The Constant Visitor

Ten years ago, I signed a lease for a solitary cabin tucked into the folds of the Blue Ridge foothills, forty acres of whispering pines and rocky soil that felt like the end of the world. The landlord, a man named Harold, drove up from his home in Tampa one sweltering afternoon to see how I was settling in. He was a heavyset, balding man with a nervous laugh, and after the usual pleasantries, he told me about his daughter, Emily. She had loved that cabin, he said, spending every summer and Christmas there since she was a child. He paused, his gaze drifting toward the thicket behind the cabin, and added, almost as an afterthought, that she had died in a skateboard accident on her seventeenth birthday, just a year before I moved in.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. Grief is a private thing, and I respected his quiet sorrow. A couple of weeks later, I ran into Harold’s sister, Margaret, at a small country store down the mountain. She was a brisk, practical woman who didn’t mince words. I asked, out of politeness, where Emily was buried. Margaret pointed toward a ridge to the east. ‘She’s up there, not quarter mile from your door. You can walk it in ten minutes.’ She paused, then added with a strange, flat tone, ‘She wanted to be close to the cabin.’

On a warm, late-November day, the kind where the air is thin and golden, I decided to find the grave. I followed a deer trail that wound through the oaks, their leaves a brittle carpet underfoot. After a while, I came to a small clearing. In the center stood a granite headstone, polished to a mirror sheen, the kind that catches the sun. The inscription was simple, except for the last line, which made me stop cold: ‘BE CAREFUL, I AM WATCHING OVER YOU.’ I thought it was an odd thing to put on a grave, almost as if she were taunting the world, but I shrugged and continued my walk, dismissing it as a family’s private sentiment.

That night, tired from the trek, I sat down at my laptop to chat with a woman I’d met online, a writer from Asheville named Carla. We’d taken to video calls nearly every night, and I was looking forward to the comfort of her voice. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, talking about our days, the weather, the isolation. Then she went quiet, her face on the screen growing still. ‘Who else is in the cabin with you?’ she asked, her voice tight. I laughed and told her I was alone. She didn’t laugh. She said she’d just seen a figure pass behind me, reflected in the dark window behind my desk. A young girl, she said, with long hair and a pale dress.

I turned and saw nothing. The room was empty, the window black except for my own reflection. I flicked on the overhead light and laughed it off, telling her it was a trick of the light, a shadow from a tree. But Carla was adamant. She described the figure in detail: a teenage girl, barefoot, her hair hanging wet around her face, standing just behind my left shoulder. I felt a cold draft that hadn’t been there before. I ended the call early, blaming a sudden headache, and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched.

The next night, I opened my laptop reluctantly. Carla’s face appeared, her eyes wide with unease. She told me she had a bad feeling, that she’d been reading about the cabin’s history. She’d found an old newspaper article about Emily’s death. The article was brief: ‘Local girl, 17, dies in skateboard accident near family property.’ But Carla had dug deeper. She found a blog post by a woman named Sandra who claimed to have lived in the cabin years ago. Sandra wrote that strange things happened there, things she couldn’t explain. She had woken up one night to find the refrigerator door open and food tossed on the floor, the water running in the sink. Another time, she found the words ‘I’m here’ traced in the dust on the windowsill, written backward, as if from inside the glass.

I read those words and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the November cold. I went to the window, tracing the dust on the sill with my finger. There, in the faint light of the moon, I saw it: ‘I’m here’ written backward, just as Carla had described. I wiped it away with my sleeve, but the next morning, it was back.

I began to keep a journal of the strange occurrences. The smell of jasmine, even in winter. The sound of a girl humming, always the same tune, one I couldn’t quite place. The feeling of being touched on the shoulder, a light, almost apologetic tap, when I was alone. I tried to rationalize it, to attribute it to wind or my own imagination, but the events grew more frequent and more pointed. One night, I found the skateboard. It was leaning against the front door, a pink and gray board with a chip in the nose, as if it toppled over in a moment of tragedy. I hadn’t put it there.

I called Margaret and asked her about the inscription on the tombstone. She was silent for a long moment, then she sighed. ‘Emily always said that,’ she said. ‘She was a daredevil, always pushing herself, and her mother used to tell her to be careful. Emily would just laugh and say, ‘Don’t worry, I’m watching over you.’ It was her way of saying she was to be feared, not pitied. After she died, her mother insisted on putting those words on the stone. She said it was what Emily would have wanted.’

I hung up the phone and sat in the dark, the weight of those words pressing on me. ‘BE CAREFUL, I AM WATCHING OVER YOU.’ It wasn’t a blessing; it was a warning. The girl who died on her birthday, who loved that cabin, was not at rest. She was still there, watching, waiting.

The next morning, I found the door ajar. I hadn’t opened it. A trail of wet footprints led from the entrance to the bedroom, where the bed was neatly made, but on the pillow lay a single strand of long, dark hair. I remember Emily’s hair was dark in the old photos I’d seen.

I decided to leave. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was not alone, that the girl was not merely a ghost but a presence, an entity that had claimed the cabin as her own. I packed my things and drove away without looking back. I never spoke to Carla again, though I often thought of her. I found out later that she’d moved away from Asheville, never explaining why.

But as I sit in my new apartment in the city, the hum of traffic a safe distance away, I still feel her. I see her in my dreams, standing at the foot of the bed, her wet hair dripping onto the carpet, her lips moving in mute words. I have a mirror in my living room, and sometimes, in its reflection, I catch a glimpse of a girl with hollow eyes, standing just behind my shoulder. I don’t look anymore.

I thought I could escape her, but I know better now. Some places keep their dead, and some dead refuse to leave. She is watching, always. And I can’t shake the feeling that one day, she’ll decide it’s my turn to watch her too. Until then, I sleep with the lights on, and I never look into the dark windows at night, for fear that I’ll see her face pressed against the glass, smiling at me, her lips mouthing the words that are now etched into my soul: Be careful. I am watching over you.