I awoke that morning expecting an uneventful day. My older brother was driving into town from college to spend a bit of quality time with me. No big plans. When he arrived, we grabbed a snack, caught up on family news and generally decided we'd take advantage of a beautiful early October day and take a ride with no specific destination in mind. Little did we know what was to come!

Kev drove recklessly fast, a common trait among 19 year old college dudes. At sixteen, I was just happy to exhibit a bit of my wild side. I had always been your basic 'good girl'; without much prompting, I usually toed the line when it came to rules.

We were careening down Boston Road in the general direction of the Mass. Pike and who knows from there? Ah, the joys and ignorance of being young felt like a vitamin elixir! Windows open, my long hair whipping in my face, laughing over corny jokes and singing in brother-sister duets to whatever the radio spit out at us.

Without explanation Kev slowed down and gave me a grave look. "I think we're meant to take the next right-hand turn." He said. This might be a great time to tell you that my brother had demonstrated multiple times in his life that he had some indefinable ability to pick up on the paranormal.

Not one to be dissuaded I knew it would be fruitless to quiz him, so I shrugged and muttered "Alrighty then!"

As it turns out the next right was a barely discernible narrow road, partially hidden by shrub overgrowth on both sides. It didn't look promising to me and I offered as much. "We'll know when we get there." Kev said enigmatically as he turned onto Silver Street...

We both grew quiet as we bumped our way on what seemed to be a once (long ago) paved and very narrow street, now worn down to puddles, potholes, and patches of dirt.

Where were we heading? Why had I never noticed this dumb little road in the hundreds of times I'd been on Boston Road? It all felt surreal, somehow...

Conversation slipped to silence and the air around us seemed to cool and grow still. I felt frightened in that vague way one does when the house creaks at night. I swallowed the urge to say "Let's just turn around," lest my brother look down on me.

About two miles down Silver Street the houses began to thin and the trees framing the road rustled warnings I knew I could not decipher. I hoped it was my imagination playing games with me. Too many Twilight Zone episodes when I was young, I thought...

Seemingly out of nowhere an approximately three-foot high, moss covered stone wall appeared and Kev instinctively slowed down. "We're getting close." He said. "Close to what?" I managed.

Before he could respond we reached a portion of the stone wall which formed an arch, about ten feet high and five feet wide-tapering down again to another length of stone wall broken only by a driveway that led to a dilapidated, run down, clearly vacant house.

I knew we were going to enter the driveway before Kev even began to turn the steering wheel. This house was calling to us in every way but words. I have no sixth sense, yet the hair on the back of my neck was tingling.

Kev turned off the car and we both got out-silently approaching what was clearly a cement walkway to a side door of the house. There was a single step "landing" there.

On the landing, etched in the cement was this message: "Rest here awhile for me in memory of my three children who died."

Beneath the message were three sets of varying sized children's footprints.

Grief overcame me. A sense of indescribable loss. "If they died, how did she manage to get the imprints?" He murmured. "She." Yes-we both felt it was the mother who'd left the message. How? Why?

Kev walked in front of me and turned the doorknob. He seemed as surprised as me that the door was unlocked. As if someone had called "Come on in!" We both entered as if we belonged there...

Slowly we toured the kitchen, and an adjoining "summer kitchen"--popular in older homes in the New England area. There were a few pots on the counter and some dusty, cracked dishes in the sink. Dishes and pots in this empty old house? It didn't make sense.

We continued into the living room. Wallpaper was peeling like bark off a decrepit tree. Magazines and old newspapers were scattered on the floor.

The room was bare except for a single cherry-wood three-shelf book case that stood like a roadblock at the base of the stairway leading to the second floor. That single piece of furniture was immaculate. No scratches or dust. Kev slid it away with ease and I began to run up the stairs.

"Careful!" He shouted. "I don't think it's safe!"

I was already standing in the middle of the first upstairs bedroom as I heard him slowly making his way up a much shakier sounding set of stairs than I'd imagined or allowed myself to notice. More torn wallpaper. Dirty windows that cast a speckled bit of sunlight on worn wooden floors. Nothing else...

In the second bedroom there was a large chest of drawers. It seemed incongruous that any furniture- the book shelf downstairs and this dresser-were in this shell of a house at all! I turned to Kev to offer that thought, only to see him pushing at the side of the dresser, struggling trying to move it.

"Help me get it away from the wall!" He insisted. Together we pushed and tilted until finally we had moved it about two feet from the wall.

We stood side by side transfixed by what we saw...

Fully hidden behind the dresser was a--how to describe it? Not a closet, nor a cubby. It was a three by four-foot "area" clearly built into the house, then hidden by the chest of drawers. Kev leaned in and quickly stepped aside to let me look.

There were scratches on the floor. Faintly legible was the shaky printing of the word "help." There were hand prints on the wall--children's hand prints. What secrets did this house hold? Children had been hidden in that space, no question about that, we agreed.

"We're out of here!" My brother whispered as he half slid down the stairs. I was right behind him as we raced for the car.

Kev was speeding in reverse while backing into the street. I felt my fingers claw for the dashboard. If it took us ten minutes to get from my parent's house to there, it took less than five to get home. We were spooked. Nothing felt normal. Nothing felt real. We were overwhelmed.

My fourteen-year old brother James was home and Kev and I tripped over our syllables spilling our experience-finishing one another's sentences. "What the hell did we just see?" he asked, uncharacteristically shaken.

James, with the bravado of a fourteen-year-old was typically unfazed by all of this and got his kicks ragging on us for being afraid of our own shadows, chicken, and scared of "ghosts."

"Come on you morons, take me back there so I can see this freak-fest!"

On any other day I think Kev or I would have refused. Somehow without discussing it we both felt a need to face the Silver Street house again to verify our experience. If James wet his pants, then so much the better!

More confident in our destination this time, we doubled back and turned onto Silver Street--Postulating about the dresser, the book shelf, the eerie message and footprints in cement.

"Almost there," Kev said to James-" Get ready to eat crow!"

"Here we are!" Kev said as the stone wall came into view. The stone archway. The driveway. Kev turned in...

There was no house. There was no sign of a house.

There was the driveway, the walkway, the landing with the same ominous message: "Rest here awhile for me in memory of my three children who died."

No house meant no door. Whatever "door" Kev and I had entered was slammed shut. Nothing to see but a slight mound with overgrown grass...

"No way!" James guffawed... "You two numb skulls got me again!"

"I wish," Kev said, a tremor in his voice. I was beyond words, beyond belief...stunned and faced with the unexplainable.

Everything I've stated is true. We entered a house that didn't exist. We climbed stairs that were not there. We could not explain it then and decades later we still have no answers.

Eventually Kev and I did a deep dive into researching the property. We spoke with the neighbors on the street over the next three weekends. Nobody recalled a house being present in their time-though each volunteered they assumed there must have been one "sometime." (Given the driveway and such.)

We (unfortunately) shared with friends, each of whom was all too eager to dabble in the mystery. We held a makeshift seance, convinced a Medium to come "read" the site, summoned spirits to come forward...
It is foolish and dangerous to open doors when we don't know what's on the other side.
We got nothing but tossed from the property at midnight by police, shivers of fright, and more haunted by our experience.

Over the next year I admit we visited the site more often than we should have. I was obsessed. I was compelled to seek worldly answers to an otherworldly experience. My parents began to worry about my brother and me.

We knew what they could not know. We'd experienced it together. This had been no group psychosis or dual delusion. Knowing what it was not is not the same as understanding what it was...

An elderly man who was our town historian suggested we go to the neighboring town and search the property records for Silver Street.

Oh, how I wish I could wrap this up with a bow...

We did research.

Town records showed there had been a house on that property, (hence the stonewall, the archway, the driveway).

The same town records indicated that house had burned down in a tragic fire in 1921.

The woman of the house had perished and was found charred on the floor of an upstairs bedroom. Documents indicated that it took several days to locate her three dead children.

They were found huddled together in death-in the hole in the wall behind the chest of drawers.