The Cardboard Cathedral

We arrived in Valparaíso on a Tuesday, lured by the promise of crumbling mansions and vibrant murals. The city sprawled over a dozen hills like a drunk giant’s discarded jigsaw puzzle, and every street seemed to tilt at an impossible angle. Our original hostel had double-booked, and with the weeklong Festival de la Luz approaching, every room in the city was claimed. Desperate, we found a listing for a ’boutique hotel’ called El Refugio, tucked into the hillside of Cerro Alegre.

The building was a narrow, five-story Victorian structure that had been recently renovated, though the scaffolding and tarps on either side suggested the work was far from done. Inside, the floors were polished concrete, the walls painted in muted grays, and the only light came from thin, slatted windows that made the corridors feel like an abandoned aquarium. The room itself was a shoebox—a bed, a tiny desk, a bathroom no bigger than a phone booth—but it was clean, and the view from the window overlooked the labyrinthine stairways and rusted funiculars below. We were the last guests to check in, and the clerk, a gaunt man with a waxy complexion, handed us a brass key with the number 7 stamped on it. ‘Don’t mind the noises,’ he said, his eyes not quite meeting ours. ‘The building settles.’

The first night was uneventful, save for the occasional groan of metal and the distant barking of stray dogs. We slept deeply, exhausted from the long bus ride from Santiago. But the second night, we woke to a sound like wet cardboard being ripped from a wall. It came from the room above ours, slow and deliberate, followed by a low, rhythmic thumping. I assumed it was workers on the renovation site, though the sound was too close, too intimate. My partner, Mateo, suggested we investigate, but I pulled him back. ‘It’s just a building,’ I said. ‘Old buildings talk.’

The next morning, we noticed that the door to room 8, the one directly above us, was ajar. We peeked inside and found a space identical to ours, but the walls were covered in sheets of cardboard, taped haphazardly over the plaster. The window was sealed shut with duct tape, and in the center of the floor lay a small pile of what looked like shredded paper, though when I knelt to examine it, I realized it was the remains of a Bible—pages torn into thin strips, the print smudged and illegible. Mateo laughed uneasily and called it ‘renovation art,’ but I noticed the strips were arranged in a spiral pattern, like a whirlpool, and at its center was a single charred matchstick.

That night, the sounds returned, but this time they were accompanied by a voice—a low, guttural whisper that seemed to seep through the ceiling. I couldn’t make out the words, but the rhythm was that of a prayer, or a curse. Mateo slept through it, but I lay awake, staring at the crack in the ceiling that ran from corner to corner, like a river on a map. As the whisper grew louder, the crack seemed to widen, and I could swear I saw something move within it—a pale, segmented shape, like a worm, but impossibly thin. I blinked, and it was gone.

On the third morning, we decided to leave. But when we tried to check out, the clerk was nowhere to be found. The front desk was empty, and the hotel’s only phone line was dead. We tried the door, but it was locked from the outside, and the key didn’t fit. We were trapped. Panic set in, but Mateo, ever the pragmatist, suggested we search for a back exit. We wandered the halls, and every door we tried was locked, except for room 8. It was wide open now, and the cardboard sheets had been torn down, revealing the plaster beneath—which was covered in a faint, reddish-brown stain that looked like a handprint, though the fingers were far too long, and there were seven of them.

We retreated to our room, and as the sun set, the whispers returned, louder this time. They seemed to come from all directions, pouring through the vents, the cracks, the gaps under the door. I looked at Mateo, and his face was pale; he was hearing them too. The voice was now unmistakably a woman’s, sobbing and chanting in Spanish, a phrase I couldn’t parse except for one word: ‘espejo’—mirror. I turned to the bathroom, and the mirror above the sink was fogged, though the room was cold and dry. I wiped it with my sleeve, and the glass showed not my reflection, but a dim, indistinct figure behind me, dressed in white, its face obscured by what looked like a crown of thorns made from metal wire.

I screamed, and the figure vanished. Mateo ran in, and when he saw my terror, he shook his head. ‘It’s just the light,’ he said, but I knew better. That night, we huddled under the blankets like children, and the whispers built to a crescendo, then stopped abruptly. In the silence, I heard a noise—wet and repetitive, like a tongue against dry lips. It was coming from the ceiling, directly above us. I looked up, and the crack had widened into a jagged fissure, and through it, I saw a single eye—milky, wide, unblinking—staring down at us. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

The next thing I remember, we were standing in the street, the hotel behind us, its façade now covered in fresh scaffolding and plastic sheeting, as if it were being demolished. A passing worker told us the building had been condemned for years, and no one had stayed there since the accident—a fire that had killed a woman in room 8, a devout Catholic who had sealed herself inside with cardboard and prayer books. We never spoke of what we saw, but that’s all it took to drive me to these sleepless nights. I still feel the residue of that presence, clinging to me, and I know it’s not just the building. It’s the mirror inside me, waiting for a reflection I can no longer trust.