The Last Lantern in Langhorne

I still get a chill when I tell this story, though it happened over a year ago. My family had been renting the same cottage on the coast of Maine for seven summers, a tradition we clung to like barnacles to a hull. But that August, something felt off from the moment we arrived. The usual salt breeze carried a sweetness like rotting fruit, and the gulls, normally raucous, were silent, perched like grey tombstones on the dock.

My younger sister, Lily, and I shared a room at the end of the hall. The walls were paneled in dark knotty pine, and the only window faced the marsh, a flat, reedy expanse that at dusk turned the color of bruised plums. We’d always loved that view, but this year, the marsh seemed to breathe, a slow, rhythmic swell that made my stomach churn.

The first night, exhaustion from the drive pulled me under, but sleep came in fits. Around 2 a.m., a sound surfaced from the murk of dreams—a tapping, delicate as a moth against glass. I blinked awake, the room lit by the faint moon through the window. My cousin, who’d come along this year, lay in the bed opposite mine, a lump under the covers. The tapping grew insistent, a staccato of knuckles, then a pounding that rattled the frame. I sat up, heart hammering, and saw a shape pressed against the glass—a long, pale hand, fingers splayed, slapping the pane with thuds that seemed to echo in my chest.

I didn’t scream. My voice was a knot in my throat. I shoved my cousin, Theo, awake. ‘What?’ he groggy, then his eyes snapped wide as he saw it. The thing outside was tall, impossibly so, its head brushing the top of the window. Its face was a blur, but I could see two black eyes, like wet stones, staring straight at us. It smiled—a thin, wet slash—and then it pressed its face to the glass, the skin smearing like clay, leaving a greasy residue before sliding down and out of sight. For a moment, there was nothing but the hum of the swamp.

We didn’t sleep that night. We huddled in the hallway, telling ourselves it was a deer, a prank, anything. But the next day, we found the window smeared with a substance that smelled of low tide, and the marsh grass beneath was beaten flat, as if something massive had lain there. The locals, a tight-lipped lot, said nothing, but the old woman at the general store—her name was Pratt—gave us a long, knowing look and said, ‘Best not leave the back porch light off.’ That night, we didn’t.

For two nights, nothing. But on the third, I woke to a rustling in the reeds, a sound like dry bones rubbing together. I crept to the window, and there was the thing again, but this time it wasn’t alone. It was cradling something—a shape that moved, soft and gray, like a half-born creature. It rocked it, almost tenderly, and then it turned its head and locked eyes with me. Its mouth opened, and a sound came out, not a scream, but a mournful whistle, like a train in the distance. And in that whistle, I heard my name, whispered by a voice I knew—my grandmother’s, who had passed the previous winter.

I stumbled backward, tripping over Theo, who had come up behind me. ‘It’s a ghost,’ he breathed, ‘a wailing ghost.’ The next morning, we found the back porch screen torn, and the lantern we’d hung was gone. The marsh extended a dark finger of mud right up to the house, as if something had dragged itself closer.

We packed up that day, cutting the vacation short. As we drove away, I looked back at the cottage. The lantern, our lantern, hung from a post at the edge of the marsh, swaying though the air was still. And in the window of our room, a pale hand waved slowly, then was gone. We never found out what it was. But now, whenever I hear a tapping at night, I don’t check the window. I pull the covers up, and I pray the light stays on.