In August last year I was really lucky to win first place in the inaugural Kaidankai podcast writing contest. The theme was haunted houses and at around the same time the Fates (and Martin’s dad’s golden labrador, Pebbles) guided me to the ruins of an old stewards’ house in one of the small woods that made up Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, UK. So, I started to think of the ruins that houses are built on and the lives that homes are built on. I imagined the house taking on the form of a woman who bears witness to the deaths of the house (women’s deaths) and who relives them every day.
The story was read by Kaidankai’s host Linda Gould, and it was amazing. I listened to it on a drive up to the Midlands from the South East on a dark night and frankly I was on the edge of my seat! She transformed a slightly creepy little story into something really chilling. Linda is a wonderful reader of ghost stories and incredibly generous to the writers she showcases on Kaidankai. If you like contemporary ghost stories, you really should give the podcast a listen – here’s a link to my story ‘Forest House’. With Hallowe’en just around the corner, why not?
And here’s the opening of the story. If you’d like to read the story in full, please visit the Kaidankai website by clicking on the link below (you’ll need to scroll down the page on Kaidankai to find it, but there are loads of other stories for you to enjoy as well.)
You know the forest well. You walk it everyday – oh, how you walk – long loping strides when the summer sun’s high, brisk steps kicking up leaves that litter the floor brown and gold, and those tiny, careful footfalls crunching through snow in the very stillness of winter. You walk it with your skin, eyes, nose, the minute anvil and hammer in your ears working hard to bring this forest’s voice to a place so deep inside it’s as if it has a language just for you.
This day, the sun is warm. Spring has been in sway for almost a month now. And yet you will wish you had not left the house this morning. You will wish you hadn’t trusted the direction the little spaniel that you’d rescued from the dog’s home four years ago had chosen to take. You will even wish that you had never started the game she loves so much, the game in which, after she has fetched her ball a dozen times or so, you ask her: — Which way should we go?
Full story first published on the Kaidankai podcast and website August 2023. https://www.kaidankaistories.com/august-2023-haunted-horror-contest-winners.