In the quiet, forgotten town of Ash Hollow, where the wind whispered through skeletal trees and the houses sagged like weary old men, there stood a single abandoned home at the end of Sorrow Lane. Its windows were boarded shut, its paint peeled like dead skin, and the locals swore that no one had crossed its threshold in decades. Yet, on a frigid March night in 2025, Evelyn Carver, a woman with a penchant for the strange and a restless curiosity, found herself drawn to it.
Evelyn had heard the rumors: footsteps in the attic when no one was there, shadows that moved against the moonlight without a source, and a faint glow that sometimes flickered through the cracks in the boards. She wasn’t one for superstition, but her life had grown stale—her days blurred into a monotony of gray—and the house promised something different. Armed with a flashlight and a crowbar, she pried open the front door, the wood groaning as if reluctant to let her in.
The air inside was thick with dust and the sour tang of decay. Furniture lay draped in rotting sheets, and the floorboards creaked under her boots. She swept her flashlight across the room, its beam catching on cobwebs and broken trinkets, until it landed on something odd: a single candle, perched on a warped mantelpiece. It was unremarkable at first glance—tall, white, and slightly melted at the edges—but it stood out in the desolation, untouched by time. A tarnished brass holder cradled it, and beside it lay a box of matches, their red tips still vibrant against the faded cardboard.
Evelyn approached, her breath visible in the cold. She ran her fingers over the candle’s waxy surface, expecting it to crumble, but it felt oddly warm, almost alive. Curiosity gnawed at her. She struck a match, the hiss of sulfur cutting through the silence, and lit the wick. The flame leapt to life, steady and golden, casting a soft glow that seemed to push back the shadows with an unnatural vigor.
At first, nothing happened. Then, the whispers began.
They were faint, like voices carried on a distant wind, overlapping and indistinct. Evelyn froze, her heart thudding against her ribs. She turned, expecting to see someone behind her, but the room was empty. The whispers grew louder, threading into words she could almost grasp—“Look… see… remember…”—and the flame flickered, though there was no draft. She leaned closer, peering into the light, and that’s when the visions started.
The flame twisted, and within it, shapes formed: a woman in a tattered dress, her face obscured by a veil, standing in the very room Evelyn occupied. The woman knelt before the mantel, her hands trembling as she lit the same candle. The scene shifted—blurred and jagged—like a film reel skipping frames. Now the woman was screaming, clawing at the walls as dark figures loomed behind her, their forms too tall, too thin, too wrong. The flame flared, and the vision dissolved into another: a man, gaunt and wild-eyed, scribbling furiously in a journal, muttering to himself as the candle burned beside him. His shadow stretched across the wall, but it wasn’t his—it had too many arms, too many eyes.
Evelyn stumbled back, her breath ragged. The whispers swelled into a chorus, insistent and pleading, and the flame grew brighter, hotter, until it felt like it was searing her skin from across the room. She tried to blow it out, but the fire didn’t waver. She knocked the candle to the floor, but it righted itself, the wax unmarred, the flame unshaken. Panic clawed at her throat. She grabbed her crowbar and fled, the whispers chasing her into the night.
Back in her apartment, Evelyn couldn’t shake the images. Sleep eluded her; every time she closed her eyes, she saw the woman’s veiled face, the man’s frantic scribbling, the shadows that didn’t belong. The next day, driven by a mix of dread and compulsion, she returned to the house. The candle still burned on the mantel, its wax unchanged, its flame as steady as ever. She hadn’t imagined it.
This time, she brought a notebook. She lit the candle again—why, she couldn’t say—and watched as new visions unfurled. A child, no more than ten, huddled in a corner, clutching a doll as footsteps echoed overhead. A family gathered around a table, their faces blank and hollow, staring at the candle as if it held their souls. Each scene was a fragment, a shard of terror etched into the flame, and Evelyn scribbled them down, her hand shaking. The whispers guided her, urging her to “see more, know more,” and she obeyed, night after night.
Weeks passed, and Evelyn changed. Her skin grew pale, her eyes sunken, her voice a rasp. She stopped answering calls, stopped leaving her apartment except to visit the house. The candle became her obsession. She learned its secret: it didn’t just show the past—it fed on it. The people in the visions had lived in that house, had lit that candle, and it had trapped them, their fears, their final moments, burning eternally in its light. And now, it wanted her.
One night, as the flame revealed a vision of herself—standing in the house, staring blankly as shadows gathered—she understood. The candle didn’t burn out because it consumed the living to keep itself alive. She tried to destroy it, smashing it with the crowbar, dousing it with water, but it always returned, whole and burning, waiting for her.
The last anyone saw of Evelyn was a figure slipping into the house on Sorrow Lane, her silhouette swallowed by the dark. The glow still flickers through the boarded windows some nights, and those who pass by swear they hear whispers—Evelyn’s voice among them, begging to be remembered, begging to be seen.