The Eighth Floor’s Hum

I was seven when I first heard it—a faint, melodic hum that seemed to seep through the walls of our apartment on the eighth floor. It wasn’t a whistle, exactly, but a series of notes that rose and fell like a lullaby sung by someone with no breath. I asked my mother if she heard it, and she said it was the pipes. I asked my father, and he said it was the wind. But the hum followed me, even when the windows were sealed and the water was still.

At nine, I saw something. I was playing with my toy cars near the hallway mirror, and in the reflection, behind my own smudged face, there was a figure—a small, hunched shape that darted into the shadow of the linen closet. I spun around, but nothing was there. The closet door was slightly ajar, and inside, among the folded towels, I found a single gray button. I kept it in my pocket for years, convinced it was a clue.

We moved when I was twelve, to a house at the end of a cul-de-sac, far from the city’s hum. But the silence there was worse. The first night, I lay in my new bed, and the hum returned, fainter, like a memory. It came from the attic. My parents said it was the old furnace. I knew better.

By fourteen, I had a name for it: the Wandering Note. It would appear when I was alone—during dinner prep, in the shower, while I did my homework. It was always the same sequence, five notes that looped, as if waiting for a response. I tried humming back once, and the hum stopped for a week. I thought I had broken the cycle. But then I found a small pile of gray buttons on my pillow, all identical to the one from the Hallway House.

At seventeen, I learned the truth from an elderly neighbor, Mrs. Kessler, who had lived in the Hallway House before us. She told me about a previous tenant, a young girl named Elsie, who had died in the bathroom. The official report said it was pneumonia, but Mrs. Kessler whispered that Elsie had been locked in there for hours, crying and humming a tune to keep herself calm. The tune—she hummed it for me—was the same five notes.

I confronted my parents that night, demanding to know why they never believed me. My mother finally broke down. She admitted she had heard the hum too, but she’d been told all her life that it was her imagination. ‘We thought it would go away if we ignored it,’ she said. ‘We were so wrong.’

That’s when I knew I had to stop it. I did research, pouring over old records and city archives. I found that Elsie had a younger brother, Liam, who died of a fever a year later. They were buried together in a small cemetery on the outskirts of town. I started visiting their graves, leaving white flowers, hoping to make peace. But the hum only grew louder.

One night, I woke to find my bedroom door ajar, and the hum was coming from the hallway. I followed it, my feet bare on the cold floor. The house was dark, but I could see a faint light coming from the bathroom at the end of the hall. I pushed the door open. The mirror was fogged, and on the glass, written in the condensation, were the words: ‘TWELVE YEARS, TWELVE MORE.’ The hum intensified, and I felt a cold breath on my neck.

I spun around. For a split second, I saw a reflection in the mirror—not my own, but a small, pale girl with wet hair, her eyes black and empty. She was holding a gray button. She placed it on the sink, and it rolled toward me. I screamed.

My parents rushed in, but the mirror was clear, the words gone. I was trembling, and they finally believed me. We moved again, but the hum followed, lodged in the walls of every new home. I’m twenty-five now, and I’ve learned to live with it. But the buttons keep appearing—on my dresser, in my shoes, under my pillow. I’ve collected forty-eight so far. And every time I look in a mirror, I see a flicker at the edge of my vision, a small girl standing just behind my shoulder, humming that same five-note tune. I know now that it will never stop. Not until I join her, and I’m beginning to think that maybe that’s the only way to end it. The hum is in my ears as I write this, and tonight, I will finally answer.