The Lavender Wall

In the autumn of 2012, I moved to a small coastal town in Oregon for a teaching position at the local community college. The town was quaint, with a main street lined with antique shops and a diner that served the best clam chowder I’d ever tasted. I found an apartment in a converted Victorian house on the edge of town, a three-story building with four units. The rent was remarkably low, and the place was spacious, with high ceilings and large windows overlooking the Pacific. My two friends, Mark and Julia, also rented units in the same building. We thought we’d hit the jackpot.

The first week was idyllic. We painted our walls, arranged furniture, and explored the nearby beaches. But soon, we began to notice oddities. The building’s third floor was always locked, and the landlord, an elderly man named Mr. Abernathy, was evasive about why. He would mutter something about ‘ old plumbing’ whenever we asked.

Our neighbors in the adjacent units were scarce, but when we mentioned our address to the locals, their smiles would fade, and they’d exchange uneasy glances. One woman at the grocery store whispered to me, ‘Be careful on the third floor.’ When I asked her what she meant, she just shook her head and hurried away.

Things took a turn during our second week. Mark, Julia, and I were in my kitchen, discussing the strange vibes we all felt, especially in the hallway leading to the locked door. Julia admitted that whenever she passed it, she felt a chill and heard a faint humming. Mark said he saw a flicker of movement from under the door, like a shadow passing, but there was no one else in the building.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, listening to the creaks of the old house. Around 3 a.m., I heard a faint scratching from the hallway. I got up and crept to the door, peering through the keyhole. The hallway was dim, but I saw something that made my blood run cold: a pair of small, bare feet, standing just outside the locked door, on the wrong side. I stumbled back, my heart racing, and when I looked again, the feet were gone.

The next morning, we decided to confront Mr. Abernathy. He grew pale when we mentioned what we’d seen. Finally, he confessed: the third floor had been sealed for years after a tragedy. A young woman, Lily, had lived there in the ’60s. She had a daughter, Clara, who was about five. Clara loved to sing a lullaby, a haunting little tune about a lavender wall. One day, both vanished. They were found weeks later, dead in the same room, but the circumstances were never explained. The room has been locked ever since, but people have reported seeing the girl’s ghost, humming that lullaby.

We were skeptical, but we couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. That evening, we sat in my living room, trying to rationalize our fears. Julia suddenly froze, her eyes wide. ‘I can hear her,’ she said. ‘Humming. It’s coming from the wall.’ We all listened. Indeed, a faint, sweet humming emanated from the wall behind my bookshelf. Then, a child’s voice, soft and plaintive, whispered, ‘Why won’t you play with me?’

We decided to leave. But as we packed, the humming grew louder, and we realized the doors were locked from the inside. The lights flickered, and a figure appeared in the hallway—a woman in a lavender dress, her eyes hollow, her mouth moving silently. She pointed a trembling finger at the stairs leading to the third floor, and we understood: she wanted us to follow.

We climbed the stairs, our feet heavy with dread. The door to the third floor was now open, revealing a dimly lit hallway. At the end, a room with a wall painted a sickly lavender. In the center of the floor, an old music box lay, and on the wall, scrawled in childish handwriting, were the words: ‘Come play, or I’ll be lonely.’

We backed away, but the floorboards beneath us gave way, and we fell into darkness. When we awoke, we were in the same room, but now the door was sealed, and the lavender wall was bleeding a thick, dark liquid. We were trapped. The humming had stopped. In its place, a silence so profound it felt like a scream. We huddled together, realizing we were now part of Lily’s story, forever trapped in that room, waiting for the next tenants to join us.