The Visit from the Tall Man

I never believed in ghosts until we moved to the old farmhouse in the Bavarian countryside. My name is Ana, and I’m fifteen. My mother married Klaus, a German engineer, and his job transfer brought us to this remote village near the edge of the Black Forest. The house was a inheritance from Klaus’s great-uncle, a man I never met but whose presence seemed to linger in every creaking floorboard and dusty photograph.

It was the first night that I saw it. I couldn’t sleep, the unfamiliar silence pressing in like a heavy blanket. My room was at the end of the hallway, its window overlooking a tangled orchard that seemed to swallow the moonlight. I lay in bed, listening to the wind rustle the leaves, when I noticed a shape by the wardrobe. At first, I thought it was a pile of clothes, but then it moved. It was tall, impossibly tall, with long limbs that bent at unnatural angles. Its head tilted as if it were studying me, but its face was a void, a blackness that drank the dim light. I couldn’t scream. I could only stare until my eyes burned with exhaustion, and then I blinked, and it was gone.

I told myself it was a dream, a trick of my tired mind. But the next night, it returned, this time closer, its head resting on a hand as it knelt beside my bed, like some macabre observer. I felt a cold breath on my cheek, though no air moved. I shut my eyes tightly and recited the Lord’s Prayer, but when I opened them, it was still there, patient and unmoving. After that, it came every night, never speaking, never touching, just watching. My grades plummeted, and my mother thought I was depressed. But I knew I wasn’t insane. I had to prove it.

I began to investigate the house. In the attic, I found a diary belonging to Klaus’s great-uncle, a man named Wilhelm. The pages were yellowed, but the handwriting was neat, almost obsessive. He wrote about ‘the visitor’ that came to him as a boy, and how it followed him all his life. He described the same tall figure, its featureless face, and the way it would rest its chin on its hand, as if waiting for something. He called it ‘der Wächter,’ the Watcher. He claimed it only appeared to those who were ‘chosen,’ and that it demanded a blood price to be set free. The last entry was dated a week before his death, and the final line read: ‘It wants the child. But I will not give it.’

I showed the diary to my mother, but she dismissed it as a ranting old man’s imagination. Desperate, I decided to confront the figure. That night, when the Watcher appeared, I forced myself to meet its gaze, or where its gaze should be. ‘What do you want?’ I whispered. The black void of its face seemed to pulse, and a cold, dry voice echoed in my mind, not through my ears: ‘I am the Keeper of the Threshold. You have crossed into my domain. To leave, you must offer a piece of yourself.’ It raised a hand, long and skeletal, and pointed a finger at my chest. I felt a sharp pain, like a shard of ice piercing my heart, and then it withdrew, and the pain faded.

I woke up the next morning in a cold sweat, but I felt different. I was calm, almost euphoric. I went about my day, but I noticed something odd: my reflection in the mirror seemed delayed, as if it lagged behind my movements. And in the corner of my eye, I kept seeing a tall, dark shape that vanished when I turned. My mother grew worried when she found me staring at the wall for hours, my mind empty. That evening, I heard a girl singing in the orchard, a Romanian lullaby my grandmother used to hum. I went outside, and there, under the apple tree, stood a girl about my age, but her eyes were black, and her smile was too wide. ‘You gave him a piece, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘Now you’ll see what I see. Forever.’ She laughed, and the sound was like breaking glass.

I realized then that I was not alone in this curse. The girl was one of Wilhelm’s descendants, a cousin I never knew, who had disappeared years ago. I found her diary in the attic, hidden behind a loose board. She had been chosen too, and she had offered her voice, and now she was a mute spirit, bound to the orchard, able to only whisper the songs of the dead. I knew I had to break the cycle before it became permanent. I searched Wilhelm’s diary for a way to release the Watcher. There was a ritual, involving a mirror, a lock of hair, and a promise to carry the Watcher into our own bloodline willingly. The catch: you had to name the Watcher, giving it identity, which would make it mortal but bind it to the family forever.

I decided to do it. That night, I set up the mirror in my room, placed my hair and a photo of my mother inside a circle of salt, and spoke the name I found in an old church record: ‘Ludwig.’ The Watcher appeared, not as a shadow, but as a gaunt man in an old-fashioned suit, his face partially visible, with hollow eyes. He looked at me with something like relief. ‘You have freed me from my limbo,’ he said. ‘But now I must feed on your family’s memories until you die.’ I felt a shaking in the floor, and from the mirror, my mother’s reflection stepped out, her face a mask of terror. ‘What have you done?’ she screamed. But it was too late. Ludwig merged with my mother’s shadow, and she collapsed. When she woke, she had no memory of me, only a vague sense of loss.

I fled that house, leaving behind the orchard and the whispering girl. Now I live with my aunt in a city apartment, but the Watcher is still with me, in my reflection, in my dreams. He takes a memory every night, and I forget more and more of who I was. I’m writing this story in the hopes that someone, somewhere, knows how to reverse it, or at least how to say goodbye to the ones you love before you forget they ever existed. If you see a tall figure with a hand resting under its chin, do not acknowledge it. Do not speak to it. And above all, never, ever give it your name.