The Painted Room

I never believed in the supernatural as a child, not really. I loved ghost stories, sure, but they were just stories. Then we moved to the old farmhouse outside a dusty town in eastern Oregon, and everything changed. I was fourteen, and for the first time in my life, I had my own room. It was a small room at the end of the upstairs hallway, with a window that faced the endless wheat fields. The previous owners had painted the walls a deep, unsettling red, and there was a strange, lingering smell of oil paint and old dust. My father said it was probably just the cheap paint they used, but I always felt like the room was watching me.

It started with small things. I would close my door at night, and in the morning, it would be open a crack. I’d find my books rearranged on the shelf, though I knew I hadn’t touched them. I told my parents, but they just smiled and said I was imagining things. My younger brother, who was nine, once said he saw a lady standing in my doorway, but he was always making up stories to scare me. I tried to ignore it, but the feeling of being watched was constant, especially when I was alone.

One night, about a month after we moved in, I woke up to the sound of scratching. It was coming from inside my closet. I lay there, heart pounding, telling myself it was just mice. But the scratching grew louder, more insistent, until it sounded like someone raking their fingernails down the wooden door. I mustered up the courage to get up and open the closet, but there was nothing there. Just my clothes, hanging like ghosts. I closed the door and went back to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there until the first light of dawn crept through the window, and I saw that my closet door was open again.

That’s when I noticed the painting. I had never seen it before, but it was leaning against the wall in the back of the closet, half-hidden by my winter coat. It was a portrait of a woman with dark hair and vacant eyes, dressed in old-fashioned clothes. She wore a high-collared dress, and in the background, there was a room that looked exactly like mine, with the same red walls. I felt a chill run down my spine. I pulled the painting out and set it on my desk, determined to ask my mom about it. But when I turned around, it was back in the closet.

I started to feel like the painting was alive. Sometimes I’d catch it out of the corner of my eye, and I’d swear the woman in it had moved. Once, I even thought I saw her mouth open, as if she were about to speak. I became obsessed with it. I would spend hours in my room, just staring at the painting, trying to decipher its secrets. My grades plummeted. I stopped hanging out with my friends. My parents were worried, but I couldn’t explain. I just had to know who that woman was.

One evening, I was alone in the house. My parents had taken my siblings to a movie. I was sitting on my bed, facing the painting, which I had placed on the opposite wall. I had tried to remove it many times, but it always ended up back in my closet, so I had given up. As I stared at it, the woman’s lips began to move. I heard a faint, silky voice whisper, ‘Come closer.’ I was frozen. ‘Come closer,’ it repeated. I felt my body move against my will, rising from the bed and walking toward the painting. I tried to stop myself, but it was like I was a passenger in my own body. I stopped right in front of the canvas, so close I could see the brushstrokes. ‘This is your room now,’ the woman said. And then she reached out of the painting and grabbed me.

I woke up on the floor, my room in disarray. The painting was gone, but in its place, on the wall, was a large, dark stain that hadn’t been there before. I never saw the painting again. I told my parents I had a nightmare, but I knew the truth. The woman had claimed my room for her own. I moved to the living room couch that night, and for the rest of the time we lived there, I refused to sleep in that room. My parents never understood why. The room remained empty, the door always closed.

Years later, I learned that the previous owner, an old woman named Eleanor, had died in that room. She had been a painter, and she had used that red paint for her masterpiece, a self-portrait that she finished just before her death. According to the neighbors, she never left the house after that, and her body wasn’t found for weeks. I don’t know what happened to the painting. Maybe it’s still there, waiting for the next occupant of the painted room. And sometimes, late at night, when I close my eyes, I can still see her face, and I hear her whisper, ‘Come closer.’ I’ve never gone back to that house. I don’t think I ever will.