By Sarah White

For the first assignment in my Creative Writing class this summer, I challenged my students to write a “portal story.” This is a story about the first time your protagonist reaches the place on the other side of the portal, and it must include the three steps of entry, transition, and exploration. If you’ve read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, or seen The Wizard of Oz, you know what a portal story is. Here’s mine.

For fun–since I have some students in the class who enjoy writing in the horror genre–I decided to try giving my true story a horror twist.

(Entry)

Sarah stepped through the warped front door and into the hush of Linda’s House, a place clinging like a secret to the edge of a ravine just east of Bloomington, Indiana. Donna handed her the keys and a warning: “The man at the bottom of the hill? I’ve got a restraining order against him. Don’t wander past the sheds.”

The air inside the house was stale, like breath held too long. Sarah explored cautiously, touching the rough-hewn logs of the old hunting cabin, blinking at the sudden shift into the knotty-pine-panelled 1970s addition. The light was a greenish hue, filtered through a dense tree canopy. Every window seemed to look into the woods, but no window gave a full view of what might be watching from them.

That night, the shadows thickened early. Branches scraped against the roof with a sound like fingernails. Sarah triple-locked every door, dragged a chair in front of the back entrance. She tucked herself in bed under a heavy comforter and tried not to imagine being watched.

(Transition)

Sometime before dawn, she dreamed—but it felt more like memory than imagination.

She was inside the house, but it was darker, colder. A man burst through the front door. His face blurred, but the pistol he pointed at her was clear as day. “Out,” he ordered, and she and a young woman—someone unfamiliar but heartbreakingly dear—were driven outside.

They stumbled into the yard. Wet leaves. Cold air. Her heart fluttering like a dying moth. The man raised the pistol. The girl screamed.

One shot. Blood sprayed hot against Sarah’s skin. The girl crumpled. Another shot. Then Sarah fell, too.

And in the instant before she died, she realized: he had done this before.

(Exploration)

She woke choking. The house was silent, except for the groaning of floorboards upstairs.

In the morning, she hurried to Donna’s house, pale and trembling.

“Did you hear any ghosts?” Donna asked, trying to smile.

Sarah told her the dream.

Donna stopped smiling. “How did you know?” she said. “A woman came by once. Said she lived in that house as a child, before Linda. Told me she was holding her mother’s hand when her father shot her.”

The air went cold.

“He didn’t kill her. But the daughter remembered everything.”

That night, Sarah returned to the ravine house, the dream still clinging like smoke. The trees didn’t just press in—they leaned. Listening.

Footsteps creaked overhead.

She locked every door but knew locks wouldn’t help. Not with something already inside. Something waiting for someone who could finally see it.

That night, the house did not let her sleep.

(Every word of this story is true.)

© 2025 Sarah White