The Light in the Attic

March 26, 2026

by Ellis

2 min read

Story Premise 2 min read (219 words)

"We moved into the old Miller place last spring. The previous owner was a quiet man who lived alone for many years. I never asked why he sold it so quickly. Sometimes, I hear soft footsteps from the floor above when I know I am the only one home. A sudden coolness will pass through […]"

We moved into the old Miller place last spring. The previous owner was a quiet man who lived alone for many years. I never asked why he sold it so quickly.

Sometimes, I hear soft footsteps from the floor above when I know I am the only one home. A sudden coolness will pass through a room on a warm day. I told myself it was just the house settling.

Last Tuesday, my cousin Leo and his sister Anna came over. Anna and I stayed in the kitchen talking, while Leo and my little sister went up to the attic to play. They were up there for nearly an hour before they came running down, wide-eyed.

The single light in the attic had gone out. They swore they didn’t touch it. We all went up to look. The room was dark, and the bulb was simply gone from its socket. We searched every corner, moved boxes, but found nothing. My father came up and looked too, but he saw no sign of it.

After my cousins left, I went back up to the attic to get a blanket. I clicked the light switch out of habit, and the room lit up. The bulb was back in the lamp, shining brightly, as if it had never been missing at all.

Related Horror Movies to Watch

Heinous Acts

2014

Dark

1990

Down a Dark Hall

2018

Xue ye hua

1970

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Blue Crayon

My name is Evelyn, and this begins in the winter of my junior year. I was obsessed with old parlor games, anything that promised a glimpse beyond the veil. My grandmother had left me a dusty, leather-bound book of spiritualist practices, and tucked inside its pages was a faded, hand-drawn ouija board on a scrap […]

The Creosote Hall

The moment my head hit the pillow, the world tilted. It wasn’t the slow drift into sleep I knew, but a sudden, violent yank, as if the bed had been pulled from under me. I gasped, and then I was there, standing on a cracked asphalt playground under a sky the color of old brass. […]

The Hollow Chime

Before I could even speak, I learned to read the rhythm of our house. It was a creaking, groaning, breathing thing, an old farmhouse that had swallowed three generations of my family. But when I was eight, my father inherited a job in the desert, and we moved to a place that wasn’t ours. It […]

The Harvest of Hollow Hills

The summer I turned seven, the world was a place of golden light and long shadows, and I, Mara, believed in nothing I couldn’t see. My parents, ever practical, had no time for fairy tales, and I took their skepticism as gospel. We lived in the lowlands, where the fields stretched like patchwork quilts to […]

The Brass Chain

The summer I turned nine, we left the cramped apartment in the city and moved into my grandfather’s old house in the foothills of the Appalachians. The house had been in the family for generations, and after my grandparents passed, it fell to my parents to sort through the clutter. I hated it from the […]

The Last Spiral of the Kite

The night after the funeral, Mira found Karl’s old kite in the garage, its red tail snagged on a nail. She’d been avoiding the house since the service, but her mother had asked her to fetch a shovel for the garden, and there it was, coiled like a sleeping snake. Karl had flown it the […]

The Lantern Keeper’s Invitation

Three nights after the funeral, the dream came. I was standing in a vast, dimly lit hall, the kind you’d find in an old railway station, but the walls were lined with bookshelves that reached up into darkness. The air smelled of dust and old paper, and there was a low hum, like a distant […]

The Glass and the Gaps

In the autumn of my seventeenth year, I often stayed over at my friend Elias’s place, an old farmhouse that had been in his family for generations. The house sat at the end of a long gravel drive, surrounded by fields that went fallow and woods that pressed in close. Elias had a way of […]

The Hollow Traipse

It was the summer of ’93 when I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the salt marshes—a place that had been in my family for generations but had stood empty for nearly a decade. The house sagged like a tired animal, and the floorboards throughout creaked and groaned with every shift in […]

The Keepsake Box

The first thing I remember about Gran’s cottage was the smell of lavender and old wood, and the way the sunlight always seemed to pool on the stair landing, never quite reaching the bottom. The upstairs was a haven of soft rugs and warm quilts, but the downstairs was another country entirely. It was a […]

The Blue Lamp’s Visitor

I never put much stock in the unseen. My father’s death was a fact, a piece of family history as mundane as the creak in the hallway floorboards. He died when I was an infant, a victim of his own despair after my mother left. I grew up with this knowledge, and I’d mention it […]

The Flicker Pact

In the dry heat of a Nevada suburb, I grew up in a two-story house that always smelled of sunbaked wood and the faint metallic tang of the air conditioner. My room was at the end of the hall, a small square with a window that faced the empty lot behind us. I loved that […]