The Lantern’s Wake

In 1982, I was nine, and my family had just moved into an old granary turned house on the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills. The place was a relic of a failed homestead, all weathered boards and a tin roof that pinged with every gust. My father, a man of quiet optimism, had bought it cheap, hoping to start a sunflower farm. My mother, pragmatic and weary, spent her days patching the drafty windows while my older brother, Dale, and I explored the outbuildings. We were a brood of five kids, but Dale was the one I trusted, even when he spun tall tales.

One night, about a month after we settled in, Dale shook me awake in our shared loft bedroom. His face was pale in the faint moonlight. ‘There’s something in the corridor,’ he hissed. ‘Big, like a bison, but standing on two legs. It just stood there, watching.’ I laughed, half-asleep. ‘You’re dreaming, Dale. You’ve been eating too much beef jerky.’ But he was serious. He said it was just outside our door, a hulking shape blotting out the hall light. I pulled the covers over my head and told him to go back to sleep. He didn’t.

For the next few nights, I noticed Dale would lie awake, staring at the door. Then one evening, he challenged me. ‘Sleep in my room for a week. See if you see it.’ I agreed, partly out of bravado, partly because I was curious. I dragged my mattress into his corner, and we stayed up whispering about the ghost of a pioneer who might have hung himself in the rafters, or the old farmer who’d gone mad and buried his family in the fields. Dale said the shape had broad shoulders, but no arms. It just stood, like a monolith.

Three nights in, I couldn’t sleep. A storm was brewing outside, and the wind rattled the loose tin on the roof. I turned to see if Dale was awake, and that’s when I saw it. In the doorway, silhouetted against the dim glow of the kerosene lamp my mother left in the hall, was a figure. It was massive, with shoulders so wide they brushed both sides of the frame. Its head was low, like it had no neck, and its arms hung down to its knees, ending in what looked like clumps of earth. It didn’t move. It just stood, breathing slow and heavy, like a bull. I screamed, and Dale jolted awake, but by the time he lit a match, it was gone.

We told our parents the next morning, but they dismissed it as a dream or a shadow. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the house was perched on something old, something that didn’t belong to the sunflowers we were planting. I started exploring more, and in the basement, behind a wall of rotting crates, I found a trapdoor. It was bolted with a rusted chain and a padlock. The wood around it was blackened, as if something had tried to burn its way through from underneath. I didn’t tell anyone, but I began to have a nightmare where I opened that door and climbed down into a root cellar, only to find the dirt floor moving, churning, as if something was burrowing up.

The figure appeared again, not in the doorway, but in the field at dusk. We were all outside, planting seeds, and I saw it standing at the edge of the barley that bordered our property. It was taller now, its shoulders like a barn, and it held a lantern in one hand. The light was faint, like a firefly, but it cast a sickly orange glow that made the crops seem to bend away from it. My father saw it too, and for the first time, he went pale. He shouted at us to get inside, and he spent that night in his easy chair, a shotgun across his lap.

The next day, my mother found a bundle of sage and dried corn husks tied to the front porch railing, with a piece of paper wrapped in twine. On it was written in faded ink: ‘He wakes when the lantern is lit. Do not let the light touch the earth.’

That evening, as we sat down to dinner, the power went out. The storm had knocked down the lines. My father lit a kerosene lamp, but the flame flickered and sputtered, and then the whole lamp went dark. In the silence, we heard a sound from the basement: a heavy scraping, like something being dragged across concrete. Then the trapdoor began to bulge upward, the wood groaning. The latch rattled, and the chain clanked against the floor.

My father grabbed his shotgun and ran to the basement door, but before he could descend the stairs, a loud crack echoed from below, and the trapdoor flew open, slamming against the ceiling. From the dark opening, a shape rose, massive and hunched, its head brushing the joists. It held the same lantern from the field, now burning bright with a cold flame, and it raised it high, as if to douse the house in light. The glow spilled across the basement floor, and where it touched, the dirt began to crack, and pale roots—like fingers—pushed upward, reaching for us.

We fled the house that night, leaving everything behind. We drove through the storm, not stopping until dawn painted the sky pink. When we returned a week later to salvage what we could, the house was gone. In its place was a gaping pit, a perfect circle, filled with black soil that seemed to breathe. The only sign we had ever lived there was a single sunflower, growing tall at the edge of the hole, its head turned toward the horizon, like a sentinel.

Years later, when I was old enough to understand, I read the county records. The land was once the site of a Lakota burial ground, and in the 1890s, a settler had tried to build a granary over it. He vanished mysteriously, and the locals said he’d kindled a lantern in the wrong place, waking something that had been sleeping. Now, whenever I see a sunflower, I remember that night, and the shape that stood in the doorway, its shoulders scraping the frame, waiting for the light to guide it home. I never told my own children what I saw, but sometimes, I catch them staring out at the fields, and I wonder if they see the lantern winking from the shadows, calling them closer, just as it called me.