You may or may not have heard of the House of the Others. I certainly have.
The House is an American urban legend I’d been looking into on and off the past few years. The tale goes like this, essentially:
There is a house outside of town, deep in the woods. You can only find the House by accident. No roads lead directly to it, and you couldn’t build one that does if you tried, because the House moves. You may find it standing tall one day, and when you returned to that same spot the next, the House itself would be gone. The only thing remaining that would mark that the House had ever been there at all would be the detritus it left behind. Little things you would expect to find in a normal house, like shoes, a book, or a watch. Who these things belong to, nobody knows. The objects left behind simply belong to . . . others.
You wouldn’t be able to find the House again. No one ever finds it twice.
And that’s the bare bones of the legend, more or less. The fine-comb details change depending on the region, naturally. One of the delightful traits of urban legends is the way they shift and change as they are spread. If you happen to be a reader from Maine, for instance, you may have also heard that electronics break down near the House. An Arizonan may have heard that the House only appears in the Superstition Mountains. In upstate Washington, the House is instead the Log Cabin. Add to that, while the modern form of the legend seems to have popped up sometime in the late 1970s, iterations of it can be found dating all the way back to before European colonists rolled up to American shores.
Now, as I’ve previously mentioned, I’m a nut for all things supernatural. Mostly I collect items of interest, but I’m a bit of a tourist as well. Me being me, I took this urban legend far more seriously than the other kids at recess when I first heard it. I’ve never doubted the possibility of the House’s existence. I’ve always wanted to visit it, to see the House for myself. Specifically, see the inside, because that part is not mentioned in the legend. I’ve been reaching out through my usual channels of information for anyone with any leads, or even anyone with personal experience with the House that they’d be willing to share. As is usually the case with these things, I mostly hit dead-ends and goose-chases. But my patience was rewarded last week when I was contacted by a young woman from Oregon (to preserve her privacy, I’ll be referring to her as Alice) who claimed that the House made regular appearances in her area. She corroborated this claim with a few photos of a house that was certainly in a place a normal house would not be, as well as some testimony from two other townsfolk. Needless to say, I caught a flight the day after receiving her email and met Alice on the outskirts of her town (which again, I won’t reveal the name of to preserve her privacy).
Alice kindly gave me a ride to where the House had last been sighted. She also shared an affinity for the supernatural, and seemed to carry a sort of pride that her hometown had been chosen by the House for several visits.
We arrived at the location of the sighting. The surrounding woods were a perfect match for the photos she’d sent, minus the great gap where the House had once stood. In that rectangular space, the ground was about an inch lower than the rest of the area, and a handful of trees within the space were, there’s no better word for it, squashed. Flattened right into the ground. The House, in accordance with legend, had not stood around waiting for us. But lucky me, a few other things were. I sifted through the leaves as Alice watched. A jacket, a bracelet, a stick of cherry lip balm.
Alice shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, it doesn’t usually leave behind anything interesting. Sometimes it doesn’t leave anything at all.”
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