The Lost Nursery of Windmereach House

The interior of Windmereach House yields no resistance to time. It does not fight back — it gives in. Not violently, but with the slow, steady compliance of routines broken mid-gesture.

Light filters through sagging lace panels, but it no longer illuminates; it only outlines the silhouettes of stillness. The floors do not creak underfoot — they sigh.

Nothing in the house has been cleared, claimed, or carried away. The rooms are not empty. They are too full to breathe.

The Forgotten Room Off the Upper Landing

Agnes Hallowmere, the youngest daughter of shipping magnate Harold Hallowmere, was born in this house in 1893 and lived here until the family’s rapid dissolution in 1902. The nursery at the end of the upper landing was hers. Agnes was sickly, as referenced in surviving correspondence stored in a drawer within the governess’s cabinet. Letters addressed to “Nurse Edith” detail herbal tinctures, “tonic powders,” and “severe morning spells.”

A diary found beside the hearthstone in the nursery contains entries in a careful but childlike hand: “Mister Bear guarded me again,” “I was brave today,” and “Mother said I must stay upstairs now.” The final page reads simply, “No one came.”

The Hallowmere family fled the estate in late 1902 after Harold’s bankruptcy trial. Agnes is not listed in any travel records thereafter.

Letters in the Hearth

The hearth in the master drawing room was long ago bricked shut, but the ash pit remains accessible. In 1981, surveyors found inside a bundle of letters tied with a child’s hair ribbon — pale, almost white. The letters are addressed to “Papa” and all in the same looping child’s hand. They speak of toys being “very quiet,” the wind in the chimney “not making the scary voice anymore,” and the wish to “go into the garden again someday.”

No such garden survives on record.

Windmereach remains untouched. The toys unmoved. The final page never turned.

It remains abandoned.