Willow and Hearth

“I promised that I would show the creepiest thing in this house,” she says, and the first thing she does is rule something out. It is not the attic. “The attic is a whole separate video,” she says, “when I feel like going up there.” The on-screen text over her 87 second video reads: “One of the scariest things we found in our 1792 home.”

The creator is @saraheposts, and the post is dated August 30, 2026. Her caption is a joke about the house: “I mean i’ll show you the attic room but I have to ward the ghosts off first.” It carries tags for old house and historic home content, including #1700shome and #scarythings.

She gives the attic a short mention before moving on. She says it is in great condition for a space around 240 years old, and that there is a tiny room up there with signatures on the walls and a coat hanger. “Don’t even get me started,” she says. “I’m not going there today.”

Then she shows where the scary thing turned up. She is standing in the butler’s pantry, a long narrow room with pale green painted cabinets and a wood floor. Before she and her family moved in, but after they had bought the house, her little brother was walking through it for them. He opened a cabinet and found a VHS tape.

She reaches up to the cabinet and brings the cassette down to show the camera, a boxy black case with a swirl of bright color on the label. She does not play it. “If you’ve ever seen the movie Sinister, if you find a VHS tape in your new home, you don’t watch it,” she says. “So I’m not going to.”

She does read the label aloud. It says 1953 to 1957 and describes the tape as scenes from home, followed by a family name that she reads and the audio does not make clear. She says the house was the childhood home of a relatively famous politician, and that the tape would probably be an interesting one to watch. “But it’s never gonna happen,” she says. For now it stays up in the cabinet, and she says she forgets it exists. Her last line is a joke: “I’ll probably burn it someday.”

The practical part comes from the Library of Congress, whose preservation office publishes guidance on magnetic tape cassettes in general. For tapes kept at home it recommends a cool place at room temperature or below, with relative humidity around 35 to 40 percent, away from attics and basements. It says cassettes should be stored upright on their long edge, handled by the outer shell without touching the spools, and kept away from strong magnetic fields such as speakers, televisions and motors. Light, radiators, vents and vibration are also things to avoid.

The same guidance says a tape that has been in cool storage should be allowed to come up to room temperature before it is played, and that cleaning magnetic tape is a job for preservation specialists. That matters for anyone who finds an old tape in a cabinet, because a tape that has sat in an old house for decades has been through whatever temperatures that house has gone through. The Library of Congress page does not cover transferring a tape to digital, so ask an archive or a media conversion service about that rather than assuming a home player is safe.

If you buy an old house and open a cabinet to find something left behind, a short list follows from the video. Leave it where it is until you have photographed it in place. Read and photograph any label. Keep it upright, away from heat and speakers. Ask the sellers or the listing agent whether anything was left on purpose. And do not destroy it, even as a joke, because a label dated 1953 to 1957 is the kind of record a family, a local historical society or the next owner may want.