The Dread Machine
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Murder Cabin Adventures: 2023
🕑 Added 2023-05-18 22:10:42 +0000 UTCEvery year, we host a writer's retreat at the creepiest Airbnb within our budget. Luckily, creepy Airbnbs aren't hard to find when your budget totals whatever you and six friends manage to find between your couch cushions.
Last year, we stayed here, at a place we lovingly refer to as "Gail's Murder Cabin." We wrote stories, played board games, fought intense thumb war battles, and spent a lot of time sitting outside watching the trees breathe. We also found invasive plants, a bejeweled fez, a fairy garden, fake ice cream, and a hidden sublevel that looked like the Batcave. We loved our time spent at Gail's and recommend it highly if you're looking for a beautiful, quiet property to spend a long weekend at.
This year, we stayed here, at a place I will forever refer to as "Suburban Chainsaw Massacre" and will never recommend to anyone, ever.
We planned to return to Gail's, but a mistake on Airbnb's side caused our reservation to be cancelled. Before Airbnb could correct the issue, someone else swiped our weekend, leaving us without a venue. Thankfully, my close friend Kanishk (who organizes and hosts the Murder Cabin with me) helped locate alternative options. We promptly booked the house, even though it looked more "normal" than we'd like.
Don't let the pretty pictures in the listing fool you: this place is outright unnerving to stay in.
Before booking anywhere, I check the negative reviews. At the very least, it's good to know what you're in for, to determine whether you can tolerate what the negative reviewers had to deal with. In this case, the negative reviews centered around the host's surveillance, with one reviewer claiming he yelled at her through the Ring camera for being outside too late.
This didn't seem too unreasonable. The guy has neighbors and doesn't want them disrupted. Completely understandable. Other reviewers had similar complaints, but the circumstances were questionable enough that we gave the host the benefit of the doubt.
We should not have.
My husband Jason and I spent most of Friday driving to gather all our ducklings--my co-editor Tim Burkhardt, my co-conspirator Kanishk Tantia, and some fresh blood (our beloved first reader Kathleen Morrish, and Andrew Kozma, a very brave writer who thinks nothing of stepping into a Murder Cabin with five Discord friends and an editor he's worked with a handful of times).
Long drives go by quickly when you're debating which career would be the most strategically advantageous for a serial killer whose primary motivation is achieving the highest body count without ever getting caught, so that's what we did.
When I finally had a chance to look at my phone, I saw a message from the host--a long list of strange, strict rules, punctuated in ALLCAPS, that weren't communicated in the listing, including a prohibition against smoking anywhere on the property or being outside after 10 pm. The message warned us not to attempt to get into the attic, "as it is locked for your safety." Each infraction came with a hefty fine: $500 if a neighbor calls to complain, for instance.
We were left with the impression that we were house sitting for an overbearing parent who definitely did not want us there, but we let it go, since we're a bunch of nerdy writers who don't cause trouble anyway.
Upon arrival, we all chose rooms and got cozy (with booze). Both floors have identical layouts--living rooms in the front, kitchens and staircase in the back, the common rooms bridged by long, straight hallways lined with doors that lead to the bedrooms.
It didn't take long for us to notice that, up close, the house looked little like the pictures. All of the furnishings were cheap. You know the kind I'm talking about: flat-packed particleboard garbage manufactured to look "rustic" so nobody notices how shitty it is until they really look at it. Weirdly, all of the tags were still attached.
We found noise-detection devices mounted to the ceiling and enough outdoor cameras to make us all check behind our mirrors and give the smoke detectors in our bedrooms side-eye.
But whatever, right? It's just a weekend rental. We made some jokes about how the whole point of the Murder Cabin is to stay somewhere that looks like a slasher movie set, so...mission accomplished.
I went to take a shower, and maybe it was the alcohol, the THC edibles, the list of rules, or all of the above, but the bathroom creeped me TF out.
The walls were covered in reclaimed wood and what looked--at a quick glance--like cement or polished concrete. Looking closer, I realized it was actually exposed sheetrock, cracked and crumbling in places. Holes pockmarked the wood all over the bathroom, like a bunch of peepholes. The counter was a mess of moldy, rotting scrap lumber and click-lock wood flooring, screwed together haphazardly. A perfect example of D-I-why?
Once we saw these things, we couldn't unsee them.
The lighting in the house is weird. Bright in a sterile, glaring way in some rooms, dim and murky in others. The tacky rustic aesthetic and kitschy "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art that photographed so well for the listing photos made the house seem like a Venus flytrap for "modern farmhouse" types. I joked that the host was probably scuttling in the attic, slithering between the walls, watching and listening. I mentioned Butcherface, a creepypasta I read years and years ago, about a killer who lives in peoples' attics, stalking and recording his victims before hacking them to pieces. (You can read it if you'd like, but it's unedited and needs about fifty-seven trigger warnings.)
Tim removed all the devices from his bedroom, piling them atop a small table, which he placed in front of a locked door in the upstairs living room. "It's a trap," he said. "If someone tries to come in through here, it'll fall over and make a shit ton of noise, and we'll all wake up."
This was on night one, guys. We were making booby traps on night one.
I slept like a stone.
On Saturday, we hit the grocery store early in the morning and spent the rest of the day writing, the little worker bees churning out wordlings in various corners of the house. Tim and I took advantage of the gorgeous weather and sat at the picnic table in the back yard.
That's when we noticed the house had a fourth level--a basement with blacked-out windows.
Did we let that creepy ass basement distract us from our work? No sir, we did not. We kept on writing, even as the next door neighbor, a very Nosy Nellie, wandered around her back yard, scowling at her grass, likely hoping for us to give her a reason to call the host.
Now, keep in mind that what I'm about to tell you happened very late at night, after very many drinks. I am an unreliable narrator, but I've consulted everyone present, and this is what we all agree happened:
Kanishk called out, "Who opened this door?"
The rest of us got up from the living room and walked down the long, narrow hallway to the kitchen, to see what he was talking about.
Jason got there first. "You found it like this?"
Kanishk was standing by the stairs, next to a slightly ajar door.
"Did you open it?" Kanishk asked Andrew.
"Wasn't this supposed to be locked for our safety?" I said.
"No," Kathleen said. "That's the attic."
"Wait--this isn't the attic?" (Both floors have identical floor plans. I told you, I'm an unreliable narrator.)
"It's the basement," Jason said.
"So, who opened the door?" (We all asked this, in one way or another.)
To this day, nobody knows. As of yet, nobody has admitted to it.
Now, could we just close the door and ignore the basement with the blacked-out windows? Nope. We weren't going to sleep until we could confirm that the basement didn't contain any human bodies, living or dead, so we pulled the door open and saw exactly the kind of hellmouth you'd expect--a rickety, narrow set of bare wooden stairs leading into pitch dark.
Like any reasonable, risk-averse person would, I say, "Fuck that. We're not going down there."
Like the kind of person who dies first in every horror movie ever, Tim says, "I'll go down and check myself."
Of course, I object (because I follow The Rules), but true to the role he's chosen, Tim laughs and says, "I'll be right back." So I follow, because the last thing we need is someone getting murdered at the Murder Cabin. (We're all dark speculative and horror writers. I don’t even want to think about what our search histories look like.)
Kathleen, Jason, Andrew, and Kanishk watched from the top of the stairs, telling us to be careful--probably not so much because they were worried about a hidden psychopath who wears clothes made from the flesh of Airbnb guests, but more because drunk people shouldn't be stumbling down shoddy, creaky stairs in the dark.
We flick the lights on, and it's a basement. That's all. Just a big room with stone walls, concrete floors, and the beginnings of some more amateur construction work. No underground monitoring station. No shrine to Gacy. No bodies. No Butcherface.
Still, we performed as thorough an investigation as two very intoxicated editors could before accepting that we were likely alone in the house.
Assuming that the attic, locked for our safety, was indeed empty.
Anyway, we had a ton of fun and are coming up with a plan for next year, preferably one that involves an actual bed and breakfast in Salem, Massachusetts. Our Airbnb days are done, I think.
