The Lantern Keeper’s Window

It was the autumn of 1994 when I moved into the old carriage house behind the Merriweather estate. The main house had been converted into a museum, but the carriage house had been left to rot, a two-story brick relic with a sagging roof and a kitchen window that looked out onto a graveyard of rusted farm equipment. My roommate, a quiet art student named Dana, took the room upstairs, and I took the one on the ground floor, just down the hall from the bathroom. From the first night, I felt it—a prickling at the back of my neck, a sense that something was studying me from beyond that grimy pane. I told myself it was the wind rattling the old storm windows, or the way the overgrown lilac bush scraped against the glass. But the feeling was too deliberate, too focused. I started taking the long way around the living room to avoid passing the kitchen after dark.

Dana never mentioned anything, and I was too embarrassed to bring it up. I was a rational person, a biology major. Ghosts were fairy tales for children. But there were nights when I’d be brushing my teeth and I’d catch a flicker of movement in the reflection of the kitchen window, just a dark shape that vanished when I turned. I began to sprint from the bathroom to my room, my heart pounding, feeling foolish and terrified at once.

One Friday in late October, a friend from my botany class, Marcus, came over. We drank cheap beer and played cards at the kitchen table, the very window at my back. Around midnight, Dana, who had been quiet all evening, slammed her cards down and looked at me with wide eyes. ‘Do you ever feel like you’re being watched? Like this place isn’t right?’ she asked. I nearly choked on my beer. ‘You too?’ I said. We compared notes, and both admitted to the same nightly terror of walking past that window, the sensation of being prey. Marcus, who had been listening, set down his beer and said, ‘That’s because you two are sitting in a dead spot. This property used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad. They say a lantern was always kept in this window to guide runaways. But one night, the owner was caught, and he was hanged from that old oak outside. His ghost is supposed to be watching for the signal that never comes.’

We laughed it off, but the joke died in our throats when the kitchen light flickered. Dana went to bed soon after, and Marcus left, leaving me alone to clean up. As I stood at the sink, I felt it again—that pressure, like a hand on the back of my skull. I spun around, and for a split second, I saw a man’s face pressed against the glass, pale and hollow-eyed, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Then it was gone.

A few days later, I was in my room, unable to sleep, when I heard a scraping sound from outside my door. I cracked it open and saw a beam of light moving across the living room, as if someone was walking with a lantern. I crept to the hallway and peered into the kitchen. The window was open, swaying on its hinges, and the cold air carried the smell of damp earth and rot. A voice, thin and reedy, whispered, ‘Still waiting.’ I slammed the window shut and ran to Dana’s room, but when I threw open the door, she was gone. The bed was untouched, her easel propped against the wall, and on the canvas was a painting of me, asleep in my bed, with a figure standing over me, holding a lantern.

I don’t remember much after that. I woke up the next morning on the kitchen floor, the door to the cellar wide open. Dana was never found. The police questioned me, but there was no evidence. I moved out the next week, but I still think about that window. Sometimes, when I look out at the city lights, I see a pale face watching me from a distance, and I hear that whisper: ‘Still waiting.’ And I know that whatever that thing was, it’s not confined to that old carriage house. It found a new window to watch from. Mine.