Don’t let the clock stop

February 24, 2025

by Talia

This story isn’t mine, but it happened to my uncle, Daniel, when he was just 17 years old.

In 1975, his mother, Sarah, had been a widow for a few years before she married Robert. After their wedding, they moved into a new home in a quiet little town. It was a simple house with three bedrooms. Sarah brought many things from her past, including a tall, wooden grandfather clock that had belonged to her late husband, Henry.

Henry loved that clock. He made sure it was always wound so it would chime every hour. When he got sick and knew he didn’t have much time left, he told Sarah, “Don’t let the clock stop. If you do, I’ll come back to remind you.”

At first, Sarah or Daniel would wind the clock as usual. But after moving, life got busy. There were boxes to unpack, new furniture to buy, and Daniel had to adjust to a new school. Weeks passed, and one day, they realized they had forgotten about the clock.

That evening, as they sat down for dinner, the clock began to chime.

But it wasn’t wound.

They all looked at each other, confused. The key to wind it had been lost during the move. How was it working? They assumed it was just some leftover energy in the gears and ignored it. But the clock kept chiming every hour.

Determined to find an answer, Daniel and Robert took the clock apart, checking for anything unusual. The pendulum swung as if it was working normally, but they never wound it up. There was no reason for it to still be ticking. To stop the noise, they put it back in its box and stored it in the closet.

But the clock didn’t stop.

At exactly 2 a.m., the chimes echoed through the house.

Sarah had enough. She was shaken, remembering Henry’s words. Daniel still didn’t believe an object could be haunted. To prove it wasn’t, he removed the pendulum completely and put the clock back in the closet.

A few hours later, the chimes started again.

When Daniel opened the box, he froze. Even without the pendulum, the small metal arm that held it was still moving on its own. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Sarah broke down in tears. The sound was no longer just eerie—it was a painful reminder of the past. She couldn’t bear it anymore. Within a week, she sold the clock to someone in town.

After that, the house was quiet.

No one ever heard what happened to the clock. Daniel sometimes wondered if the new owner had the same experience, but no one wanted to find out. Some things are better left alone.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Cinder-Faced Visitor

The summer I turned twelve, my father’s job transferred us to a dusty little town called Barrow Creek, out where the highways fray into gravel and the sky presses down like a lid. We rented a two-story farmhouse on the edge of the old orchard, a place with peeling paint and a porch that sagged […]

The Lantern-Keeper’s Debt

My grandmother always said the marsh didn’t forgive debts. I thought it was just her old-country superstition, the kind she sprinkled like salt over every conversation about the land. But I learned, the summer I turned twelve, that the marsh kept ledgers in reeds and water, and it collected with interest. We moved to the […]

The Last Ring

In the autumn of 1974, the small farming town of Bellhaven was gripped by an unseasonable chill. My mother, Elena, was eight months pregnant with my older brother, and we had gathered for the wake of my grandmother, Marta, at the old house on Cedar Lane. Marta had been a pillar of the local church, […]

The Dripping Threshold

It was the last Tuesday of June, the air thick and heavy like a damp blanket. My cousin and I, bored out of our minds, sat in his stuffy apartment in the sleepy town of Millbrook. Midnight was still an hour away when he remembered a forgotten place he’d seen on a long walk weeks […]

The Floorboards in the Hall

I have always been a skeptic wrapped in a believer’s skin, someone who reads every ghost story and listens to every whispered account, always hoping for a crack in the world’s surface. My name is Elara, and I have spent years chasing that thin, cold line between the living and the dead. My dreams have […]

The Static Between Tenants

My name is Elias, and for most of my life, I’ve been a skeptic. Ghost stories were for children and the gullible. But that changed when I was sixteen, in the fall of 1997, in the city of Bakersfield, California. My mom had just gotten a job as a night-shift nurse at the county hospital, […]

The Hollow Hour

At fourteen, Maya was a collector of other people’s endings. She read obituaries like love letters, memorized the dates and causes, and sketched tiny tombstones in the margins of her school notebooks. Her bedroom walls were papered with tarot cards, her nightstand stacked with dog-eared volumes on astral projection and the restless dead. But her […]

The Man in the Basement

I never believed in the supernatural until I moved into the old brownstone on Beacon Street in Boston. It was a cramped, creaking place that my girlfriend, Clara, had inherited from her grandmother. We were both students at Emerson College, and the idea of free rent in the city was too good to pass up. […]

The Painted Room

My friend Lena had inherited her grandmother’s Victorian mansion in the sleepy town of Ravensworth, tucked away from the city’s noise. The house was a labyrinth of creaking floors and dusty portraits, but its centerpiece was a sunroom that had been converted into a gallery of unsettling paintings. Lena called it ‘the painted room,’ and […]

The Hat That Crossed the Creek

It was the summer I turned fourteen, and my dad had dragged our family up to a godforsaken patch of outback Queensland to visit his old mate, Tom Gunderson. Tom had bought this run-down cattle property about thirty klicks from the nearest town, a place that had been a regular stopover for the drovers moving […]

Marbles of the Last Floor

The summer I turned sixteen, my father and I moved into the top floor of a crumbling brownstone in the borough of Quincy, a neighborhood where the streetlights flickered like dying fireflies and the air always smelled of wet concrete and burnt sugar from the bakery below. The apartment was a labyrinth of slanted ceilings […]

The Bell That Wouldn’t Ring

The morning sun bled through the curtains like watered-down wine, but I knew better than to trust it. The clock read 11:00 AM, and I had to drag myself out of bed for another investigation. My name is Mara Ellison, and I’ve been chasing the unexplained for over a decade. Today’s case was different—it was […]