The Dripping Sound Above the Nursery

In 1989, I shared a sprawling, decaying Victorian mansion in the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island, with four other graduate students. The house, built in the 1880s by a wealthy textile merchant, had been split into oddly shaped apartments, but we rented the entire second floor and attic. The place was a labyrinth of narrow hallways, unused dumbwaiters, and peeling wallpaper that seemed to hold the musty breath of a century. We were all broke, sleep-deprived, and too busy with our dissertations to question the cheap rent or the fact that the landlord only communicated by mail.

About three weeks in, my roommate Lena started sleepwalking. She’d stand in the middle of the hallway at 3 AM, her eyes open but vacant, pointing at a spot on the ceiling where the plaster formed a dark, water-stained bloom. We’d guide her back to bed, and she’d have no memory of it in the morning. We joked that she was stressed about her thesis on pre-Civil War textile mills, but the joke wore thin when she began to leave small, deliberate objects in the hallway: a child’s marble, a rusted key, a single leather boot. When we asked her about them, she’d say, ‘I’m just tidying up.’ None of us had ever seen those things before.

The first direct encounter happened on a rainy October night. I was in my room, unable to sleep, when I heard a slow, rhythmic dripping from the bathroom above—a sound that shouldn’t exist because the bathroom was directly under the attic, and the attic was sealed off. I went to investigate and found the door to the attic slightly ajar. The scent of damp wool and coal dust wafted down. I pushed the door open, and the dripping stopped. In the dim light from my flashlight, I saw a child’s rocking horse in the center of the attic, its paint chipped, and a small brass plaque on the wall that read ‘For Edmund, Age 4.’ I didn’t touch anything. I backed out, and the dripping resumed, as if it had been waiting for me to leave.

The next day, I told my other roommates, Marcus and Priya. They thought I was pranking them. Then Marcus found a cluster of small handprints on the inside of his closet door, as if a child had been shut in there. The prints were faint, like ash, and they wiped away easily with a damp cloth—but they reappeared the next night. Priya, a skeptic, decided to stay up one night with a voice recorder. She caught nothing, but when she listened back, there was a soft, high-pitched humming between the recorded silence, a lullaby she didn’t recognize. She played it for us, and Lena, who had been quiet, started to cry. ‘That’s what my mother used to hum to me before she died,’ Lena whispered. ‘But she died in a fire when I was four.’

We all tried to ignore the growing unease, throwing ourselves into work. But then the drip became a steady trickle, and the attic door creaked open on its own. We decided to investigate together, armed with flashlights and a camera. The attic was larger than we expected, filled with old trunks, moth-eaten curtains, and a crib in the corner, its sides worn as if by small teeth. In the crib, we found a child’s diary, its pages brittle and yellowed. The entries were simple: ‘Daddy locked me in the attic again. I hate the dark. The man with the red eyes watches me. He says I’m his now.’ The final entry read: ‘I’m going to sleep now. He says I’ll never have to leave.’

The name in the diary was Edmund, the same as on the plaque. We later learned from a neighbor that the original owner had a son who died in the 1880s, supposedly of a fever. But the neighbor also mentioned local rumors: the father was a cruel man, and the boy was ‘sickly’ and rarely seen. The father claimed the boy ran away, but no one believed him. The attic had been sealed shortly after.

We tried to leave the house, but every time we packed our bags, we found them unpacked the next morning, and the attic door would be open again. The dripping became a constant companion, a slow, mocking pulse. One night, I woke to find all four of us standing in the hallway, looking up at a dark shape that resembled a child, but its head was too large, and its eyes were like burn holes in a shroud. It pointed at me, and I felt a cold, wet hand on my shoulder—Lena’s hand, but her eyes were black. She smiled, and her voice was not her own: ‘Edmund wants us to play.’

We never made it to the front door again. The house wouldn’t let us. We became part of its collection, our faces appearing in the attic windows, waving at passersby who rarely looked up. And the drip above the nursery continues, a sound that never stops, a sound that is, in fact, the slow, endless falling of tears from a child who will never be heard, but who now has an audience of five.