The Key in the Mailbox at 44 Birch Lane

I was house-sitting for a friend of a friend in a town called Stone Hollow, a name that sounds made up until you see it on a road sign. The house was a gray Cape Cod at 44 Birch Lane, and the instructions were simple: pick up the key from under the ceramic frog by the back door, water the plants, grab the mail. But when I pulled into the driveway that October evening, the mailbox was open and a key sat inside, tarnished and cold, tied to a tag that read 'Front Door — Do Not Leave Unlocked.' The problem was, that key opened the front door just fine. And the lock on the inside of the front door had been deadbolted from the outside. I spent the night trying to understand why every clock in the house ran backward, why the phone rang with no one on the line, and why the woman in the photograph on the fridge looked exactly like my grandmother — except she was holding a newspaper from next week. This is what I found in the basement at 3 a.m. when I finally followed the sound of running water. #TheWrongHouse #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #StoneHollow #BirchLane #keys #mailbox #deadbolt #backwardclock #basement #blackwing #photograph #grandmother #newspaper #tarnishedkey #October #nightmare #unsettling Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo