The Crooked Lantern

The Crooked Lantern

It began in late autumn, after we moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the marsh. The house had been empty for years, and the realtor had warned us about the damp and the constant creaking of the floorboards. But we were charmed by the wide porch and the way the fog rolled in from the water each evening. My partner, Delia, and I thought it would be a peaceful retreat from the city. We were wrong.

At first, the oddities were subtle. We’d find the kitchen faucet dripping when we knew we’d turned it off. The back door would be slightly ajar, though we always locked it. And there was the smell—a faint, sweet odor of rotting honey, especially near the cellar door. Delia dismissed it as mold or maybe a dead animal in the walls. I tried to agree, but a knot of unease tightened in my chest.

Then the nights started. We’d be lying in bed, just drifting off, when a sound like a heavy chain being dragged across the floor would echo from the attic. Or the frantic scratching inside the walls. I’d get up to investigate, my heart hammering, but I’d find nothing. Once, I walked into the living room and saw, for just a split second, a figure standing by the window—a tall, gaunt silhouette that seemed to be wearing a crooked hat. When I blinked, it was gone, and the window was bare.

Delia saw it too one night. She woke from a nightmare, gasping, and pointed at the corner of the room. ‘There’s someone there,’ she whispered. I turned on the light, and of course, no one was there. But the air was cold, and I could feel eyes on us, watching from the shadows. That feeling of being observed was constant now, like a weight pressing on my skin.

The breaking point came on the first Monday of December. We had just turned off the lights, and the house settled into its usual nighttime groans. Then, from the kitchen, came a violent crash—pots and pans clattering, glass shattering. Delia screamed, and I bolted upright, grabbing the flashlight from the nightstand. ‘Stay here,’ I said, but she followed me, clutching the back of my shirt.

We crept down the hallway, the floorboards creaking under our feet. The kitchen was a disaster—drawers pulled out, cutlery strewn across the tile, a chair overturned. But the back door was locked, the windows intact. And there, on the kitchen island, was our old brass lantern, the one we’d bought at an antique shop in town. It was glowing, a sickly yellow light that flickered as if fueled by something unseen. We hadn’t used it in weeks; it was on a shelf in the living room.

I reached out to touch it, and as my fingers brushed the cold metal, the flame died, and the room plunged into darkness. At the same moment, a sound filled the house—a low, guttural hum that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The floor began to vibrate, and I felt a presence, immense and malevolent, pressing down on us. Delia screamed again, and we ran for the front door, fumbling with the lock. We burst out into the night, the fog swallowing us, and we didn’t stop running until we reached the main road.

We never went back. We left everything—our clothes, our books, even our cat, which we later discovered had vanished. We moved to a cramped apartment in the city and tried to forget. But some things you can’t escape. A few weeks later, I was unpacking a box of kitchen items, and there it was: that same brass lantern, its glass slightly cracked, but the wick dry. I hadn’t packed it. I hadn’t even gone back to retrieve it. I threw it in the trash, but that night, I saw it on the nightstand, glowing with that sickly light.

We threw it away three more times—in a dumpster, into the river, even buried it in a field. But it always returns, sometimes placed upright, sometimes tilted, as if it has a mind of its own. Delia says she sees a figure standing by it in the dark, wearing a crooked smile. And every night, as we lie in bed, I hear that hum, low and constant, growing a little louder each time. The lantern is learning our patterns, and I’m terrified of the day it finally tips over and spills its light onto something it shouldn’t.