onto a weedy courtyard. The house, in pale flaking brick, stood across an overgrown lawn. It was neglected; its paint was peeling. But there was no doubt that it had been an elegant house.

Hans-Peter stopped the car and helped his wife out. They waited a few moments but no one came to the door; no faces appeared at the window.

There was a curious oppressed silence that the couple broke with their footsteps as they walked towards the front door.

Later, Therese recalled what happened next. "We stood at the door, and Hans-Peter knocked. We heard the knocks resounding through the house—an eerie sound—but no one answered. There were curtains at the windows, and there appeared to be furniture inside. We were quite sure the house was inhabited.

"Eventually, my husband tried the door. It was unlocked. There seemed little harm in having a quick look around now that we had gone this far. He went in first and I followed."

The house was dim and filled with cobwebs. The furnishings that filled every room were thick with dust, riddled with the ravages of moth and worm. In the kitchen, crockery and cutlery were laid out on a table for a meal that obviously had never been served. In the pantry, bread and vegetables, laid on the marble slabs, had long since rotted away.

All the trappings of living were there in the decaying, neglected house. Only the people were missing.

Therese resumed the story. "By this time I was ready to leave—I wouldn't have lived there however reasonable the price. But Hans-Peter was determined to look over the rest of the place.

"We walked along a gloomy corridor and opened a door to what I assumed to be the main living room of the house. The door swung back and we both saw them clearly. There were people in the house.

"Heavy curtains hung at the windows but there was still enough light for me to be certain of what I saw. There were four people in the room—a man, a woman, and two children. They were sitting immovably in chairs around the fireplace. It was like a weird tableau.

"After what seemed like hours—it could only have been seconds—they turned and looked at us. They were wearing clothes in vogue in the 1890s and the man held a silver-topped cane.

"Strangely, my first reaction was not one of fear or horror. I just thought how pale and sad they all looked...."

Slowly, the image faded before the visitors' eyes and finally vanished completely. Not surprisingly, the Storrers wasted no time in putting as many miles as possible between themselves and the house on the hill!

It couldn't have been a hallucination, because they had both witnessed it. Afterwards they separately recounted what they had seen, and the details tallied exactly.

It was over six months before Hans-Peter Storrer could bring himself to drive back to the village in the hills to seek an answer to the mystery that had been plaguing him. And he found it at the first place at which he called—the tiny post office run by Ludwig Wahlen.

"That house, sir, has been for sale for nearly ten years," Herr Wahlen said. "There was a shooting tragedy up there. The master shot his wife and two children. It was in all the papers."

He rummaged in a drawer and produced a yellowed sheet of newsprint. A large photograph headed the page. Looking at it, Hans-Peter saw again the sad pale faces of the dead family he had disturbed in the house on the hill.