The Depot’s Lullaby

When I was eight, my parents bought a tired, two-story house on the outskirts of Blackwood, a town so small it didn’t even merit a traffic light. The house had a peculiar layout: the main floor was a sprawling, low-ceilinged space that felt too open, while the upstairs had been divided into a self-contained apartment, complete with its own kitchen and a narrow staircase that creaked even when untouched. The previous owners, an elderly couple, had kept the house cluttered with relics from its past life as a general store—shelves still lined the walls, and in the corner of the living room sat an ancient, out-of-tune upright piano, its keys yellowed and its wooden frame scarred.

From the start, the house felt off. Not in a dramatic way, but in a persistent, nagging manner—like a constant draft you couldn’t trace. The upstairs apartment was always a few degrees colder, and the doorway to it seemed to exhale a faint, musty odor of old wood and dust, even after we aired the place out. My room was on the main floor, down a short hall from the kitchen. It had a large closet with sliding doors, and behind the back panel of that closet, there was a hidden door leading to a narrow set of stairs that descended into a basement. The basement was unfinished, with dirt floors and stone walls, and it smelled of damp earth and something metallic.

About a month after we moved in, the strange occurrences began. It started with the piano. At precisely midnight, I would be jolted awake by the sound of a single, dissonant chord—a heavy, resonant B-flat that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards. The first time it happened, I thought my mother was playing, but when I crept into the living room, the room was empty, the piano bench was pushed in, and a thin layer of dust on the keys showed no fresh fingerprints. The second time, I brought my parents, and we all watched from the doorway as the keys depressed on their own, playing a slow, melancholic waltz that lasted about a minute before falling silent. My father inspected the piano, but found nothing mechanical that could explain it.

The disturbances escalated. In my closet, the door to the basement would sometimes be ajar when I knew I had closed it. The basement itself became a place I dreaded. There was a small, separate room at the bottom of the stairs, off to the left, its door always slightly ajar. Entering that room felt like stepping into a freezer. The air was thick with unease, and I could feel icy fingers brushing the back of my neck even when no one was there. I started having nightmares of a man with hollow eyes standing in that room, humming a lullaby I’d never heard before.

One evening, my father decided to spend the night in the basement to ‘get to the bottom of it.’ He took a flashlight and a sleeping bag. My mother and I waited upstairs, but we heard nothing unusual until about two in the morning, when we heard a piercing scream from below. We rushed down to find my father sitting on the floor, white as a sheet, babbling about a face in the dark. He refused to sleep in the house again, and we moved out within a week.

Years later, I returned to Blackwood for a funeral, and on a whim, I asked the local librarian if she knew anything about the old store that used to be my house. She told me that in the 1920s, the store had been run by a man named Elias, who had a young daughter named Lily. Lily had died of scarlet fever in that very house, and Elias, grief-stricken, would spend his nights playing piano tunes meant to soothe her. The upstairs apartment, she said, was actually Lily’s old playroom, and the hidden room in the basement had been used as a cold storage for milk and meat—but also as a makeshift morgue when the town had no doctor.

That night, I sat in my motel room and couldn’t shake the feeling that I was still hearing that waltz. I closed my eyes, and for a moment, I saw the room in the basement—the door now wide open, and the figure of a little girl standing inside, humming the same lullaby from my nightmares. Her eyes were empty, but she was smiling, beckoning me to come closer. I haven’t slept soundly since. I’ll never forget the cold of that room, or the way the piano always played at midnight, as if waiting for someone to listen.