The Lantern’s Glow

When I was twelve, my cousin Theo and I spent our summers at our grandmother’s old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The house was surrounded by endless cornfields that swayed like whispers in the wind. Our grandmother, a woman of few words, often warned us to stay inside after dark, but we never listened. We were obsessed with the paranormal, and the farmhouse, with its creaky floorboards and drafty corridors, was our playground.

One particularly hot afternoon, while the adults gathered on the back porch for lemonade and gossip, Theo and I decided to investigate the new doorbell camera our aunt had installed. We thought we might catch a raccoon or maybe a stray dog, but mostly we hoped for something spooky. We sat cross-legged on the hallway floor, the tablet propped against the wall, watching the grainy feed of the empty driveway. After ten minutes of nothing, we got bored and wandered off to raid the cookie jar.

When we returned, our aunt Margo, who was fighting a long battle with illness, was lying on the couch, her face pale and her eyes half-closed. She said, ‘Someone’s been ringing the doorbell for the past five minutes. It’s driving me crazy.’ We checked the footage, but the timeline showed nothing—no cars, no people, no movement at all. Theo and I exchanged nervous glances. Our aunt Margo was not one to lie, especially not about something so trivial.

We decided to watch the feed again, this time with focused attention. The minutes ticked by, the static of the camera hissing softly. Then, at the edge of the frame, a blur. It was fast, too fast to be human, but it had a shape—tall and thin, with limbs that seemed too long. It moved like a spider, darting across the yard heading straight for the backyard, where our parents were chatting. My heart hammered in my chest. Theo grabbed my arm. ‘Did you see that?’ he whispered. We rewound the footage, but the blur was still just a blur, a smear of grey against the green field.

We burst out the back door, yelling for everyone to come inside. Our parents looked at us like we were crazy. My dad said, ‘You two need to stop watching those horror movies.’ But we insisted, and our grandmother, who had been sitting quietly in her rocking chair, set her glass down. ‘There are things in those fields older than this house,’ she said softly. ‘They don’t like being watched.’ The adults exchanged worried looks, but my mother just shook her head. ‘Enough with the stories, Mom.’

That night, we stayed in the living room, which was unusual. The adults were talking in hushed tones, and I could feel a strange pressure in the air, like a storm about to break. I couldn’t sleep, so I crept back to the tablet. The feed showed the driveway, now bathed in the dim glow of the porch light. I watched for what felt like hours. Just before dawn, when the world was still and grey, I saw it again. The blur rushed past, this time stopping at the camera, its face—if you could call it that—pressed close to the lens. It looked like a melted candle, with drooping features and hollow eyes. It stared, unblinking, for a long moment. Then it smiled, a wide, wet grin, and slowly backed away, dissolving into the field.

I didn’t scream. I couldn’t. When I showed my father the footage in the morning, he went pale. He said, ‘That’s impossible.’ But there it was. We never sold the farmhouse, but we never stayed there again. To this day, the footage is still on that tablet, locked away in a safe. Every so often, someone dares to look, and they see the same thing: a blur, a face, and the faintest shape of a hand reaching out, as if to pull the viewer through the screen. We know it was real. We just don’t know what it was, or what it wanted. Sometimes, late at night, I hear the doorbell ring. I never answer. And I think that’s the only way to keep it out there, in the fields, waiting.