The Alder Street Tenant

I should start by saying, this was not my first encounter with the unexplained, but it was the one that stripped away every ounce of skepticism I had left. My name is Lena, and this happened in the autumn of 2012, just after I turned twenty-one. I had recently graduated from a small community college and was working part-time at a struggling independent bookstore. My then-boyfriend, Marcus, had inherited a lease on a dilapidated second-floor apartment in the old mill town of Halverton. The building was a converted textile mill, built in the 1890s, with massive windows and exposed brick, but the charm was lost on us because the place was a drafty, creaking labyrinth. The rent was laughably cheap, and we were young and in love, so we took it.

Our unit was one of four on the top floor, but the others were vacant, occupied only by the ghosts of sawdust and industrial grime. The hallway stretched long and dark, lit by a single flickering fluorescent tube that buzzed like a trapped wasp. The apartment itself was a long shotgun layout: a galley kitchen that smelled of mildew, a living room with a sagging sofa we salvaged from the curb, a bedroom that overlooked the smoking chimney of a nearby tannery, and a bathroom with a clawfoot tub that seemed older than the building itself. We were happy in a grungy, bohemian way, but within weeks, the unease began.

It started with the radiator in the bedroom. It would clank and gurgle at odd hours, even when the heat was off. At first, I chalked it up to old pipes. But then, the sounds became more intentional. It would emit a series of rhythmic thumps, like a knuckle rapping three times, paused, then twice more. Marcus, ever the pragmatist, said it was just the building contracting. But I knew better. I had grown up in a house where my grandmother spoke to the spirit of my grandfather, and I had seen things I couldn’t explain. This was different. This felt like a summons.

One evening, while Marcus was at his late shift at the diner, I was curled up on the sofa with a book. The apartment was quiet except for the wind outside, which moaned around the window frames. That’s when I heard it: a soft, muffled sob from the bedroom. I set my book down, heart pounding. I crept to the bedroom door, which was ajar, and peered in. The room was empty, but the radiator was weeping. Not leaking water, but a low, keening sound that rose and fell like a child in distress. I stepped closer, and as I did, the sound stopped abruptly. Then the radiator clanked once, loudly, as if in greeting.

I told Marcus about it, but he dismissed it with a grin and a kiss on my forehead, calling me his ‘sensitive girl.’ Yet, that night, I woke to find him sitting bolt upright in bed, staring at the radiator. His eyes were open but vacant, and he was whispering a name: ‘Edmund.’ I shook him, and he blinked, startled, then claimed he had no memory of it. The name made me uneasy. It felt old, like from a different era.

Over the following weeks, the presence intensified. Small objects went missing—keys, a hairbrush, a book—only to reappear in impossible places, like inside the oven or wedged between the floorboards. On one occasion, I opened a drawer to find a photograph of a family I didn’t recognize, sepia-toned, with a man in his thirties glaring at the camera, a woman with hollow cheeks, and a small boy with a defiant stare. I turned it over, and scrawled on the back was ‘The Edmunds Family, 1924.’ A chill ran down my spine, because the boy in the photo had the same face I saw on Marcus when he was in his trance.

The final act began on a late October night. Marcus had gone to visit his mother for the weekend, leaving me alone. I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, when the radiator in the bedroom clanked its triplet. Then the door, which I had left open, slowly creaked shut on its own. The air grew thick and cold, and I heard heavy footsteps padding across the wooden floor in the bedroom. I froze, toothbrush dripping, as the footsteps stopped just outside the bathroom threshold. I could feel a presence, a weight, pressing against the air. I forced myself to look, and in the doorway stood the ghost of a boy, no more than eight, with a gaunt face and hollow eyes. He wore a stained nightshirt from another century. He pointed a trembling finger at the floor, then at me, and mouthed two words: ‘He’s coming.’

I stumbled back, colliding with the clawfoot tub, and the boy vanished. The radiator in the bedroom let out a deafening bang, and the lights went out. In the darkness, I heard a man’s voice, low and gravelly, right next to my ear: ‘You took my place.’ I screamed, and the voice dissolved into a wail that seemed to come from the walls themselves. I scrambled for the door, but it was stuck. Feeling the panic rise, I threw my shoulder against it, and it gave way. I fled the apartment, down the long hallway, not stopping until I was in the cold night air, shivering in my thin pajamas.

I never went back. I moved in with my sister, and Marcus and I broke up not long after, largely because he couldn’t let go of the apartment, insisting the rent was too good to pass up. I heard from a mutual friend months later that he had begun talking to himself, calling himself Edmund, and that he would sometimes wake up screaming about a boy in a nightshirt. The building was eventually condemned and demolished, but I still carry the memory of that boy’s pointing finger. To this day, I cannot walk past a radiator without listening for the sound of three knocks, and I’ve learned to never, ever ignore the summons.