The Crying Room

When I was an infant, my parents bought a dilapidated farmhouse in rural Maine, far from any neighbors. The previous owner, a reclusive old man named Mr. Harlow, had died under mysterious circumstances, and the estate was sold at auction. My mother, desperate for space, fell in love with the sprawling porch and the overgrown apple orchard. My father, a practical man, was wary of the house’s creaking bones, but the price was too good to pass up.

We moved in during a gray October, the kind of day where the sky presses down like a lid. The first night, I slept in a bassinet in my parents’ room, but soon I was given a nursery at the end of the upstairs hall, a room with peeling wallpaper and a window that looked out onto the orchard. My mother joked that the house had ‘good bones,’ but my father noticed things. At night, after my mother and I were asleep, he would watch television in the living room, and he’d hear it: a faint, plaintive crying. It sounded like a baby, but not me—I was asleep in my crib, or sometimes in my mother’s arms because I had a cold.

The crying came from the empty rooms at the other end of the hall, past the bathroom and the linen closet. Every time my father got up to investigate, the sound would stop the moment he stepped into the hallway. He’d check on me, find me still and dry, and then walk to the far end of the hall, where the wallpaper was darkest and the floorboards warped. Nothing. But as soon as he settled back into his armchair, the crying would resume, like a needle scratching a record.

This went on for weeks. My father tried to sneak, tiptoeing in his socks, but the crying always ceased the instant he crossed the threshold of the hall. He began to doubt his own ears. Once, I was staying with my grandmother in town, and he still heard the crying. He called the police, but they found nothing. The deputy, a young man with a tired face, said, ‘Old houses play tricks.’ My father didn’t sleep well after that.

One night, my mother was away visiting her sister, and I was in my crib. My father, exhausted, fell asleep on the couch. He dreamed of a woman in a long dress, standing at the end of the hall, her face in shadow, holding a bundle. In the dream, she lifted the bundle and it began to cry. He woke with a start, heart pounding. The house was silent. But then he heard it—a low, guttural moan, not a baby’s cry, but something deeper, angrier. It came from the wall behind the couch. He pressed his ear to the plaster and heard, as if from far away, a muffled sobbing. He tore at the wallpaper, revealing a door that had been sealed shut, its edges painted over.

He pried the door open with a crowbar. Inside was a small, windowless room, the walls stained with something dark. In the corner, a rusted crib, its mattress torn and discolored. On the floor, a child’s shoe. And in the air, the faint, sweet smell of decay. My father called the police again, and they found a human skeleton under the floorboards, wrapped in a moldy blanket. The remains were too small to be an adult.

The old man, Mr. Harlow, had been a recluse. They later learned he had a daughter who died as an infant, and that he had kept her body in the house. The crying my father heard was not coming from the baby version of me, but from that sealed room, the room of a child who had never been given a proper burial. The house was condemned, and we moved out. But even now, in our new apartment, I sometimes see my father pause at the end of a hallway, listening. And I wonder if he still hears the crying, and if he ever will again.