The Late Night Static

When I was four, we lived in a two-story farmhouse in the flatlands of central Nebraska. My room was at the top of the stairs, and my older sister, Beth, was across the hall. One August night, the heat was unbearable, and I couldn’t sleep. I crept downstairs to the parlor, where my dad kept the old wood-paneled TV. I turned it on, volume low, and watched an old black-and-white monster movie, lying on the braided rug.

I must have dozed off. Sometime later, I woke to the hiss of static—the screen was filled with shifting gray and white noise, the ‘snow’ that came when the station signed off for the night. I remember thinking it was too bright, and the sound was like a thousand tiny voices. I closed my eyes and tried to fall back asleep, but then I felt arms slide under me—gentle but firm. I cracked my eyes open just enough to see a figure in a long gray dress, carrying me up the creaking stairs. I thought it was Mom, so I let my eyes close. I was placed in bed, the thin sheet pulled to my chin, tucked in like a burrito.

The next morning, I asked Mom if she’d carried me to bed. She looked puzzled. ‘No, honey, I went to bed early, and Dad had the late shift.’ Dad worked at the grain elevator and sometimes came home after midnight, but he’d driven straight to bed. When I asked Beth, she said she’d been asleep all night.

That didn’t worry me much as a kid. But a few weeks later, I woke early and found my sister crying in her room. She said she saw a woman in her doorway, watching, and when she blinked, the woman was gone. We told Mom, who dismissed it as a nightmare. But then I started noticing things: my doll’s hair would be brushed when I hadn’t touched it, and the TV downstairs would flick on by itself, always showing static, even when unplugged.

One night, I decided to stay up to catch my midnight carrier. I hid under the parlor couch after everyone went to bed. The TV was off. I waited, heart pounding. Hours passed. Then, a soft click—the TV turned on, but the screen was black, no static. The room filled with a faint smell of lavender, like my grandma’s perfume. I heard footsteps on the stairs, slow and heavy, but no one came down. After a while, the TV clicked off.

I told Dad, and he got a strange look. He admitted that the previous owner, an old widow named Mrs. Kravitz, had died in the house ten years ago. She’d always watched TV late at night, and when the stations went off the air, she’d leave the static on for comfort. Dad said, ‘She must have gotten attached to you kids, since you remind her of her own grandchildren who visited in the summers.’

That made me feel better, until one night I woke to find a figure standing over my bed—a tall, thin silhouette, featureless except for its outline. It reached down gently, and I felt a papery hand touch my forehead. I screamed. Mom rushed in, but the figure was gone. From then on, I slept with the lights on, and my parents put a nightlight in the hall. I still felt watched.

Years later, when I was ten, we moved away. I never knew if the lady truly haunted the house or if it was my imagination. But every time I hear static—on an old TV, on a radio—I get a chill, remembering the soft touch of fingers that were not my mother’s, and the lingering whisper of a voice that said: ‘Sleep tight, little one.’