The Scratching Behind the Plaster

When Lena was nineteen, she shared a cramped flat with two friends, Marta and Ingrid, in an old brick building on the edge of town. The flat had high ceilings, drafty windows, and a persistent smell of damp plaster. They’d painted the walls a cheerful yellow, but it never quite masked the cold that seeped through.

One evening, they were curled on the threadbare sofa, watching a grainy movie on the old television. Ingrid was knitting, needles clicking rhythmically, while Marta complained about her shift at the diner. Lena was half-listening, her mind drifting to the stack of bills on the kitchen counter, when a sound cut through the mundane chatter.

It was a scrape, slow and deliberate, like fingernails dragging against the inside of the wall. It started near the corner by the radiator and moved along, leaving a trail of dry, rustling noise. They all froze, eyes wide. ‘What was that?’ Marta whispered, her knitting needles dropping to her lap.

The scraping continued, unhurried, as if something were tracing patterns behind the pale yellow paint. Lena’s skin prickled. She thought of the previous tenants’ stories, dismissed as old wives’ tales, about the woman who’d died in the building decades ago, her heart giving out as she clawed at the wall.

They scrambled to their feet, abandoning the sofa, and huddled in Ingrid’s bedroom, which was farthest from the sound. But it followed them, the scraping now emanating from the wall shared with the hallway. It grew bolder, longer strokes, like long nails raking down the plaster. Marta began to cry, and Lena’s heart hammered against her ribs. Ingrid, though pale, managed to dial her boyfriend, Erik, who lived a few blocks away.

‘There’s something in the walls,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘Can you come? Now.’

They waited, the scraping ceaseless, punctuated by a soft thud every so often, as if something heavy had shifted. When Erik arrived, he searched every room, every closet, even the attic hatch, but found nothing. The scraping stopped the moment he stepped into the flat, and they were left in silence, breathing shallowly, exchanging looks that said: it knows we’re afraid.

Other things happened after that. A glass plate on the counter shattered into a thousand pieces, no hand near it, with a sound like a gunshot. Footsteps paced upstairs in the empty apartment, heavy and deliberate, when they were all downstairs. Doors creaked open on their own.

But the worst was when Lena was alone one afternoon, reading in the living room. The scraping started again, closer, behind the wall directly behind her chair. It was slow, almost teasing, and then it stopped. She held her breath. There was a faint suction noise, like a mouth pulling away from plaster, and then a whisper, so low it might have been the wind: ‘Let me in.’

It was then Lena remembered the old photograph she’d seen in the landlord’s office, of a young woman with hollow eyes standing in front of that very building, her hands pressed flat against the foundation. She’d died young, the landlord had said, in the upstairs room, and her spirit had never left the walls, always scratching, always seeking a way back in.

Lena never told the others about the whisper, but they all knew. They stopped using the living room, and eventually they moved out, leaving the yellow walls and the silence behind. But sometimes, in her new, modern apartment, Lena wakes at night and swears she hears a faint scrape, scrape, scraping, just behind her head, waiting patiently for her to listen.