The Hollow Choir

The first time I saw the chapel, it was through a curtain of swamp fog, the kind that doesn’t lift but settles into your bones. I’d driven three hours past the last gas station, past the ‘No Trespassing’ signs that seemed almost welcoming, to a place called the Hollow Choir. It wasn’t on any map, just a name scratched into a rusted mailbox. I was a paranormal investigator, third year in, and I thought I’d seen everything. But this place… it felt wrong from the start.

My name is Elias Vane, and I’d come to photograph the chapel’s famous stained glass, a window depicting a choir of angels said to weep blood on the anniversary of a forgotten tragedy. But as I parked my Jeep and stepped out, the fog swallowed the sound of my boots on the gravel. The air was thick with the smell of wet earth and something else, something sweet and decaying, like old flowers left too long in a vase.

The chapel itself was a squat, gray stone building, its roof sagging like a tired animal. The entrance was boarded up, but a side door hung ajar, its hinges groaning like a creature in pain. I was a fool to go in alone, but I’d done it a hundred times before. I had my camera, my recorder, my flashlight, and the certainty that whatever I found, I could handle.

Inside, the air was colder than the October night outside. My breath puffed in white clouds as I swept my flashlight across the room. The pews were covered in a thick layer of dust, but as I walked the aisle, I noticed a single row where the dust had been disturbed, as if someone had sat there recently. I set up my equipment, the digital recorder to capture EVPs, the camera to catch anomalies, and I began my routine: call out, wait, listen.

‘Is anyone here?’ I asked, my voice echoing off the stone walls. Silence. Just the drip of water somewhere. I tried again. ‘My name is Elias. I mean you no harm.’

That’s when I heard it: a faint, high-pitched hum, like a choir singing far away. It was so soft I almost missed it, but it grew steadily, a discordant harmony of children’s voices. I fumbled for my recorder, but it was already running. The hum swelled until it filled the chapel, and then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

The silence that followed was heavier than before. I turned to leave, but the door I’d come in through was gone. No, not gone—there was a wall of rough stone where it should have been. Panic clawed at my chest. I spun around, my flashlight beam skittering over the walls. The windows were all bricked up now, and the air, which had been cold, grew stifling, like being buried alive.

That’s when I saw the figures: they stood in the aisles, faint, translucent, their faces hidden by what looked like choir robes. They swayed in unison, and the hum started again, but this time it was a dirge, a slow, mournful lament. They advanced toward me, and I stumbled back, but the aisle ended at a stone altar I hadn’t noticed before. On it lay a single object: a small, leather-bound book, its pages yellowed and brittle.

I grabbed it, thinking it might be a clue, a way out. As I opened it, the choir stopped. Their heads turned, and I saw their faces for the first time—or rather, what should have been faces. They were voids, swirling with darkness, and from those voids came a sound like a million whispers, all saying my name.

‘El-i-as…’ The book burned my hands, and I dropped it. It fell open to a page, and I saw a list of names, dates, and one word repeated over and over: ‘Solemn.’ Beneath the list, a drawing of a window, the same as the one outside, but with the angels in mourning.

The choir drifted closer, their coldness seeping into my skin, and I knew I wasn’t meant to leave. I understood then: the chapel was a maw, a patient thing that fed on the lonely and the curious. The book was a ledger of its meals, and my name would be added once I was gone.

I did the only thing I could think of: I recited the Lord’s Prayer, thinking it might repel them, but my voice came out as a whisper, and the choir only sang louder, their harmonies twisting into a mockery of a hymn. I fell to my knees, waiting for the void to take me.

But then, a different sound: the screech of a door, real and heavy. I looked up. A shaft of light cut through the darkness, and I saw a figure silhouetted, a man’s voice calling, ‘Hey! You okay in there?’

It was the caretaker, I’d seen his house at the edge of the property. He pulled me out, and I staggered into the fog, gasping the cold night air. He looked at me and said, ‘You were in there for hours. I saw your light.’ How long had I been trapped? My watch said it had only been ten minutes.

He drove me back to my car, his hands shaking. He told me that the chapel used to be a school for orphaned children, and that a fire had claimed them all on this very night, a hundred years ago. The school was rebuilt as a chapel, but the children never left. He said visitors sometimes get confused, lose track of time.

As he left, I looked at my camera. I hadn’t taken a single photo. I checked the recorder, expecting nothing, but the tape was full. I played it back, and there it was: the choir’s hum, clear as a bell. But at the end, a voice, a child’s voice, said, ‘You can’t leave yet. You have to sing.’

I drove away as fast as I could, and I haven’t been back. But sometimes, at night, I hear that hum, soft and distant, coming from my own throat. And I know, in the deepest part of me, that the chapel has a piece of me, a sliver of my soul, locked in that book, waiting to claim the rest.