The Ghost and the Purple House-Prologue

A Paranormal Romance Serial

Jun 28, 2025

I haven’t left my house in five years.

I had bought this gorgeous purple Victorian mansion on a hillside in the middle of nowhere. I was sick of the ordinary world and wanted to separate myself from other people.

I had never liked being around people. The way they demanded my words and attention had always made me deeply uneasy. Even when I was a little girl, I preferred to sit by myself in the corner of the playground reading or playing with my dolls rather than engage with my peers.

Once I became an adult I had made the decision to live in a shitty studio apartment in the big city, get a job with decent enough pay, work really hard and save enough money to buy my dream home, an old, beautiful house tucked away from the rest of the world and the people who inhabited it.

It took nearly a decade of working long hours and meticulous saving, but I had finally done it.

I moved in within weeks. Luckily, I had kept my belongings so few that it only took one small moving truck to transport everything to my new home. Everything was going perfectly, just like I had always dreamed.

I lived in the house happily by myself for six months on end, only leaving the safety of my beloved new house, only leaving to go into the nearest town and buy groceries for myself once or twice a month.

But soon the periods of time that I left the house at all stretched further and further in between. I began to rely on delivery apps to get my groceries, so I would have to leave the house less and less.

Then the lockdown happened. Now that there was a dangerous disease spreading throughout the entire world, I didn’t even have the option of leaving my house. Now not leaving my house was less of a comfort to me and more of a matter of survival.

Even after the lockdown was over and everyone was now free to move about their lives as they did before, as if nothing had ever happened, I was still too overcome with my anxiety to leave my house.

First, I found myself unable to go into town, even just to buy essentials for myself. Then I was unable to venture into my front yard, then my front porch, then I couldn’t even bring myself to open my front door.

Call it an unhealthy preoccupation, trauma from living through a pandemic, or a sudden burst of mental illness, but in any case, I was now too anxious to step a single foot out of my home.

It had been five years.

This affliction of mine had made me horribly, horribly lonely. My mom had passed away from a brain tumor eight years ago, and I had no other family that I knew of. I was never the type of person to keep friends either.. All I really had for company were my two cats, who were already beyond elderly and aging faster by the day. Sooner or later, I would lose them too.

But for reasons I couldn’t quite explain by any rational means, I never felt completely alone. I could constantly feel a pair of curious, benevolent eyes following me around the house, lurking in the back of closets and dark stairwells.

For the longest time, I thought I was just insane, imagining things that weren’t there.

That was before he revealed himself to me, the century and a half old ghost who had been observing me carefully for the past five years, waiting for the perfect time to make himself known

Grace’s Spook Show

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