The Candle Procession

July 29, 2026

by Tina

We moved to the old farmhouse when I was five, and I grew up there with my brother, Liam, who was three years older. Despite having my own room, Liam often carried me to his bed at night, claiming I looked cold or lonely. I never remembered the journey; I would wake up in his room, tangled in his quilt.

One night, I woke in a daze and slipped out of Liam’s bed, padding down the hallway to the top of the stairs. Liam, still awake, called after me, ‘Where are you going?’ I didn’t answer. He followed, his voice growing worried as I stood at the top of the landing, staring down the staircase. ‘What’s wrong? It’s the middle of the night.’

I couldn’t speak. My eyes were fixed on the base of the stairs, where a procession of four figures was ascending. They wore long, dark habits that pooled around their feet, and each held a thick, black candle that flickered with a flame that cast no light. Their faces were hidden in the shadows of their hoods. They moved in perfect silence, their steps making no sound on the creaky wooden steps.

As they reached the top, they glided past us, heading straight for my little room. I felt a cold draft as they passed, and the smell of old wax and damp earth filled my nostrils. Liam shook my shoulders, and I finally managed to whisper, ‘Don’t you see them? Four monks with black candles, going into my room.’

Liam’s face went pale. He looked at the empty hallway, then back at me. ‘There’s no one there,’ he said, his voice trembling. But I saw them clearly, even as they disappeared through the door of my room, which was slightly ajar. The last one turned its head slightly, and for a moment, I thought I saw a glimpse of a withered face, but then it was gone.

I wasn’t scared, just puzzled. The next morning, I told my parents, but they dismissed it as a dream. Yet, night after night, the procession returned. I would wake up, walk to the top of the stairs, and watch them climb. Sometimes they carried candles, sometimes they carried a small, ornate box, and once, I swear I saw them carrying a bundle that looked like a swaddled baby.

Years passed. I grew up, and the sightings became less frequent, but they never stopped entirely. I always felt a strange calm when I saw them, as if they were guardians of some secret. It wasn’t until I was seventeen and about to leave for college that I discovered the truth. My great-grandmother, who had lived in that house before us, had been a midwife. She had died in my room, and according to family lore, she had a vision of four monks coming to take her soul to the afterlife. They were her personal escort, bound to the house.

But that wasn’t the whole story. One night, just before I left, I saw them again, but this time, they stopped at the foot of my bed. The leader raised a withered hand and pointed to me, and I heard a voice in my head, clear as day: ‘You are the keeper now.’

I never told anyone about that. I left for college, but every time I returned home, I would see them at the top of the stairs, watching me. I understood then that they were not just a memory; they were a promise. The house had chosen me to carry on the duty, to witness their procession for the rest of my days. And as I walked up those stairs on my last visit before my parents sold the house, I fell in step behind them, a black candle appearing in my hand, and I knew I would never leave.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

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 […]

The Day the House Went Cold

In the autumn of 2011, I was living with my father in the old farmhouse that had been in our family for generations. The house was nestled in a valley that seemed to trap the fog, making every dawn feel like a scene from a forgotten film. Dad and I had grown closer since he […]

The Grip of the Unseen

My grandmother always said the woods remembered. That they kept the bones of every mistake, every secret buried under moss and root. I used to think she was just being poetic, the way old people get. But now, standing at the edge of the Harlow Forest with a duffel bag of salt and iron, I […]

The Last Train to Weldon Hollow

In the autumn of 1994, my father inherited a decommissioned signal box from his great-uncle, a retired railwayman. The box sat at the edge of the village of Weldon Hollow, a place that time seemed to have forgotten, where the only sounds were the whisper of wind through the yew trees and the occasional distant […]

The Hollow Bloom

The day had begun with a brittle, crystal clear sky over the town of Kettlewood, where my mother and I had come to visit my grandfather, a man of few words but many silences, which I now know were filled with stories he never told. We were there to mark the anniversary of my grandmother’s […]

The Trough of the Old Cow Barn

I was twelve when my parents split, and my mother and I left the converted dairy farm we had called home for nearly a decade. My father stayed behind, but the house never felt like ours again after my mother’s key turned in the lock for the last time. We moved into a cramped flat […]

The Sixth Sick Day

My husband, Daniel, and I moved into the old Coldwater place in the autumn of ’88. It was a sprawling, sun-starved house with peeling paint and a porch that sagged like a tired jaw. His boss, Mr. Hargrove, owned it and rented it to us for a pittance, warning us only that it was ‘drafty.’ […]

The Hollow Wall

My mother told me about the year we lived in the old mill house, and what happened to my sister before I was born. We had moved from the city to a sprawling, ramshackle house on the edge of a dying mill town in the Appalachian foothills. The house had once been the mill owner’s […]

The Bell in the Attic

We had lived in the old farmhouse for five years, and the usual quirks had become almost mundane. The creaking floorboards in the hallway, the cold drafts that swept through the kitchen despite the sealed windows, the occasional shadow that slipped past the corner of your eye. It was the kind of place you could […]

The Null Above the Cut

In the late autumn of 1995, I was a night-shift security guard at the Pine Hollow Dam, a massive concrete structure that loomed over the Blackwater River gorge in the Pacific Northwest. The dam was old, its turbines humming a constant drone that had become the soundtrack to my insomnia. The guard shack was a […]