The Woman in the Attic

When my mother remarried, we left the city for a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of a cedar forest. The previous owner had vanished without a trace, leaving behind a house filled with dust, old newspapers, and a peculiar smell of mothballs and dried apples. My stepfather, a quiet man with a nervous laugh, insisted we could make it our home. The first time I walked through the front door, I felt it: a sharp, piercing cold that clung to my skin like a wet shroud. The air seemed to thicken in the hallway, and my breath came out in a pale mist, even though the thermostat read seventy degrees.

My mother, who had always had what she called ‘the sixth sense,’ dismissed my shivering as nerves. But that night, as I lay in my new bed, I heard it: soft, rhythmic sounds, like bare feet padding across the wooden floor upstairs. The house was old, and the wind often rattled the windows, but this was different. It was a deliberate, measured gait, stopping and starting, as if the walker was pausing to listen. I pulled the covers over my head and squeezed my eyes shut, but the footsteps continued, moving directly above my ceiling, then fading away.

The next morning, I found my little brother, Leo, sitting at the kitchen table, his small hands wrapped around a glass of milk. He was chattering away to someone I couldn’t see, his eyes fixed on the empty chair across from him. ‘She’s nice,’ he said when I asked. ‘She’s sad, but she likes us.’ My mother laughed it off, calling it a vivid imagination, but I saw the flicker of unease in her eyes. She had always been sensitive, but this house seemed to amplify it. She began to have nightmares, waking up in tears, whispering about a woman who stood at the foot of her bed, holding a pair of scissors.

Things escalated. We would set an extra place at dinner for ‘Ruth,’ as Leo called her. He would leave out crayons and paper, insisting she wanted to color with him. One afternoon, I heard Leo’s laughter coming from the attic, a place we had been told never to go because the stairs were rotten. I called his name, but he didn’t answer. I climbed the creaking steps, pushing open the trapdoor, and found him sitting cross-legged in a patch of weak sunlight, surrounded by a circle of dusty dolls. He looked up at me with a serene smile. ‘She lives here,’ he said. ‘She wants us to stay forever.’

The cold spots began to multiply. You could walk through the living room and suddenly be enveloped in a chill that bit into your bones. My mother started to hear sobbing behind the walls, and she swore she saw a woman’s face pressed against the window, though we were on the top floor. My stepfather, mocked our fears, but I noticed he began to come home later, his eyes darting nervously around the rooms. One night, I woke to the sound of breathing beside my bed. I opened my eyes, and in the dim light, I saw a tall, gaunt figure, its head tilted, its long fingers reaching toward me. I screamed, but when the lights came on, there was nothing there.

I began to see them too: faces in the grain of the wood, shadows that moved independently of the light, and a persistent whisper that seemed to come from inside my own mind, urging me to go to the attic. My mother finally cracked. She started carvings in the woodwork, symbols she had learned from her grandmother to ward off evil. She burned sage and salt, but the presence grew stronger. The footsteps became a constant presence, pacing day and night.

Then, the writing began. On the mirrors, in the dust, in the condensation on the windows, the word ‘MINE’ appeared, over and over. Leo started having fits of terror, screaming about a woman with no face who wanted to take his soul. My mother, in a desperate act, decided to have the house blessed by a priest. The priest arrived, but he barely got through the front door before he fled, his face white, muttering about a ‘spirit of vengeance.’ He refused to come back.

I knew then that we had to leave. But the house wouldn’t let us. The keys to our car disappeared. The phone lines went dead. The doors would sometimes refuse to open, as if held shut by an invisible force. We were trapped, prisoners in this frozen, watchful house.

The end came for my stepfather. He had always been the skeptic, the one who laughed at our fears. One evening, he went up to the attic to fetch some old boxes, and he didn’t come down. We found him at the bottom of the stairs, his neck twisted, his face frozen in a mask of terror. But the worst part was the message scrawled on the wall in what looked like old, dried blood: ‘YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT.’

The police dismissed it as a tragic accident, but we knew better. My mother fell into a deep depression, spending hours staring at the walls, whispering to the unseen. Leo grew silent, his eyes vacant, as if he had retreated to some place far away. I was the only one left to fight, so I researched the house’s past, uncovering a story of a woman named Ruth who had died here in the 1920s, heartbroken and insane after her husband left her. She had been a seamstress, known for her sharp scissors, and she had killed several children she believed were her own before taking her own life. Her rage had soaked into the walls, waiting for a new family to torment.

I knew what I had to do. I gathered her bones, which I found in a hidden compartment in the attic floor, and I gave them a proper burial. I spoke to her, apologized for the intrusion, and promised to leave if she would let us go. That night, the house fell silent for the first time in months. The footsteps ceased, the cold spots disappeared. The next morning, the doors and windows opened easily, and our car keys were back on the kitchen counter, as if they had never been gone. We packed quickly and drove away, leaving that cursed place behind.

But as we drove down the dirt road, Leo looked back. ‘She’s still there,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘She’s always there.’ And I swear, from that day on, I stood there in the rearview mirror, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were not alone. Even now, in our new apartment, I sometimes feel a cold breath on my neck, and I swear I see a pale face in the window, watching me, waiting for the day we might return.