The Haunted House of the Valley

After Edith had shown Toby how to work the digital archive, she returned to her desk, which gave Toby the privacy he needed to start his search. He typed the words “haunted house” and “willowcreek” into the search bar and directly got 3 results. The newest had just been published three months ago:

Willowcreek’s Greatest Tragedy Remains a Mystery

20 years after the tragic incident at the Moore residence, Willowcreek’s own “Haunted House” remains vacant.

Back in 1990, it was an ordinary house, and the family of four living there, just a typical family.

Today, most of Willowcreek’s residents know the house in the Valley of the Lost Flowers solely from a variety of different stories about it. Just a few remember the horrible accident that left a 13-year-old boy without a family.

On Wednesday, October 31st, Henrietta Moore, her husband Charles and their two-year-old daughter Amelia went out for dinner, not knowing that it would be their last. Their teenage son, Henry, who did not feel like going out, stayed behind. Just after 10 pm, Henry recalls hearing his parents’ car coming up the driveway. He went outside to greet his family, only to witness what would later become Willowcreek’s greatest tragedy. The family car collided with the big willow tree in their front yard, resulting in the instant demise of all three passengers. The cause of the crash is still unclear today.

Henry Moore was taken into foster care, and has not been seen in Willowcreek since then.

As for the house, many realtors have tried to sell it in the past, but none of the new residents had ever stayed longer than a month. Each had different stories as to why they moved out, but they all agreed on one thing:

The house is haunted.

One thing is clear, what happened in that Autumn night was a tragedy that has left its mark on Willowcreek and its inhabitants, both directly and indirectly, and will continue to impact us in the foreseeable future.

When he finished reading the article, Toby didn’t know what to think. He printed the article quickly but instead of taking any further look at it, he just shoved it in his backpack, turned off the computer and hurried out of the library.