The Sixth Chair

I’ve always been drawn to the strange, even as a child. My grandmother used to say I had the ‘sight,’ but I just thought the world was more interesting than most people admitted. I remember playing in the dusty attic of our old house in Vermont, surrounded by forgotten relics, when I was six. My cousin, Emily, was three, and we were pretending the moth-eaten armchairs were a royal court. I was the queen, and Emily was my loyal subject. But I kept feeling like there was a third presence with us, a chill in the air that didn’t belong to the autumn drafts.

One afternoon, my mother was watching us from the doorway, half-listening while she folded laundry. I was telling Emily about the ‘invisible man’ who sat in the sixth chair, the one with the broken leg. She giggled and pointed to the empty space, saying, ‘He’s here!’ My mother laughed it off, but later she told me that when I was barely able to talk, I used to have long, one-sided conversations with ‘the man in the tall hat.’ She never saw him, but she said my eyes would follow something across the room.

Years passed, and I grew to explain away such things. I’m sixteen now, and I believe in the power of the mind to play tricks, especially in old houses with creaky floors and too many shadows. But last winter, something happened that I still can’t rationalize.

My father was away on business in Norway, so it was just my mother, my younger brother Leo (who was five), and me, plus our two golden retrievers, Max and Ruby. We were all huddled in my parents’ huge bed, watching a movie to stave off the cold. Around two in the morning, I woke up parched. I slipped out of the warm cocoon, and my bare feet hit the icy wooden floor. I grabbed my phone to light the way, and the dogs stirred but didn’t follow.

As I walked to the kitchen, I passed the dining room. The door was ajar, which was odd because we always kept it closed to keep the heat in. I peeked inside. The moonlight streamed through the bay window, casting long, eerie shapes on the table. And there, in the dust on the glass, was a single word: ‘HELLO.’

I froze. The word looked like it had been written by a small child, shaky and uncertain. But no one else was awake. I shook my head, thinking it was a trick of the light, and hurried to the kitchen. I drank a glass of water and tried to ignore the chill that ran up my spine.

On my way back, I stopped at the dining room again. The door was now fully open. I stepped in, and I saw that the word ‘HELLO’ was gone. In its place was ‘SIT DOWN.’ My heart hammered. I backed away, but my foot caught on a rug, and I stumbled. When I looked up, I saw faint, misty figures sitting around the table, their shapes barely visible in the moonlight. One of them, the one at the head, seemed to wear a tall hat.

I ran back to my parents’ room, slammed the door, and jumped into bed, pulling the covers over my head. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

The next morning, I told my mother, but she dismissed it as a nightmare. However, when Leo woke up, he said he had seen ‘the nice man in the hat’ in his dreams. ‘He said he wanted to play with me,’ Leo said. ‘But I don’t think he was nice. His smile was too wide.’

That weekend, my mother decided to declutter the attic. We found an old photograph among my late grandfather’s things. In it, a group of people were seated at a long table, and there were six chairs. In the sixth chair, there was a faint, ghostly shape of a man in a tall hat. The photograph was dated 1923. The house we lived in was built in 1925.

I knew then that the presence had been waiting for a long time. And it had finally found someone who could see it. I just hope it doesn’t want to take a seat at our family table permanently.