The Empty Swing Set

March 15, 2026

by Jaiden

The old Victorian on Elm Street had always been a local curiosity. Locals whispered about the original owner, a recluse who vanished one winter, leaving behind a house full of strange, unfinished carpentry projects. When Clara rented the top-floor apartment, she’d dismissed the tales as small-town gossip. She shared the sprawling space with two other artists, neither of whom were home that Tuesday afternoon. Clara was in the kitchen, meticulously arranging her brushes by bristle type, when a sound, distinct and heavy, like a sigh of profound weariness, issued from directly behind her. It wasn’t startling, initially. It sounded precisely like her downstairs neighbor, Marcus, a kind man she often heard pottering around his studio. But Marcus would have had to phase through her locked door. She spun around. The kitchen was empty, the afternoon sun slanting through the grimy windowpane, illuminating dust motes dancing in the silent air. A thorough check of the apartment revealed no one. The deadbolt on the front door was still firmly in place.

A few weeks later, Clara was visiting her sister in the city, a good hundred miles away. Her roommates, too, were scattered – one at a gallery opening in Chicago, the other visiting family upstate. Only Marcus remained in the building, his studio door ajar as usual. When Clara returned late Sunday, exhausted from the journey, Marcus, his brow furrowed with genuine confusion, met her in the hallway. “Where were you all day yesterday?” he asked, his voice laced with a strange anxiety. Clara, perplexed, replied, “Yesterday? I was with my sister. I just got back from the city.” Marcus’s eyes widened, his usual calm demeanor replaced by something akin to alarm. “That’s… odd,” he stammered, “because yesterday afternoon, she and I… we saw you. In the garden.”

Clara’s blood ran cold. She lived alone, except for the occasional presence of her roommates. Marcus, too, had been ostensibly alone, save for the presence of the woman whose studio occupied the apartment below him – a pale, gaunt artist named Elara, known for her unsettling, hyper-realistic sculptures. Marcus described Elara’s demeanor as increasingly erratic in recent weeks. He’d been preparing his own canvases when he heard a commotion from Elara’s studio, a choked gasp followed by a dull thud. He’d gone to check, finding the door slightly ajar. Inside, Elara was nowhere to be seen, but her latest work was finished: a life-sized effigy of Clara, startlingly lifelike, posed as if caught mid-fall from the old, disused swing set in the overgrown back garden. The effigy wore Clara’s favorite scarf. A single, rusted chain of the swing set lay broken on the damp earth beneath it, as if it had finally given way under an unbearable, unseen weight. The profound sigh Clara had heard in her kitchen now seemed to emanate from the very fabric of the house, a mournful exhalation of something trapped, something that had briefly, terrifyingly, mistaken her for another.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Cradle of Ash

The Pinehollow Historical Society had been our client before, but this time it felt different. They’d called us about the old Merriwether Farmhouse, a rambling Victorian that had stood empty for a decade after the last occupant, an elderly woman named Esther, had passed under circumstances the county coroner had politely labeled ‘indeterminate.’ The society […]

The Harvest Portrait

The autumn of my sixth year, my grandmother, Nana Rose, held her annual harvest gathering. Our farmhouse, nestled in the amber fields of Nebraska, was the heart of these celebrations. The air smelled of cinnamon and damp earth, and the porch was strung with gnarled gourds and dried corn. My great-grandfather, Pa Anderson, had been […]

The Glass Operator’s Log

Marta Voss had spent the last decade of her life chasing signals. As a radio astronomer at the High Desert Radio Observatory, she lived by data, not by faith. She had debunked more ‘anomalies’ than she could count—cold spots, electronic voices, images of saints in toast. The universe, she told her colleagues, was a beautiful, […]

The Cold Press

I remember that night in late February, the sort of damp chill that settles into old brick and doesn’t let go. I had just finished a double shift at the cannery, my fingers still smelling faintly of brine and metal. The house was one of those narrow, pre-war rowhouses on Hemlock Street, a place I’d […]

The Collector of Lost Hours

The trouble began, I think, with the blackout. Not the one that hit the whole neighborhood—that was just a storm, a tree branch, a transformer. I mean the one that happened inside our house, in the tiny gap between the kitchen and the dining room, on a Tuesday evening when I was carrying a stack […]

The Painted Window

The summer I turned sixteen, my little sister Mira and I started cataloging the impossible. It began with small things—a flowerpot that had moved three inches overnight, the persistent smell of pipe tobacco in a house where no one smoked. Then came the sightings. Mira, who was twelve and had always been more perceptive than […]

The Clover Warning

In the autumn of 1989, my fiancé Marcus and I decided on a final camping trip before our November wedding. We drove deep into the pine woods of northern Minnesota, far from any town, seeking the perfect spot by a cold, clear lake. But the weather had other plans. The wind howled off the lake […]

The Spinning Top in Room 3B

The first time I saw the boy, I was hauling a box of my great-uncle’s old clothes up to the fourth-floor storage room of the Everhart Hotel. The hotel had been in our family for generations, and after my great-uncle’s death, my aunt Cordelia had decided to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast. I was helping […]

The Stairwell at 3:27

The first time I saw it, I was coming down from the attic, a box of old Christmas ornaments in my arms. The stairwell light was a sickly yellow, barely illuminating the narrow passage. A figure stood at the bottom, silhouetted against the dim glow from the kitchen. It was tall, impossibly thin, and utterly […]

The Clockwork Hum

In the autumn of 2015, I found myself in the small, dust-choked town of Marrow, North Dakota, sent there by my company to oversee the digitalization of the local archives. The town was a skeleton of its former self, its main street lined with boarded-up storefronts, a single diner that served grey coffee, and a […]

The Cinder Path

I’m writing this from the burn unit at St. Anne’s Hospital, my hands swathed in bandages, my face still pink and peeling. They say I’m lucky to be alive. I don’t feel lucky. I feel like I’ve been given a glimpse of something that should have stayed hidden, and I’m terrified of what it might […]

The Ceiling Watcher

I remember the summer of 2005, not for the usual reasons a thirteen-year-old might recall a summer, but because it was the summer my grandfather decided to demolish the old Whitmore Sanatorium in upstate New York. He had inherited it decades ago, a crumbling monstrosity of peeling paint, rusted bars, and empty corridors that seemed […]