The VHS Tape

My name is Elara, and I’ve always been told I have a ‘gift’—a sensitivity to the spiritual realm that others find unsettling. But I never feared it, not really, because I’ve always clung to the belief that I am protected by a higher power. This is the story of how that belief was tested, in the autumn of 1995, in a small town in the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany.

My husband, a quiet engineer named Tomas, had been stationed at a NATO communications base near a village called Lindenthal. We lived in a two-story apartment above a bakery, and the constant smell of fresh bread was a comforting anchor in an otherwise foreign land. I had found a small, welcoming church in the neighboring town, and it was there I met Renata. She was a Swiss woman, married to a logistics officer named Hans, and we quickly bonded over shared anxieties of being apart from our loved ones.

Renata’s apartment was on the top floor of a pre-war building, with creaky floors and high ceilings. The building itself had been there for over a century, and the landlord, Herr Dorn, was a wiry old man who spoke little English. That evening, as our husbands were both on a month-long exercise in the Black Forest, Renata had invited me over for a girls’ night. We had rented a stack of VHS tapes from the local video store—American classics that she missed from her time in the States.

We ate popcorn and watched two films, laughing at the grainy quality and the outdated fashions. Around midnight, the wind outside picked up, rattling the windows in their old frames. Renata switched off the TV and said, ‘Let’s watch one more. My mother sent me a tape I haven’t seen yet. It’s a compilation of French music videos from the eighties.’ She dug through a basket of tapes and pulled out one with a plain white label, handwritten in marker: ‘Souvenirs.’ I shrugged, and she popped it in.

The screen crackled to life, but instead of music videos, there was a static-filled image of a living room. It looked like it was filmed on an old camcorder, with a time stamp in the corner. The room was sparse, with a single armchair and a side table with a lamp. A woman with dark hair sat in the chair, her face obscured by shadow. She was humming a lullaby—a haunting melody I didn’t recognize. Then, a child’s voice, barely audible, said, ‘Mama, I’m cold.’ The woman didn’t respond. The camera stayed fixed on her for a full minute, then the screen went to static.

Renata laughed nervously. ‘That’s weird. My mother must have recorded over something.’ She fast-forwarded, but the rest of the tape was just static. We shrugged it off and went to bed, but I couldn’t shake that melody. It followed me into my dreams.

The next morning, Renata was quiet, and I noticed dark circles under her eyes. ‘Did you sleep well?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘I kept dreaming of that lullaby,’ she admitted. ‘And I felt like someone was watching me.’ I confessed the same feeling. We decided to investigate the building’s history, thinking maybe the apartment had a past that was influencing the tape.

Our landlord, Herr Dorn, was hesitant but finally told us the story. In the 1930s, the building had been a boarding house. A young woman named Greta had lived in Renata’s exact apartment with her six-year-old son, Lukas. Greta had been a singer, but after her husband died in a factory accident, she fell into a depression. One winter night, she left Lukas alone in the apartment while she went out, and when she returned, the boy was gone. He had wandered onto the frozen lake behind the building and fallen through the ice. Greta never recovered, and she drowned herself in the same lake a year later. Her ghost was said to wander the halls, humming that lullaby to call her son.

As Herr Dorn spoke, I felt a cold draft, and I could have sworn I saw a small, translucent shape standing at the end of the hall. I blinked, and it was gone.

That night, Renata and I decided to watch the tape again, hoping to see more, maybe find a clue. As the music video channel played, we heard a faint crackling behind the music. We turned up the volume, and there it was—the lullaby, mixed into the audio track. Renata’s eyes widened. ‘I didn’t hear that before.’ We rewound and played it again, and this time, we saw the woman from the video standing in the doorway of Renata’s bedroom, her face pale and wet, as if just pulled from the lake. She was reaching out to us, her mouth moving soundlessly.

I froze, but Renata screamed and threw a shoe at the TV. The screen went black, and the room felt suddenly colder. Then, from the hallway, we heard a child’s whisper: ‘I’m still cold.’ We both ran out of the apartment, not stopping until we were in the street.

We spent the night at a hotel, and the next morning, we decided to confront the ghost. We went back to the apartment, armed with a crucifix I had blessed, and Renata carried a Bible. We played the tape one more time, but this time, I spoke to the image. ‘Greta, your son is at peace. You need to let go.’ The figure on the screen stared at me, and then, slowly, she shook her head. The lullaby grew louder, and the room began to shake. The TV flickered, and then a cold hand touched my shoulder from behind. I spun around, but nothing was there.

Then, the tape rewound on its own, and when it stopped, it played a new scene: a playground behind the building, where a small boy in a winter coat was laughing, playing in the snow. The woman in the armchair was now watching him, her face soft and sad. The boy turned to the camera and waved. I felt a chill run down my spine, but also a sense of sadness. I realized the ghost wasn’t trying to harm us—she was trying to show us what she had lost.

We left that apartment and never returned. We told Herr Dorn we had a mold problem and needed to move. He was understanding, maybe knowing more than he let on. Renata and I remained friends, but we never spoke of that night again. As for me, I kept that tape. I never watched it, but I felt a responsibility to honor that mother’s grief. In a way, it made me question my own faith—not in God, but in the boundaries between worlds. And sometimes, late at night, I can still hear that lullaby, floating in the air, a reminder of the thin line between the living and the lost.