The Painted Door

In the autumn of 2012, I was a senior in high school, and my friends and I had a habit of testing the supernatural. My best friend, Clara, had a basement that her parents had converted into a ‘media room,’ complete with a projector, beanbag chairs, and a wall of old VHS tapes. It was our Friday night ritual to binge horror movies until midnight, but that night, we decided to try something different.

Around 10 PM, after the third movie, the conversation drifted to urban legends. Clara’s younger brother, Theo, had joined us, and he brought up the story of the old mill on the edge of town. He claimed that a girl had been murdered there in the 1920s and that her spirit still lingered. I was skeptical, but Clara and our friend Mira were eager to test it. They suggested we use a planchette we found in a thrift store to contact her.

We set up the board on a cardboard box in the center of the room, and I wrote the letters and numbers on a piece of paper. As we placed our fingers on the planchette, the air grew still. At first, nothing happened. Then, the planchette began to move, spelling out the word ‘HELP.’ We were thrilled, but also uneasy. We asked who was there, and it spelled ‘MARY.’ That was the name of the girl from the legend.

We asked her what she wanted, and the planchette spelled ‘PAINT.’ We looked at each other, confused. Then the planchette moved to the edge of the board and pointed to a door in the corner of the room that we had never noticed. It was a small, wooden door, painted a dull gray, but covered in a layer of dust. Clara said she had never seen it before.

We approached the door, and on the handle was a note in fading ink that read: ‘If you open this door, you must paint it red before closing it.’ We thought it was a prank, but curiosity got the better of us. Clara opened the door, and a cold draft swept out. Inside, it was dark, and a narrow staircase descended into blackness.

We decided to explore. We grabbed a flashlight from the shelf and descended. The stairs were wooden and creaked with each step. At the bottom, we found a small room, empty except for a single easel. On it was a canvas, but the painting was blank. On the floor, there was a can of red paint and a brush.

Mira picked up the brush and dipped it in the paint. She started to paint a red line on the canvas, but the paint seemed to spread on its own, forming shapes. Within minutes, a picture emerged: a girl with long hair standing in a field, but her face was blank. The scene looked like our town.

We were terrified, but we couldn’t look away. As the painting finished, we heard a faint sobbing coming from behind us. We turned, and the doorway we had entered was gone. The wall was solid concrete.

We were trapped. The only way out was through a different door that appeared on the opposite wall. It was painted red, and it was open. We ran through it, and found ourselves back in the media room, but the door we had first opened was now painted red.

We tried to open it, but it was locked. We heard a voice whisper, ‘You must paint the door red to close it.’ We looked at the door, and indeed, the paint was not finished. There were bare patches.

We scrambled to find paint, but the can was gone. Then Clara’s brother screamed. We turned to see the girl from the painting in the room with us. she was pale, and her face was still blank, but she was reaching out to us.

We grabbed the nearest objects – a can of red soda, red nail polish, anything – and started to cover the bare patches. As we painted the last spot, the door creaked open. We rushed out, but when we turned back, the door was gone, and the wall was solid again.

We never spoke of it to anyone, but we each had a strange mark on our hands: a red slash, like a paint stroke. To this day, I cannot look at a red door without feeling a chill, and I still hear the faint sobbing of a girl who was never found, because her face is in a painting that hangs in my attic, painted by a brush I didn’t hold.