The Glass Eye in the Attic

I was never the kind of person who believed in ghosts, not really. I loved the shows, the thrill of a good scare, but deep down I figured it was all just entertainment. My mom, though, she had a quiet intensity about her when it came to the supernatural. She never said much, but I knew she had stories she kept locked away. One evening, we were curled up on the couch with a bottle of red wine, watching a grainy documentary about abandoned asylums. The wine loosened our tongues, and I asked her if she had ever seen anything she couldn’t explain. She paused, swirling the dark liquid in her glass, and then she told me about the summer of 1974, when she was eleven and her family moved to a crumbling farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a place called Hollow Creek.

She said the house was ancient, with peeling wallpaper and floors that groaned even when no one walked on them. Her father, a taciturn man, had bought it cheap from a widow who had vanished without a trace. The only thing left in the attic was a heavy, iron-bound trunk that her father tried to pry open but gave up on. My mom, being a curious girl, found the key one day hidden under the loose floorboard in her closet. She waited until her parents were outside, then dragged the trunk into the slanted light of a dusty window. The lock clicked open with a sigh, and inside she found a collection of oddities: a tarnished silver locket, a child’s leather shoe, and a small glass eye, blue as a robin’s egg, nestled in a velvet case.

She said the eye felt cold, unnaturally so, and she had the insane urge to slip it into her palm. The moment her skin touched the glass, the attic went silent, even the creaks of the old house seemed to hold their breath. And then, she heard a voice, not in her ears but inside her skull, soft and pleading, ‘You have my eye, but I need my eye to see the way out. Please, girl, give it back to me.’ Panicked, she shoved the eye back into the case and locked the trunk, but the voice didn’t stop. It followed her down the stairs, whispering ‘give it back’ over and over, until she ran outside and vomited behind the barn.

For weeks, she refused to go near the attic, but the voice grew louder, more desperate. It would call her name in the dead of night, and she’d find the glass eye on her pillow, even though she had locked the trunk and hidden the key. One night, she woke to find her bed covered in the eye, hundreds of them, all staring at her, all the same blue. She screamed, and her mother rushed in, but when the light flicked on, the eyes were gone, leaving only a single tear on her cheek. Her mother dismissed it as a nightmare, but my mom knew it was real.

She finally told her father, who, to her surprise, didn’t laugh. He just frowned and said, ‘There are things, girl, that don’t belong in this world. That eye is one of them. We need to put it back where it came from.’ So they drove to the old cemetery on the hill, the one overgrown with brambles. Her father had a map, and they found a grave with no name, just a date: 1872. He dug down and found a small wooden box, and inside was a porcelain doll with a missing eye. He placed the glass eye into the empty socket, and as he did, my mom said she heard a woman’s sigh, a sound of relief, and then the wind died, and the world felt lighter. They reburied the box and never spoke of it again.

My mom finished her wine, and I saw her hands shaking slightly. She looked at me, her eyes wet, and said, ‘I’ve never told anyone that. But I know it was real, because I still dream of that eye sometimes, and I always wake with the feeling that I’m being watched.’ She reached into her pocket, and for a moment I thought she would show me something, but she just drew her hand out empty. I asked her what happened to the house, and she said it burned down a few years later, and no one ever found out why. She never went back, and my father never knew the real reason she refused to visit that part of the state.

I’ve never been able to look at a glass ornament the same way since. And sometimes, when I’m alone in a dark room, I feel a cold draft and a whisper that sounds like ‘give it back.’ I don’t know if it’s my imagination or if there’s something more, but I do know one thing: my mother is not a liar. And if she says the eye was real, then I believe her. But I’ll never ask her again, because I’m afraid of what else she might tell me—or what might answer instead of her.