The Hollow Door

We moved into the old farmhouse in the autumn of 2021, drawn by the price and the promise of land for our horses. The structure itself was a defiant skeleton of its former self, a two-story colonial with peeling paint and a sagging porch. The previous tenants, a reclusive couple who had kept an untold number of cats and dogs, had left their mark. Every door in the house bore vertical gouges, deep furrows that climbed from the baseboards to the top of the frames, as if the animals had tried to escape something on the other side. We told ourselves it was just wear and tear, desperate for a home.

By the following spring, we began to feel uneasy. It started with a pervasive sense of being watched, even in rooms with no windows. We’d turn corners expecting to see someone, only to find empty hallways. The attic became a place of dread. It was always humid up there, and swarms of flies clustered against the single dormer window, buzzing in a cacophony that seemed to pulse in rhythm. We never found a source for the flies, no dead animal, no filth. They just appeared with the first warm days and vanished with the first frost.

We hired a housekeeper, a local woman named Marta, to help manage the dust and grime that seemed to seep from the walls. On her first day, she descended from upstairs with a pale face, clutching a cross that she wore around her neck. She spoke little English, but her eyes were wide as she pointed to the ceiling, muttering something about ‘los gritos’—the screams. We dismissed it as an overactive imagination. But then she refused to go upstairs at all, and after a week, she quit without explanation.

Determined to solve the mystery ourselves, my husband, Paul, and I decided to investigate the attic. We pushed open the hatch and climbed the rickety ladder into the stifling heat. The flies were worse than ever, thick as a shroud. The room was empty, save for an old rocking chair that creaked as though recently disturbed. In the corner, half-hidden under a tarp, we found a child’s doll with button eyes, one of which was missing, leaving a gaping hole. As Paul reached for it, the flies suddenly dispersed, swirling around us in a frantic spiral. We both felt a rush of cold, and a whisper, like a sigh, breathed past our ears. We fled, slamming the hatch shut, and never spoke of it again.

The strange occurrences escalated. Doors that we had shut would be found ajar, a sound like wet footsteps would echo through the halls at night, and the horses in the barn would spook and refuse to enter their stalls, as if something invisible was in there with them. The scratch marks on the doors began to deepen and appear on the inner surfaces, too. Once, I noticed a pattern in the marks that looked like a crude word: ‘HELP.’ I traced it, my finger tingling with a chill, and felt a jolt as the word ‘HELP’ echoed in my mind, as if whispered directly into my brain.

We tried to ignore it, but the house was wearing us down. I started having nightmares, not of monsters, but of a hollow, hungry door in the attic that I could never open. Paul became withdrawn, snapping at the children. The animals grew restless. Finally, we called in a priest, a stern man who walked through the house sprinkling holy water and reading from a worn Bible. He paused at the attic hatch and went pale. He ordered us to leave, saying the house was ‘a doorway’ and that we had disturbed something ‘older than the house itself.’ He refused to perform an exorcism, insisting it would only make it angrier.

We moved out two weeks later, taking the horses and the children. We moved across the country and tried to start anew, but the house would not let us go. In our new home, the scratch marks began to appear on our new doors. And at night, if I listen closely, I can hear a faint buzzing, as if a fly is trapped in the walls, and the faint, desperate plea of a child’s voice, whispering, ‘HELP.’ I know now that we did not move into a house. We moved into a vessel, and something old and hungry lives within it, and it will never be full.