The Frosted Glass

We moved into the old Harrington place on the edge of Maple Hollow when I was fourteen. It wasn’t as grand as the name suggested; it was a drafty Victorian with peeling wallpaper and a cellar that always smelled of wet earth. My father had inherited it from a great-uncle he never spoke of, and we arrived in a thunderstorm that soaked our moving boxes. My sisters—Tessa, the eldest, who rolled her eyes at everything; twins Maya and Lena, who were eleven and shared a room; and me, the middle child—we all felt it. The house watched us. We’d catch flickers of movement in the corners of our eyes, a white shape hovering in a doorway when we carried furniture up the stairs, or black streaks darting around the next corner just as we turned. But we never spoke of it, because saying it aloud would make it real.

That afternoon, the sun was so bright it turned the hallway windows into squares of liquid gold. I was on the second floor, heading for the bathroom with a towel wrapped around my head, my skin sticky from helping Dad fix the porch railing. The bathroom had a glass shower door, not clear but rippled with a pattern that distorted everything behind it—like looking through water. I stepped in and turned the handle, and the hot water pounded against my back, washing away the grime. I lathered my hair with the cheap shampoo Mom had bought, the scent of coconut filling the steam. My eyes were closed, and I was humming a song I’d heard on the radio, when a shadow fell across the glass.

I froze mid-lather. The light in the bathroom had changed, dimmed. I opened my eyes a crack, and through the ripples I saw a small, dark silhouette on the other side of the shower door. It was about the height of a child, but it was pitch black, like a hole in the fabric of the room. I thought it was one of my sisters, maybe Maya, come to tease me.

‘Hello?’ I said, my voice echoing off the tile. ‘Which one of you is it?’

No answer. The figure didn’t move. It just stood there, watching me through the frosted glass, its edges fuzzy, as if it were made of smoke. A knot tightened in my stomach. My sisters would have laughed, made a joke, or at least said something. This thing was silent. I told myself it was just a towel hanging on the hook, a trick of the light. But the silhouette was too solid, too dark. It had a head, shoulders, and arms hanging at its sides.

I closed my eyes again, a bad idea, but I wanted to rinse the shampoo out before I did anything. I turned my face toward the water, letting it stream over my scalp. When I opened my eyes, I expected the figure to be gone, a figment of my overactive imagination. It was still there, but it had moved closer. It was pressed right against the glass, and I could see the outline of its face—no features, just a smooth misshapen head. My heart slammed against my ribs. I slapped the water off, grabbed the handle of the glass door, and yanked it open.

The steam rushed out in a billow, and the bathroom was empty. The door to the hallway was closed. The air was cold, a stark contrast to the warmth of the shower. I stood there, dripping wet, my skin covered in goosebumps. Then I saw it: a tiny handprint on the inside of the shower glass, right at the height of the figure’s hand. It was black, not soapy or wet—it looked like ash pressed into the surface. I touched it, and it smeared, leaving a gray streak on my finger.

I did not finish my shower. I wrapped a towel around myself, my legs shaking, and ran out into the hallway. My sisters were in the living room downstairs, watching TV. I burst in, my hair still dripping. ‘Did one of you just come up to the bathroom?’ They all looked at me, bewildered. ‘No,’ Tessa said, not even looking up from her show. ‘You’re still wet. You look like a ghost.’

I didn’t tell them what I saw. I went back upstairs later, dressed, and the handprint was gone. But from that day on, the house felt different. The corner-of-the-eye sightings grew more frequent. I’d see the black figure more often—in the hallway, at the end of my bed, always watching. Sometimes it would be joined by the white one, a tall, wispy thing that seemed to be missing its lower half. They never did more than watch, but the watcher in the shower was the first time I felt malice, a deep, patient hatred that seemed to emanate from the glass.

A year later, we moved out. I remember standing in the empty front hall, with all our boxes piled by the door, and I saw the white figure standing in the doorway to the living room. It was faint, like fog, but it was unmistakably there. It stepped halfway through the doorway, and I swear it was watching me with eyes that weren’t there. We drove away, and I didn’t look back.

But the handprint stayed with me. I’ve tried to scrub it from my memory, but it’s etched there, like that day. I live in Texas now, far from that house, but sometimes, when I step into a shower with a frosted glass door, I see a dark shadow on the other side, and I hear my own voice asking, ‘Hello? Which one of you is it?’ And I know, whatever it was, it’s still there. It’s still waiting.