The Hayloft Visitor

My first encounter with the unnatural happened when I was nine, in the autumn of 1987. We lived in a pre-fab modular home, the kind that always smelled of damp particle board, set on a failing apple orchard in upstate New York. My younger brother and I shared a room, our beds against opposite walls, mine positioned so that if I lay flat, I could see straight down the short hallway to the back door. The door had a frosted glass panel, and at night, the porch light cast a sickly yellow glow through it, making strange shapes.

That night, I remember the weight of sleep pressing on me, but something kept me hovering at the edge of consciousness. The house creaked—old homes do that—but this was different. It was a rhythmic ticking, like the sound of a fingernail tapping on glass, coming from the window above my head. I lay motionless, my heart thudding, too scared to look. I finally drifted into a restless slumber, filled with disjointed images.

I dreamed of a girl, about my age, with white-blonde hair and wearing those flared jeans with embroidered flowers on the pockets. She was running through the orchard, dodging between the gnarled trees, her face a mask of terror. She stumbled into the small, leaning barn at the edge of the property, and I saw her duck behind the rusted tractor, pressing herself into the corner. Then a figure appeared in the barn’s wide doorway—a massive silhouette, too tall, too broad, with shoulders that blotted out the moonlight. It stood there, motionless, staring. And then the dream shifted, and I was staring at myself in the dream, but my eyes were hollow.

I woke with a start, gasping for air. The room was dark, but the hallway was not. The back door’s glass panel was glowing brighter than it ever had, as if the light source itself was pulsating. And I heard a sound—a low, wet dragging, like a heavy sack being pulled over the linoleum floor. Then, from the kitchen, came a child’s voice, high and thin, singing a lullaby I didn’t recognize. The voice was coming closer. I pulled the covers over my head, my body rigid, and clutched my brother’s arm. He was asleep, unaware.

Then the singing stopped. In the silence that followed, I felt a cold draft wash over me, and a pressure at the foot of my bed. The mattress compressed as if someone heavier than a child was sitting there. I was frozen, unable to scream. The pressure shifted, and I could sense something leaning over me. I squeezed my eyes shut, begging for it to just go away. Then I heard a whisper, so close it tickled my ear: ‘He’s still looking.’

I don’t remember falling asleep again, but I must have, because the next thing I knew, the sun was streaming through the window. My brother was already dressed, standing by the door, looking at me strangely. ‘Why were you talking to yourself last night?’ he asked. I didn’t answer. I never told anyone about that night.

Years later, when I returned to the orchard to clear out the old house before it was demolished, I found a faded photograph in a box hidden behind a loose wall panel in the barn. It showed two girls, maybe my grandmother’s generation, standing in front of that very barn. They were dressed in flared jeans and blouses. Their faces were strange—the girl on the right, with white-blonde hair, looked terrified, her eyes wide. A large, unidentifiable shadow loomed just at the edge of the frame. I flipped the photo over. Scrawled in pencil was a date and a single line: ‘She never found him. Neither did I.’ I dropped the photo and left, and I have not been back since. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I still hear that dragging sound, and I know the hayloft visitor is waiting for someone to notice her.