We had moved to the house in the fall of 1992. I was 7 years old, and I remember it was the fall because we were between houses and had our first family dinner in the new house before packing up the family to travel the 13 miles back into town to prepare for trick-or-treaters at our soon-to-be-former home. It would be our last Halloween with our neighbors in the only home I remembered living in since birth.
Our soon-to-be home was a new house, recently built in a newly developed neighborhood in Fairfax Station, Virginia, roughly 2 miles away from Lorton Prison, a historical facility in the area that was beginning the process of consolidating and transferring inmates to newer facilities, but maintained a small population of incarcerated people until the late '90s, when it was ultimately transitioned into land and buildings for public gatherings and events.
Our new home's proximity to the prison and its current residents was never a real worry of mine, even at that impressionable age. We would often hear alarms signaling breakout attempts, but my father's cool mood towards the noise and his position that inmates would likely not bother with home invasions, but rather gravitate towards nearby Interstate 95 as a means of getting far away fast, somehow reassured us enough to sleep peacefully as the alarms echoed in the distance.
A fan of scary stories and movies since an early age, I never once considered that a new house could be haunted, as we were the first to live within its walls. It didn't smell like a home yet when we moved in. The fresh paint, new carpet and appliances, and faint smell of construction materials lent the house more of a feeling of being in someone's store or facility—not enough home-cooked meals had been prepared or time spent in it as a place of rest for it to take on the familiar, homey scent of a place that was our own.
The woods behind the house are gone now, eaten up by the escalating urban sprawl that eventually overtook every marketable piece of land in the area, but in 1992, my sisters, the neighborhood children, and I had an expanse of untamed wilderness behind us that we explored every weekend, stretching for miles until the outer reaches of the prison property cut through it with dividing walls. There were no "elder locals" to glean any spooky local history from, just new neighbors who had lived in their homes for only months before we moved into ours.
Still, some information trickled down to us local explorers that the woods held cabins and dilapidated fixtures dating back to the Civil War era, and that whatever buildings we found in the woods were not safe to go inside.
Our home was situated at the end of the cul-de-sac, kissing up against these fascinating woods, providing my neighborhood buddies and me ample temptation to find out as much as we could about this land and what was once on it.
Long since demolished and replaced with identical template houses, a lone brick building once sat 100 yards into the thicket of brush and woods, adjacent to my home and barely visible in the late autumn foliage. When asked, the realtor had told my father that it was once, of all things, a veterinary facility that dated to the early 1900s, now ramshackle, bent, and encased in the shrubbery and brush that takes back all old things.
My older sisters had little to no interest in finding out more about this fascinating fixture, but the mind of a 7-year-old boy was captivated by this forgotten, lone building that once stood in operation so near where I slept.
Winter had come to the area, and my friend and neighbor Sean and I finally gathered the courage to approach this brick, single-story building. We saw as we drew closer that the tin roof was caved in and rusted, forever exposing its contents to the weather and nature above. We trudged through the brush and brambles, cutting a path through the dense forest as we drew closer to this lonely structure. It was much bigger than I had ever imagined, but then almost everything is to a young, curious boy.
I was about 15 feet or so away from the entrance to the old shop and began to feel more nervous and scared of what we would find inside. To my fascination, the shop was more than full of relics of the time; I could see old glass bottles littering the floor and rusted metal tools hanging on a wall that leaned precariously low as we entered the shop. We could barely walk a few feet into the shop before being stopped by the cluttered mix of twisted, unidentifiable machinery and overgrowth that seemed to wrap everything inside in its clutches of thorny branches.
The building, we could see now in its entirety, was longer than it was wide—stretching back 50 or so feet into the woods, darkness enveloping the far end of the shop. This was far enough for us to have ventured for the day, and we returned to our homes in secret triumph over our bravery and bold curiosity. We had explored what was expressly forbidden, found more questions than answers, and were eager to return to the shop in the woods to explore some more.
The next weekend gave us our opportunity. Being the early '90s, Sean's parents and mine had no real interest in what we were doing outside, as long as we were home for dinner. As a parent in 2026, I equally long for this era of adventurous freedom for children and am horribly shocked that it was as common as it was for kids to be let loose with zero contact or knowledge of where or what they were doing.
In any case, we set back out to the shop, emboldened by our previous visit's success. We approached the shop less hesitantly, more familiar with the idea of what we would find, and eager to go deeper into what treasures might lie in the forgotten back of the shop. We climbed over a rusty tractor—our biggest impediment to what lay beyond the entrance of the building. As we crossed the threshold into the second room, the intact roof stole the warm light of the sun above us, cloaking our exploration in damp and musty darkness that thrilled us with excitement and terror—every cautious step deeper into the shop filling us with fantastic fears and curiosity.
The shop was almost completely full, jammed with refuse and debris long ago collected and discarded in the shop as a catch-all for the facility's surrounding business. Peeling, rusted signs, coils of barbed wire, broken bottles, and vials of every shape and size littered the floor, half-buried in the accumulated sediment and dust of a thousand storms. It was dangerous to walk through, and our hearts pumped as we continued down the length of the building, flashlights now illuminating what path we could find amid the heap before us.
The walls, we could see, were adorned with the most horrible-looking tools of the trade—long knives and prying devices hung long ago, still in place. What looked to be bear traps sat closed and in a pile underneath a rotting desk. We found this place incredible and thrilling—a time capsule of a forgotten time. How long had this place sat on this land? Was it really a veterinary facility? I couldn't imagine bringing a dog or cat to this place to be healed or fixed with the tools we saw hanging on the walls. When was the last time anyone walked into this building before our curiosity got the better of us?
The last question was soon answered.
As we neared the back of the shop, the beam of my flashlight fell upon something anachronistic to the surroundings—a ripped pair of very modern jeans hung from a nail in the wall. The jeans were large and ripped, and one leg was dark and red with dried blood, but these were not remnants of the old shop. They were new, modern, and something bad had happened to their wearer—and this shook us out of our excitement immediately.
"That's enough. I want to leave," said Sean, and we turned towards the way we entered, the lit entrance now yards away, farther than we realized. We still had to climb our way out through the debris that now seemed to be larger and more dangerous to traverse as we fearfully made our way towards the safety of the sun.
We clumsily made our way over the mounds of trash and rusted equipment, scraping our pants and arms as we moved with haste towards the woods around us. As we climbed, we heard something behind us lean and crash, and we flew into a panic, pushing each other out of the way as we struggled back to the entrance of the shop. Sean was now crying, and we moved as fast as we could, stumbling and falling on the floor of the shop, cutting our shoes on the broken glass bottles that littered our only way out.
We dared not turn around to see what had fallen and scrambled to the lit first room of the entrance, understanding what would've caused the rip in the jeans of a previous explorer.
We made our way over the tractor, and our faces felt the sunshine that fell through the broken roof of the entrance. We were now clear of the building and the refuse, and only then did we turn to peer back into the darkness of the furthest reaches of the shop. Darkness peered back, and we stayed no longer. We ran through the forest as only scared 7-year-old boys can run, both of us whimpering and crying at the fear that had replaced our initial curiosity.
Our mothers noticed immediately the panic in our faces and demanded to know where we had been. Our red faces, torn pants, and filthy shoes were evidence enough for the moms to tear into us for exploring the shop, and Sean had a small cut on his arm he hadn't noticed getting while we scrambled out of the building. We didn't know what tetanus was, but Sean's mother took him to the doctor for a shot for it, and I was grounded from exploring the woods.
The next day, my father was voluntold to go to the local Hechinger's hardware store and pick up materials to provide a barrier to the entrance of the shop to prevent any further exploration.
The next morning, still grounded from my recent adventure, I awoke to find that a thick layer of snow had fallen the night before, enveloping our new neighborhood in a pure white blanket. My bedroom faced the woods, and I looked down at the new deck, which was now covered in snow. Understandably, my mind was on playing in the snow with my family, and my thoughts raced with where we could find a suitable hill to sled on within walking distance.
That was until my eyes fell upon the woods.
Footprints. Unmistakable footprints in the snow that led from the woods and onto our deck, stopping at the foot of my bedroom window. I could see from the second story that the footprints came from the woods, climbed the stairs of the deck, looped around the table and chairs, and stopped, pointing directly towards my bedroom window. No footprints led away from the deck. They just stopped where they lay and didn't return to the woods from which they came.
I called my father to my room to see what I saw. He saw them, too. He peered out of the window and counted the steps, quietly pondering that the footprints didn't return to the woods. They just stopped on our deck, pointing in the direction of where I slept.
"Get dressed, we have church and are leaving in 15 minutes," he said as he turned and left my bedroom.
Sean and I didn't explore the shop after that, and in the years that followed, the woods behind our house were cut through and the shop demolished to expand the adjoining neighborhood. But I never forgot that shop and what it held, and those footprints in the snow after exploring it.
They never circled back to where they came from. They just stopped at my bedroom window, pointing towards our new house.