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Old Abandoned Palace in the Fog. Glinka, Poland, Lower Silesian

"On architecture, memory, and quiet horror"There are houses you leave behind — and houses that follow.You can walk out the door, lock it, move cities, change names. Still, something remains lodged in the back of your thoughts: the way the air felt heavier in certain rooms, the floorboard you learned to avoid, the window no one ever opened.Not every house is haunted.But some are aware.Architecture is often treated as neutral — walls, doors, rooms arranged for function. Yet anyone who has lived long enough in one place knows better. A house absorbs the rhythms of the people inside it. Their grief. Their arguments. Their silences. Over time, it stops being an empty container and becomes a record.This is where quiet horror lives.Not in sudden violence, but in accumulation.A staircase worn down by pacing.A bedroom kept closed long after it’s emptied.A smell that returns without explanation.Absence leaves marks just as clearly as presence does.<figure id="figure-huccof26uymk5lisax" class=""><img id="huccof26uymk5lisax" src="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1327837669/photo/old-haunted-abandoned-mansion-in-creepy-night-forest-with-cold-fog-atmosphere-3d-rendering.jpg?b=1&amp;s=2048x2048&amp;w=0&amp;k=20&amp;c=dIJvgiy_PWhfUOssUlVKW0gnAAgmLEOjxizKZ0218MU=" alt="old mansion" class="object-cover bg-gray-100" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9;" data-mce-src="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1327837669/photo/old-haunted-abandoned-mansion-in-creepy-night-forest-with-cold-fog-atmosphere-3d-rendering.jpg?b=1&amp;s=2048x2048&amp;w=0&amp;k=20&amp;c=dIJvgiy_PWhfUOssUlVKW0gnAAgmLEOjxizKZ0218MU=" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9;"></figure>In many families, houses become repositories of what couldn’t be spoken. They hold the weight of decisions made too quickly, truths buried for convenience, moments everyone agreed to forget. The building stands while generations pass through it, learning instinctively which spaces feel wrong — even if no one tells them why.Children sense this first.They understand when a room should be avoided, when a door should stay shut, when something about a place feels watchful. They may not have language for it, but they recognize it all the same. By the time they learn to rationalize, the house has already taught them what to fear.That fear doesn’t always announce itself.Sometimes it’s just discomfort.A hesitation.A feeling that something is being observed — not actively, not maliciously, but persistently.As if the house remembers more than you do.This is why houses recur so often in gothic horror. Not because they creak or crumble, but because they endure. They outlast the people who tried to control the narrative inside them. They remain when excuses fade. They hold contradictions without resolving them.A house doesn’t need to act.It only needs to remember.Perhaps that’s why we return to them in stories — not to escape, but to listen. To trace the outline of what was never addressed. To stand in a doorway and acknowledge that some places don’t loosen their grip simply because we’ve left.Some houses don’t let go.They wait.<figure id="figure-grvaup29lnmk9lb7yq"><img id="grvaup29lnmk9lb7yq" src="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1132874457/photo/dark-silhouette-of-girl-behind-glass-locked-alone-in-room-behind-door-on-halloween-in.jpg?b=1&amp;s=2048x2048&amp;w=0&amp;k=20&amp;c=mN-hr5UUMJpjzOj4h3VXSY-grrR0LiTbeJu_XirB3aQ=" alt="Dark silhouette of girl behind glass. Locked alone in room behind door on Halloween in grayscale. Nightmare of child with aliens, monsters and ghosts. Evil in home in monochrome. Inside haunted house." title="Dark silhouette of girl behind glass. Locked alone in room behind door on Halloween in grayscale. Nightmare of child with aliens, monsters and ghosts. Evil in home in monochrome. Inside haunted house." class="object-cover bg-gray-100 rounded-2xl md:rounded-3xl lg:rounded-4xl" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="undefined" data-positiony="undefined" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1132874457/photo/dark-silhouette-of-girl-behind-glass-locked-alone-in-room-behind-door-on-halloween-in.jpg?b=1&amp;s=2048x2048&amp;w=0&amp;k=20&amp;c=mN-hr5UUMJpjzOj4h3VXSY-grrR0LiTbeJu_XirB3aQ=" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;"></figure>Houses remember what people try to forget.

Some Houses don't let go

"On houses that remember, guilt that lingers, and the horror of inheritance"I’ve always been drawn to the kind of horror that arrives quietly.Not the sudden shock. Not the spectacle. But the slow, insistent feeling that something has already gone wrong — and that everyone involved has learned to live around it.The stories I write tend to circle the same ideas: houses that feel too aware, families bound by silence, memories that refuse to stay buried. These are not coincidences. They’re echoes of the way I experience fear — as something cumulative, something inherited, something that settles into walls and bloodlines alike.I’m less interested in monsters than in aftermath.What happens after the door closes.After the fire dies down.After everyone agrees not to talk about it.That’s where horror becomes intimate.<figure id="figure-ll6mltuyuqmk1b7f67"><img id="ll6mltuyuqmk1b7f67" src="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/656324964/photo/house-in-fog-at-night-in-the-garden-landscape-of-ghost-house-in-the-dark-forest.jpg?b=1&amp;s=2048x2048&amp;w=0&amp;k=20&amp;c=3nG-mNZE-1Kzm2U4TJ9hF-SKcGr7KvjaNOnMIot-5VI=" alt="house in fog at night in the garden, Landscape of ghost house in the dark forest." title="house in fog at night in the garden, Landscape of ghost house in the dark forest." class="object-cover bg-gray-100 rounded-2xl md:rounded-3xl lg:rounded-4xl" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="null" data-positiony="null" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/656324964/photo/house-in-fog-at-night-in-the-garden-landscape-of-ghost-house-in-the-dark-forest.jpg?b=1&amp;s=2048x2048&amp;w=0&amp;k=20&amp;c=3nG-mNZE-1Kzm2U4TJ9hF-SKcGr7KvjaNOnMIot-5VI=" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;"></figure>Places, especially, hold this kind of weight. A house can absorb what happens inside it — the grief, the guilt, the things left unsaid. Over time, it stops being a setting and becomes a witness. Not an active one. Just present. Remembering. Waiting.Families do something similar.They carry patterns forward. They pass down habits, resentments, and omissions as naturally as names. In my work, horror often emerges not from a single act, but from what is inherited and never questioned. The unspoken rule. The avoided room. The truth everyone senses but no one names.Time, too, rarely behaves in a straight line. Memory bends it. Trauma fractures it. In my stories, the past is never fully past — it leaks into the present, distorts it, presses against it until something gives.I don’t write horror to frighten.I write it to examine what lingers.To explore the spaces between what we know and what we admit. To sit with discomfort rather than resolve it too quickly. To let the reader feel that subtle, persistent unease — the sense that something has been wrong for a long time, and that acknowledging it may be worse than ignoring it.Some stories don’t end.They settle.<figure id="figure-1sjk06exyh9mk1b7f67"><img id="1sjk06exyh9mk1b7f67" src="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1327271183/photo/ghost-in-the-dungeon.jpg?b=1&amp;s=2048x2048&amp;w=0&amp;k=20&amp;c=LP9Uc0H6Q_91jo_e6c51vcu10lENBwEbmpz-ff_ZWk8=" alt="gothic characters" class="object-cover bg-gray-100" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9;" data-mce-src="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1327271183/photo/ghost-in-the-dungeon.jpg?b=1&amp;s=2048x2048&amp;w=0&amp;k=20&amp;c=LP9Uc0H6Q_91jo_e6c51vcu10lENBwEbmpz-ff_ZWk8=" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9;"></figure>Some stories don’t end.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;They learn how to wait.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Why I Write the Stories I Do

When I was a child, there was an old radio in the corner of my grandmother’s sitting room. Its dials were stiff, its wood veneer chipped, and it rarely found a clear station. But once — late at night, when the house was supposed to be quiet — I turned the knob and the static seemed to form a voice. Just a breath, a half-sentence I could never quite catch. Long after, I wasn’t sure if I heard it… or if I only wanted to.That feeling — the uncertainty between sound and silence, reality and imagination — stayed with me. It followed me into my writing, whispering at the edges of every story. And it found its true home in my new novel. Echoes in the Static (Blurb)"...Maya Evans survived the car crash. Her best friend Chloe didn’t. But Chloe isn’t gone — not entirely. In the quiet moments, the house hums. The mirrors keep prints that shouldn’t be there. The static grows louder..." Echoes in the Static is a story about grief, guilt, and the things we bury until they claw their way back. It’s about how silence can scream louder than any ghost, and how the mind can become the most terrifying haunted house of all. <a data-mce-href="https://amzn.eu/d/1HGHCQR" href="https://amzn.eu/d/1HGHCQR" title="Echoes in the Static" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Step Inside! Echoes in the Static is now available on Amazon and free to read in Kindle Unlimited.﻿</a>Sometimes the static isn’t empty.&nbsp;Sometimes it’s waiting for you to listen. — Ana W. Black

When the Satic spoke back!

We don’t often talk about it. Those small moments that slip past explanation, tucked into the folds of ordinary life. A missing set of keys that appear on the table you already checked three times. A flicker in the mirror, just behind your shoulder, though you know you were alone. The way the hallway feels longer at night, as if the house is stretching its breath.Maybe you’ve shrugged them off. We all do. Logic is comforting. But sometimes logic doesn’t hold. Let me tell you a small story…Last week, a woman—ordinary, sensible, the sort who pays bills on time and forgets where she left her umbrella—was folding laundry late at night. The hum of the washing machine downstairs had already faded, and the house was as still as paper.She carried a basket of towels down the hall. Halfway to the linen cupboard, she noticed one towel wasn’t hers. Not in colour, not in texture. It was thin, yellowed, smelling faintly of violets.She frowned, but placed it on the stack anyway. Houses collect odd things, don’t they?&nbsp; Later, when she opened the cupboard, the stack was neat again. Perfectly folded. Every towel accounted for. Except the violet-scented one. That was gone.The strangest part?&nbsp; In the morning, when she went to make coffee, she found it draped over the back of a chair in the kitchen. Damp, as if someone had just stepped out of a bath.We all live with echoes like these. Maybe they’re memory. Maybe they’re something else.What about you? Have you ever found something that shouldn’t have been there—or worse, something missing, only to return as though it had been watching you? I’d love to hear your stories.Until then, keep your doors closed at night. And check your cupboards carefully. — Ana W. Black

Have you ever noticed it too?

From the desk of Ana W. Black Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you came?What if the room forgot too?In The Last Page, there is a story buried near the centre—one that many overlook until it’s far too late. “The Room With No Windows.” A quiet tale at first glance: a traveller, a warm inn, a room “perfect for writing.” But the fire dies quickly. The curtains stop moving. And the door? It never existed.I wrote this story in the dead of night, during a storm where even my reflection seemed uncertain. It came to me whole—like something I was remembering, not inventing. The wallpaper peeling like skin. The static in the mirror. The word etched into the floorboards again and again:&nbsp; STAY.You might wonder: What kind of inn assigns that room?Here’s a darker question:What if the inn isn’t assigning it? What if it’s choosing its guest?And what if you were the one being chosen?Have you read The Last Page yet? ... If not, the room is still empty. For now.<h2> </h2>

The Room wih no windows

There’s something about Clara that never quite leaves you. I remember writing her the way one would whisper a secret into a room that shouldn’t echo. I didn’t plan for her to stay. She was meant to be a shadow in the corner, a child with hollow eyes and a stitched-up mouth who flickered between pages and vanished like breath on glass. But some characters refuse to leave quietly. Clara clawed her way deeper. And so The Last Page gave her a room. For those who haven’t met her yet—Clara is the pale girl locked in the attic in one of the book’s darker short stories. The house she haunts is not just brick and wood, but memory, guilt, and a terrible silence that grew so loud it fractured the walls. The woman who moves in believes the sounds are pipes, rats, the creaking of old bones settling in old places. But we know better. Don’t we? Clara doesn’t scream. She taps. Slowly. Three times. Then silence. There’s a reason for that, and if you’ve read between the lines, you already feel it in your chest. Clara was forgotten. Not in death—but in life. Locked away for being too strange, too quiet, too uncomfortable. She was the child they couldn’t explain, the secret they wanted to bury under wallpaper and prayers. And yet… she stayed. Writing her story was, in many ways, writing a eulogy for every part of us we’re told to suppress. The sensitive child. The quiet watcher. The one who saw too much, felt too deeply, and made others uncomfortable with our silences. Clara is grief with a face. She is the manifestation of what happens when pain is ignored until it festers into something sentient. Her story was never meant to end when the page turned. She lingers in the mirror. In the corners of the next story. She might even be part of Echoes in the Static—but I won’t confirm or deny. (Let’s just say… reflections don’t always show what’s really behind you.) So yes. I love Clara.&nbsp;Because Clara is the girl who stayed.&nbsp;And some ghosts deserve to be heard. Until the next whisper,&nbsp;Ana

Ana W. Black

Ana W. Black |Of Shadows and truths

Some Houses don't let go

Why I Write the Stories I Do

When the Satic spoke back!

Have you ever noticed it too?

The Room wih no windows

The Girl who stayed behind the walls.