The Hollow Hum

In the sweltering late summer of 1994, I found myself crashing at my friend Mark’s place in Fox Hollow, a sleepy town nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians. My last apartment had become uninhabitable after the landlord stopped fixing the plumbing, and my job at the county records office didn’t start until the first of October. Mark had a spare room in his basement, and I’d helped him out before, so it was an easy yes.

Fox Hollow was the kind of town where everyone knew everyone, and the biggest excitement was the annual harvest fair. Mark lived in a sprawling old farmhouse his grandmother had left him, complete with a barn that leaned slightly to one side and a well that hadn’t been used in decades. The house had that musty smell of old wood and dust, but it was free and I was grateful.

The first week was uneventful. Mark and I would sit in the basement rec room, a paneled space with a worn couch and a television that picked up three channels if you held the antenna just right. But then things started to go missing. A pair of my socks, a pack of gum, Mark’s favorite lighter. We’d tear the place apart looking for them, only to find them in plain sight a day later—on the kitchen counter, on the coffee table, on the basement stairs. It was unsettling, but we shrugged it off, blaming our own forgetfulness.

Then the humming began. It was a faint, low hum, like a refrigerator but deeper, almost subsonic. It would start late at night, around three in the morning, and last for exactly twelve minutes. Mark’s dog, a mutt named Hector, would growl at the basement door, his hackles raised, and Mark’s kitten, Miso, would hiss at empty corners. The hum seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and when it stopped, the silence was even worse.

One night, I woke up to the hum and decided to investigate. I crept down the creaky stairs, the floorboards groaning under my weight. The rec room was bathed in a pale blue light from the television, which was on despite being unplugged. Static danced across the screen, and through it, I could swear I saw a shape—a tall, thin figure with no face, just a blur of dark pixels. I blinked, and it was gone. The hum stopped abruptly, and the television flickered off.

The next morning, I told Mark. He laughed it off, said the old house was playing tricks on us. But that afternoon, we found a note written in shaky handwriting on the kitchen table. It said: ‘STOP LISTENING.’ Mark’s grandmother had passed away in the house five years earlier, and Mark said she had always been a bit strange, talking about ‘the hum from the well.’ That night, we decided to check the well.

We grabbed a flashlight and headed to the backyard. The well was covered with a rotting wooden lid, barely holding together. We lifted it with effort, and the smell of damp earth and something worse hit us. Shining the light down, we saw not water, but a narrow, brick-lined shaft that seemed to go deeper than the light could reach. And there, at the bottom, something glinted. It was a small, square metal box, about the size of a book. Mark, being the braver or more foolish one, insisted we fetch it. We rigged a rope and he went down, as the air grew colder. When he came back up, he was pale, and the box was in his hands, its surface covered in strange, curling patterns.

We took the box inside and examined it. It had no latch, no hinge, but the top slid off with a click. Inside was a roll of film and a worn piece of paper with a list of dates, all in the 1950s, and next to each date was a time and the word ‘LISTEN.’ Mark’s hands trembled as he held it. ‘My grandmother used to tell me about a voice in the well,’ he said. ‘She said it told her things, warned her about accidents. She said it was with her until she died.’

We developed the film in the makeshift darkroom Mark had set up in the basement for his photography hobby. As the images emerged, we saw the same tall, faceless figure, always in the background, sometimes barely visible, sometimes stark against a dark doorway. The hum came that night again, and this time, it wasn’t just a hum. It was a voice, whispering in our ears, though we were alone. It said, ‘Join me. I will show you everything.’

Mark was entranced. He started going to the well every night, sitting by its edge, muttering to himself. I tried to stop him, but he pushed me away, his eyes glassy. One night, he never came back. I found the well lid shattered, and when I looked down, there was nothing but darkness, no sign of Mark, no box. The hum was gone, and the house was silent.

The police searched the property, but found no trace of Mark. I moved out, leaving Fox Hollow and its secrets behind. The last thing I did was take that film roll with me, hidden in my jacket. I never looked at it again. Sometimes, late at night, I think I hear a faint hum, coming from somewhere deep inside my mind, and I know that the well is still there, waiting. And the voice? It never stopped whispering. It just waits for someone else to listen.