The Weeping Well on Holloway Farm

The summer I turned sixteen, my parents sent me to stay with my aunt in the dusty town of Holloway, nestled in the folds of the Appalachian foothills. It was a place of abandoned orchards and skeletal barns, where the only sounds were the rasp of cicadas and the occasional lowing of a distant cow. Aunt Martha’s farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel lane, its white paint peeling like sunburned skin. She was a taciturn woman, her face etched with lines that seemed to hold secrets rather than smiles.

Across the fields, a quarter mile through waist-high grass, stood the ruins of the old Holloway place. The house had collapsed into itself decades ago, a heap of rotting timber and shattered slate. But the well remained. It was a squat cylinder of moss-covered stones, its wooden cover rotted through, leaving a gaping black mouth. Aunt Martha warned me to stay away. ‘There’s a thing in that well,’ she said, her voice flat. ‘It feeds on the lonely.’ I thought she was just a superstitious old woman, and I was bored beyond belief.

The local kids had their own name for it: the Weeping Well. They said if you stood at the edge and listened, you could hear a woman sobbing from the depths. But they never dared go near, except for one—a boy named Elias, who claimed he’d once seen a pale hand reach up from the darkness. I called him a liar, and to prove him wrong, I marched to the well that very afternoon.

The day was oppressive, the air thick with humidity and the smell of decaying vegetation. As I approached, I noticed the grass around the well was yellowed and brittle, as if the soil had been poisoned. A sense of wrongness settled over me, like a cold hand on the back of my neck. I peered into the hole. A sour, earthy smell rose up, along with a faint metallic tang. I held my breath and listened. Nothing. I laughed at my own fear, kicked a pebble into the darkness, and turned to leave.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The image of that black maw lingered in my mind, and I kept hearing a faint, rhythmic sound—like dripping water, or perhaps a sob. I convinced myself it was just the old house settling. But the next day, I found a small, crudely carved wooden figure on my windowsill, its face twisted in anguish. I brought it to Aunt Martha. Her face went pale. ‘It’s an offering,’ she whispered. ‘The well took something, and now it wants something back.’

I should have heeded her warning, but curiosity got the better of me. That night, I snuck out with a flashlight. The moon had yet to rise, and the fields were a sea of inky black. I stumbled through the grass, my heart hammering. When I reached the well, I saw something strange: a glimmer of light emanating from the cracks between the stones, pulsing like a heartbeat. And then I heard it—a woman’s voice, soft and broken, calling my name. It wasn’t my name, but it sounded familiar, like someone I’d known in a dream.

I leaned over the edge, my flashlight beam cutting through the murk. The light reflected off something at the bottom—a glint of metal. A locket? A ring? I leaned further, trying to make it out. The voice grew clearer, more desperate. ‘Help me,’ it wept. ‘I’ve been down here so long.’

My mind screamed to run, but my body moved against my will, my hand reaching down into the darkness. The air grew cold, frosting my breath. My fingers brushed against something slick and cold—a hand. It grasped my wrist with surprising strength, and I cried out, yanking back. The grip held, and I felt myself being pulled inexorably toward the edge. I clawed at the stones, but the hand would not relent. My feet slipped on the damp earth, and I tumbled forward, the dark swallowing my scream.

I woke in a faint, gray light, my head throbbing. I was lying on a muddy floor, surrounded by walls of ancient brick. Above me, a pinpoint of light marked the well mouth. I was trapped at the bottom, and I wasn’t alone. A figure crouched in the shadows—a woman with long, tangled hair, her skin the color of quarry silt. She rocked back and forth, and from her lips came the sobbing I’d heard. When she looked up, her eyes were voids, and I saw my own reflection in them, but twisted—older, hollowed out.

‘You came,’ she said, her voice dripping with false gratitude. ‘Now I can leave, and you will take my place.’ She smiled, a crack in her pale face.

I scrambled backward, pressing against the wet bricks. ‘No,’ I managed, ‘I won’t.’ But she only laughed, a sound like stones grinding together. ‘You’re already here. That’s all it takes.’

Days passed, or perhaps only hours. I couldn’t tell. The woman—she told me her name was Lenore—claimed she’d been a farm girl in the 1880s, betrayed by a lover who threw her down this well to die. But as she spoke, her story kept shifting. Sometimes she was a healer, sometimes a witch, sometimes a child. She was a liar, a shape-shifter, a predator. She fed on my fear, my loneliness, my longing for home. I felt my memories fading, replaced by hers. I was losing myself.

In a moment of despair, I remembered an old prayer Aunt Martha had taped to the refrigerator, a faded lithograph of St. Michael vanquishing a demon. I’d never been religious, but I recited it aloud, my voice cracking. Lenore recoiled, shrieking, her form blurring like heat shimmers. She lunged at me, but the prayer seemed to burn her. I scrambled up a rotting rope that, incongruously, had appeared from the darkness—a lifeline, perhaps, from Aunt Martha on the surface.

I climbed with frantic strength, the rope biting into my hands. Lenore clawed at my ankles, her fingers like ice. But I kicked free and pulled myself over the lip of the well, tumbling onto the grass just as the first rays of dawn painted the sky pink. I lay there, gasping, my body aching, my mind reeling. When I finally looked back into the well, the darkness was silent, but I knew it was waiting.

I limped back to Aunt Martha’s house, my clothes torn and muddy. She was waiting on the porch, holding a cup of tea. She didn’t ask what had happened; she just nodded, as if she’d known all along. ‘You’ll never be the same,’ she said softly. ‘But you’ll live.’

I left Holloway a week later, but the well stayed with me. Every time I hear dripping water, or a woman sobbing in a distant room, I remember the feel of that hand, and I know that somewhere, in the depths of that ancient well, a new presence has taken root—lonely, angry, and hungry. And perhaps one day, it will call for someone else, a new lonely soul to claim as its own. But for now, I keep my distance, and I never, ever answer when I hear my name whispered in the dark.