The Last Lantern in Via dei Sepolcri

I’ve always been the one who feels things before they happen—a cold spot in a warm room, the prickle at the back of my neck that says someone’s watching, even when I’m alone. My grandmother called it ‘the sight,’ but she also warned me never to chase it. ‘You don’t go looking for the dead,’ she’d say, ‘because they’ll find you anyway.’ I should have listened.

That summer, my cousin Elena from Toronto came to stay with us in our old town in Sicily. She was fifteen, two years older than me, and fascinated by the crumbling stone buildings and the stories of our ancestors. My grandfather, Nonno Aldo, was too frail to climb stairs, so he slept in the ground floor room that used to be the kitchen of our 17th-century farmhouse. The room had a heavy wooden door and small, barred windows—once used to store tools, now filled with dusty furniture and the smell of old tobacco.

The second night she was here, we decided to sleep in the room at the end of the hallway, the one that had been closed for years. It was right above Nonno’s room, separated by a floor that creaked with every step. Elena was excited; I was nervous. ‘They say the house is haunted,’ she whispered, but I just shrugged. It was our house, and I’d never seen anything until recently.

We stayed up late, talking about school and boys, and then the sounds began. At first, it was just a scraping, like old hinges moving without oil. Then, the scratching—something between fingernails and metal—coming from inside the wall behind the bed. I froze, but Elena said it was probably just rats. ‘Are you scared?’ she teased. I didn’t answer because I saw the shadow under the door. It wasn’t a person’s shape, not really; it was a dark patch that grew and shrank, as if someone was standing just outside, shifting their weight.

I made Elena sit with me, and we watched the door. After a while, the shadow receded, and the scratching stopped. I felt a wave of relief, but then the floor beneath us began to vibrate—not like an earthquake, but like someone was dragging a heavy chain across the room below. Nonno’s room. I heard his muffled coughing, then a low, slow voice speaking in Sicilian, a language I barely understood. ‘Chi è là?’ it asked. ‘Who is there?’ I looked at Elena; her face had gone pale.

We crept to the old servant’s staircase that spiraled down to Nonno’s room. The door at the bottom was ajar, and we saw him sitting on his bed, unaware of us, staring at the far wall. There was a lantern on the nightstand, its flame flickering. Then we saw it: a shadow on the wall, bending over him like a figure made of smoke, and he was talking to it—not in fear, but in anger. ‘Vattene! Leave!’ he shouted. The shadow didn’t move. Instead, it turned its head—if it had a head—and looked directly at us.

I grabbed Elena’s arm and pulled her back up the stairs. We locked ourselves in our room, but the presence followed. The air turned cold, and we heard a voice, not from the stairs but right between us. It was clear and intimate, like someone leaning into our ears. ‘Io vedo le vostre paure,’ it said. ‘I see your fears.’ And in that moment, I felt a fear so raw that I wanted to scream, but no sound came out.

That’s when we discovered the real story. The next morning, I found an old letter in a drawer in that room, watermark from 1923. It was written by my great-grandmother to her sister, describing how my great-grandfather had killed a man in that very room—a rival who trespassed—and that the man’s spirit refused to leave. ‘He haunts the floor,’ she wrote, ‘and he feeds on fear. He only listens to the one who holds the lantern.’ The lantern from Nonno’s nightstand—it was the same one, passed down.

That night, we decided to confront it. We took the lantern and placed it in the center of the room. We said a prayer, and then we waited. The flame began to bend, not from any draft, but as if something was blowing on it from inside. The voice returned, but this time it spoke in English, slow and halting. ‘You have no light,’ it said. ‘Your light is borrowed. You will never burn bright enough.’ Then the flame flickered and died, plunging us into darkness. And from the darkness, I felt a cold hand on my shoulder—not gripping, just resting.

I don’t remember how we got out. But from that night on, I couldn’t enter that room without a fresh candle, and even then, I always saw a faint silhouette in the corner, watching. Elena went back to Canada, and we never spoke of it again. But sometimes, when I’m alone in the house, I still hear that scratching, and I know it’s not rats. It’s the man under the floor, waiting for someone to bring the lantern back.