The Pellet Stove’s Hum

In the autumn of 2019, I moved into my late Aunt Cora’s farmhouse in the remote town of Blackwood, Vermont. The house was a century-old Cape Cod style, with creaking floors that seemed to amplify every footstep, and a wood-pellet stove in the living room that hummed day and night. I took the upstairs bedroom at the end of the hall, right across from the bathroom. Aunt Cora had insisted on leaving the bathroom nightlight on, a strange habit I never questioned until that October.

The first night, I woke to a rhythmic thumping, like someone marching in heavy boots, coming from the hallway. I groggily checked my phone: 3:07 AM. I figured it was just the house settling, but the sound grew louder, more deliberate. I threw open the door, ready to yell at my cousin who was staying with me for the harvest, but froze. A figure stood in the hallway, not twenty feet away, but it wasn’t my cousin. It was a pillar of pure blackness, a silhouette darker than the shadows, and it had a head—a smooth, featureless oval that swiveled slowly, as if scanning the walls. It didn’t look at me; it just marched, its footfalls landing with dead weight on the old pine boards, making the floorboards tremble. I couldn’t move. My breath caught in my throat as it passed, and then it was gone, as if it had never been. But the hallway air was cold, and the nightlight flickered like a dying candle.

The next morning, I told my cousin, but he laughed it off, saying I had a bad dream. But I noticed he kept the bathroom door closed that night, and the night after that, he left for the city early. I tried to forget it, but my sleep became fractured. Every night, at 3:00 AM, I’d hear the marching, and I’d lie still, staring at the crack under my door, watching for a shadow to pass. But the shadow never came to my room. The sound would travel from the end of the hall, past my door, and into the guest room at the far side, where Aunt Cora had kept her sewing machine.

One night, I gathered the courage to follow the sound. I crept out of my room, my bare feet silent on the cold floor, and saw the black figure entering the guest room. It stopped in the doorway, its head tilting as if listening. Then, it turned to face me. For the first time, I saw its face, or rather, the absence of it—a smooth void, but within that void, a faint shimmer, like the surface of an old mirror. It didn’t speak, but I heard my aunt’s voice, disembodied, as if from the walls: ‘He’s coming for the floorboards.’ I snapped awake in my bed, drenched in sweat, the pellet stove’s hum droning downstairs.

I couldn’t sleep after that. I went to the guest room, which I rarely entered, and found it dusty, with an old sewing machine and a pile of blankets. In the corner, one floorboard was loose. I pried it up and found a hollow space, filled with old photographs—all of them of a man with hollow eyes, standing in this house, in different decades. And a newspaper clipping: a fire that had killed a family in this house in 1928, including a man who was never identified.

That night, I bolted the door and placed a chair under the knob, but at 3 AM, the marching started again, louder than ever, and the sound was coming from inside my room. I hid under the covers, trembling, as the footsteps stopped at the foot of my bed. I could hear breathing, slow and ragged. Then, the covers were ripped off, and I saw the figure, now with a face—the face of the man from the photographs, his eyes white and sunken. He leaned down, and his breath was like rotten wood, and he whispered, ‘The floor is old. You must replace the boards.’ Then he dissolved, leaving me in darkness.

The next day, I tore up the entire bedroom floor, down to the joists, and found nothing but soil. But as I replaced the boards, I realized I was putting back the same boards, because they fit perfectly, and the pellet stove hummed louder and louder. I haven’t slept since. Every night, I hear the marching, but now it’s coming from the walls, the ceiling, the attic. And last night, I saw his face in the pellet stove’s dark window, smiling, as he tapped the floor from beneath.