The Unfinished Rite

In the autumn of 1994, my mother and I moved into a two-bedroom flat on the fourth floor of a pre-war building in the city. The place had a musty scent of old wood and mothballs, and the radiators clanked and hissed like restless spirits. My two older cousins, Mateo and Iñigo, who were both studying architecture at the nearby university, had come to live with us that year, along with our house helper, a quiet girl named Pilar, who was about their age. Our weekends were no longer quiet; they were filled with laughter, loud music, and the smell of instant noodles and burnt toast.

One Saturday, as we lounged in the cramped but cozy living room, debating which horror film to rent, the overhead light flickered. Pilar, who was curled up on the armchair, hugging a cushion, said, ‘This old place has got a lot of quirks.’ The thermostat on the wall was set to 70, but the room suddenly grew chilly, as if someone had pressed a cold glass against my spine. I noticed that Mateo’s mug of coffee had a thin film of ice on its surface. He set it down with a clink. ‘Weird,’ he said, but we shrugged it off, attributing it to drafty windows.

That night, I woke to the sound of scratching. It was not the scrape of branches against glass, for there were no trees near our windows. It was a deliberate, rhythmic scratch, like fingernails dragging along the wall behind my head. I turned on the lamp and found nothing. The noise stopped. I lay back down, and just as I was drifting off, I heard a faint, melodic hum, a tune I didn’t recognize, coming from the direction of the closet. The closet door was ajar, though I had closed it before bed. I got up, my heart pounding, and slammed it shut. The hum ceased.

The next morning, I mentioned it at breakfast. To my surprise, Pilar looked pale. She said, ‘I heard that too, last night. It came from my room, from the vent.’ My cousins exchanged uneasy glances. Mateo said he’d dreamed of a woman in a white dress standing at the foot of his bed, crying. Iñigo mocked him, but his laugh was forced. I remembered that three years earlier, I had seen a ghost in our old apartment, and I knew the feeling of being watched.

Days passed, and the occurrences escalated. Pots and pans clanged in the kitchen at midnight, but when we checked, they were on the floor. Mirrors fogged up with an image of a handprint that vanished as we watched. And always, there was that humming, the same eerie melody, growing louder each night. The air grew heavy with the smell of canal water and dead flowers.

One evening, I found Pilar in the hallway, staring at the wall. She was mumbling in her native tongue, a prayer. I touched her shoulder, and she flinched. ‘She is here,’ she said, her eyes wide. ‘The woman in white. She says she died here, in this very apartment, in 1954. She was a young maid, and she was pregnant. The master of the house refused to acknowledge the child. He locked her in the closet, and she suffocated. Her body was not found until weeks later. She says her spirit is trapped, because the child was never given a proper burial, never even named.’

My blood went cold. The closet in my room—the one that had been ajar—that was where she died. My mother, who had kept quiet, now spoke. She had always been practical, but her face was drawn. She said she had found an old photograph in the attic of a young woman, and behind it was a torn note: ‘I am with child. He denies me. I will take my own life if I must.’

The haunting grew more aggressive. That night, the scratching was everywhere, and the humming turned into a wailing. I saw the woman standing in the corner of my room, her face gaunt and hollow, her hands clutching a ghostly bundle. She pointed at me, then at the closet, and mouthed, ‘My child.’

We decided to do something. Pilar, who knew the rituals, said we needed to give the child a name and a proper send-off. We found a lock of hair and a tiny, rusted cross in a hidden compartment of the closet floor. We gathered in the living room, lit candles, and spoke a eulogy. We called the child ‘Gloria’ for the glory she never had. As we finished, the wailing stopped, and the house fell into silence.

The next morning, the apartment felt lighter, and the air was clear. But I was uneasy. The woman’s suffering had been acknowledged, but was that enough? The final week passed without incident. We thought it was over.

But then, on the last Saturday of the month, I came home late to find the living room in perfect order, yet the floorboards were covered in a fine layer of ash. And in the center, arranged in a circle, were thirteen small, unrecognizable bones. And on the wall, written in a ruddy smear, were the words: ‘Who names her child, must bury her.’

We had given the child a name, but we had not given her a body to bury. That night, we dug under the closet floor and found a tiny, decayed skeleton swaddled in tattered cloth. We buried it in the garden, said proper prayers, and placed a small stone marker inscribed ‘Gloria.’

The hauntings ceased completely. But I will never forget the lesson: when you name a ghost’s child, you must also give it a grave. For some spirits, the final rite is not just a name, but a resting place. And if you fail to provide it, the dead will remind you until you do.