The Charred Recorder

I’ve always been drawn to the unexplained, and so was my friend Mara. We’d spend hours poring over books about the paranormal, convinced that the veil between worlds was thinner than most people believed. So when we stumbled upon a late-night show featuring a medium who used a voice recorder to capture ghostly whispers, we were hooked. It wasn’t a Ouija board, which we’d both sworn off after a particularly unsettling incident with a planchette that spelled out a name we didn’t recognize. This method seemed safer, more scientific.

Mara lived in an old farmhouse on the outskirts of a town that had seen better days. The house creaked and groaned as if it had stories to tell, but we’d never experienced anything truly spooky there. That night, we decided to try the medium’s technique in her living room, which was cluttered with vintage furniture and knick-knacks. The only light came from a single candle we placed on the coffee table, casting long, dancing shadows on the walls. We switched off the electric lights and sat cross-legged on the floor, the voice recorder placed between us, its red light blinking like an eye in the dark.

For the first few minutes, we tried to be serious, but the tension was too much. We started giggling, making up ridiculous questions to ask the so-called spirits. ‘Do you like peanut butter?’ Mara joked. ‘Are you a ghost or a ghoul?’ I added, stifling a laugh. The recorder captured our voices, but nothing else. We began to get bored, the novelty wearing off. Just as we were about to give up, the candle flickered violently, though there was no draft. A cold sensation crawled up my spine, and the hair on my arms stood on end. The recorder let out a high-pitched whine, then went silent.

We froze, the laughter dying in our throats. The room felt suddenly oppressive, as if we were being watched. The shadows seemed to deepen, and the candle flame burned a strange blue at its base. I wanted to turn on the lights, but my limbs felt heavy, like in a nightmare. Mara reached for the recorder, but just as her fingers touched it, the candle went out. In the pitch black, I heard a sound—not from us, but from the recorder, a garbled voice that didn’t belong to either of us. It said, ‘I counted them all.

My heart pounded as I fumbled for the light switch. When the overhead light flickered on, the room looked normal, but the recorder was in a different spot, closer to the wall, and its casing was warm to the touch. We played it back, hearing our own voices, but at the end there was a metallic scraping sound, like nails on a chalkboard. Then, a man’s voice, deep and mournful: ‘The first one was in the attic.’ Mara and I exchanged horrified glances. She admitted she had keys to the attic but had never been up there because the door was stuck.

We didn’t sleep that night. We stayed up, talking in hushed tones, the recorder sitting on the kitchen table like a cursed object. The next morning, we decided to try the attic door. It wasn’t stuck; it creaked open easily, as if recently oiled. The stairs led up into a dusty, cobweb-filled space, illuminated by a single bare bulb that flickered on as we reached the top. In the center of the attic was a child’s rocking chair, rocking gently on its own. Next to it, on a dusty shelf, lay an old voice recorder, its tape half-chewed, and a photograph of a young boy with solemn eyes. The tape, when we played it, contained a woman’s voice sobbing: ‘They took him, my boy.’

We never found out who the boy was, but the local librarian told us that the house had been a boarding house in the 1920s, and the owner’s son had disappeared without a trace. The recorder we used that night, we found later, was not the one we started with. The original was still in the living room, untouched. The one we captured the voice on was older, more worn, and it had a char mark on its casing, as if it had been through a fire. We burned the recorder in the backyard, but to this day, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being counted. And sometimes, late at night, I think I hear that voice again, whispering, ‘The first one was in the attic,’ as if there’s a second one waiting to be found.