The Hollow Touch

I was twenty-three, fresh out of college, when I moved into the old carriage house behind the Whitmore estate. The main house had been abandoned for decades, but the carriage house was habitable, and the rent was a steal. I needed cheap, and I needed quiet to write my thesis. The landlord, a man named Mr. Ellery, warned me about the ‘atmosphere’ of the place, but I dismissed it as real estate talk.

Weeks passed, and I fell into a routine: wake, write, walk the overgrown grounds, sleep. The house had a strange acoustics – every footstep echoed as if the walls were listening. Sometimes I’d catch a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision, but when I turned, nothing was there. I chalked it up to drafts and old wiring.

One night, as I sat reading by the fireplace, a deep chill settled in the room, despite the flames. I looked up from my book, and the air thickened. I couldn’t see anything, but I felt a presence, something large and slow, moving toward me from the corner of the room. My heart hammered. I tried to move, but my muscles locked.

The presence reached me. It wasn’t a touch I felt on my skin, but an invasion. A sensation began in my chest, like a slow-blooming flower of icy needles, spreading through my veins to my fingertips and toes. It wasn’t painful, but it was overwhelming. And with it came a wave of emotion so intense it brought tears to my eyes – a profound, aching love, as if I was being embraced by a long-lost parent. Then, just as suddenly, it receded, and I could move again.

I didn’t sleep that night. I told myself it was a panic attack, a hallucination. But it happened again a week later, and then nightly. The touch would come from different directions – sometimes on my chest, sometimes on my back, sometimes a gentle pressure on my shoulder when I was at my desk. Each time, the same suffocating love that left me shaky and confused.

I started researching the property. In the county archives, I found a mention of the Whitmore family tragedy. In 1901, the youngest daughter, Elspeth, had died of a fever at the age of seventeen. Her mother, devastated, was said to have spent hours in her daughter’s room, weeping and calling her name. The mother died a year later, of a broken heart, they said.

After that, the paranormal visits increased. They happened during the day now, not just at night. I’d be making coffee, and an invisible hand would press on my lower back. I’d feel a breath on my neck, but when I spun around, the room was empty. The love was still there, clinging to me like a second skin, but now it was tinged with a note of desperation, as if the presence was trying to tell me something, to reach me through the veil.

I grew obsessed. I read every book on spiritualism I could find. I tried to communicate, speaking aloud to the empty air, asking questions. But there was no answer, only the silent touches. I began to lose weight, to neglect my work. My friends worried, but I couldn’t explain – they would think I was crazy.

One evening, I was lying on the floor of the living room, exhausted, when the presence returned. It was more intense than ever. The cold wrapped around me like a blanket, and the love was so overwhelming that I felt my consciousness begin to slip. In that moment of surrender, I saw a flash of a room – a small, dark room with a single window, and a young woman lying on a bed, her chest still, her eyes open. She was calling out, not for her mother, but for me. She whispered, ‘Why do you stay away? I was waiting.’

I jolted upright, breathing hard. My skin was prickling, and the feeling of love was slowly receding like a tide. I knew, then, that the presence wasn’t a ghost of the girl, but the ghost of the mother, who had been waiting for her daughter to return. And she had mistaken me for her.

The visits stopped after that. I moved out at the end of the month, leaving the carriage house to gather more dust. But sometimes, late at night, I still feel a faint pressure on my chest, as if a hand is gently resting over my heart, and a whisper of that love, that desperate, hollow love, reminds me of what I’ve left behind. And I wonder if the mother is still there, waiting for the daughter that will never come home.