The Wet Stones of Craigmoor

The rain had been falling for three days straight, turning the ancient driveway of Craigmoor Priory into a slick ribbon of mud and moss. I was new to this, my fourth investigation, and the thrill was still sharp enough to cut through the November chill. My name is Finn, and I had come with a group of amateur ghost hunters from the Scottish Lowlands, lured by the promise of a site steeped in centuries of whispered tragedy. We parked our cars at the top of the hill, the headlights carving tunnels through the downpour, and began the treacherous descent.

The path was a sunken lane, bordered by gnarled, skeletal trees that clawed at the sky. The wet stones underfoot were treacherously slick, and I kept one hand on the rough stone wall that ran alongside, my breath puffing in white clouds. I was the youngest, and the most eager, my heart hammering against my ribs as the ruin loomed into view below.

Craigmoor Priory had been a thriving Cistercian monastery until the Reformation, when it was sacked and left to crumble. The Dissolution had been brutal here; the monks were said to have been walled up alive in the crypt for refusing to surrender. Now, only a few skeletal pillars remained, rising like the ribcage of a giant beast, and scattered stones formed a haunted labyrinth. But there was one section that had survived better than the rest: a vaulted undercroft built into the side of a natural cave, its roof intact, providing a dry haven from the relentless rain.

We huddled there, our torches casting dancing shadows on the dripping walls. The group was an odd assortment: a retired teacher named Margaret who claimed to be an empath, a skeptical IT technician called Ren, and our leader, a man with a theatrical streak named Callum, who carried a digital voice recorder and a box of electromagnetic field meters. I was just Finn, the tagalong who had read too many books. The air was thick with the smell of wet stone and old earth, and the silence was punctuated only by the steady drip, drip, drip from the ceiling.

We began the standard protocols: introductions, asking for any spirits to communicate. Callum’s voice echoed strangely, warping and distorting in the confined space. My own voice felt alien as I spoke, the sound absorbed by the porous rock. For an hour, nothing happened. The meters stayed quiet, the recorders captured only the sound of our own breathing. Then, Ren, who had been sweeping the floor with a small camera, paused.

‘There’s something here,’ he said, pointing at the screen. ‘Look at this.’

We crowded around the tiny display. There, on the ground near the base of one of the pillars, was a small, circular pattern in the dust and grime. It was too regular to be natural, a perfect ring of tiny indentations, almost like a series of small feet had trodden a circle. Margaret gasped, her face pale. ‘It’s a spirit trap,’ she whispered. ‘They used to trap souls.’

I frowned. ‘That’s not historically accurate,’ I said, but my voice sounded thin. My heart was beginning to race, and not just from the cold. The air felt heavier, as if a great weight were pressing down on us. I took a step back, and my heel slipped on a patch of wetness that hadn’t been there a moment ago. I looked down to steady myself, and that’s when I saw the indentation in the mud: a footprint, but it was unnaturally small, the size of a child’s foot, and it was fresh, the edges crisp and moist. No one had moved that way.

The dripping seemed to intensify, becoming almost a patter, as if something else was moving in the dark recesses of the cave. Callum, ever the showman, decided we should do a séance. I was uneasy, but the others agreed. We sat in a circle on the cold flagstones, our torches off, leaving only a single red light glowing from a battery-operated candle in the center. We held hands, and I felt Margaret’s hand trembling.

Callum began to chant in a low monotone, calling out in a language I did not recognize. I felt a cold draft, despite the walls being solid. My ears began to pop, and I heard a sound, like the distant skittering of many small claws on stone. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block it all out. Then, the candle flickered and died, and the darkness was absolute.

A voice cut through the silence, but it wasn’t any of us. It was a thin, reedy whisper, barely audible over the pounding of my own heart. It said, ‘You have disturbed the floor.’

I felt a hand, cold and damp, grip my own. I knew it wasn’t Margaret’s, because hers was on the other side. I tried to pull away, but the grip tightened, and I realized it was icy, like a river stone left out in winter. I heard a scream, and it took me a second to realize it was my own.

In a panic, I scrambled backwards, breaking the circle. I fumbled for my torch, my fingers clumsy. I managed to switch it on, and the beam swept across the faces of the others, who looked as terrified as I felt. But then the light caught something else, near the back of the undercroft, where the wall met the cave rock. There was a gap, a fissure in the stone, and from it, a slow, viscous liquid was seeping, black and oily, crawling upward against gravity. It moved, like a living thing, forming shapes.

We watched, frozen, as the liquid coalesced into a rough figure, a shape of a monk, but its features were indistinct, melting, and it had no eyes. It held out a hand, and from its palm, the same dark liquid dripped down, hitting the stone floor with a hiss. The voice whispered again, now directly inside my head. ‘You tread where the buried weep. Now you must Join the circle.’

We ran. We scrambled over the treacherous stones, slipping and sliding, the rain now a torrent, soaking us to the bone. The drive back up was a nightmare, our feet sliding on the mud, our hearts pounding in our ears. I didn’t look back, but I heard a sound behind us, the sound of a million wet feet slapping on stone, growing closer.

When we finally reached the cars, we didn’t speak, just threw open doors and gunned the engines. I drove for hours without stopping, until the sun rose over the moors, and only then did I feel a semblance of safety. But when I got home, I realized I still had the trace of a cold, damp grip on my wrist. And there, on my arm, was a mark, a perfect circle of small, dark bruises, like the one we had seen on the floor. I tried to rub it off, but it remained, a permanent reminder that I had been touched by something from below.

I never went back to Craigmoor, and I never spoke of it to anyone who wasn’t there that night. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I wake to find that faint whispering in my ear, and the mark seems to ache. The circle is broken, but it will always be waiting, and I know that, one day, I may have to return and ‘complete the ring’—or be forever trapped in that circle of dark, wet stones.