The Cassette Rewind

In the autumn of 1998, my then-wife Elena and I moved into a refurbished farmhouse on the outskirts of a small town called Millbrook. It was a fixer-upper, with creaking floorboards and a lingering odor of old wood and dust. We had two daughters, Mia and Chloe, and we thought the place would be perfect for them to have a bit of land to run around on. For the first few months, everything was normal. Then, the oddities began.

It started with small things. Our stereo, which was a dusty model with manual knobs, would turn on by itself. We’d be reading in the living room, and suddenly a soft static would fill the air. We’d watch the volume knob rotate as if an invisible hand was turning it, and then the machine would switch to a random radio station. We’d laugh it off, saying, ‘The ghost must like this song.’ But it happened more and more often, always at odd hours, and always with a sense of deliberate timing.

Then, the voices started. I’d be in the kitchen, and I’d hear Elena call my name from the bedroom. But when I went to check, she’d be in the backyard, or she’d say she never called me. The same with her: she’d hear me from the garage, but I’d be in the bathroom. It was disorienting, and the girls started mentioning that they heard our voices too, calling them from other rooms, but never when we were there.

Keys, remotes, and other small items would randomly vanish and reappear in bizarre places. I’d set my keys on the hall table, only to find them in the laundry basket an hour later. Elena’s glasses would end up in the fridge. The girls’ toys would migrate from their playroom to the staircase, or even outside on the porch. We started to feel as if something was unsettled in the house, but we couldn’t pin down what it was.

One night, when the girls were staying over at a friend’s house, the full weight of the phenomenon came to bear. At around 2:00 AM, I was jolted from a deep sleep by a small, insistent voice at the foot of the bed. It was a child’s voice, whimpering, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy’ over and over. In my half-awake daze, I thought it was one of our girls, sleepwalking or having a nightmare. I reached out to nudge Elena, but she was already awake, her eyes wide in the darkness. She whispered, ‘I hear it too.’

We both sat up in terror. The voice was not our children. It sounded like a little girl, but tinny, as if it were being played through a speaker. It was coming from the corner of the room, near the old built-in wardrobe. As we watched, the wardrobe door creaked open by itself. Inside, on the top shelf, I saw a vintage cassette player we had never noticed before. It was dusty, with a cracked plastic casing, and its reels were slowly turning.

The voice was emanating from that player, and as we stared, a second voice, a man’s, joined in, deep and strained: ‘He’s coming.’ The little girl’s voice then repeated, ‘Mommy, he’s coming.’ The cassette player emitted a high-pitched whir, then went silent. The door to the wardrobe slammed shut, and the room fell into an icy stillness.

We didn’t sleep that night. We stayed up, holding each other, and when the morning came with the girls returned, we tried to convince ourselves it was a prank, but we knew it wasn’t. We began to investigate the house’s history. An elderly neighbor, Mr. Higginbottom, told us that the farmhouse had been built in the 1930s, and in the 1950s, a family had lived here: a mother, a father, and a young daughter named Sarah. The father had a history of violent outbursts, and one night, he killed his wife and Sarah before turning the gun on himself. The bodies were found days later, with the little girl’s voice heard on an answering machine begging her grandmother for help.

That cassette player, we discovered, was Sarah’s. She used to record herself singing and telling stories, and her father would listen to them at night. But the tapes had been destroyed after the murder-suicide, except for one, hidden in the wall. It was that tape that had somehow found its way into the cassette player, and it was replaying a recording of Sarah’s last moments, a loop of her calling out for her mother.

We tried to rid the house of it. We burned the cassette, but the next day, it reappeared in the wardrobe, pristine. We moved the cassette player to the attic, but we’d find it back in the bedroom each morning. The voice would call out at odd hours, sometimes just a single ‘Mommy,’ sometimes a full sentence: ‘He’s in the walls.’

We consulted a local priest, who performed a blessing, but it did nothing. The final straw came when we discovered the father’s old hunting knife under the floorboards. The moment I touched it, the cassette player began to play a distorted, guttural chant, and the words ‘He’s coming’ were repeated over and over again. I dropped the knife, and suddenly the house went dead quiet.

A week later, we packed our things and left. We never told the girls the full truth; we just said the house had too many drafts. But after we moved, we started to hear the voice in our new apartment, the same childish cry for ‘Mommy’ in the dead of night. And sometimes, we’d find the cassette player on our bedside table, its reels turning, a faint whisper emanating from it, growing louder each time.

I don’t know where it is now, but I know it’s still with us. And sometimes, when I look at Elena in the dark, I see her eyes not looking at me but over my shoulder, as if she sees something behind me. I’m afraid to turn around.

So, that’s my story. I’m not sure what it means, but I know this: some things are better left buried, and some voices never stop calling.