The Pencil Trap

It began on a humid August night in the backwoods of Maine, where the air clung to your skin like a wet shroud. My friends—Jenna, Marcus, and I—were the kind of bored teenagers who’d try anything once, and when Jenna found a tutorial online for a homemade spirit board, we thought it would be a laugh. The instructions were simple: take three pencils, arrange them into a square with one side missing, and have two people hold the open ends while the third asks questions. The pencils would move to answer, spelling out words or pointing to directions.

We set it up on the splintered floor of my grandmother’s abandoned hunting cabin, a half-mile into the pines. The only light came from a single oil lamp, casting dancing shadows that made the corners feel deeper than they were. Jenna and Marcus held the pencils, their fingers slick with sweat, and I asked the first question: ‘Is anyone here with us?’ The pencils trembled, then swiveled to point at a chipped teacup on the shelf—the only object in the room that seemed out of place. We laughed, thinking it was a trick of gravity, but then the pencils moved again, tracing a path to the window where a moth battered against the glass. A chill ran through us, but we dared to continue.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, and the pencils scraped across the floor, spelling out ‘CORINNE.’ The name meant nothing to us. ‘How did you die?’ Jenna’s voice cracked. The pencils drew a jagged line, then a loop, then a sharp stop. ‘PUSHED.’ We exchanged nervous glances, but curiosity won. ‘Where are you?’ The pencils pointed to the ceiling, where a dark stain spread across the wooden planks like a hand reaching down. We blew out the lamp and fled, feeling eyes on our backs as we stumbled through the dark woods.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. My bedroom was in the attic of my parents’ house, and the window faced the forest. Around 3 AM, I heard a faint scratching from the roof above me, like something with long nails dragging across the shingles. I froze, my heart pounding. The scratching stopped, replaced by a low, guttural laugh that seemed to come from right outside the glass. I yanked the curtains shut and hid under my blanket, but I could still hear it moving, shifting weight on the rafters. When I finally peeked out at dawn, the roof was bare, but there was a deep scratch mark in the paint, as if something had been dragged across it.

The next day, Marcus called, his voice shaky. He’d seen a dark figure crouched on the water tower behind his house, its limbs too long, its head tilted at an unnatural angle. It was watching him through his bedroom window, and when he blinked, it was gone. Then Jenna called, sobbing. She’d felt a cold hand grab her ankle while she was in the shower, and when she turned, the curtain was pulled back, revealing a shadow that vanished as soon as the water hit it. We tried to convince ourselves it was our imagination, but the pattern was clear: the entity was following us, waiting until we were alone.

We decided to stop playing the game, thinking that would end it. We burned the pencils, sprinkled salt across our doorways, and hung crosses above our beds. But the activities only intensified. One night, I woke to find the cross on my wall inverted, and the air in my room was so cold I could see my breath. A high-pitched whispering emanated from the closet, and I could swear I saw a face pressed against the slats of the door, its eyes like black pits. Jenna called me in a panic the same night, saying her blanket was being pulled down toward the foot of her bed, no matter how hard she clutched it. She heard that same laugh, close to her ear, as if the entity was lying beside her.

Marcus didn’t answer his phone for three days. When Jenna and I finally drove to his house, we found him in his basement, huddled in a corner, his eyes wide and unblinking. He kept pointing at the ceiling, muttering, ‘It hangs there at night,’ but when we looked, there was nothing. He showed us a series of photos he’d taken on his phone—blurry images of a dark shape swinging from the rafters, its neck twisted. The photos were timestamped at 3:33 AM, each for the past three nights. Marcus admitted he’d been too afraid to leave the basement, convinced that the stairs were guarded by something he couldn’t see.

We tried to find help. I contacted a paranormal investigator from Bangor, but she turned pale when she saw our photos. She said the entity we’d contacted wasn’t a ghost—it was a ‘fragment,’ a piece of a malevolent force that had been trapped in the cabin’s land long before the cabin was built. She warned us that by opening the square, we’d given it a lease on our lives, and the only way to be rid of it was to complete the square again and send it back. But she refused to tell us how, saying that doing so would only anger it further. She advised us to leave town, but we had nowhere else to go.

We decided to try the reverse: to rebuild the square and ask it to leave. We gathered new pencils and returned to the cabin, this time at midnight. The air was thick with the smell of rot, and the windows were frosted despite the August heat. We set up the square in the center of the room, and I asked, ‘Corinne, are you here?’ The pencils spun violently, then spelled out ‘YES.’ ‘What do you want?’ I asked. The pencils traced a word that made my blood run cold: ‘COMPANY.’ Then the lamp flickered, and we heard a heavy thud from the roof. Something was walking above us, deliberately, each step creaking the old beams. Jenna screamed as a dark shape slid down the chimney, landing in the soot-filled fireplace, its form hunched and massive, with a face that was all teeth and empty sockets.

We ran for the door, but it swung shut with a bang, and the handle wouldn’t budge. The entity spoke in a voice that seemed to come from all directions, a broken whisper: ‘You opened the square. Now you belong to me.’ I fumbled for my phone, but the battery was dead. Marcus pulled out a cross, and the thing laughed—a wet, choking sound. ‘Your symbols are just scratches,’ it said. ‘You’re mine now.’ Then the pencils on the floor rose into the air, arranging themselves into a perfect square around us, and the world went dark.

We woke up at dawn, lying in the clearing outside the cabin, our phones destroyed, and our memories of the night fragmented. But we knew it wasn’t over. We returned home, but the signs followed us. Jenna found her name scratched into the bathroom mirror. Marcus found a note under his pillow, written in a child’s hand: ‘I’m still waiting.’ And I, even now, feel a cold breath on my neck whenever I’m alone. We never speak of it, but we all know: the square has a missing side, and it’s always open, waiting for you to step inside.