The Hollow Man on Ward Six

When I was nine, my parents sent me to Camp Kestrel, a place for ‘troubled’ children, nestled in the worn-down hills of the Appalachians. We slept in old Civilian Conservation Corps barracks, split into dorms with bunks. I was assigned to Ward Six, the last building at the edge of a field that dropped into a deep, wooded hollow. The place had a sour, medicinal smell that clung to the blankets.

On the third day, I was lying on the bottom bunk in Ward Six, bored and picking at a loose thread on the mattress. Above me, on the wood of the top bunk, there was a carving. It wasn’t a name or a heart, but a message, scratched in shaky letters: ‘HE DIED WHERE YOU LAY. ON THURSDAYS, HE RETURNS TO TAKE HIS SPOT.’ I thought it was a prank by some older kid. I laughed and showed it to my roommate, a wiry boy named Milo. He just shrugged and said, ‘I heard they had a suicide here once.’ I didn’t think much more about it.

The week crawled. Thursday arrived gray and wet. We spent the day doing pointless crafts and group therapy. By night, I was tired. I fell asleep as soon as the lights went out, Milo in the bunk above me, shifting occasionally.

At 11:45, I woke to a scraping sound outside, like something being dragged across gravel. I sat up in the bottom bunk, my heart doing a nervous flutter. The noise stopped. Then, the door handle started to rattle, a frantic, insistent jiggle. I froze, thinking it was one of the counselors playing a prank. But then the rattling stopped, and I heard a low, guttural breath right outside the door, as if someone had pressed their face to the gap.

I looked toward the single window next to the door. The moon was hidden, but there was enough light to see. A face appeared there, pressed against the glass. It was pale, waxy, and too long. Its eyes were not eyes but empty, wet holes, and its mouth hung open, a deeper black. It stared straight at me. I couldn’t breathe. The face held for a long second, then vanished.

A heavy thud hit the roof right above me, so hard that dust sifted down from the ceiling. Then another thud, and another, as if something was crawling across the shingles. The sounds moved toward the far end of the roof, then stopped. The silence that followed was worse than the noise. I called up to Milo. ‘Did you see that?’ No answer. I reached up and touched the bottom of his mattress. My hand came away wet and sticky.

I scrambled out of bed, pulling on my shoes, and ran to the door. I yanked it open. The clearing outside was empty, a few floodlights casting long shadows. I ran to the counselors’ building, hysterical. They came back with flashlights, found nothing on the roof, nothing at the window. But when they checked our room, Milo was gone. His sheets were soaked with something dark, and there was a trail of that same liquid leading out the back door, into the hollow.

They searched for hours and found nothing. The police came, but the rain had washed away any tracks. They questioned me repeatedly, but I could only describe the face. The search dug into the hollow and found an old, unmarked grave behind Ward Six. The county coroner identified the remains as a man who had been a counselor at the camp in the 1950s, who had gone missing one Thursday and was presumed to have run off.

I never found out what happened to Milo. They sent me home the next day. But every Thursday since, just before midnight, I hear that same scraping sound outside my bedroom window. And in the dark glass, I sometimes see that wet, pale face with the empty eyes, watching me, waiting for me to come lie down in his spot.