Haunted

The Mallory house was built in the late 1900s, a beautiful great house surrounded by a pleasant estate, and mysteriously abandoned soon after. The local town rarely thinks about it these days, aside from the usual ghost stories... and persistent rumours of people disappearing on Hallowe'en night. These days it's home only to spiders and mice... right?

Five people--a woman avoiding her abusive boyfriend, a psychic looking for trapped ghosts, a Victoriana blogger researching her next post, a musician yielding to a dare by his co-workers, and an indie sceptic vlogger intending to debunk the stories--find their way into the house on Hallowe'en, and find it much less empty than they expected. A lot can happen before sunrise.

Trigger warnings: passing references to an abusive relationship, extremely brief references to difficult past circumstances in the lives of a few characters, one creepy hospital scene. I think that's all? I mean, it's a 'haunted' house on Hallowe'en, but these are not malicious monsters. No sex, no violence, a little profanity mostly from one character. Otherwise, you can expect transformation, fun with gender, monsters, a (non-kinky) octopus, and all my usual weirdness. If you've read the stories in my Bondage collection, you'll be fine.

The author does not condone going into abandoned houses at any time, let alone Hallowe'en night, or ingesting anything handed to one by even the friendliest mad scientist, or otherwise doing most of the things that people do in the course of this story, no matter how fun it might look. If the author could get into that library, however, this advice would almost certainly be disregarded.

---

The Mallory house is based on a real house. I don't know whether it's still there, but it was featured in The Architectural Record, starting on page 142/632 of the scanned pdf, complete with photos inside and out, some description, and a floor plan. I've taken a few liberties with the locations of doors and little things like that, and decorated it as I saw fit, but the layout is essentially consistent. I found it on Internet Archive (I love that whole organization and what they do!) as public domain, right here: https://archive.org/details/architecturalre4019unse_0. I've uploaded two versions of the floorplan as an image to my Google Drive for the curious (or potentially the confused, although I hope not) and the links to the lightly-annotated and non-annotated versions will be at the top of each chapter. (It's also included in the cover.)

Posting schedule: 5 chapters per day, 40 chapters in total, plus an epilogue added to the last day.