It’s funny, really. You can spend your whole life avoiding trouble, building the perfect, predictable little bubble around yourself, only to have it burst open thanks to one stupid trip to the town you thought you’d left behind for good. Maybe I should start from the beginning, before things got so... twisted.
Woodbury, Oregon, was the kind of town that boasted three things: miserable winters, an even more miserable Walmart, and the kind of small-town rumors that kept people looking over their shoulders. But my connection to this place? Pure nostalgia. I grew up here, after all, though I got out before the small-town gossip and stale air sucked the life out of me. After a couple of decades out, the place felt more like an unfortunate chapter in a book I’d never read again.
Except this October, thanks to my ailing dad, I found myself driving back to Woodbury with my daughter Kylie, just in time for Halloween. A family reunion, with all the quaint charm of a horror flick waiting to happen.
We checked into the only motel in town—the Bates Motel's shabby cousin, it seemed. The walls were thin, the air stale. Perfect. After settling in, I felt compelled, maybe out of morbid curiosity, to do what I hadn’t done in years: visit the house where the infamous Thompson twins grew up. Rumor had it, they were weird kids, but they were something even better than that—they were legendary. Woodbury’s own version of the boogeymen, except this was a pair of boogey-girls.
The twins, Jessica and Jennifer, were the town’s whispered secret, a real-life horror story right out of middle-of-nowhere Oregon. Born conjoined at the torso, they shared a single heart and one lung. It was a miracle they even survived infancy. Their mother, Mrs. Thompson, was a bit of a wild one—known for wandering the woods late at night, and though she was as much a legend as her girls, not in a good way. She was always muttering about deals and pacts and promises she made to bring her daughters into the world. The kind of talk that made everyone in Woodbury nervously laugh and lock their doors at night.
But the twins, now that’s where the story really got dark. From the get-go, they were morbid little creeps. Sickly, pale, with an uncanny knack for finding ways to get into trouble without ever stepping foot outside the house. They were known for their peculiar, and let’s just say, disturbing fascination with animals. Cats and dogs around the neighborhood started disappearing, and what was left behind—oh, let’s just say it didn’t come back wagging its tail.
But then the twins fell deathly ill, which wasn’t unusual, given their condition. This time, though, they needed a doctor, and bad. Mrs. Thompson took them to the only guy willing to treat them, a new doctor in town, Dr. Meyer, who had just moved to Woodbury from Portland. Dr. Meyer, a man completely unprepared for what he was about to deal with, laid them flat on their backs on the exam table, not realizing the deadly consequence of such an innocent act.
As the story goes, one twin, Jessica, suffocated, unable to expand her lungs under her sister’s weight. Jennifer, as she died, stared straight at Dr. Meyer, her eyes boring into him with an intensity that would have sent a shiver down the spine of anyone with a hint of a soul. With her final breath, Jennifer cursed him—murmuring something like “Somaneta Forest.” And that’s when the real horror began.
Back to the Present
So, naturally, that’s where Kylie and I ended up that night, standing in front of the decrepit Thompson house, which was rumored to be haunted or cursed or, knowing Woodbury, both. Kylie rolled her eyes and snapped a few pictures, blissfully unaware that sometimes even the dumbest stories have a sliver of truth to them. The air felt heavy, like it had some kind of thickness to it, almost choking.
I should have stopped us right then and there, turned around and gone back to our rusty hotel room. But curiosity, that itch to get a good scare—maybe the same curiosity that had once led the Thompson twins into dark places—got the better of me.
We slipped inside, stepping around creaky floorboards and piles of dusty furniture. The house was quiet, dark, almost expectant, like it had been waiting all these years for someone to wake it up.
The basement door was slightly ajar, as if beckoning us. Kylie, with that teenage confidence that nothing bad could ever happen, headed down the stairs, her phone light bobbing in front of her. I followed, my heart pounding a little harder than I’d admit. The basement smelled like damp rot and something else, something metallic and sickeningly sweet. In the far corner was an old trunk, its lid slightly cracked open. Inside, we found stacks of tattered notebooks, childish drawings scratched across every page.
But it wasn’t just the usual kid stuff. The drawings showed cats and dogs, torn apart, little stick figures with red scribbles around their necks, and strange symbols scrawled between the margins—symbols I’d seen before in the notebooks of a kid obsessed with horror movies. These were symbols the twins supposedly drew, symbols that meant things to them, things only they knew.
As I looked closer, Kylie tapped my shoulder. “Dad,” she whispered, “did you hear that?”
At first, I heard nothing, just the blood pounding in my ears. Then, faintly, a whisper. A slithery, hissing whisper that seemed to creep up from the walls themselves: Somaneta Forest… Somaneta Forest.
I shushed Kylie, straining to hear the sound, and the temperature around us dropped, an icy chill that cut straight through our coats. My heart stopped as a pair of voices echoed from the walls, high and whispery, chanting that phrase over and over. I squeezed Kylie’s shoulder, but before I could react, the chanting stopped, replaced by the sound of soft footsteps—childish, unsteady, as if the voices themselves were moving around us in the dark.
The Curse of Somaneta
We bolted, but the walls seemed to breathe, and the shadows seemed to stretch, clawing toward us with dark, curling fingers. Just as we reached the top of the stairs, the basement door slammed shut in our faces. My grip on reality was slipping, but I did what I always do—I shut it down, focused. We had to get out. I took a deep breath, threw my weight into the door, and it gave way. We stumbled out of the house and down the street, not stopping until we reached the motel.
Back in our room, I flipped on every light, pacing the room while Kylie watched, pale and silent. I thought it was over, a weird, creepy fluke, a story to laugh about later. But that night, when I finally drifted off to sleep, I had a nightmare.
I was standing in a forest, cold, dense, and suffocating. The ground was spongy under my feet, and the trees towered above me, casting shadows that felt like hands reaching out. Through the dense fog, two figures approached—two girls with pale faces and hollow eyes, moving in perfect sync. Their lips were moving, repeating that cursed phrase.
Somaneta Forest… Somaneta Forest.
And just as they reached me, the one in front raised a bony finger, pointing right between my eyes.
The Final Chapter
I woke up in a cold sweat, but the nightmare didn’t end when I opened my eyes. Kylie stood at the foot of my bed, her face blank, her eyes wide, repeating that phrase in a voice that wasn’t hers.
The curse hadn’t stayed buried in that house. It had followed us.
