For the past year or so I've been posting short horror stories based on the houses featured in Kelsey McKinney's Defector column, Zillowing Out. They've gotten remarkably good responses, especially for things written usually in about 90 minutes.
I haven't really found a good use for Cohost yet, but maybe there can be one now, I'm gonna post them all here so that people can find them more easily than digging through the comments section of a paywalled website.
First one came out in December 2021. I got a response saying "Gosh, that's beautiful. I would like it if you would tell us a ghost story every week, please...." and I ended up doing mostly exactly that. These started as a paragraph, many are thousands of words long now.
Text:
I want to be a kindly old grandfather in this house and bake cookies for a whole kindergarten class of small children who I am not related to and whose origins are never explained. They never get older, they have no names, they just appear every afternoon around 2:45, rushing in through the living in a thunderous herd of tiny feet, eat my freshly baked chocolate chip desserts, and then after they all smile at me, they walk out the door and all at once fade away into dust, which I spend the rest of the afternoon sweeping up.
Original article: https://defector.com/zillowing-out-samford-ny-i-want