The Loft in the Hill

When I was eight, my family spent weekends at the old Millbrook place, a sprawling farm owned by our friends, the Hardings. We’d arrive early, when the dew still clung to the grass, and leave long after the stars came out. There were four of us kids: me, my brother Sam, and the Harding twins, Leo and Mia. Our favorite playground was the bank barn, a massive structure built into the side of a hill. The upper level was a hayloft, where we’d spend hours burrowing tunnels and building forts among the bales. Below, accessible from the lower pasture, was the cow barn, dark and smelling of hay and manure. The only ways in were the big front doors on the upper level, and a small window near the peak of the roof, facing the house. Even when the hay was piled high, it never reached that window. The loft had no electricity, so our games were lit by the sun streaming through that one window, casting long, shifting shadows as the day wore on.

One late October afternoon, we were playing in the loft as the sun began to dip behind the hills. The light through the window turned amber, and the dust motes danced in the beams. We were playing hide-and-seek, and I had squeezed behind a stack of hay bales near the back wall, where the floorboards creaked ominously. I remember pressing my ear to a gap between the boards, listening to the muffled sounds of the cows below. Then I heard something else: a low, rhythmic thumping, like a fist against wood, coming from beneath the floor, right below where I was crouched. It stopped as suddenly as it started, and I shrugged it off, thinking it was a cow kicking the stall.

Later that evening, after the sun had set, we were out in the yard behind the house, which faced the barn. The adults were inside, laughing over coffee. The air had turned crisp, and the barn was a black silhouette against the violet sky. For no reason at all, I looked up at the loft window. There was a face. A man’s face, pale and gaunt, pressing against the glass. His eyes were dark, and his mouth was open in a silent scream. I froze, a cold prickle running down my spine. I nudged Sam, but by the time he looked, the face was gone. He told me I was seeing things, that it was probably a branch or a shadow. But I knew what I saw.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing that face, the desperation in it. The next morning, I went to the barn with the others, determined to find an explanation. We climbed to the loft, and I pointed to the window. The glass was clean, no smudges. But against the wall, directly below the window, I noticed something: a small, rusty hook, driven into the wooden beam. It was out of place, and it looked old, much older than the barn. I pulled at it, and a section of the beam slid open, revealing a dark, narrow crawlspace that led down into the barn’s structure. It wasn’t on any of the drawings my father had made of the place; it was hidden.

The others gathered around, and we peered into the void. A putrid smell wafted out, a mix of decay and old grain. We hesitated, but curiosity got the better of us. I found an old lantern in the barn, and my father had some matches in his pocket. He lit it, and we carefully descended a rickety ladder into the crawlspace. It was a low, narrow tunnel, just wide enough for a child to crawl. The lantern cast grotesque shadows on the walls, and we could hear scuttling sounds above us. After about ten feet, the tunnel opened into a small, cramped room, no bigger than a closet. In the center, there was a wooden chair, and on it sat a dusty, faded photograph in a frame. The photo was of a man, not much older than my father, with thinning hair and a kind face. But his eyes were wide, and his mouth was open in the same silent scream I had seen at the window. I dropped it, and the glass shattered.

We scrambled out of there, our hearts pounding. We told the adults what we had found, and they went in, crawling, and came back pale. They called the police, who found that the room had been sealed up for decades. The man in the photo was identified as a former farmhand who had gone missing in the 1950s. His remains were never found, but in the room, they found a diary. It explained that he had been hiding from something, something he had unleashed in the hayloft. He had barricaded himself in that hidden space, but the thing, which he called ‘the Hollow Man’, found him anyway. The last entry read: ‘It lives in the grain. It wears my face. It wants to get out.’

After that, we never played in the barn again. But sometimes, late at night, I’d look out my bedroom window, and I’d see the loft window in the moonlight. And sometimes, I’d see a pale face pressed against the glass, watching the house. Not the farmhand’s face, but the face I first saw, gaunt and desperate. And I knew it was still in there, waiting for someone to open the door again. I often wonder what would have happened if we had never found that hidden room, if we had left the barn to its secrets. But we did, and now it knows we exist. And it knows where we live.