The Whisper in the Walls

---

The Whisper in the Walls

The house on Elmwood Lane had stood empty for years—its shutters sagging, ivy choking its brick exterior, and an uneasy silence hovering around it like a fog. Locals called it cursed. Kids dared each other to run up and touch the front door, only to bolt screaming before they could even knock.

When Sarah and her husband Tom bought it at a bargain price, they thought they were lucky. “It just needs some love,” Sarah had said, her voice echoing with optimism. Tom agreed, eager to fix up the place and turn it into a home for their growing family.

But the house had other plans.

It started subtly at first—creaks in the floorboards when no one was walking, faint drafts in sealed rooms, and an eerie coldness that never lifted from the hall upstairs. Sarah blamed it on the house’s age. Old wood makes noise, she told herself. Old pipes hiss. But one night, as she tucked their toddler Lily into bed, she heard it for the first time.

A whisper.

It was so faint she thought it was the wind until it came again—slow, deliberate, brushing past her ear like cold breath.
“Sarah…”

She spun around. No one was there.

The whispers grew bolder. They came at night, always from within the walls. Sometimes they called her name, other times they muttered in a language she couldn't understand. When she pressed her ear to the walls, the voices stopped—replaced by a dull, pulsing heartbeat that wasn’t hers.

Tom didn’t believe her at first. “You’re just tired,” he said. “This place is old. It’s playing tricks on you.” But when Lily started talking to someone in her room at night—someone she called “the quiet lady in the walls”—Tom’s doubt started to crack.

One night, they heard Lily crying. They rushed in, only to find her staring at the corner of her room, eyes wide with terror.
“She’s mad,” Lily whispered. “She said I can’t stay.”

They called in a contractor to open the walls, convinced there was some animal, maybe even squatters. What they found was worse.

Behind the nursery wall, sealed in with bricks and rotting wallpaper, was a narrow space—a crawl cavity that ran along the entire length of the house. Inside were remnants of old furniture, melted candles, and hundreds of symbols carved into the wood. In the far end, they found a child-sized rocking chair. It was still rocking.

They moved out the next day.

But Sarah hears the whisper still, sometimes, late at night when everything is quiet.
It always says the same thing.

“You left me behind.”