Written by Harlan Finch – Observer of Small Mysteries
I went there.
Not because I thought I’d find something – but because it would have been wrong not to try. Widow Creek isn’t on any road you take by chance. It's on the edge of something. And the Lynch farm is one step farther. The house sits quietly in the countryside, as if deliberately hidden. No sign, no mailbox, no sign of life—but no sign of decay either. More like a kind of abandoned everyday life.
The front door was locked, but not particularly well. Someone had been here before. More than once. I saw shoeprints in the hallway, fresher than the layer of dust suggested. Inside: order. No vandalism, no destruction. But many things had been rummaged through, as if someone had been looking for something.
That wasn’t unusual, especially given the remote location. What was strange was me. As soon as I entered the house, everything became... hyper-clear. Not visually in the usual sense – but detailed to the point of irritation. I looked at the dust on the windowsill and knew, with a certainty I can’t explain, that it had lain there undisturbed for exactly eight months and four days. As if you were looking through a microscope without knowing what you were supposed to focus on.
I looked at a shoeprint in the hallway, deep in the dust. And I knew when it had been made. Not roughly – exactly. A very specific date. I thought I was losing my mind.
In the living room I found what one might have to call a shrine. No cross, no rosary – but a clear centerpiece: a small table with several photos, a few dried flowers, a silver hair clip, and a postcard, apparently much newer than anything else on the table – from the souvenir shop of a town I didn’t recognize. In fading ink:
“I’m fine.”
The woman in the pictures smiles with an intensity that tightens your chest. In one of the photos she stands next to a man who looks much younger than the records would suggest – Wyatt Lynch, maybe in his early thirties. And in between, in another picture: a small girl with bright red hair. Three, maybe four years old.
Upstairs, a small room. Posters of planetary orbits, an outdated CRT monitor on a dust-covered desk. On the shelf: nonfiction books, mostly biology and mathematics, some with notes in the margins. In the closet: clothes, neatly folded. Not current, but not old enough to be forgotten.
I don’t know how to date a child’s room – but this one felt like someone had left it halfway through a life.
There was an R. Lynch. She lived here. Not as a shadow. Not just as a name on a package. But as a real child, with real things, a real room. And she didn’t just vanish. She left. At some point. And no one asked where she went.
What I can’t explain is the feeling of being there.
It wasn’t haunting. No cold breath, no creaking beams. It was – concentration.
When I left the house to take a look around the grounds, the sensation faded – but it has never fully disappeared since that day. In fact, I found something that made me believe I might have discovered a hidden ability in that house. I explored the barn and shed: a few juvenile graffiti on the back wall of the shed, not even particularly creative – names, initials, a date.
The date! The day I had thought of when I looked at the footprints. I’m not superstitious. But something is definitely different here than in other places. Not in a horror-movie sense. But in a way that won’t let me go.
I didn’t take anything. Just images, impressions. Questions. And a new way of looking at the world. And also – a few photos of that postcard. I’m almost certain it’s from 2017. But maybe the postmark can be enlarged. And I can figure out the town. Why did old Lynch place it on his shrine?
To be continued.
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