The Unpainted Room

The night before the move, my cousin Mari and I snuck into the old farmhouse on Wolf Road—a place my parents had bought dirt cheap after the previous owners vanished without a trace. We had a Ouija board hidden in her backpack, and the thrill of trespassing in our own future home made our palms sweat. The house smelled of dust and dried apples, and the floorboards groaned under our feet as we set up sleeping bags in the den, a small room whose walls were stark white, unpainted, as if someone had run out of time.

At midnight, we sat cross-legged on the cold wood floor, the board between us. Mari lit a single candle, and we placed our fingers on the planchette. We asked, ‘Is anyone here?’ The silence was heavy, broken only by the wind rattling the windows. Then the planchette moved—slowly, deliberately—to ‘YES.’ But that was it. No other movement, no ominous messages. After several more questions with no response, we shrugged it off as imagination and packed the board away, too spooked to continue. We crawled into our sleeping bags, laughing nervously, and fell asleep.

I woke to Mari shaking me. ‘Do you hear that?’ she whispered. I listened. A faint, rhythmic scraping came from the walls—like fingernails dragging across plaster. It moved from one side of the room to the other, then stopped. We held our breath, but nothing else happened. The next morning, we noticed a thin line in the dust on the den’s floor, as if something had been dragged across it during the night. We chalked it up to mice and began hauling boxes inside.

The first week in the house, we noticed the den’s white walls seemed off. In certain lights, they appeared yellowed, as if stained by nicotine or age. My father tried to paint over them, but the new paint dried in patches, and a faint outline of a door appeared on the inside wall—a door that didn’t exist from the other side. He laughed it off as a bad batch of paint, but I saw him staring at it more than once, frowning.

Months passed. The house settled into a routine of creaks and groans, but the den remained strangely cold, even in summer. My younger brother refused to enter it, saying he saw ‘a woman with long fingers’ standing in the corner when no one was there. We told him it was his imagination, but I started leaving the den’s door closed at all times.

One night, I woke to the scraping sound again, louder this time. I crept to the den, which we’d turned into a storage room, and peered through the crack. The moonlight streaming through the window illuminated a figure—tall, thin, with arms that hung too long. It stood in the corner where my brother swore he saw the woman, and it was scraping the wall with its fingers, carving a pattern into the plaster. As I watched, it turned its head, and its face was featureless, a blank white sheet stretched over bone. I stumbled back, and when I looked again, it was gone.

We called a local historian, who told us the farmhouse was built in the 1920s by a reclusive artist named Elias Thorne. He had painted only one room in the house—the den—but he never finished it. His last painting was of a woman with long, elegant fingers, but he died before completing her face. The historian said Elias was known for his obsessive need for perfection, and he often left his canvases blank when they didn’t meet his standards.

That night, I hauled the Ouija board out of the trash and, alone in the den, lit a candle. I placed my fingers on the planchette and asked, ‘Elias? Are you here?’ The planchette shot to ‘YES.’ I asked, ‘Will you ever finish the painting?’ The planchette moved to ‘NO.’ Then it spelled out: ‘I NEED MORE SKIN.’

I ran out of that room and never entered it again. We sold the house at a loss and moved across the country. But sometimes, late at night, I feel a faint scratching on my skin, as if something is trying to scrape me clean, and I know the unpainted room is waiting for me to come back—and it will keep waiting until I have nothing left to give.