The Counting of Stairs

When I was nine, my family spent a week at my great-uncle Harold’s farmhouse in the Welsh Marches. It was a sprawling, stone-built place from the 1700s, with creaking floors and a narrow, twisting staircase that seemed to swallow sound. I’d always loved it there, the way the rooms smelled of woodsmoke and old paper, but that February visit, something felt off.

It was the third evening. The adults were gathered in the parlor, drinking tea and laughing over a game of cards. My younger cousin, Thomas, and I were in the large entrance hall, building a tower from blocks that Harold had kept from his own children. The hall was lit by a single, low-wattage bulb in a brass fixture with a pull-cord, casting long shadows that jumped with every flicker. I remember feeling a prickle on the back of my neck, as if someone was standing just behind me, watching. I turned, but there was no one.

‘Did you feel that?’ I asked Thomas.

He looked up, his face blank. ‘Feel what?’

‘Like someone’s looking at us.’

He shrugged and went back to his blocks. I tried to ignore it, but the feeling persisted, growing colder and more insistent. I even walked to the foot of the stairs and looked up into the dark well above, half-expecting to see a figure silhouetted there. Nothing.

At around half past nine, Thomas grew tired and went in to sit on his mother’s lap, quickly falling asleep. I stayed in the hall, determined to finish my tower. The house was quiet now, save for the crackle of the fire and the murmur of adult voices. That’s when I heard it: a soft, rhythmic scratching, like fingernails dragging across wood. It came from the direction of the staircase, but it wasn’t the sound of mice. It was too deliberate, too slow. Scratch. Pause. Scratch. Pause.

I told myself it was an old house settling, or maybe a bird trapped in the chimney. I kept building. The scratching continued, growing closer, as if something was descending the stairs one step at a time, pausing to scratch at each one. The air grew cold, and I could see my breath.

I tried to call out to my parents, but my voice got stuck in my throat. The scratching stopped right at the bottom of the stairs. I felt a presence there, a weight, though I couldn’t see anything. The light bulb flickered, and in that intermittent dark, I saw it: a thin, tall shape, humanoid but wrong, with limbs too long and a head bowed as if it was counting the steps. It had no face, just a smooth, grey surface, but I knew it was looking at me.

It took a step forward, and I felt the pressure of its attention as if it had placed a hand on my shoulder. I stumbled backward, my tower crashing to the floor. The noise brought my uncle to the door. ‘Everything alright?’ he asked, and as he spoke, the figure was gone, the cold lifted, and the scratching returned, but now from upstairs, as if it was retreating.

I couldn’t speak. My uncle and father came out, finding me shivering and pale. They scolded me for being scared of the dark, said the old house was full of drafts and sounds. But I knew what I had seen.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my narrow bed, listening. The scratching started again, coming from the wall beside me. Then, I heard a voice, a thin, dry whisper: ‘One… two… three…’ It was counting, slowly, endlessly. It counted the stairs, I realized. But there were only thirteen steps in that house. The voice went past thirteen, into numbers I didn’t recognize, as if counting steps in a place with no end.

I pulled the covers over my head and didn’t move until morning. When I told my parents, they attributed it to a nightmare, but I never went near that staircase again. We never spoke of it. But years later, when my great-uncle passed away, I inherited a box of his journals. In one, from 1932, I found a sketch of that same stairwell, and a note: ‘She counts. She counts the steps that lead to the room where she waits. I have blocked the door with iron, but she grows stronger each year.’

The room at the top of the stairs had always been locked. We were told it was storage. But now I wonder, what did Harold keep hidden behind that iron? And why, on that winter night, did I feel her watching me, as if I was the next step in her count?