Emily had always been drawn to abandoned places. Crumbling hospitals, forgotten asylums, derelict mansions—if it was empty and eerie, she had to explore it. So when she heard rumors about the Victorian house on Eldridge Street, she couldn’t resist.

The locals called it The Whispering House.

“No one who goes in stays long,” the old man at the gas station had warned, his milky eyes unblinking. “And no one who stays ever comes out.”

Emily scoffed. Ghost stories were just that—stories.

But the moment she pushed open the creaking front door, the air inside felt wrong. Thick. Stale, yet humming with something alive. Her flashlight beam cut through the dust-choked darkness, revealing peeling wallpaper and warped floorboards. Then—

A whisper.

“Emily.”

She froze. The voice had been so close, so familiar, it sent a jolt down her spine.

“Hello?” she called, forcing a laugh. “If this is some local kids messing with me, it’s not funny.”

Silence.

Then, from the hallway ahead—a giggle. A child’s laugh.

Her breath hitched. She hadn’t seen any footprints in the dust but hers.

Step by cautious step, she moved deeper into the house. The whispers returned, murmuring just beyond her hearing. The temperature dropped. Her flashlight flickered.

“You’re home,” a woman’s voice sighed—her mother’s voice.

Emily’s blood turned to ice. Her mother had been dead for ten years.

The walls around her pulsed, breathing like a living thing. Shadows stretched, twisted, formed shapes—a man in the corner, a little girl at the top of the stairs.

“We missed you,” her sister’s voice chimed in.

Emily stumbled back, but the front door was gone. The hallway stretched endlessly, doors slamming shut one by one behind her. The whispers rose to a deafening chorus—her family’s voices, all of them, calling her name, begging her to stay.

The last thing she saw before the darkness swallowed her whole was the outline of her father, his hollow eyes gleaming in the gloom, his lips parting in a smile.

“Welcome home.”