My Neighbor Is Haunting

The house next door had always been empty—or at least, that’s what everyone said.

It was the kind of old place that looked like it was holding its breath: porch sagging, curtains drawn tight, windows like tired eyes. Every kid on the block had a story about it. Some said a woman once walked off its roof thinking it was a stairway to heaven. Others claimed the furniture moved itself when the moon was full. But I wasn’t afraid.

I was lonely.

When I first saw him, he was sitting on the front steps like he’d always lived there—pale, small, barefoot, and wearing clothes that looked like they’d been sewn a hundred years ago. He didn’t wave. He just watched me.

“Hi,” I said.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he replied, tilting his head. “You’re… new.”

“I live here,” I said. “Right next door.”

He blinked. “No one lives there. It’s always been quiet.”

“I moved in last week.”

“Oh.” He seemed to process this like someone swallowing something bitter. “Then that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

He stood and looked me over with a curious frown. “Why I feel cold all the time. Why the lights flicker. Why I hear breathing when I’m alone. It’s you.”

I laughed. “You think I’m a ghost?”

“No,” he said seriously. “You’re my haunting.”

His name was Eliot.

Every day after school, I’d find him waiting. We didn’t talk about school or parents or cartoons. We talked about silence, about shadows, about how time felt soft in his house, like wet fabric. His world was made of memories that no longer belonged to anyone. He said I made things “louder”—as if my presence shifted the walls.

“Sometimes I hear music,” he whispered once, “but only when you’re near.”

One rainy afternoon, I asked him how he died. His lips pressed tight.

“I didn’t die.”

“But… you don’t eat. You never come inside. You don’t blink much.”

“I don’t remember dying,” he said. “That’s different.”

His words scared me more than if he’d screamed.

I tried telling my parents about Eliot. My mom smiled and ruffled my hair. My dad joked that I was finally using my imagination. No one believed me.

But things got stranger. My bedroom grew colder at night, even in summer. My dreams turned vivid: I walked down unfamiliar hallways filled with whispers. I woke up once with dust on my shoes. The kind of dust that only lives in old attics.

One evening, Eliot didn’t show up.

The next day, I found him inside my room. Sitting on the floor. Drawing in the dust on the wooden floorboards.

“I had a memory,” he said without looking up.

“Of what?”

“I think I used to be you.”

My breath caught. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Doesn’t it?” He looked at me with tired eyes. “Maybe you’re my second chance. Maybe I’m just the echo of a life I wanted to live better.”

I couldn’t respond. I didn’t know how.

The day Eliot vanished was the day the house next door caught fire.

No one knew how it started. The firefighters arrived too late to save much. Just blackened beams and a porch turned to ash. The strange thing was, the house hadn’t been connected to the power grid for over a decade. It shouldn’t have caught fire at all.

I waited for Eliot for weeks. Months.

He never came back.

But sometimes, when I walk past the empty lot where his house once stood, I swear I hear laughter. A boy’s voice whispering just beneath the wind, saying, “You’re still my haunting, you know.”

And maybe he’s right.

Maybe we haunt each other.