Speaker 1: Calorogu Shark Media, Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories
and our special Christmas series The Long Cold. This is
episode two. The spaces between the snow didn't stop. By
Christmas Eve morning, it had buried Tom's car up to
the door handles. The porch steps had vanished entirely beneath
white drifts that reached the railing. When I looked out
the front window, I couldn't see the road anymore, couldn't
see where the yard ended, and the forest began, just white, endless,
suffocating white. We weren't going anywhere, not today, maybe not tomorrow.
Tom made pancakes for breakfast, humming Christmas carols while Lily
drew pictures at the kitchen table. He'd already dismissed my
story about the footprints, already explained away my daughter's words
about the man in the wall. Kids have imaginary friends,
he'd said. She's probably just processing being in a new place.
But I couldn't stop watching her, couldn't stop noticing the
way her eyes drifted to the walls when she thought
no one was looking, the way she'd pause mid crayon stroke,
head tilted as if listening to something. I couldn't hear Lily, Honey,
I sat down across from her. Can you tell me
more about the man you talked to last night. Tom
shot me a look from the stove. Don't encourage it.
Lily didn't look up from her drawing. He's tall, really tall.
He has to bend down a lot because the spaces
are small. What spaces the spaces where he lives Behind
the wall, she switched from a red crayon to a
black one. He's been here a long long time, longer
than the house. That doesn't make sense, sweetheart, How could
he be here longer than the house? She shrugged the
way only a seven year old can shrug, with complete
unconcern for logic. He just was, He says, this was
his place first, before great great Grandma came. My mouth
went dry. He talked about great great Grandma. He talks
about all of them. He knows all the names. She
looked up at me then, and her eyes were so clear,
so innocent, so utterly untroubled. He knows your name, too, mommy.
He's been waiting to meet you for a really long time.
Tom set a plate of pancakes in front of her. Okay,
that's enough. Spooky talk. Eat your breakfast, she ate. She
seemed fine, completely perfectly fine. I wasn't. After breakfast, while
Tom entertained Lily with a game of Candyland, I began
to search the cabin. I don't know what I was
looking for, evidence, maybe proof that I wasn't losing my mind,
or proof that I was that this was all exhaustion
and stress and the particular madness that comes from being
trapped in a small space with winter pressing in from
all sides. I started with the room where Lily had slept,
my old room. I ran my hands along the walls,
feeling the old wallpaper with its faded roses pressing against
the plaster beneath, solid, unyielding. No hollow spaces, no hidden doors.
But then I noticed the closet. It was small, barely
big enough to hang a few coats. I'd never thought
much about it as a child, but now standing before
it as an adult, something struck me as wrong. The
dimensions the closet was too shallow, given the thickness of
the cabin's walls, given the space between this room and
the next, the closet should have been at least two
feet deeper. I pushed the hanging clothes aside, old coats
that smelled of cedar and age. I pressed my palm
flat against the back wall, and I felt it. A
seam in the wood, barely perceptible, painted over and hidden,
but definitely there, a vertical line running from floor to ceiling.
My heart began to pound. I pressed harder, knocked gently
on the wood. On the left side of the seam,
the sound was flat and solid. On the right side hollow.
The sound was hollow. Something was behind this wall, a space,
a void enough that I could hear the difference. When
I knocked. I stumbled backward out of the closet, stood
in the middle of my daughter's room, breathing too fast,
staring at that dark rectangle like it might open at
any moment. It didn't. The closet stayed still and silent,
just an old closet in an old cabin. But I
knew now, I knew there were spaces in this house
that weren't on any blueprint, spaces that had been deliberately hidden,
spaces where someone or something could move without being seen.
I searched the rest of the cabin with new eyes.
In the hall closet, I found scratches on the inside
of the door. Not the random marks of age and use.
These were deliberate parallel lines, grouped in sets of five,
like someone had been counting days or keeping score. In
the basement, behind the old furnace, I found a smell,
faint but distinct, something organic, something wrong, like meat left
too long in the sun, but older, fainter, as if
the sauce had moved away, but the memory of it
remained In the pantry. I found the gap. It was
behind the shelves, hidden by cans of vegetables that had
expired in twenty nineteen, A section of the back wall
that didn't quite meet the corner, A darkness that, when
I pressed my face close and let my eyes adjust,
seemed to extend back further than it should, further than
was possible given the cabins layout. I grabbed a flashlight
from the kitchen drawer. My hands were shaking so badly
I almost dropped it twice. I aimed the beam into
that gap, that impossible space, and I saw a passage narrow,
rough hewn walls of old tim and exposed insulation. It
ran parallel to the kitchen wall and then turned, disappearing
into shadow beyond the flashlight's reach. Someone had built tunnels
into this cabin. Someone had created a network of hidden
spaces running through the walls like vanes, and someone had
been using them. On the floor of the passage, just
visible at the edge of my light, I could see
marks in the dust, long dragging marks, as if something
heavy had been pulled through recently. I stepped back from
the gap, stepped back until I hit the kitchen counter
and couldn't step back any further. Tom My voice came
out as a whisper. I tried again, louder. Tom. He
appeared in the kitchen doorway, Lily trailing behind him. What
what's wrong? I pointed at the pantry, at the gap
behind the shelves. There's there's something back there, a passage
in the walls. He frowned, moved past me, looked at
the gap for a long moment. Sarah, that's just it's
an old cabin. There's probably all kinds of weird construction.
These places weren't built to code. There are drag marks.
Someone's been using it, drag marks. He aimed the flashlight
into the gap, looked, looked longer. When he turned back
to me, his expression was careful, controlled. I don't see
any drag marks. They're right there on the floor in
the dust. He looked again, shook his head. Honey, I
think you're seeing things that aren't there. You're stressed. Your
Mum's not here. It's been a weird twenty four hours.
Maybe you should lie down. I'm not. I stopped, looked
at Lily, who was watching us with those untroubled eyes.
We shouldn't talk about this in front of her. There's
nothing to talk about. Tom closed the pantry door firmly. Finally,
it's an old house with old construction. That's all. Now,
come on, let's focus on making this a nice Christmas Eve. Okay,
your mom will probably show up any minute. He walked away.
Lily followed him. After a moment. I followed too, but
I didn't forget what I'd seen. I couldn't forget that afternoon,
while Lily napped and Tom read by the fire, I
went up to the attic. I hadn't been up there
since I was a teenager. The ladder still pulled down
from the hallway ceiling with the same arthritic creak I remembered.
The space above was cramped and dusty filled with boxes
my grandmother had left behind, mus decorations, old clothes, photo albums.
I found what I was looking for in a box
marked family history in my grandmother's careful handwriting photographs, dozens
of them, generations of my family captured in black and
white and faded color. My grandmother as a young woman
standing on the cabin's porch, my mother as a child
building a snowman in the yard. My great grandmother, whom
I'd never met, sitting in the rocking chair by the window,
all of them taken here at this cabin in winter
at Christmas. I flipped through them, slowly, studying each one,
looking for something. I didn't know what until I found it.
A photograph from nineteen sixty two. My grandmother, my grandfather,
my mother as a young girl, and another child I
didn't recognize, a girl of about five with dark hair
and my grandmother's eyes. They were posed in front of
the Christmas tree, smiling at the camera, but in the
window behind them, in the reflection on the dark glass,
there was something else, a shape, tall and thin, barely
visible like a smudge on the negative. My hands trembled
as I picked up another photograph, nineteen fifty eight, my
grandmother alone, holding a cup of something hot, standing in
the kitchen, and there in the dark rectangle of the
pantry doorway behind her, the same shape, tall thin watching
nineteen seventy one, nineteen seventy nine, nineteen eighty four, nineteen
ninety five. Every photograph taken in this cabin at Christmas,
every single one, and in every single one, if you
looked careful at the windows, at the doorways, at the
dark corners where the camera flash didn't quite reach, you
could see it. The same shape, the same figure watching
from the shadows. Decades of photographs, decades of the same presence.
I found a photo of myself, then six years old,
standing in front of the fireplace in my footy pajamas,
holding a present wrapped in red paper. My mother had
taken that picture. I remembered the moment. I didn't remember
the shape in the window behind me, the tall, thin
shape that seemed to be leaning toward me, as if curious,
as if hungry. At the bottom of the box, beneath
all the photographs, I found a letter, yellowed paper, brittle
with age, my grandmother's handwriting, but shakier than I remembered
older Ruth. It began my mother's name. If you're reading this,
I'm gone, and you've come back to the cabin despite
everything I told you, despite all my warnings, I suppose
I shouldn't be surprised. This place calls to us. It
always has. I need you to understand what lives here,
what has always lived here. It was here before the cabin,
before the family, before anything. It found us when we
built on its land, and it has stayed with us
ever since. It doesn't want to hurt us. I know
that sounds impossible, but it's true. It doesn't want to
hurt us. It wants to keep us. It gets lonely
in the cold, in the dark between the walls. It
wants company. It takes children when it can. It took
your sister, Margaret in nineteen sixty two. You were too
young to remember her, but I've enclosed a photograph. She
was five years old. She wandered into the walls on
Christmas Eve, and she never came out. I've spent my
whole life trying to understand it, trying to appease it.
The lights help. It doesn't like the lights, neither does
the cold. It sleeps when the cabin is empty and
wakes when we return and bring warmth. Don't bring Sarah here.
Don't ever bring her here at Christmas. It remembers her.
It's been waiting for her to come back. I'm so
sorry for all of it, for building here, for staying,
for not burning this place to the ground when I
had the chance. If you're reading this, it means I've
failed to protect you. It means you've come back, and
it means it's already too late. Don't let it take
the children, Ruth, whatever you do, don't let it take
the children. The letter wasn't signed. It ended mid page,
as if my grandmother had been interrupted, or as if
she'd run out of time. I sat in that attic
for a long time, rounded by boxes of family history,
holding photographs of a thing that had haunted us for generations.
The girl in the nineteen sixty two photograph, the one
I hadn't recognized, my mother's sister, Margaret, taken by whatever
lived in the walls of this cabin. And my mother,
Ruth had come here anyway, had come here three days
before us alone, to do what to confront it, to
appease it. Where was she now? I put everything back
in the box climbed down from the attic, walked through
the cabin like a woman in a dream. Tom was
asleep by the fire, book open on his chest. The
snow still fell outside the windows. The light was fading
toward evening, and Lily's room was empty. The bed was
must her rabbit was on the floor, and the closet door,
the closet with the hidden seam I'd found that more,
stood open. I ran to it, pushed the clothes aside.
The back wall of the closet was gone. In its
place was a dark rectangle, a passage leading into the
spaces between Lily. My voice cracked, Lily, nothing silence, just
the wind outside and the creak of old wood, and
somewhere far away, in the darkness of those hidden passages,
the faint sound of my daughter laughing, laughing at something
I couldn't see, something that had been waiting for her
to come back. Ghost Scary Stories is a production of
Caloroga Shark. Some elements of AI may have been used
in this production, but it was written, edited, mixed, and
produced by Real Live People Executive producers Mark Francis and
John McDermott.