The Icehouse Incident

My name is Danny, and I’m twenty now, but I remember that summer night like it was stitched into my skin. I’ve always been drawn to the dark and the weird, the things that don’t have easy answers. My friend Marcus and I were ghost hunters in our own small way—cardboard ouija boards, a boom box with a cheap tape recorder, and flashlights that never worked right. We were fifteen and invincible, or so we thought.

The summer before my junior year, I was staying over at Marcus’s place. He lived in a town called Harlow, a speck on the map that had once been a hub for shipping ice from the nearby river to the big cities down south. The old icehouse still stood at the edge of town, a massive brick structure with broken windows and a roof that sagged like a tired old man. It was fenced off, but we knew the gaps in the chain-link fence by heart.

That night, the air was thick and warm, and the moon was nothing but a sliver of bone. Marcus had stolen a bottle of his dad’s whiskey—not to drink, but to ‘bless’ the ouija board, he said. We laughed too loud as we slipped through the fence, our sneakers crunching on gravel. The icehouse loomed ahead, darker than the night itself.

We set up in the main cavern, a room that had once held blocks of ice wrapped in straw. The floor was slick with old water and something that might have been oil. We placed our cardboard board on a wooden crate, and I lit a candle we’d brought. The flame danced, casting weird shapes on the peeling paint of the walls.

We started with the usual: ‘Is anyone here?’ The pointer—a bottle cap—didn’t move. Marcus rolled his eyes. ‘This is stupid.’ But he kept his finger on it. I asked again, more serious this time. ‘We’re here to listen. Is there anyone who wants to speak?’

That’s when the temperature dropped. It wasn’t a gradual chill; it was like stepping into a freezer. We both looked at each other, our breath fogging. The pointer shuddered, then slid to ‘Y’. We laughed nervously. ‘Okay, okay, what’s your name?’ I asked. The pointer moved in a shaky arc, landing on ‘E’, then ‘L’, then ‘L’. ‘E-L-L? Like the letter?’ Marcus said, his voice tight.

A sound came from deep in the building—a scraping, like something heavy being dragged across concrete. We froze. The candle flickered, nearly dying. Then the scratching moved, closer, around us. It was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Marcus grabbed my arm. ‘Maybe we should go.’

But the pointer moved again, faster, spelling out ‘L-0-T-T-A’. I didn’t understand. Lotta? The scratching grew louder, and the air got colder, so cold my teeth chattered. The pointer then flew off the board, clattering onto the floor. In the silence that followed, we heard a child’s voice, faint and distant: ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’

We bolted. We tore through the dark, tripping over debris, not stopping until we were outside, gasping for air. The fence was behind us, but we kept running until we reached the streetlight. We didn’t talk about it on the way back. Marcus wouldn’t even look at me.

The next day, we tried to convince ourselves it was the whiskey, or our imagination, or a prank by some town kid. But we both knew we’d felt it. And that afternoon, we went to the library to dig into the icehouse’s history. That’s when we found the newspaper clippings from 1937.

A girl named Lotta Evers had died there. She was ten years old, and she’d been playing hide-and-seek with her brother among the ice blocks. She’d crawled into a slot left for a block that was about to be filled, and the workers didn’t see her. They dropped the next block right on top of her. It took hours to get her out, and by then, she was frozen solid. The icehouse closed shortly after.

We stood in the library, staring at the grainy photo of a little girl with braids. I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the air. Marcus whispered, ‘She spelled her name. L-O-T-T-A.’ We didn’t say more.

We’ve both moved on, but I can’t shake it. Sometimes, on cold nights, I hear that scraping sound outside my window, and I swear I smell old ice and wet straw. And I wonder if Lotta’s still there, waiting for someone to come back so she can finish her game.

I never touch a ouija board again, cardboard or otherwise. Some doors, once opened, are impossible to close.