Apparently, spooky season reading is officially underway at my house, and The Farmhouse by Chelsea Conradt was the perfect book to keep it going.
This was my first Chelsea Conradt book, and while I don’t read a ton of supernatural stories, I’m starting to think maybe I should. Give me a creepy old farmhouse, a mysterious barn, some ghosts, and a decades-old mystery, and apparently I’m in!
Every woman who has lived on this farm has died. Emily just moved in.
When Emily Hauk’s mother dies, it’s time for her and her husband, Josh, to finally leave San Francisco. A farm in rural Nebraska is everything they want for a fresh start: clear skies, low costs, and distance from the grief back home.
They should have asked why the farm was for sale.
Three years ago, a teenage girl went missing from the farm. Soon after, the girl’s mother mysteriously died. The deeper Emily digs, the more stories she finds of women with a connection to her new home who’ve met their own dark ends.
The farmhouse was meant to be Emily’s fresh start, but with each passing day, her sanctuary slips further away. The barn seems to move throughout her property, as though chasing her. Her mother’s favorite music drifts across the corn. She swears she saw blood in one of the farmhand’s trucks. And the screams that wake her are not foxes, no matter how many times her husband says otherwise.
My Thoughts on The Farmhouse
Warning: Major spoilers ahead!
This was the perfect book to continue my spooky season reading.
I don’t read a lot of supernatural books, but when they’re done well, I LOVE them. And The Farmhouse absolutely hit the mark for me.
It was spooky without being the kind of book that scared me. Instead, there was this constant feeling that something wasn’t right.
And I believed Emily.
Maybe that’s part of why Josh frustrated me so much.
Emily’s Fresh Start
One thing I really liked about Emily was how much she embraced this completely different life.
She and Josh move from San Francisco to a farm in rural Nebraska. Those two lives couldn’t be much more different.
But Emily tries.
She buys chickens. She ventures into town. She gets to know people. She starts settling into this strange new place and genuinely seems willing to make a life there.
And that’s important because Emily isn’t simply running around the farmhouse looking for ghosts from the moment she arrives.
She’s grieving.
She’s just lost her mom, and Josh has already watched her spiral after that loss. This move is supposed to be a fresh start for both of them.
So when Emily starts experiencing things that don’t make sense, I could understand Josh initially being skeptical.
She hears things. She sees things. The barn seems to MOVE around the property. She becomes suspicious of the farmhands.
That’s a lot.
I wasn’t expecting Josh to immediately say, “Yep, obviously our barn is haunted.”
But COME ON, JOSH.
Why Won’t Anyone Believe Emily?
This was probably one of the most frustrating parts of the entire book for me.
Emily desperately wants Josh to believe her.
And he just…doesn’t.
I could understand him questioning some of it. I could even understand him wondering whether Emily’s grief was affecting what she was seeing and hearing.
But it felt like he went so far in the opposite direction that Emily was completely alone.
And I mean that both literally and mentally.
She’s living on this isolated farm, experiencing increasingly disturbing things, and the person who’s supposed to be beside her essentially dismisses all of it.
That bothered me.
It wasn’t simply that Josh didn’t believe the supernatural explanation. At times, it felt like he didn’t really care enough to find out what was happening to his wife.
And the more the story unfolded, the more that seemed to fit into a much bigger theme.
The women knew something was wrong.
The men didn’t listen.
Again and again.
Alice, Bridget, and the Women of the Farm
Once Emily really begins to understand Alice and what she’s trying to show her, I loved watching Emily stand her ground.
She could have continued questioning herself.
She could have listened to everyone telling her that what she was seeing wasn’t real.
Instead, she trusted herself.
And ultimately, she was able to get justice for Bridget.
That was SO satisfying.
What started as Emily trying to understand the strange things happening around her became something much bigger. There weren’t just unexplained noises or a creepy barn. There were women who had disappeared, women who had died, and stories that had been buried along with them.
Literally.
And I loved the way they finally found the truth.
They had to rip apart that barn.
After spending the entire book with this barn that seemed to move, loom over Emily, and almost take on a life of its own, there was something incredibly satisfying about watching it finally be torn apart.
And underneath it were answers.
The missing women were finally found.
They couldn’t be ignored anymore.
Emily and Josh
I hated that Emily and Josh ended up divorced.
But at the same time, I understood it.
There are some things you can’t just pretend didn’t happen once the immediate danger is over.
And I loved that Emily finally asked Josh the question I’d been wanting her to ask:
Why didn’t you believe me?
Because that mattered.
This wasn’t simply a disagreement over whether ghosts were real. Emily had been terrified, confused, and questioning her own reality, and the person she needed most didn’t stand beside her.
Then, in a twist I really loved, Josh is ultimately the one who can’t stay at the farmhouse.
Emily can.
After everything that happened there, after everything she saw, and after everything she learned, Emily is the one who stays.
I loved that.
The farmhouse was supposed to be their fresh start, but in the end, it became hers.
She found new farmers to lease the land, and she made a life for herself there on her own terms.
The place that had once made her feel completely powerless became a place she chose.
Would I Recommend The Farmhouse?
Absolutely.
The Farmhouse had so many of the things I love in a good mystery: secrets, suspicious characters, people who aren’t sure whom they can trust, a past that refuses to stay buried, and enough twists and turns to keep me wanting answers.
Then it added ghosts.
Perfect.
There were ups and downs, characters who wanted to trust one another but couldn’t, a marriage being tested under some pretty unbelievable circumstances, and women whose stories had been ignored for far too long.
Most of all, I loved Emily.
She listened when everyone else told her not to. She trusted what she was seeing. She stood her ground. She helped uncover the truth, and she helped give women who had been forgotten the justice they deserved.
And after all of it?
She stayed.
That might have been my favorite part.
Another spooky-season win for me!