I read this story on some horror forum online… God, it must’ve been 10 years ago now, maybe more.
It always stuck with me. I don’t know why. It wasn’t particularly well-written, and the concept has been done to death. But even now, all these years later, I’ll catch myself thinking about it. Or I’ll see a picture on the wall and I’ll remember.
The story went something like this:
A guy moves into a house. It’s old, has a lot of history, he gets it cheap. So, he gets settled in, everything is perfect. And then a few weeks later, he discovers there’s a woman in one of the paintings on the walls, a woman who wasn’t there before. It’s a landscape painting, she’s wearing some sort of old-fashioned clothing… maybe Victorian? Probably Victorian. That’s how all these stories go. She’s got long black hair and pale skin and deep, staring eyes. Looking at her sort of creeps him out.
He thinks he just hadn’t noticed her before, tries to write it off as the fallibility of the human brain, but then she shows up in other painting. And then in family photos, he starts seeing her in the background. It gets worse when she starts showing up in mirrors, and now the guy’s hearing creaks and bumps in the night, feels like he’s being watched, sees things out of place that he can’t account for.
Finally, he wakes up one day, walks downstairs and finds images of the woman sketched over every square inch of the walls, and every drawing seems to stare directly at him.
It was one of those stories that had a picture with it. It was supposedly one of the walls with the woman sketched over and over on it. The sketching wasn’t very good, but there was something unsettling about the picture all the same.
Like I said, not the best one out there. We never find out who the woman is or why she’s tormenting the poor narrator. We don’t know why she suddenly appears on the walls. There’s no resolution, and the climax leaves something to be desired.
And yet.
I’ve tried to find the story again but I never could. Maybe the author deleted it. I wish they hadn’t. I’d like to see that picture again.
A few weeks ago, mom asked my help in going through some of great-grandma’s things. We come from a family of packrats with a strong interest in genealogy, meaning that throughout generations, we’ve kept and recorded just about everything, squirreling it away to sit untouched in our attics.
My mom inherited a lot of these artefacts of our family history from her mother, and since I’m the only one of us children who’s shown an interest in our ancestry, I’ll inherit them after she dies. So it was in my interest to help her sort through great grandma’s things (and maybe convince her to get rid of some of the more damaged items if I could).
We ended up bringing her photo albums downstairs and spent part of the afternoon just paging through them, mom pointing out the people she knew, which was most of them.
And then we came to this one picture.
It wasn’t in a sleeve – it had been just tucked between two random pages. It was an old black and white polaroid of a woman in a long dress. She was staring impassively at the camera, her mouth twisted into a slight frown. She had this beautiful long hair and piercing eyes. Her hands were folded in front of her.
And something about her just felt familiar.
I asked my mom who she was, but she couldn’t place her. There wasn’t anything written on the back of the photo to give us a clue.
The last time my mom had looked at the album had been years… over a decade, maybe more. She didn’t recall ever having seen the picture, couldn’t imagine she would have left it there, out of place as it was.
I asked her if I could take it with me, on a whim, and she agreed. I couldn’t get that strange sense of familiarity out of my head. It wasn’t until I had gotten all the way home and through my front door that it hit me – she looked like the woman in the story.
Obviously, there hadn’t been any good pictures of the woman in the story. Just drawings. What I mean is that she looked exactly like I’d imagined her. Down to the curved wave in her hair and the placement of her hands. That’s when I remembered another detail of the story that I’d long forgotten – the woman had her hands clasped in front of her in every picture, but in the drawings on the walls, she was reaching out as if to grab the narrator.
I called my mom and told her about the story and the picture. I could tell she thought I was reading too much into things – she’s a pretty practical and skeptical person. She did agree to go through great grandma’s writings and papers and see if she could figure out who the woman could be.
The next time I spoke to her was at my brother Nathan’s memorial. It was just a few days after we found the picture. Ten years ago, Nathan was found in his home, his throat cut. He was only 34. Although the police investigation into his death picked up momentum almost immediately, nobody was ever charged for the crime. Our family has thoughts on who might have done it, but we’ve never been able to prove anything. We probably never will. Each year on the anniversary of his death, we have a little family gathering to remember and mourn.
So we were at mom’s house, looking through old pictures of my brother and remembering. Mom had already told me that she hadn’t found any information on the picture we’d found days before. It was about what I had expected. I had decided to just stow the picture away and forget about it when I came across this certain picture of my brother.
It was from his housewarming party, taken just a few months before his death. He was standing with his arm around me and we were both making these stupid faces at the camera. I’ve looked at that photo thousands of times by now, but this was the first time I really noticed the painting in the background. It was a landscape painting, showing rolling hills dotted with trees. And there, standing next to one of the trees was a figure. I had to squint to make it out, but it looked like a person. A woman.
I was distracted for the rest of the memorial. I took the picture with me when I went home and I just sat there and stared at it, wishing I could see the painting a little better.
With that story on my mind and the picture mom and I had found, it was hard not to connect the dots, even though I was half convinced the dots I was connecting didn’t actually exist. Clearly, I was reading too much into it. Nathan’s death was hard on me and I’m always a little off around the anniversary. I was seeing things that weren’t there as a way of coping with the fact that my big brother’s murderer will probably never face justice for what he did.
I put both of the pictures in my bedside drawer and decided to leave well enough alone. Maybe another day when I was feeling more like myself, I’d look at them again. Maybe.
Weeks passed by and gradually my uneasiness faded. It became easier to see it all as a product of my imagination. I’ve always been the imaginative sort, anyway.
And then, yesterday.
I got up to get dressed for work and walked into the bathroom. As I passed by the mirror, I saw someone else standing in there with me. A woman, with dark, wavy hair and piercing eyes, her hands folded primly in front of her.
I whirled around, only to find myself alone. When I turned back to the mirror, her image was gone.
It was her. I’m sure it was her.
I haven’t stopped thinking about her since then. Or that story. Was it a story? Did I get all the details right? Maybe she showed up in the mirror first, was that it? What exactly happened after that? The story ended with her image scrawled all over the walls… but what came after that? Did the person ever write an update?
I need to find the author. I need to know if it was who I think it was, and if so, why he didn’t tell me what was going on. Is it somewhere in his journals?
If you remember this story, please help me find it. Something terrible is about to happen, is already happening to me, and I need answers.
And I’m afraid the only one who could give them to me is dead.