The Hollow Wall

My earliest ghostly memory isn’t from the old farmhouse where I grew up, but from a cramped bungalow in the outskirts of Saskatoon, where my mother, my sister, and I moved in with her new boyfriend, Gerald, when I was five. The house was a single-story structure with a basement, and with three adults and two kids, space was tight. Gerald had a son, Trevor, a teenager who was given the basement bedroom, and I was assigned a small room down the hall from my mom’s. The walls were thin, and the heating vents were like pipes for whispers.

From the very first night, I felt a wrongness in that room. It wasn’t fear born of childhood imagination; it was a stillness broken by a faint, rhythmic scratch that came from within the wall beside my bed. At first, I thought it was mice, but the pattern was too deliberate—a pause, then three quick scratches, as if something was answering. I called out, ‘Hello?’ but the scratching stopped, only to resume when I settled. I buried my head under my pillow and hummed to myself until sleep took me.

My mother dismissed it as house sounds, but Gerald, a pragmatic man, showed me the wall. ‘It’s solid, kid. Nothing in there but insulation.’ He tapped the plaster, and I swore I felt a vibration from the other side, as if something tapped back. He didn’t notice. He went back to his TV show, leaving me with a growing knot in my stomach.

Over the next weeks, the scratching grew bolder. It would follow me along the hallway as I walked, like an echo, and sometimes I’d see the wallpaper ripple near the baseboards, even with no drafts. My sister, only two, started pointing at the corner of my room and saying, ‘Doggy,’ though we had no pets. She’d giggle and wave, and a cold spot would bloom in the air. I tried to tell my mom, but she was always tired, always distracted by Gerald’s moods. He was quick to anger, and I learned to stay quiet.

One evening, I left a toy truck in the hallway, and the next morning, it was in the basement, amidst dusty boxes. My mom blamed me, but I knew I hadn’t touched it. Trevor, Gerald’s son, looked at me strangely. He was a quiet, lanky kid with a perpetual grimace. He caught me in the kitchen one day and said, ‘That room use to be a girl’s room. The one before you. Her name was Emily. She died, like, maybe twenty years ago. My dad never talks about it.’

That night, I lay awake, staring at the wall. The scratching started, but this time it was faster, more urgent. I pressed my ear to the wallpaper, and I heard something else—a faint humming, a lullaby I half-remembered. A cold draft washed over my feet, though the window was sealed. Then, in the corner, I saw a shape materialize: a small girl in a white nightgown, her face indistinct, but her eyes were dark hollows. She pointed at the wall, and I saw something written there, etched in the wallpaper, as if by a tiny finger: ‘Let me out.’

I screamed, and my mother burst in. She saw nothing, but she felt the cold. She finally listened, and that night we slept in her room with the lights on. Gerald, furious at being disturbed, argued, but my mom put her foot down. He mutter about ‘imaginations’ but agreed to check the wall. The next day, he and Trevor pried open the section of the wall that was affected. Inside, we found a hidden space—a hollow within the wall, filled with a child’s rusted toys, a hair ribbon, and a small metal box. In the box was a photograph of a girl who looked like me, but older, and a letter dated forty years prior. It was a plea from a young mother asking for help, saying her daughter was ‘trapped’ and ‘listening at the walls.’ The handwriting was shaky.

That night, after the wall was sealed again, the scratching was gone, but the humming remained. It drifted through the vents, and my sister would hum back, matching the melody. I knew we hadn’t freed Emily; we’d just opened a door. A few weeks later, my mom kicked Gerald out after he shoved her during an argument. We moved to a small apartment across town, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had followed us. In the new place, I’d sometimes hear the faint scratching from my closet, and my sister would point to the air beside her and say, ‘She’s here.’ And I’d see a faint outline of a girl in the corner of my eye, standing beside her, humming that lullaby.

I never told anyone, because who would believe me? But I knew that Emily was with us, not as a malevolent ghost, but as a lost soul who had latched onto our family, desperate for connection. And I realized that the scariest thing wasn’t the scratching or the cold or the shadows—it was the hollow wall that we opened, because now, we were never truly alone.