The Portrait of the Hollow Man

In the autumn of 1987, during a NATO interoperability exercise, my mother, Sergeant Elena Voss, was stationed at a remote former SS communications relay center in the Harz Mountains, Germany. The facility, known as ‘Felsennest’ by the locals, had been repurposed as a supply depot, but its original purpose lingered in its cold stone corridors and heavy iron doors.

One night, after a grueling week of drills, the base commander granted the troops a rare evening off. Most of the soldiers headed to the recreation hall for a beer and music, but Elena and three other women—Corporal Anja Richter, Specialist Maria Flores, and Private First Class Hana Sato—chose to stay in their shared quarters, a sparse room that had once been an officer’s sleeping chamber. To pass the time, they explored the building, their flashlights casting long shadows over faded swastikas and peeling Nazi propaganda posters. In a dusty storage closet, they found a large, framed portrait of a stern-faced man in a high-collar uniform, his eyes following them as they moved. The frame was ornate, gilded, and the glass was cracked, but the face was eerily intact.

Back in their room, on a whim, Maria suggested they turn the portrait into a makeshift Ouija board. She had heard stories about the building’s dark history and wanted a thrill. Using a marker, they drew a crude alphabet and numbers on the back of the canvas, and they placed a shot glass in the center. They sat around it, fingers resting lightly on the glass, and began to ask questions. The glass remained still for a long while, until Elena, half-jokingly, demanded, ‘If anyone is here, give us a sign.’

At that exact moment, a thunderous pounding erupted from the heavy oak door leading to the main hallway. It was not a knock but a rhythmic, hammering force, as if someone were wielding a sledgehammer. The women froze, their hearts racing. Anja, the boldest, grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. The hallway stretched before them, long and cavernous, lit by a single flickering bulb at the far end. No one was there. The sound ceased instantly. They strained to see any movement, but the hall was empty, and the only other exit was a stairwell at the opposite end—impossible to reach in the seconds it took to open the door.

They slammed the door shut and leaned against it, panting. Hana whispered, ‘Maybe it’s just the heating pipes.’ But the silence that followed was deeper than before, like a held breath. Elena, trying to calm herself, looked at the portrait now lying face-down on the bed. She flipped it over, and her blood ran cold. The painted eyes, which had been looking forward, were now looking directly at her. The face seemed subtly changed—the mouth, once neutral, now curved into a faint, knowing smile.

The women decided they had had enough. They hung the portrait back on the wall, facing the room, and went to their cots, trying to laugh off the incident. But none of them slept. Every creak and groan of the old building made them jump. Around 2 AM, Elena heard a faint scratching from the wall behind her head, like fingernails on stone. She turned over and saw the portrait, its glass reflecting the moonlight. The eyes were gone—just blank, dark sockets. She buried her face in her pillow and whispered a prayer.

In the morning, they compared notes. Anja had also seen the eyes shift. Maria claimed she heard a voice whisper her name, a guttural German she didn’t understand. Hana felt a cold hand touch her ankle during the night. They agreed never to speak of it again. But as they packed to leave, Elena noticed something on the back of the portrait: a name and a date scratched into the wood—’Klaus, 1944.’

Years later, Elena researched the building. She learned it was abandoned in early 1945 when the SS fled, and that the commander, a man named Klaus Brandt, had committed suicide in his quarters rather than surrender. His body was found in the room they had stayed in, with a bullet wound to the head. The portrait had been his, painted by a prisoner just weeks before his death. The image, they said, was a perfect likeness. But Elena never told anyone that in her dream that night, she had seen the hollow-eyed man standing at the foot of her bed, pointing a pistol at her temple, whispering, ‘Now you see me.’