Whispers of Laurel Creek

 

Laurel Creek was the kind of town you drove through without stopping. Tucked into the backwoods of upstate New York, it had a population small enough to know everyone’s secrets but large enough to have secrets worth keeping.It was here that Ethan Gray found himself, thirty miles from nowhere, driving past rotting barns and crooked houses, following a job lead at the county’s only newspaper. His new editor had offered him a cheap rental—a weathered old house on the edge of town. The rent was suspiciously low, but Ethan was too broke to question why.

The house sat just off a narrow gravel road, beside the thick forest that gave Laurel Creek its name. The forest was ancient, the kind of place where trees grew too close together and no birds sang. Ethan, city boy through and through, didn’t think much of it.

Not until he met her.

He first saw her on his third night in the house. He was sitting on the sagging front porch, sipping beer, when she stepped out from the woods.

She was pale, her skin almost translucent in the moonlight, her hair black as the void between the trees. She wore a thin white dress, and her bare feet left no mark in the dirt. Her eyes—deep, dark pools—fixed on Ethan with an intensity that made him forget to breathe.

“Are you lost?” Ethan called out.

She tilted her head, her lips curling into a smile. Not a friendly one, but not unfriendly either—like she knew something he didn’t. Then she turned and walked back into the woods, swallowed by the dark.

Ethan couldn’t stop thinking about her.

He saw her again the next night, and the night after that. Always at the edge of the woods, always in that same dress, her hair whispering in the wind. Ethan started to leave his porch light on, hoping she would come closer.

She never did.

The townsfolk were no help. When Ethan mentioned her at the diner, the old waitress gave him a look that was somewhere between pity and fear.

“You leave her be,” she muttered, refilling his coffee. “Some things out here don’t want to be found.”

The sheriff, a heavyset man with tired eyes, was even more direct.
“Don’t go in those woods,” he warned. “They’ll keep you.”

But Ethan was already in too deep.

He dreamed about her.

In his dreams, she was standing at the foot of his bed, hair dripping wet, her dress clinging to her body as though she’d just crawled from a river. She would whisper his name—Ethan—a soft, beckoning sound, and he would wake with the taste of earth on his tongue and the scent of damp leaves in his nostrils.

By the end of his first week, Ethan was obsessed.

He left offerings at the forest’s edge—flowers, candles, once even a lock of his own hair. She would watch from the trees, her face unreadable, her eyes locked on him like a predator studying prey.

It wasn’t love, not yet. It was something darker. Something deeper.

The storm came on the tenth night.

Thunder rattled the windows, and rain lashed the roof like nails. The power flickered and died, leaving the house in suffocating silence. Ethan lit candles and sat by the window, watching the woods.

She was there.

Lightning lit up her face—a flash of pale skin and black eyes, standing just beyond the tree line. This time, she stepped closer, until her bare feet touched the gravel road. Her dress clung to her, wet and torn.

Ethan opened the door. The storm howled around him, but inside it was silent.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she raised her hand and beckoned him.Come.

Ethan followed.

The forest swallowed him whole. The trees pressed close, the branches clawing at his skin, the mud pulling at his feet. The further he went, the less human the forest felt. It was alive—not just with insects and animals, but with something older, something hungry.

He caught glimpses of her between the trees—always just out of reach, her white dress flickering like a ghost through the dark. His breath came fast, and his heart pounded, but he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to.

Finally, he found her.

She stood in a small clearing, surrounded by a circle of stones, her bare feet sunk into the wet earth. Her eyes locked onto his.

“Ethan,” she whispered.

He stepped into the circle, and the world went black.

When he woke, it was daylight, and he was lying on his front porch, mud caked to his clothes, his hands scratched raw. His phone was missing, his shoes gone, his memory fragmented like a broken mirror.

But he could still feel her—under his skin, behind his eyes.

He couldn’t stop thinking about her lips, though they’d never touched. Couldn’t stop imagining her fingers tracing patterns on his skin, though they never had. The forest was inside him now, and so was she.

The townsfolk avoided him. Even the sheriff stopped checking in. Something in Ethan had changed, and they all saw it. Something in his smile, in the way his eyes always flicked toward the woods.

The dreams became real.

She came to him at night—not just in his mind, but in his bed. Her skin was cold as stone, her lips soft as silk. She whispered secrets into his ear, stories of the forest, of things that lived beneath the roots and under the river’s black water. Things she had become part of.

She was Laurel.

Once, a girl like any other. Then a bride-to-be who wandered into the woods on the eve of her wedding. The forest took her, and something else gave her back—a bride to the dark.

She loved Ethan, in her own way. But love, in Laurel Creek, was never sweet.

Ethan stopped writing, stopped eating. His world shrank to the house and the woods, the boundary between them thinner every day. Sometimes, he found his own handwriting scrawled on the walls—I love her. I love her. I love her. Over and over, until the ink ran out and the words dissolved into scratches.

She began to show her true self.

Beneath the white dress was skin stitched together with black thread. Her hair writhed like roots, and her eyes—those deep, dark eyes—were pits, not into her soul, but into the earth itself.

He loved her anyway.

On the final night, she came to him covered in soil and blood. Her lips brushed his ear.

“Come with me,” she whispered.

Ethan didn’t hesitate.

He walked with her into the forest, hand in hand, the mud swallowing their feet, the darkness wrapping around them like a wedding veil. The trees parted for them, the earth welcoming them home.

They found the circle of stones again, but this time it was Ethan who stepped into it first.

She kissed him—deep and cold—and the earth opened beneath his feet. He didn’t scream as the forest took him. He was home.

In Laurel Creek, they say you can still see them sometimes, two figures dancing between the trees—a bride in white and her lover, their hands entwined, their eyes black as the void.

Some call it a curse. Others call it love.

In Laurel Creek, they are often the same.