The Stained Glass Reflection

My wife and I moved into the old Harrow House a year ago, drawn by its peeling Victorian charm and a rent that seemed too good to be true. We soon learned why. The house was a repository of tragedy, and I believe it held onto a fragment of its last owner, a woman who had died in a fire. But the first sign came to me before we even unpacked all the boxes.

It was a humid September evening. I was alone in the house, unpacking books in the study that overlooked the tangled garden. The sun had set, and I had just turned on the desk lamp when I felt a draft from the hallway, even though all the windows were shut. I walked to the doorway and looked down the long, dim corridor. At the end, a full-length mirror reflected the staircase, but something was wrong. The reflection showed the staircase lit by a warm, orange glow, unlike the cold darkness I stood in. And in that reflected light, a figure descended the stairs, a woman in a long, charred dress. Her face was partially obscured by shadow, but where her left cheek should have been, there was a patch of blackened, peeling skin, like burnt paper.

I did not run. I was frozen. The woman in the reflection did not seem to see me. She walked down the stairs, through the hallway, and disappeared into the wall where the kitchen would be. When she vanished, the reflected light dimmed, and the mirror returned to showing the dark stairwell. I stood there for a long time, my heart pounding, until my wife called from upstairs, asking if I had seen the gas leak detector.

I did not tell her right away. I thought it might be a trick of the light, a remnant of a nightmare. But over the next weeks, the reflections became frequent. I would catch the mirror from the corner of my eye, and it would show the hallway from a different time, with wallpaper in a different pattern, or furniture I did not recognize. Sometimes I would see the burnt woman standing at the end of the corridor, her face partially hidden, as if waiting.

My wife, Elena, began to notice something was off. One night she woke me, saying she had heard a faint crackling sound, like a fire smoldering, coming from the mirror downstairs. We both went down, and there it was: the mirror was warm to the touch, even though it was glass. In the reflection, we saw a room we did not have, a parlor with a fireplace, and a figure in a rocking chair. The woman was facing away, her head bowed, and I could see that the back of her dress was burnt away, revealing a spine like a row of knuckles.

The events escalated. One evening, I was preparing dinner in the kitchen, and I saw a reflection in the polished steel of the refrigerator door, not of the kitchen, but of the same burnt parlor, and the woman was now facing me. Her face was a mask of cracked, charred skin, with one eye milky white and the other a burning ember. Her mouth opened as if to speak, and I heard a dry, rasping whisper: ‘You have my house.’ I shouted and threw a pan at the fridge, which, of course, did nothing.

Elena suggested we investigate the house’s history. We found old newspapers in the attic, yellowed and fragile, that told of a fire in 1925 that had killed a woman named Madeline Ashcroft, who was said to have been a recluse and a collector of antique mirrors. The story said the fire started in her parlor, and her body was found near a large mirror, which was melted and warped. The reporter noted that the mirror was returned to the family, but its exact location was unknown. We realized we had that mirror in our hallway, the one we had found in the basement when we moved in, too heavy to carry up, so we left it there. But we had a full-length mirror in the hallway, not the burnt one. Unless… we looked at the mirror again, and it was not the mirror we thought. It was larger, ornately framed, with a tarnished, almost gold, metalwork. It had not been there before.

The climax came on the anniversary of the fire, October 12th. That night, every reflective surface in the house showed the burning parlor. The glass in the windows, the kitchen utensils, even the water in the toilet bowl. We saw the woman, Madeline, standing in the center of the parlor, surrounded by flames. She reached out a hand to us, and her mouth opened, and this time we heard her clearly: ‘You can leave. Or you can stay and burn.’

We took the hint. We packed our bags and fled that night, leaving most of our belongings behind. We checked into a motel, and in the morning, we drove back to look at the house one last time. The front door was ajar, and through the window, we saw the mirror, and in it, the parlor from a time before the fire, with Madeline sitting in her rocking chair, peaceful, but her face still half-burnt, as if the reflection was stuck between moments. She looked at us, and gave a small nod, as if approving our departure.

We never went back. We found a new apartment, and as far as I know, it is not haunted. But I still avoid mirrors, especially in the dark. And sometimes, when I catch my reflection unexpectedly, I see a flicker of orange light at the edge of my vision, and I feel a warmth on my left cheek, like a hand hovering just above. But I tell myself it is just my imagination, a leftover fear. Yet tonight, I was washing my hands, and I looked up into the bathroom mirror, and I saw that my reflection was a split second behind my movements. And in the reflection, behind me, a door stood ajar that was closed in the real world, and through that door, I saw a familiar hallway, and at its end, a burnt woman watching me. I blinked, and it was gone. But I know what I saw. And I know that some houses never let go, and neither do their mirrors.