The heat was oppressive that day, the kind of suffocating summer afternoon that makes the air shimmer above the pavement and turns car interiors into furnaces. I had cranked the air conditioning in our Honda Civic to its maximum setting, but even with the windows cracked slightly for circulation, the temperature gauge on the dashboard read ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit. The sun blazed mercilessly through the windshield, creating harsh shadows and making everything inside the car feel like it was melting, including us.
Emma, my six-year-old daughter, sat silently in her booster seat behind me, her usually animated face strangely blank as she stared out the passenger window at the passing suburban landscape. Beads of perspiration dotted her upper lip despite the air conditioning, and her mouth hung slightly open in a way that suggested she was somewhere else entirely, lost in thoughts that a child her age shouldn’t need to navigate alone.
I had been chattering nervously about our plans for the afternoon—a trip to the library followed by ice cream at her favorite parlor—but my words felt hollow in the increasingly tense atmosphere of the car. When I offered her water from the bottle I kept in the cup holder, she didn’t respond or even acknowledge that I had spoken. The silence stretched between us like a physical presence, heavy and uncomfortable in a way that made my maternal instincts prickle with unease.
Then, in a voice so quiet I almost missed it over the hum of the air conditioning, Emma whispered, “The lady in the tree told me not to go home.”
The words hit me like ice water despite the sweltering heat. I glanced quickly in the rearview mirror, catching sight of her pale face reflected in the glass, my eyebrows drawing together in concern and confusion.
“What lady, sweetheart?” I asked, turning down the radio that had been playing softly in the background and giving her my complete attention. “What are you talking about?”
Emma blinked slowly, her movements deliberate and almost otherworldly in their precision. When she spoke again, her voice carried a certainty that chilled me to the bone.
“The one behind the glass,” she said simply, as if this explanation should make perfect sense to me.
I twisted in my seat to face her directly, my seatbelt cutting uncomfortably across my chest as concern deepened into something closer to alarm. “What glass are you talking about, honey? Where did you see this lady?”
“The one in your bathroom, Mommy,” she replied, her small fingers beginning to nervously tug at the fabric of her yellow sundress, twisting it into tight knots that spoke to an anxiety she couldn’t yet articulate.
My heart gave a sudden, violent lurch in my chest as the implications of her words began to sink in. We had left our house less than an hour ago, and during that time, Emma had been quietly coloring in her activity book while I methodically packed her overnight bag for what was supposed to be a fun sleepover at my sister’s house. The only mirror in our master bathroom was positioned directly above the sink, its surface reflecting not just whoever stood before it, but also the large window that faced the dense woods behind our property.
Those woods had always made me slightly uncomfortable, filled as they were with towering oak and pine trees that blocked out most of the sunlight even during the brightest part of the day. The previous owners had mentioned something about the forest being part of an old estate that had been abandoned decades earlier, but I had never given it much thought beyond appreciating the privacy it provided from neighboring houses.
“She said you’re not Mommy anymore,” Emma continued, her voice taking on an eerie, matter-of-fact quality that made my skin crawl. “She said you’re only wearing her.”
I forced myself to laugh, but the sound came out strained and artificial, more like a bark than genuine amusement. I was trying desperately to treat this as a child’s whimsical fantasy, the kind of imaginative story that six-year-olds sometimes create when they’re processing emotions they don’t understand.
“Did you make her up, silly goose?” I asked, injecting as much lightness into my tone as I could manage while my mind raced to find logical explanations for what she was describing.
But Emma’s lower lip began to quiver visibly, and I could see tears forming in her dark eyes—the same eyes she had inherited from my grandmother, along with what my mother had always called “the sight.”
“She said you wouldn’t believe me,” Emma whispered, her voice breaking slightly. “She said she’d prove it when the sun goes down and it gets dark.”
My throat went completely dry, as if someone had stuffed it full of cotton. Emma had never, not once in her six years of life, said anything like this before. She was typically a pragmatic child, more interested in science books and building blocks than in fairy tales or ghost stories. She had never even mentioned our bathroom mirror specifically, despite using that bathroom every morning and evening for her daily routines.
Then, like a bolt of lightning illuminating a dark landscape, I suddenly remembered something that had happened just the week before. Our neighbor’s German Shepherd, Kaiser, had spent an entire evening barking incessantly at the side of our house that faced the woods. The dog had positioned himself directly below our bathroom window and had refused to move despite his owner’s repeated calls, his barking taking on an almost frantic quality that had kept the entire neighborhood awake.
At the time, I had dismissed Kaiser’s behavior as a reaction to some nocturnal animal—perhaps a raccoon or possum that had wandered too close to the house in search of food. But now, with Emma’s strange words echoing in my mind, the memory took on a more ominous significance.
I turned my hand to start the car engine, eager to put some distance between us and whatever was troubling my daughter, when something caught my eye that made my blood turn to ice in my veins.
There, on the inside of the rear windshield, was a handprint.
Not just any handprint, but one that was unmistakably too large to belong to Emma, whose small fingers could barely span the width of a standard piece of paper. This print was adult-sized, with long fingers that seemed to have been dragged slightly downward across the glass, leaving streaky marks that suggested whoever had made it had been pressing against the window from inside the car.
I stared at it far longer than I should have, transfixed by its eerie presence and trying to rationalize how it could have appeared there. The print had an oily quality to it, as if it had been made by someone with lotion or some other substance on their hands, but neither Emma nor I had touched that part of the car’s interior. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been in the backseat besides Emma, and her booster seat was positioned on the opposite side of the car.
My stomach churned unpleasantly as I studied the handprint more closely. Something about its sheer size felt profoundly wrong—not just unusually large, but somehow stretched and distorted, as if the fingers belonged to someone whose proportions weren’t quite human. The palm area was smeared in a way that suggested the hand had lingered there, pressing against the glass with deliberate intent.
Trying desperately to maintain some semblance of normalcy for Emma’s sake, I got out of the car and walked around to the rear window. The late afternoon sun beat down on my shoulders as I used the sleeve of my cotton shirt to wipe away the print, but instead of disappearing cleanly, it left behind a faint, oily streak that seemed to resist my efforts to remove it completely.
The residue had an almost organic quality to it, like something that had come from living skin, but it felt wrong in a way that made my hands shake as I continued trying to clean it away. No matter how hard I scrubbed, traces of the print remained visible, as if it had somehow etched itself into the glass at a molecular level.
I climbed back into the car, my heart thudding violently against my ribcage and my palms damp with perspiration that had nothing to do with the heat. Emma hadn’t moved during my cleaning efforts, still sitting perfectly still and staring out her window with that same blank, distant expression.
“You okay, love?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice steady despite the panic that was building in my chest like a pressure cooker about to explode.
Emma slowly turned her head to look directly at me, and when she spoke, her voice carried an adult-like calmness that was far more unsettling than any childish fear would have been.
“She doesn’t like being looked at in daylight, Mommy,” she said with the matter-of-fact certainty of someone stating an obvious truth.
That was the moment I decided we weren’t going home. Not today, not with this inexplicable dread settling over me like a suffocating blanket. I put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb, my hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my knuckles went white. We would go to my sister Linda’s house across town, I decided. She had a comfortable guest room and solid locks on every door, and more importantly, she was the kind of practical person who would help me think through this situation rationally.
But even as I drove through the familiar streets of our neighborhood, I couldn’t shake the chilling sensation that something invisible and malevolent had already attached itself to us, following along like a shadow that existed just beyond the edge of perception.
When we arrived at Linda’s modest ranch-style house, I concocted a quick explanation about a power outage at our place, claiming that we just needed somewhere to stay for a night or two until the electric company could resolve the issue. Linda, bless her heart, didn’t ask many probing questions. She had grown accustomed to my occasional moments of crisis and spontaneous decision-making, especially since my divorce two years earlier had left me more prone to anxiety and impulsive choices.
I got Emma settled on Linda’s comfortable sectional sofa with her favorite stuffed animal—a green frog named Mr. Ribbits that she had owned since she was a toddler—and put on a cheerful cartoon that usually captured her complete attention. But instead of watching the colorful characters on the screen, Emma sat perfectly still, clutching Mr. Ribbits against her chest and staring at the television with the intense focus of someone who was seeing something entirely different from what was actually being broadcast.
Linda, meanwhile, busied herself preparing the guest room and making us feel welcome, chattering about her work at the local veterinary clinic and asking casual questions about Emma’s upcoming school year. Her normalcy was both comforting and surreal, providing a stark contrast to the otherworldly events that seemed to be unfolding around my daughter.
Later that evening, after Linda had gone to bed and the house had settled into the peaceful quiet of a summer night, I found myself standing in her guest bathroom, staring intently at the mirror above the sink. The reflection that looked back at me was familiar—my own tired face, with stress lines that had appeared over the past few years and eyes that looked older than my thirty-two years—but I found myself studying it with an intensity that bordered on obsession.
I was almost daring the mirror to show me something unusual, to provide some concrete evidence that would either validate Emma’s strange claims or allow me to dismiss them as the product of an overactive imagination. For several long minutes, I stood there in the soft glow of the bathroom’s vanity lights, searching the reflected image for any sign of the mysterious woman Emma had described.
Nothing happened. No supernatural manifestations, no ghostly figures, no inexplicable phenomena. Just my own increasingly paranoid face staring back at me from the silvered glass.
I laughed softly at myself, feeling slightly foolish for expecting anything more dramatic. Perhaps Emma’s friend Samantha had been right when I had called her earlier for advice—maybe this was all just my daughter’s way of processing some emotional trauma she had witnessed but couldn’t fully understand. Children, after all, were remarkably adept at creating elaborate fantasies to cope with situations that overwhelmed their developing minds.
But then, just as I was turning away from the mirror, I saw it.
Not in my own reflection, but in the dim reflection of the hallway behind me that was visible in the mirror’s surface. A shadow moved across the reflected space—quick, hunched, and undeniably wrong in its proportions and movement. It was far too fast and fluid to be anyone living in the house, and it seemed to possess a predatory quality that made every instinct I possessed scream warnings.
I spun around violently, my heart hammering against my chest so hard that I could feel my pulse in my temples and fingertips. The hallway behind me was empty, illuminated only by the soft nightlight that Linda kept plugged into the wall socket for navigation during late-night trips to the kitchen.
Nothing was there. No person, no animal, no rational explanation for what I had seen moving in the reflection.
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I lay in Linda’s guest bed with Emma curled up beside me, listening to every creak and settling sound the house made while my mind raced with possibilities and explanations that all seemed equally implausible. Every shadow that moved across the walls as cars passed outside made me tense with anticipation, and every distant sound—a tree branch scraping against a window, the house’s heating system cycling on, a neighbor’s dog barking in the distance—sent adrenaline coursing through my system.
When morning finally arrived, I found Emma already awake, sitting upright in bed with a pallor that made her look almost translucent in the early sunlight streaming through the guest room window. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, fixed on some point in the middle distance that only she could see.
“She says you’ve got until tonight, Mommy,” Emma stated with the flat, emotionless delivery of someone relaying a message they didn’t fully understand.
Those were the only words she spoke before calmly climbing out of bed and walking to the kitchen, where Linda was already preparing breakfast and chatting about her plans for the day as if nothing unusual was happening.
I followed Emma to the kitchen, my legs feeling unsteady and my mind struggling to process the implications of what she had just told me. Linda was bustling around making pancakes and fresh fruit salad, her movements efficient and cheerful, completely oblivious to the supernatural drama that seemed to be playing out around her.
“You girls sleep okay?” Linda asked, glancing up from the stove with a warm smile. “I thought I heard some movement during the night, but old houses make all sorts of noises.”
“We slept fine,” I lied, accepting the cup of coffee she handed me and wrapping my fingers around its warmth like a lifeline. “Thank you so much for letting us stay. I should hear back from the electric company today about when our power will be restored.”
Emma ate her breakfast in silence, mechanically chewing and swallowing without any apparent enjoyment of Linda’s excellent cooking. She answered Linda’s cheerful questions about school and friends with monosyllabic responses, her attention clearly focused on something else entirely.
After breakfast, I decided we needed to get out of the house and clear our heads with some fresh air and normalcy. We went to the local park, where Emma and I fed stale bread to the ducks that congregated around the small pond and took turns on the swings that creaked pleasantly in the morning breeze. I was trying desperately to recreate the kind of ordinary mother-daughter activities that usually brought Emma joy and helped her forget whatever was troubling her.
But even in the bright sunlight surrounded by other families enjoying the beautiful weather, I felt intensely watched. Other parents at the park kept glancing in our direction with expressions that ranged from curiosity to concern, as if they too could sense that something was amiss but couldn’t quite identify what it was. Their children, normally eager to make new friends, seemed to give Emma a wide berth, playing around us rather than with us in a way that suggested they were responding to some instinctive warning they couldn’t articulate.
When we returned to Linda’s house for lunch, I called my friend Samantha, who taught elementary school and had a master’s degree in child psychology. I had known Samantha since college, and she was one of the few people I trusted completely with sensitive matters involving Emma’s welfare.
I explained the situation to her as carefully and objectively as I could, describing Emma’s strange statements and behavior while trying not to sound like I was losing my grip on reality. Samantha listened without interruption, asking occasional clarifying questions but mostly allowing me to get the entire story out before offering her professional perspective.
“Has Emma experienced any recent trauma or significant changes that she might not have fully processed?” Samantha asked when I had finished my account. “Sometimes children create elaborate fantasies to cope with emotions or situations they don’t understand.”
I hesitated before answering, feeling exposed and vulnerable. “She saw me crying in the bathroom a few weeks ago,” I admitted reluctantly. “I thought she was asleep in her room, but she must have gotten up and seen me having what I guess you’d call a breakdown. It was late at night, and I was dealing with some financial stress and loneliness that just overwhelmed me.”
“And that’s the same bathroom mirror she keeps mentioning?” Samantha inquired, her voice taking on the gentle, probing tone she probably used with troubled students.
“Yes,” I confirmed, feeling like pieces of a puzzle were starting to come together. “She’s never specifically mentioned that mirror before, but it’s the one where I was… where she saw me at my lowest point.”
“It could be projection,” Samantha explained patiently. “Children sometimes externalize powerful emotions by giving them a tangible form. Mirrors are particularly symbolic in this context—they represent reflection, self-examination, and sometimes the parts of ourselves we don’t want to acknowledge. Emma might be processing your emotional distress by creating this figure of ‘the lady,’ who represents the version of you she saw that night.”
This explanation made logical sense and provided the kind of rational framework I desperately wanted to believe. It would mean that Emma wasn’t experiencing supernatural phenomena, but rather working through her confusion and fear about seeing her mother in a vulnerable state she had never witnessed before.
But Samantha’s theory still didn’t account for the handprint on the car window, or the shadow I had seen moving in Linda’s bathroom mirror, or the way other people seemed to unconsciously avoid us at the park. Some part of me remained convinced that there was something genuinely otherworldly happening, something that couldn’t be explained away by childhood psychology and emotional processing.
I thanked Samantha for her insights and hung up the phone, then went to find Emma, who was sitting at Linda’s kitchen table with a box of crayons and a large sheet of paper. She was drawing with intense concentration, her small tongue poking out slightly as she focused on creating something that was clearly important to her.
When I looked over her shoulder at the artwork, my breath caught in my throat. Emma had drawn a massive tree with branches that resembled gnarled claws reaching toward a dark sky. The trunk was thick and twisted, suggesting great age and an almost sentient quality that made it seem more like a living creature than a plant. And standing beneath the tree, almost hidden in its shadow, was the figure of a woman with long, flowing black hair that seemed to move despite being rendered in stationary crayon marks.
The woman’s arms were reaching upward toward the tree’s branches in a gesture that could have been either supplication or threat, and her face, though roughly drawn with a six-year-old’s artistic limitations, somehow managed to convey an expression of both longing and malevolence.
“What’s she doing in your picture?” I asked, trying to keep my voice casual despite the chill that was running down my spine.
“She’s waiting,” Emma replied without looking up from her drawing. “She doesn’t like being forgotten.”
Something clicked in my mind at those words—a memory that had been buried so deep I had almost lost track of it entirely. I suddenly remembered a story my grandmother used to tell me when I was around Emma’s age, back when we would spend summer afternoons on her screened porch drinking sweet tea and listening to her tales of the old days.
My grandmother had grown up in rural Kentucky, in a community where folklore and superstition were as much a part of daily life as farming and church attendance. She used to tell me about a woman who lived in the deep woods—not a witch or a ghost in the traditional sense, but something else entirely. A watcher. Someone who existed in the spaces between the living and the dead, observing the world but never quite participating in it.
According to my grandmother’s story, if you ever saw this woman in a mirror or reflection, you had to acknowledge her presence immediately. You had to speak her name aloud and recognize that she was real, or she would assume you were trying to pretend she didn’t exist. And that, my grandmother had warned with the gravity of someone passing down essential survival information, was something that could never be allowed to happen.
The woman in the woods didn’t like being forgotten or ignored. She had spent her entire existence being overlooked, dismissed, and treated as if she didn’t matter. If she thought you were doing the same thing—if she believed you were trying to make her invisible—she would take steps to ensure that you understood she was very much real and very much present.
I hadn’t thought about my grandmother’s story in decades, but now it came rushing back with vivid clarity. The details that had seemed like harmless folklore when I was a child now took on a more sinister significance in light of Emma’s experiences.
Feeling like I was grasping at straws but needing to pursue every possible lead, I went to my overnight bag and pulled out an old photo album that I had brought with me purely by accident. It was one of those things you grab when you’re packing quickly, thinking you might want something to look at during quiet moments, but I hadn’t actually opened it since arriving at Linda’s house.
Emma was immediately interested in the album, abandoning her drawing to flip through the plastic-covered pages filled with family photos spanning several generations. She looked at pictures of relatives she had never met and asked questions about the people and places captured in faded color prints and black-and-white snapshots.
Then she stopped at a photograph that made my heart skip several beats.
“That’s her, Mommy,” Emma whispered, her small finger pointing at a black-and-white portrait I barely remembered seeing before. “That’s the lady.”
The photograph showed a woman in her thirties with sharp, intelligent eyes and dark hair pulled back in the severe style popular in the 1920s. According to the careful handwriting on the back of the photo, this was my great-grandmother, Evelyn Morrison, who had died young under circumstances that were never fully explained to the younger generations of our family.
I had never met Evelyn, as she had passed away decades before my birth, but looking at the photograph now, I could see a resemblance to Emma in the shape of her eyes and the determined set of her jaw. More unsettling, though, was the expression captured by the camera—a look of intense awareness, as if Evelyn knew secrets that the rest of the world couldn’t perceive.
The eyes in the photograph seemed to be looking directly at whoever was viewing it, with an intensity that made me uncomfortable even though I was looking at a picture that was nearly a century old. There was something in that gaze that suggested Evelyn Morrison had been someone who saw more than most people, who understood things that existed just beyond the edge of normal perception.
Feeling like I was tumbling down a rabbit hole but unable to stop myself, I decided to do some research into our family history. I called my mother, who lived in Florida and had always been the keeper of family stories and genealogical information. She sounded surprised but pleased to hear from me, and we chatted briefly about Emma and my work before I steered the conversation toward the topic I really wanted to discuss.
“Mom, do you remember much about your grandmother? Evelyn Morrison?” I asked, trying to sound casually interested rather than desperately seeking answers to supernatural mysteries.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and when my mother spoke again, her voice carried a nervous quality I had rarely heard before.
“Why are you asking about her?” she inquired carefully. “That’s not exactly a happy family story, sweetheart.”
“I found an old photograph, and Emma was curious about her relatives,” I explained, which was technically true even if it wasn’t the complete truth. “I realized I don’t know much about that side of the family.”
My mother sighed, and I could hear her settling into a chair as if preparing for a difficult conversation. “Evelyn was… troubled,” she said finally. “Mental illness, they said, though back then they didn’t understand these things the way we do now. She used to talk to people who weren’t there, claim she could see things that others couldn’t.”
“What kind of things?” I pressed, though part of me was already dreading the answer.
“She lived in a house at the edge of some woods, similar to where you live now, actually. She used to sit by her bedroom window for hours at a time, talking to someone she claimed lived in the trees. Her husband thought she was losing her mind, but her children—including my father—swore they sometimes saw shadows moving in the forest when she was having these conversations.”
My mouth went dry as my mother continued her account. “The story goes that one day, her husband decided to cut down the tree she was always staring at, thinking it might help her break whatever delusion she was trapped in. That night, she disappeared. They found her three days later, sitting at the base of the tree stump, completely catatonic. She never spoke another word before she died a few weeks later.”
“Did anyone ever figure out what had happened to her?” I asked, though I was beginning to suspect I already knew the answer.
“The official cause of death was listed as heart failure brought on by exposure and malnutrition,” my mother replied. “But the local people had their own theories. They said she had been claimed by whatever she had been talking to in the woods, that it had finally decided to take her rather than just communicate with her.”
As my mother spoke, I watched Emma, who had returned to her drawing and was now adding more details to the woman beneath the tree. The figure was becoming more elaborate and somehow more threatening with each additional crayon stroke.
“Mom, did you ever experience anything unusual in your house when you were growing up?” I asked hesitantly. “Anything that might have been… inherited from Evelyn?”
Another long pause, and then my mother said something that made my blood turn to ice: “When I was about Emma’s age, I stopped talking for six days straight. I just kept drawing the same woman over and over—long dark hair, wearing old-fashioned clothes, with her mouth sewn shut. My parents were terrified and took me to every doctor they could find, but no one could explain what was wrong with me. Then, on the seventh day, I woke up and was completely normal again. I never drew the woman again, and I never talked about what I had seen during those six days.”
I stared at Emma, who was now whispering softly to her stuffed frog while continuing to work on her drawing, and I felt a chill that had nothing to do with Linda’s air conditioning.
“We need to leave this place,” I told Emma suddenly, my voice urgent and shaky. “We need to go far away from here.”
But Emma shook her head with the calm certainty that was becoming her trademark response to my panic. “She already knows where you go, Mommy. She’s not stuck in one place anymore.”
That evening, after Linda had gone to bed, I took precautions that would have seemed insane to me just a week earlier. I carefully locked the bedroom door and placed salt around all the windows, following half-remembered instructions from my grandmother’s old superstitions. I didn’t really believe these measures would be effective, but they made me feel marginally less helpless and gave me the illusion of having some control over our situation.
I held Emma close as we lay in the guest bed, her small body warm and solid against mine, and I whispered prayers I hadn’t recited since childhood. She seemed calmer when I was holding her, less distant and otherworldly, and for a while I allowed myself to hope that maybe the worst was over.
But when I finally dozed off in the early hours of the morning, I was immediately plunged into a vivid nightmare that felt more real than any dream I had ever experienced. I found myself standing at the edge of a vast forest, looking up at a tree that was impossibly tall, its branches disappearing into clouds that seemed to swirl with unnatural darkness.
Standing beneath the tree was a woman in an old-fashioned dress, her long black hair moving in a wind I couldn’t feel. She was holding something in her hands—a mirror that reflected not the forest around us, but the interior of a bathroom that looked exactly like mine at home.
As I watched, transfixed with horror, the woman slowly turned the mirror toward me. But instead of seeing my own reflection in its surface, I saw her face looking back at me, her lips curved in a smile that was both triumphant and terrifying. And as I stared, her reflection began to change, shifting and morphing until it looked exactly like me—but with eyes that held a knowledge and malevolence that were entirely foreign.
I woke up screaming, a sound so guttural and primal that it seemed to come from somewhere deep in my chest rather than my throat.
Emma was gone.
I bolted upright in bed, my heart hammering so violently that I thought it might actually burst, and frantically scanned the room for any sign of my daughter. The guest bed was empty beside me, still warm where she had been lying but showing no indication of where she had gone or how long she had been missing.
I ran through Linda’s house in a state of pure panic, checking every room and calling Emma’s name in a voice that cracked with fear and desperation. I found her standing at the front door of the house, perfectly still and staring out into the darkness as if she could see something in the night that was invisible to me.
“She said the proof is now,” Emma stated without turning around, her voice devoid of any emotion or inflection.
I swept her up into my arms, sobbing with relief and terror in equal measure, holding her so tightly that she made a small sound of protest. But even as I clutched her against my chest, I could feel that something fundamental had changed. Emma felt different somehow—cooler, more distant, as if part of her had traveled somewhere else during her absence from the bed.
That’s when the lights began to flicker.
Not just the hallway light where we were standing, but every light in the house, creating a strobing effect that was both disorienting and deeply unnatural. The flickering started slowly, like the beginning of an electrical storm, but quickly accelerated until the entire house was pulsing with erratic illumination.
And then, in one terrible moment that will haunt me for the rest of my life, every mirror in Linda’s house shattered simultaneously.
The sound was like an explosion, a cacophony of breaking glass that seemed to come from every direction at once. In the hallway where we stood, I could see the destruction reflected in the remaining fragments of the mirror that hung near the front door—pieces of silvered glass scattered across floors throughout the house, creating a hazardous landscape of sharp edges and broken reflections.
Linda came running from her bedroom, her hair disheveled and her face pale with shock. “What happened?” she demanded, staring at the destruction around us with wide, unbelieving eyes. “Was it an earthquake? What could cause all the mirrors to break at the same time?”
I had no answer for her that wouldn’t sound like the ravings of someone who had completely lost touch with reality. Instead, I simply held Emma tighter and said, “We need to leave. Right now.”
We packed our few belongings in the gray light of dawn, while Linda swept up glass and muttered about calling her insurance company. She kept glancing at Emma and me with an expression that suggested she was beginning to suspect that our presence in her house was somehow connected to the inexplicable destruction, but she was too kind and too confused to voice her suspicions directly.
I loaded Emma and our bags into the car and drove straight out of town, heading toward my uncle’s place in the mountains three hours away. Uncle Robert lived in a small cottage near the cliffs, surrounded by open fields and rocky outcroppings with no large trees for miles in any direction. If distance and geography could provide protection from whatever was pursuing us, then his isolated location seemed like our best hope.
The drive was tense but uneventful, with Emma sleeping peacefully in her car seat while I white-knuckled the steering wheel and jumped at every shadow that moved across the highway. By the time we reached Robert’s cottage, the sun was high in the sky and the normal world of traffic and commerce seemed to have reasserted itself around us.
Robert welcomed us without question, accepting my vague explanation about needing a change of scenery and some time to think. He was my father’s brother, a retired park ranger who had never married and seemed genuinely delighted to have unexpected company in his peaceful mountain retreat.
We stayed with Robert for three weeks, and for the first time since this ordeal had begun, I felt like we could breathe freely. There were no whispers about ladies in trees, no mysterious handprints, and no supernatural phenomena that defied rational explanation. Emma gradually returned to her normal, cheerful self, laughing at Robert’s stories about wildlife and helping him tend his small vegetable garden.
But even during those peaceful weeks, I couldn’t completely shake the feeling that this was merely a respite rather than a permanent solution. Emma would sometimes pause in the middle of playing and stare off into the distance, as if listening to something only she could hear, and I would catch her whispering to her stuffed frog in a way that suggested she was having conversations rather than just talking to herself.
One evening, as we sat on Robert’s porch watching the sunset paint the mountains in shades of gold and purple, Emma asked me a question that sent ice through my veins despite the warm summer air.
“Mommy, if the lady wore you once, how do we know she truly gave you back?”
The question haunted me for days afterward, echoing in my mind during quiet moments and making me study my own reflection with suspicious intensity whenever I encountered a mirror. How could I be certain that I was still myself, that the woman Emma had seen in our bathroom wasn’t somehow influencing my thoughts and actions in ways I couldn’t detect?
I started therapy when we returned to civilization, working with a counselor who specialized in trauma and family dynamics. I also began researching our family history more systematically, digging through genealogical records and old documents in search of answers about Evelyn Morrison and the patterns that seemed to repeat across generations of women in our family.
What I discovered was both illuminating and terrifying. Evelyn hadn’t been the first woman in our family to experience supernatural phenomena, nor was she the last. There was a pattern stretching back several generations—women who claimed to see things others couldn’t, who spoke of watchers in the woods and figures that appeared in mirrors, who sometimes disappeared for days or weeks before returning changed and distant.
Most disturbing of all, I found a diary entry written by my mother in 1978, during the period she had mentioned when she stopped talking as a child: “The woman in the mirror tried to take me today. I pretended to forget her name, and she screamed so loud I thought my ears would bleed. But I didn’t let her in. I won’t let her wear me like she wore Great-Grandmother Evelyn.
