The moulding on the threshold of your kitchen door only grew more and more crowded as you grew up. Your parents marked your height every few years, inking it in orange amid a plethora of old lines. It had been a tradition in your family for five generations now, each family member marking their heights in a different color. When you turned ten, you couldn’t help but tease your mother for being a whole inch taller than she was at your age. In your late teens, your height started leveling off, and you mourned the tradition that you’d soon be stopping at least for a while anyway. You left your mark at exactly six feet when you left the nest. And years and years later, you knew it was time to return to the nest when you started growing once again. It had taken you a minute to travel back, so by the time your mother measured your height again, you were at nearly seven feet. And now, as you say goodbye to the sun and prepare yourself for The Transformation, you wonder where the marks will stop. Your great-grandmother holds the record, at 12 feet high, nearly touching the top of the vaulted ceiling. You hope you can be as tall, as fearsome as her. Tucking yourself in for your long-awaited hibernation, you can’t stop smiling. When you wake up, you’ll finally be: The Podcast Inside Your House.

As a twin, I often found myself watching my brother Robbie and thinking, ‘this is my face when I’m laughing’ or ‘this is my face when I’m crying.’ I’d seen my face reflected back at me through him across nearly the whole span of human emotion as we grew up.

We never got tired of looking identical. We kept the same haircuts, we swapped clothes, we pranked our friends. But as we prepared to head off to college, I began to brace myself for the inevitability that we would start to look different. Maybe I’d grow a beard, maybe he’d grow out his hair. He was always threatening to go and get himself a mullet; maybe he’d finally do it. 

I found myself wishing senior year would never end. That we’d never have to leave the nest, go to schools on different sides of the country. And in a fucked up monkey’s paw type way, I got my wish. 

Our grandfather had a massive heart attack, followed by a surgery that was going to take months to recover from. It happened just as we were making dorm arrangements, and both of us were able to defer our schooling for a year. Robbie had wanted to take a gap year anyway, but our mom talked him out of it. So hey, now we had one more year at home. 

Our gap year was far from restful though. Robbie already had a gig waiting tables, and Mom’s job paid well, so I took up the role of caregiver. I tried to keep our Grandpa, Bobby, on the path to recovery while Robbie and Mom worked overtime to keep us from drowning in hospital bills. Bills that would have been much higher if we’d had to hire a caregiver. So I knew I was helping, but there were so many days I felt guilty, just reading and watching over Bobby while they sweated the hours away.  

Of course, there were the bedpans and changing bandages and the stress of remembering medications, but I didn’t mind. I wanted to be a doctor back then, and I just figured that was all stuff I’d have to learn anyway. Once you embrace the fact that the body is just a messy vessel, and that everyone's is a little bit gross, it’s not so weird. Plus, it helped that Grandpa was pretty out of it when he needed the really invasive care, and by the time he was himself again, he could bathe himself again, too. 

And it was during this time, when he still needed me around all the time, but the worst of the danger had passed, that we grew closer than we’d ever been. Sure, I’d visited with Grandpa growing up, I’d listened to his stories, played baseball with him, all that stuff. But those deep conversations that adults can’t have with us until we’re grown up had yet to take place until that summer. We talked about everything. And though baseball was out of the question, we played chess and checkers, and I even showed him a few video games. He was pretty terrible at those, but it helped pass the time. 

As Grandpa recovered, the medical debt stabilized, and Robbie and Mom were able to relax a bit, too. They cut back their hours, and they even found time to enjoy the last little bit of summer, just a bit. 

Robbie and I even talked about going to school in the winter, with how fast things got better. But we wanted a proper freshman experience, so we started making plans to enjoy the rest of our gap year. And although I didn’t need to visit Grandpa as much anymore, I found myself heading over to his house whenever I got time. 

As summer turned to fall, grandpa began to confide in me more and more. Between walks around the neighborhood and board games, he began to tell me some things that he’d never told anyone else. Not even my dad, who’d died when he was not much older than me. Though that was probably just because he’d always thought that there was more time, that he’d tell his son those stories later. 

Grandpa told me about World War Two, though I suspected he was still sanitizing those stories somewhat. He told me about growing up in the shadow of the Great Depression, his parents always preparing for starvation, instability. And finally, we worked our way back to his own childhood, and he told me about his own grandfather. 

Grandpa’s Grandpa had been Robert the 1st. And while Grandpa didn’t know him very well at all, he finally worked his way into telling me that there was something he’d always wanted to get off his chest. When Robert the 1st was on his deathbed, he’d started to confide in Grandpa, just like we were doing now. Only Robert had been much older, and the stories he told Grandpa were much scarier. Grandpa said that there were some stories that were clearly nonsensical, just the product of whatever sickness of the mind plagued Robert in those final years. But there were some stories that were more grounded, that Robert had repeated over and over again. And with those stories, Grandpa had always regretted not pressing more, not looking into them more. Because those stories were about death. They were about death at Robert’s hands.

Robert told Grandpa about a house in the woods where he would go to “feed the beast.” He always used that phrase. He’d tell Grandpa about bringing people there, about covering up their disappearances. But whatever the beast was, Robert would never tell Grandpa. And whatever happened to those people in that house in the woods, well, Robert took that to his grave.

Before long, Grandpa and I were going to the library and digging through old survey maps of the city. We found an old address owned by Robert on a road that no longer existed, and soon we were able to pin down the approximate area where Robert’s house in the woods would have been.

But that presented its own set of problems because the spot was in the woods just north of an old marble quarry. Being in the city, you’d think it would be a relatively small spot of woods. But no, it was part of a tract of land known as ‘Area X’ that had long been the subject of debate in our city. See, Area X was a massive patch of woods, but a stretched-out one. It ran along a hillside going down into the river, so developing it would have taken serious money. Every now and then, the city toyed with making it a park or something. But Area X also served as an unofficial boundary between one of the poorest parts of town and one of the richest, and I suspect the rich folks wanted to keep it that way. 

So it sat, in a strange limbo of possibility that was never realized. 

Grandpa and I combed through old maps of the place and compared them to the most current satellite maps, but with how much the city had shifted, it was hard to pinpoint where his grandfather's house would have been. In satellite maps that had been taken in the fall and winter, we pinpointed little remnants of structures in the trees. Old concrete foundations, shacks along some nearby railroad tracks, and patches that had been cleared for something, but it was hard to tell exactly what. 

Robbie swapped back to day shift at his job, and he started coming over, helping us with our silly quest. And of course, right away, we decided to hold our own little expedition into Area X.

I’d picked up my own job by then, just interning at an office. Which never overlapped in Robbie’s weekend heavy schedule, so we had to pick a day we both got off just a few hours before sunset. We packed backpacks heavy, like we were going into the dang Amazon or something. We brought snacks, water, a first aid kit, and camping knives. We were ready to bushwhack through the wilderness.

There were two ways to get in: from the south, sneaking in through the quarry. Or from the north, which, as far as we could tell, just bordered a small riverfront park. As ready as we were to sneak around, we opted for the northern entrance, and we soon discovered that Area X was far from the undiscovered wasteland we’d been picturing.

We were expecting to cut through the woods for the half mile or so between the park and the unofficial boundary. But instead, we found the entrance paved with a wood chip trail. There were no signs, no trail markers, but people had been there. 

The trail led into a clearing with little teepees and stick fences built. That had been a huge trend in the wild spaces around our city lately, hipsters making little tents and sculptures out of fallen wood. 

I expected the trails to taper off after the clearing, but the paths beyond had been well established. We decided to head left at any of the forks, realizing quickly this would not be an expedition we could knock out in one day. The paths took us to shallow, crumbling cliffs, and as we walked along, we spotted a few small caves. We crawled in them, of course, caves are pretty rare in our part of the world, and they ended quickly. But splashes of graffiti inside them told us that this was a well-travelled place. 

The cliffs themselves betrayed a more ancient history. All along the river, where the water has eroded the landscape more, you can find fossils breaking free. It’s just seashells and trilobites and those weird coral-looking things, but they were fascinating, and we spent longer than we should have looking through them. 

After we explored the caves and the cliffs, we hit a bougie apartment development and turned back. That’s the thing about Area X: it's long but not wide, and civilization is only maybe half an hour away. With the river on the other side, it’s not somewhere you can ever really get lost in. 

We kept going along the main path for a little bit after that, a path that was well-worn by many feet over many years. And we stopped when we hit a spring. 

It was coming up out of the ground, and the water was crystal clear but smelled vaguely sulfurous. Someone had built a little wooden bridge going over it, even though there wasn’t much point, as the spring was only a few yards wide. But it added to the charm of the place. We spotted orange peels and sporadic coals scattered around, the remnants of picnics and fires. 

The spring was right on the edge of where the forest turned to prairie, and as we spotted the sun dropping low across the field, we realized we’d probably come as far as we should for the day. 

When we got back, I tried to look up any information I could find on Area X, but there wasn’t much there. There was a geocache somewhere and a few internet forum posts about a waterfall that had an old, decaying VW bug. But there was nothing official. It was like it was a secret park, claimed by everyone over the years who saw such a vast stretch of wilderness in the city, and knew there had to be something cool in there. 

Grandpa had the idea first. All the old maps we’d been looking at had inspired him, and he said we should map out Area X. We set up shop in his office, moving some of his art stuff. He’d been an illustrator back in the day, before he started to get issues with his hands and wrists. But he still had all the equipment: drafting desks and fancy pens, and pencils. And he helped us make a big outline of area X on a huge piece of butcher paper. We set up location tracking apps on our phones, and with that, made a plan to try and map out as much as we could before winter came. We also hoped that maybe along the way we’d find the remnants of great-great-grandpa Robert’s old house in the woods. 

It was so exciting. It felt like we were going on a quest for treasure, even though the treasure at the end, should we find it, might be dark family secrets, perhaps literal skeletons. 

We planned out more expeditions, always on days where Robbie was getting off work early enough that we’d have enough daylight. Rain or shine, we went to Area X on any day we could. And every time we found ourselves fighting the sunset, waiting until the last possible minute to turn back. 

It’s all a blur now, what we discovered in which expedition. There were three main trails that ran the length of the area, one down by the river, one closer to civilization where the terrain turned into prairie, and one right down the middle of Area X that ran along a long raised ridgeline. That trail was my favorite because it was just so strange. The ridgeline didn’t make any sense, really. It reminded me of the ancient earthworks we had in our part of the world, walls built that used to mark the boundaries of prehistoric cities. As we explored further and further into Area X, I even spotted an area where the ridge path had eroded a bit more, and out of it spilled tightly packed stone slabs. Then I started to wonder if the trail we walked on, the ridgeline that made no sense, was an undiscovered earthwork. 

Because Area X was easy to get into from the north and virtually impossible to get into from the south without sneaking through the quarry, it tended to get more wild the further south we went. The trails became more overgrown, and we’d find older and older things. 

And as we mapped it out, we’d report back to Grandpa and give him all the pictures we took. He’d add to the map for us, recovered enough to start drawing again, just a bit. The arthritis or whatever it was had never been able to completely stifle his creativity. 

He drew in different landmarks like they were spots on the map of some fantasy world. There was the geocache, a rusted old box with wet notebooks, that looked ancient and charming when rendered in pen. We never did find the VW bug, but we found tires at the bottom of a waterfall on the low trail. Grandpa dubbed that ‘Tire Falls’ and added it to our map. 

My favorite landmark was a tree we called ‘The oldest Honeysuckle in America’ because it was massive. See, honeysuckles are invasive; they’re from Japan originally, and they took off in America, crowding out a lot of the less hardy undergrowth. Since they’re newer, you don’t get really ancient ones that often, especially since they get trimmed down in places with sensitive plants. But in Area X, in a truly unmonitored wild space, they’d gone crazy. They grew over each other, forming curved branch tunnels. In spots with more sun, they reached up high, and the oldest one, the special one, was the biggest one I’d ever seen. It branched straight up like a tree, the trunk of which was bigger than me. 

We had a few other old trees marked down, mostly old sycamores that grew on the lower path by the river. That’s one thing I love about my city; because the river is a pain to build around, you get these weird little patches of ancient forest. They hold trees so massive they look like the ones you see in pictures of lumberjacks making their way through America in its infancy. 

We found two different old house foundations, but if they were Robert’s, they didn’t have anything there besides old concrete slabs. There was a spot where there used to be an old parking lot, but it was cracked through so much that the forest had mostly taken it back. There were other small springs coming out of the earth, and other miscellaneous remnants of civilization. We found little ropes and log staircases connecting the paths back to each other along the slopes. We mapped everything out. 

We saw other people on occasion, usually closer to the north side. They all walked with purpose and confidence. It was a place that inspired repeat visits. 

I was starting to feel like we’d found just about everything. So we once again turned to the library and the internet to try and pinpoint the exact location of Robert's old house. 

The game changer was when one of the librarians who specialized in local genealogy showed us how to use an old newspaper database. It wasn’t like in the movies, where you needed to flip microfilm over and over and hope for your big break. We could just type in Robert’s full name, and the answers we were looking for, well, they popped right up. 

I think in mapping out Area X, we’d kind of gotten lost in the whimsy and the fun of it all, and we’d forgotten about the grim reality of what we were actually searching for. 

Right away, the headlines told us that what Grandpa had suspected might have been true. Robert the 1st had never been arrested, obviously, but what grandpa didn't know was that he had been a suspect in several local disappearances. One headline even called him ‘Bob the Butcher.’ And though no one, not the police or the families of the missing, could ever prove anything, there was plenty of dirty laundry to sift through in the news. 

One woman recalled going on a date with Robert, only for him to try and drag her off into the woods. She escaped, but he didn't really get into trouble, and another article about the woman even went out of its way to note she was known to dress provocatively. 

Another article was from a girl a state over whose father had gone to work for Robert. He’d never returned, and though he’d sent a note saying he was going to Canada for another job, she thought the handwriting looked rather strange. 

In total, there were at least three other people mentioned in multiple articles, and dozens of others just mentioned here and there in speculation. We struck gold when we got to the articles about the police investigating Robert, though. Several of the articles had little maps drawn of Robert’s house, and the old dirt road that used to run out to it. They were inconsistent, but we were able to pinpoint things much more exactly than before.  

A string of late shifts from Robbie put our adventures on hold for a few weeks, so I went back to hanging with Grandpa for a bit. He taught me how to draw, and he opened up a bit more. In between learning different leaves and how to ink them out, he told me stories from the war. Stories I’d always felt were censored a bit before, but now I heard them in their full graphic detail. 

The stories that haunted Grandpa the most were the ones about his own comrades. Grandpa had expected death from the enemy, carnage in battle. But what he’d never expected were the things his fellow soldiers did between the battles or in the aftermath. Men who seemed perfectly nice, perfectly ordinary, who’d shoot a child in the head on a whim, then go back to palling around like nothing had ever happened. 

Grandpa then told me that he wouldn’t be surprised at all if we found something gruesome near Robert’s old house. He believed that all men are capable of terrible things; they just don’t always find the right place and time to do them.. 

When Robbie and I geared up for what would be our last expedition into Area X, it felt so much like our first one. We were going to spend the night, so we brought food, water, and camping supplies. 

The tentative spot was halfway between the ridgeline path in the middle of Area X and the high path near the prairie. And it was so far south it was almost at the quarry. I was hopeful we might actually find something, and that it might be relatively undisturbed. 

We took the ridge path in the middle because it was impossible to get lost; the other trails were starting to get obscured by falling leaves. As we neared the quarry, more and more jagged rocks poked out of the hill, like the spine of some massive snake was being slowly exposed. As we walked closer and closer to our own old family secrets, I wondered about the possibly ancient secrets beneath our feet. If the ridge path was along an old earthwork, there might be bodies below us as we walked. Bodies that would only be exposed hundreds of years from now, when the erosion from the path destroyed the earthwork completely. 

Robbie and I started that trip joking and laughing, and got more and more quiet the closer we got. Migrating geese and crows filled the silence, replacing the songbirds of summer. We stopped to put our jackets on before we left the path. Both to protect our arms from branches and to keep the approaching night chill at bay. 

We spotted the house after just a few minutes, the forest having hidden it from us even though we’d been so close before on a few different trips. 

It was still intact enough to call it a house, but when we actually got inside of it, we saw that not much had survived except for the floor, and the walls. It was just a brick and metal crumbling skeleton. We wandered the grounds outside of it for a bit, and we did find some neat stuff. Some old leather book spines that had survived the ages, some kitchen utensils, a big meat cleaver that was rusted to hell. I’m sure there was a lot more hidden in the leaves. But as the sun began to set, we decided to bed down for the night. We set up our tent in the ruins of the old house and made a fire. 

Robbie was tired; the long shifts at work had been getting to him. He’d been neglecting getting a haircut, and he had stubble coming in. It was strange to see him starting to look different from me for the first time ever. It made me deeply sad, because after our unexpected gap year, we’d finally be apart. It felt like we were re-living our senior year all over again, dealing with emotions we’d already dealt with. 

We talked about everything that night: life and college, and Grandpa. What it would be like if we were shipped off to war at his age. How you never know what’s waiting for you out in the world, good or bad. 

I don’t know how long we talked like that for. Hours maybe. And then the wind picked up, and we started to smell something awful. It was the scent of rot, the sickly sweet smell of maggots and death and old meat. We waited for the wind to shift, to take the smell back away, but it didn’t. 

The trees around us swayed, dropping more and more leaves that shone red and orange before they fell into the fire. Despite the smell, I felt content for just a minute there. Ready for whatever our future was going to throw at us. Because even though we’d be far away, we’d still have each other. 

And then we both fell silent at once, sensing something nearby. 

I’d always heard people describe that feeling, but I’d never experienced it. It was like a sixth sense telling us that danger was near, that we were not alone. 

I scanned the gaps in the crumbling walls, waiting for eyes to reflect back at me, and I saw Robbie looking behind me as well, doing the same. 

The trees creaking above drew my eyes north, and I watched the peeling white sycamore branches draw closer over the tops of the bricks. Only something about them was strange. Wet red and black leaves hung down like they’d been dredged up out of the river, and the branches were moving against the ones behind them. 

The smell became unbearable, and I leaned over to dry heave. It was only a second, but when I looked back up, the tree branches had come down into the ruins of the house. And only when they wrapped around Robbie did I recognize them for what they truly were: long skeletal fingers. 

In the flickering firelight, the massive hand picked Robbie up as if he weighed nothing. It pulled him up over the wall. 

I sat there in shock for just a few seconds until Robbie started screaming. Then I ran out and saw the full extent of the beast. 

It was a massive thing, made up of splintered bones and decaying flesh. It was hunched over Robbie, and I watched it slice open his leg with one knife-sharp claw. I didn’t know what to do. I ran over to it, slamming it with my backpack, thinking maybe I could distract it. But it just swatted at me, its massive bones crumpling my chest. 

I landed facing the creature, smashed against the side of the house. And when Robbie got his breath back enough to scream again, I tried to move, but I couldn’t. Too many things inside me were broken. 

I wanted to close my eyes, but I felt it was my duty to witness what happened. To be able to tell people how Robbie died. Even though later, no one would believe me. 

As the thing shifted around, I made out ribs, a spine, and limbs, all made up of smaller bones stuck together with gore. It was a massive beast, a colossal skeleton made up of hundreds and hundreds of other bones. 

As it worked on Robbie, slicing him open, it added his bones to its body, drenching the foul, decaying mass with fresh blood. Listening to Robbie scream, I thought that there could never be a worse noise. That nothing I’d ever hear in my life would compare. But when he stopped screaming, that was worse, because I knew what it meant. 

Eventually, Robbie stopped struggling, and the creature smashed his head in one quick hit that shook the ground and sent a wave of pain through my own broken bones. 

It picked up bits of Robbie’s skull to add to its own, a skull being made up of hundreds of rounded fragments all stitched together. It didn’t seem to know how teeth worked, as it placed a few skull bits in its mouth, to add to a maw full of jagged edges. It had left eye holes for itself, but when it turned to study me, there was nothing in them. Instead, it leaned in close and tested my torso with one sharp claw. But whatever it felt there, it didn't like. 

It left me alone and grabbed what was left of Robbie's carcass. Then it wrung out his body like it was a rag and poured fresh blood over its head. And finally, it stood to its full height, towering over the trees, and tossed what was left of my brother in the direction of the river. 

I waited there all night and most of the next day before they found me. And the whole time I lay there, all I could think about was why the creature left me alone. Was it because it’s like an animal, and it had had enough to eat? Was it because it was some supernatural curse, and Robbie had been punished for carrying on the family name? Paying for the sins of our ancestors? Had a simple flip of a coin at birth determined that Robbie was going to meet his death in these woods? Or was it ‘The beast’ that Robert the 1st talked about, a beast we hadn’t known could be tamed, bargained with? I would have given it anything to spare my brother if I’d only known how. 

I wish I knew. I wish I had any answers. 

But what I do know is that the horrors that I saw that night will haunt me forever. As I watched Robbie getting sliced open, as I watched him taking his last breaths, I thought to myself: ‘This is my face in unbearable pain.’ ‘This is my face while I’m dying.’ 

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the podcast inside your house! To hear every tale of terror as they are released, subscribe to our show on your podcast app or on Youtube or follow us on Facebook and Bluesky. 

Until Next Time: Remember that if you ever find a skeleton in your family’s closet, you should consider yourself lucky that there’s only one of them.