The Photograph in the Corridor

A year after we moved into our new apartment on the outskirts of Pune, my mother began complaining of a recurring presence in the hall. Our home was a modest 3BHK on the third floor of a building that still smelled of fresh paint and sawdust. We had performed the Griha Pravesh pooja on the day we entered, complete with the chanting of mantras and the breaking of a coconut at the threshold. The priest assured us that our home would be filled with positive energy. But positive energy doesn’t explain the cold spot that lingers near the end of the corridor, where the light from the kitchen fades into the darker hallway leading to the bedrooms.

My mother, a woman of routine, would wake every morning at five to prepare tea. One morning, she came to breakfast with dark circles under her eyes and a strange hesitance in her voice. She said she had dreamt of me—me, her elder daughter, not my younger brother as in the original tale—standing at the end of the corridor, beckoning her. ‘But it wasn’t you,’ she said, her hands trembling slightly around her cup. ‘It had your face, but its eyes were wrong. They were black, like a doll’s eyes.’ She dismissed it as a nightmare, but something in her voice made my father and me exchange a worried glance.

The next night, I was the one who couldn’t sleep. I had a deadline for a design project, and my laptop had run out of charge, so I had to plug it in near the dining table, which sits at the edge of the corridor. At around 2 AM, I heard a sound like a child’s rubber ball bouncing slowly from the direction of the bedrooms. I looked up, but the corridor was empty, save for the faint glow of the streetlight filtering through the windows. Then I saw it—a shadow, not cast by any object, began to stretch along the wall. It was shaped like a tall, thin figure with long hair, and it moved as if it were sliding, not walking. I thought I was seeing things, but then the shadow paused right at the spot where my mother claimed to have seen her false me, and it seemed to turn its head toward me. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. I slammed my laptop shut and hurried to my room, my heart pounding.

The next morning, I told my mother about the shadow. She grew pale and admitted that the figure in her dream had been more than just a face. ‘It spoke,’ she said. ‘It said, This is my house now. You should have left the photograph.’ I asked what photograph she meant. She confessed that while unpacking, she had found an old, dust-covered photograph in the corner of one of the storage closets—a portrait of a woman in her twenties, wearing a traditional saree, with a stern expression. The frame had a crack across the glass. My mother, being superstitious, had been about to throw it away, but my brother said it looked old and valuable, so she tucked it behind some boxes in the same closet. We had never seen it since.

Alarmed, I insisted we retrieve the photograph. But when we opened the closet, it was empty. Not a single box. The shelves were bare, as if the closet had never been used. The dust pattern showed a rectangular outline where the photograph had supposedly sat, but there was nothing else. My father, a pragmatic man, dismissed our worries and said we must have moved it during our initial unpacking. But I saw the look in my mother’s eyes—she knew better.

That night, I decided to stay up to catch whatever was haunting our home. I hid in the hallway behind a tall dresser, armed with my phone’s flashlight. The corridor was dead silent. I must have dozed off, because I woke to a sound—a soft, almost imperceptible whisper. It seemed to come from the end of the corridor, near the main door. I slowly raised my phone and angled it toward the sound. What I saw made me freeze. There, standing at the door, was a woman in a white saree, her back to me. She was pressing her hand against the door, as if trying to leave, but her feet were bare and her hair hung limp and wet, dripping onto the floor. I wanted to call out, but my voice was stuck. Then she spoke, and her voice was the same as my mother’s. ‘The corridor is mine. Through the frames, I see my home.’

I didn’t wait to see more. I stumbled back to my bed, pulling the covers over my head like a child. In the morning, I told my parents everything. My mother broke down and confessed that she had not been completely honest. The photograph had not been found in a closet—it had been handed to her by a strange old woman in the building’s parking garage, who had said, ‘Your home was built on my old house. Return this to the one who lost it, or she will return to claim it.’ My mother, thinking it a prank, had taken the photo but thrown it into a dumpster. Now she believed the ghost was angry that she had disposed of it.

My father, finally convinced, called a local priest who specialized in paranormal cases. He performed a thorough cleansing ritual, but before he began, he examined the corridor. He paused at a point where the wall met the floor, and he tapped it. To our astonishment, a portion of the wall gave way—a hidden niche, too small to be a room, but large enough to house a small shrine. Inside was a decaying photograph of the same woman, but this time with a date on the back: ‘1987.’ The priest identified it as a portrait of a woman who had lived in a hut on this very land before the building was constructed. She had died a violent death, and the construction had disturbed her resting place. The corridor, he explained, was the exact spot where her hut’s entrance had been. She wanted her photograph to be displayed in the hall, facing the main door, so that she could ‘see’ her home once more.

We placed the photograph in a frame and hung it in the corridor, just opposite the main door. The cold spot vanished, and the shadow never returned. But sometimes, when I walk down that corridor late at night, I catch a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye. And I never look directly at the photograph for too long, because the woman’s eyes in that picture seem to follow me, and her lips, I swear, are always curved into a smile that grows a little wider each time.