Whispers in the Wallpaper

The first time I heard it, I thought it was the wind. You know that soft hum that slips through old windows in the dead of night? It had that same rhythm—gentle, harmless. But there was something…off.

I had just moved into the farmhouse a week before. It was a fixer-upper, as the listing had put it. “Full of charm,” the agent said with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. It was cheap—suspiciously cheap—but I was too desperate to care. After everything that had happened, I just needed a place to disappear. A place no one would think to look for me.

The town was small, quiet. The kind of place where everyone waved even if they didn’t know you. That first day, someone left a pie on my doorstep—blueberry, still warm. But no note. I thought it was sweet.

Now I wonder if it was a warning.

At night, the house changed. It wasn’t the creaks or the settling wood—that’s normal. It was the feeling. Like something was watching from just outside the edge of my vision. Like the shadows weren’t just shadows, but things holding their breath?

I started sleeping with the lights on.

But that didn’t help the whispering.

It began behind the walls. Always just as I was falling asleep. Faint, like someone breathing words into a cloth and pressing it against my ear. At first, I couldn’t make them out. Then one night, I heard it clearly.

“Come closer.”

I sat straight up in bed, heart thudding like a war drum. My mouth went dry. I listened. Silence. Maybe I imagined it. Stress. Trauma. The brain does strange things when it’s broken.

I told myself that.

The next night, it came again.

“I’m still here.”

There was no mistaking it that time. The voice was soft but full of something heavy—sorrow, maybe. Or hunger. I pressed my ear to the wallpaper, and the wall felt warm. That was wrong. It shouldn’t be warm.

The wallpaper itself was ugly—faded yellow roses curling at the edges, water-stained from some long-forgotten leak. But now it looked…disturbed. As if it had been smoothed over something that didn’t want to stay hidden.

That’s when I started peeling.

It felt like opening an old wound. The paper came off in brittle strips, disintegrating in my hands. Behind it, dark wood, cracked and bowed. And there—hidden in the grain—a seam. Not a crack. A straight vertical line. Like a door that had been sealed shut.

I pressed against it.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Three soft knocks, from the other side.

I jumped back, my breath catching painfully in my throat. My skin prickled, my stomach flipped. But I couldn’t look away. Something inside me—something broken and curious—needed to know what was in there.

I got a crowbar from the shed.

The wood resisted at first. It groaned, like it didn’t want to let go. But it gave in with a sick pop, and the air that spilled out was stale and wet, like rotting leaves in a forgotten basement. And behind it?

A tiny room. No windows. No light. Just darkness—and the faint shape of something curled in the corner.

I stepped inside.

It was a girl. Or used to be. Her skin was gray, her eyes open and glassy, her lips cracked. But she moved. Just barely.

“Don’t go,” she rasped.

I screamed. I don’t remember leaving. Just the cold bite of gravel under my bare feet and the feeling of night air slicing into my lungs. I woke on the front lawn, shivering, arms wrapped around myself like a shield.

When I called the police, they found nothing. No hidden room. No body. Just untouched walls and a half-peeled stretch of wallpaper I couldn’t explain.

They said I was exhausted. Traumatized. Hallucinating.

But I hear her every night. At 3:07 AM on the dot. A voice inside the walls.

“Don’t leave me alone again.”

I don’t sleep much. I drink chamomile tea and pretend I’m okay. I joke with the mailman. I wave at neighbors. I bake pies to put on other people’s doorsteps. I smile.

But every night, I listen.

And now when I pass that hallway, I swear I see eyes—just under the wallpaper—watching. Waiting.

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