The Yellowed Photograph

I’m twenty-five now, and I live in a small apartment in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, but the things that happened to me when I was young still cling to me like spiderwebs I can’t brush off. The first time I felt something truly wrong was the summer I turned nine, in the old farmhouse my father inherited from his grandmother. We had moved there just weeks after my Uncle Frank passed away. He had lived alone in that house, and after the funeral, my parents decided to sell our suburban home and move in, hoping to fix it up and sell it later. I remember the house smelled of dust and mothballs, and the floorboards groaned even when no one walked on them.

One afternoon, I was home sick with a fever, and my parents had gone to the hardware store to pick up paint and supplies. I lay on the floral-patterned couch in the living room, staring at the faded wallpaper with its pattern of tiny roses. I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew, someone was shaking my shoulder—firmly, insistently. I turned over, expecting to see my mother’s worried face, but the room was empty. The front door was still closed, and the driveway was empty. The shaking hadn’t felt like my imagination; it had been physical, like a hand gripping my shoulder and rattling me. I sat up, heart pounding, and that’s when I saw it: a yellowed photograph on the mantelpiece, one I’d never noticed before. It showed a man in old-fashioned clothes, standing beside a horse, with a stern expression. I later learned it was my great-great-grandfather, who had died in that very house. But what chilled me was that in the photo, his hand was raised, as if waving—or shooing me away.

Years passed, and I tried to forget, but the second odd occurrence came when I was fifteen. It was Christmas Eve, and my cousin Emily and I were staying over at our grandmother’s new apartment in a different part of town. We had a tradition of sleeping side by side on the giant pullout couch, so we could wake up at dawn and tear open presents. That night, we were talking and laughing, but eventually we fell asleep. I woke up to the sound of someone whispering my name—not Emily’s voice, but a low, raspy murmur that seemed to come from the corner of the room. I sat up, and Emily was still asleep, breathing softly. The room was dark except for the glow of a streetlamp through the curtains. I tried to brush it off as my imagination, but then I saw the rocking chair in the corner. It was rocking, gently, back and forth, even though no one was in it. I remember the chair had belonged to my late grandfather. I watched it for what felt like minutes, my breath held, until it slowly stopped. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night, and I never mentioned it to Emily.

The last thing I experienced happened two winters ago, when I was twenty-three. I was house-sitting for a neighbor in Pittsfield, an older couple who had gone to Florida for the winter. Their house was a Victorian with a lot of history, and they had a collection of old clocks—grandfather clocks, mantel clocks, cuckoo clocks—all set to the same time, but each chiming slightly out of sync. The first night, I was in the living room reading, when all the clocks began to chime at once—except they didn’t stop after the usual number of bongs. They kept going, on and on, for a full minute, as if they were all broken. When they finally stopped, there was a deep silence, and then I heard footsteps in the hallway above. Heavy, deliberate steps. The floorboards creaked in a rhythm that didn’t match any normal walking. I call out, ‘Hello?’ but the only answer was the ticking of a hundred clocks. The footsteps came down the stairs, slowly, one step at a time. I was frozen, staring at the doorway. The steps reached the bottom landing, and then stopped. I waited, heart in my throat, but nothing appeared. The temperature in the room dropped, and I could see my breath. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the clocks all reset and ticked in unison as if nothing had happened.

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat on the couch with every light in the house turned on, and I wrote in my journal, trying to make sense of it. The next morning, I found something that made my blood run cold. In the front hallway, there was a small table with a ceramic dish for keys. Inside the dish was a torn piece of paper, written in shaky handwriting that matched the notes my Uncle Frank used to write when I was a child. It said, ‘Leave before the clocks forget.’ I showed it to the neighbors when they returned, but they had no idea who could have written it. They said they had never seen that paper before.

I can’t explain these things, and I’ve stopped trying. I still live in Pittsfield, but I avoid that Victorian house, and I’ve learned to check the mantelpiece for any new photographs. Some things, I think, are better left unseen—and some places, better left unvisited.