Hollow Moor Village — a Folk Horror Short Story

Description

A skeptical investigator enters Hollow Moor Village—the abandoned settlement where an entire community vanished in 1947—and finds that the houses remember more than people do. A slow-burning folk-horror short about ritual, memory, and the cost of listening to things meant to be left alone.

Full Story

The village crouched beneath a moonless sky, a skeleton of crumbling cottages and empty lanes. No one had crossed its threshold in decades—ever since 1947, when the whole parish vanished overnight and the bog took the few who tried to run. They called it Hollow Moor Village, and the locals still spit the name like a curse.

I make a living unpicking ghost stories—finding the seams, the props, the lies. I come with a camera, a recorder, and a stubborn need to prove the world is solvable. But the air here felt like a hand over my mouth; the kind of silence that isn’t empty, it’s waiting.

My boot hit the cobbles and the wind died. Trees stopped whispering. Even my breath seemed to hush itself. I clicked the recorder on. “Entry: Hollow Moor. Air heavy. Feeling watched.”

The lane yawned ahead, doors hanging open like gaping mouths. Dust muted footsteps; the whole place smelled of damp rot and medicine gone sour. On peeling doorframes, letters had been clawed into the wood—some fresh, some old, all the same command:

DO NOT SPEAK TO THEM

I ran a fingertip along the letters and felt a cold that wasn’t from the night. A door creaked far down the street. I raised my camera, shot a picture, and when I checked the screen the doorway was empty—except the door stood open, like a promise.

I kept walking. Market carts lay overturned; a child’s rotted doll waited alone in the street. The village didn’t feel abandoned so much as paused, as if everyone had stopped mid-breath and hoped to remain unseen.

The inn was worse. Rooms kept their beds; cups sat on tables caked with dust. In one chamber, on a sink-stained table, lay a journal—fresh. My hands shook as I opened to the last entry. The handwriting was frantic.

“They know when you’re alone. They know when you’re weak. If you hear them whisper, it’s already too late.”

A breath tickled the nape of my neck. I spun, flashlight tearing the dark, and saw nothing. The silence returned, thicker now. I read on.

“We locked the doors. We sang the old songs. We thought the walls would hold. The walls remember.”

I trained the light at the plaster. Beneath the warped boards something moved—thin shapes pressing out, faces flattened against wood, mouths open that did not make a sound. The house seemed to inhale.

A bang echoed along the street. The door I’d used to enter slammed shut. The whisper came again, soft and patient.

“You should have listened.”

I ran. The village bucked under my feet—streets rerouting, lanes elongating, doors opening and closing like a throat. Shadows slid from eaves and reached, not with hands but with a will. I forced myself toward the square, toward the path that led out. At the square’s edge the first figure had been waiting—thin, hollow-eyed, motionless.

It was not alone. Others swayed behind it, faces pale and blank like masks. Their eyes were black wells. One stepped forward, jaw unhinging with an unnatural sound and said only one word.

“Stay.”

Everything in me screamed to turn and sprint the other way. There was a gap in the crowd—a narrow path I hadn’t seen before—an opening between two ruined houses that breathed on me like an invitation. I ran through it without thinking.

Dark swallowed me.

When I woke, I was outside the village, the moor sprawling and indifferent beneath a gray dawn. Hollow Moor stood silent and whole behind me, as if nothing had happened. My camera was gone. My recorder gone. Only the journal remained in my hands, its pages damp with what might have been tears or rain.

I left it on my desk for nights, staring at the jagged lines, the warning scratched into the wood. I never went back.

Some nights, when the wind is still and the world is too quiet, I hear them—an edge of a whisper, a chorus of patient voices. I keep my windows shut, and I do not speak their name out loud.

They are waiting. Hollow Moor is waiting. And the lines in that journal keep me awake, remembering what the walls remember.