The Constant Draft

My name is Elena, and this is my account. It began with a battered cardboard box we found in the attic of our new house, a place we’d rented sight unseen from a landlord who warned us about the draft. The house, a two-story Victorian with peeling paint and a porch that sagged like a tired smile, was in a town called Murkwood, where the trees pressed close and the fog rolled in off the lake every evening. The box contained a Ouija board, but not the kind you buy in a store. This one was handmade, the wood dark and worn, the letters etched by hand, and there was a metal planchette with a small, cloudy crystal in its center. My younger sister, Iris, found it and thought it was a game. Our mother, a practical woman, warned us to leave it alone, but we didn’t listen.

We set it up in Iris’s closet, because her room was the largest, and we called out for anyone. A spirit answered, calling herself ‘Millie’. She was cheerful, told us stories about the house’s past, how she was a maid who died of consumption in the 1920s. We welcomed her, and for a while, it was like having a friendly ghost. But as weeks passed, she grew silent. We tried to contact her again, but the planchette moved erratically. Then, one night, it spelled out a name: ‘Edmund’. He was not friendly. He claimed he was a farmer whose wife, Ruth, had poisoned him and their three children, two boys and a girl, all under eight. He was bitter and accusatory, blaming us for his pain. We spoke to the children too, their voices coming through as faint, jumbled words, but they cried for their mother.

After that night, the house changed. The draft that the landlord mentioned became a constant presence. It wasn’t just a breeze; it was a cold, purposeful air that moved through the rooms, finding you no matter where you were. And the temperature in my bedroom dropped drastically. Even in the heat of summer, with the windows shut and a blanket wrapped around me, I could see my breath. My closet door, which I always kept closed, would creak open on its own, and inside, the darkness seemed deeper than it should be. I’d hear faint whispers, like children calling for help, but when I opened the door, there was nothing.

One night, I woke to find a word written in the dust on my mirror: ‘GO’. I tried to convince my mother we should leave, but she said it was just a draft and my imagination. Iris started having nightmares. She’d wake up screaming about a man with soil on his hands pulling at her blanket. She said the closet door would open and she’d see a woman with hollow eyes and three small shapes behind her. I didn’t sleep well after that. I took to leaving a lamp on in my room, but the cold persisted. It was as if the house itself had become a vessel for something else, something that wore Edmund’s grief like a shroud but was not him.

Then I saw her. I’d stayed up late, reading, when the door to my closet swung open slowly. A woman stood there, not solid, but a shimmering outline. She wore a long dress, stained with what looked like mud or old blood. Her face was gaunt, her hair stringy, and in her arms she cradled a bundle of rags. She didn’t move, just stared at me with deep, empty sockets. I tried to scream, but no sound came. She raised a hand, pointing at me, and then the closet door slammed shut. The cold intensified, and I felt a pressure on my chest, as if something were sitting on me. I couldn’t move for what felt like an hour, until the dawn light crept in and the pressure eased.

I fled the room, my breath ragged. I went to Iris’s room, and I found her sitting up in bed, her eyes wide open, staring at the closet. She whispered, ‘She’s in there. She wants us to be her children.’ That morning, I called a paranormal investigator, a woman named Dr. Reyes who lived in the next town. She arrived with a machine to measure electromagnetic fields and a recorder. She walked through the house, her face grim. She stopped in my room, then in the closet, and finally in Iris’s closet. She turned to us, her voice low. ‘There’s a residual haunting, but also an intelligent one. The woman you saw is Ruth, Edmund’s wife. But the story is twisted. It was Edmund who killed the children, and Ruth killed him in retaliation. She’s trapped here, and she’s trying to take the living to replace her loss.’

Dr. Reyes tried to cleanse the house, but the draft only grew stronger. We decided to leave, to pack up and move to a hotel. But as we were leaving, the front door wouldn’t open. The wood was swollen, the lock jammed. We were trapped. The draft blew through the halls, and I heard the children’s voices, clearer now: ‘Play with us.’ I turned to see the closet doors all open, and the woman Ruth standing at the end of the hall, her arms outstretched. Iris screamed, and my mother began to cry out a prayer. But I just stood there, feeling the cold seep into my bones, knowing that the draft was not of this world, and that we had opened a door that could not be closed. The last thing I remember is the woman’s mouth opening, and a sound like wind through dead leaves, before the darkness swallowed me. The house at Murkwood still stands, and sometimes people see lights in the windows. And if you press your ear to the door, you can hear a draft inside, and the faint sound of children laughing.