A Shadow Named John

Chapter One

I jolted awake, my heart hammering against my ribs.

Wait… what? Am I dreaming?

I sat frozen under the covers, staring into the dark. It had sounded so loud, so incredibly real. I climbed out of bed, my feet hitting the cold floorboards, and pulled on my robe, tying the belt tight around my waist as a shield against the chill.

Slowly, I walked through the apartment. I checked the heavy deadbolt on the front door, turned on the lights in the living room, and peeked into the empty guest bedroom. Nothing. I didn’t see anyone. Yet, as I stood there in the quiet, I could have sworn on my life that someone had just whispered my name right into the shadows of my bedroom.

I walked over to the window and parted the blinds, peering down into the moonlit driveway. No strange cars. No movement. Just empty asphalt.

It was deeply odd. I crawled back into bed and pulled the duvet up to my chin, but I couldn’t shake the heavy, suffocating sensation that someone was standing in the corner of the room, watching me sleep. I had only moved into this place a week ago. The layout was still unfamiliar, the shadows fell in strange shapes, and I hadn’t felt quite at ease yet. My imagination is just playing tricks on me, I whispered to myself, closing my eyes. New place, new nerves.

Before long, my life settled back into a normal, comforting routine. I woke up, went to work, came home, cleaned, cooked, watched a bit of television, and went to bed. It was the mindless, exhausting repetition of a young adult fresh out of university, desperately trying to build a career and a life from scratch.

But tonight, the routine shattered.

The unsettling sense of being watched returned with a vengeance. I was curled up on the couch, completely engrossed in a new book I’d found called Fallen. I was so deeply pulled into the narrative that when I realized it was part of a series, I immediately made a mental note to hunt down the rest of the copies the next day.

And that’s when I heard it.

Clear. Distinct. Heavy.

The sound of footsteps pacing and walking.

I sat up straight, my book dropping to my lap, my ears straining against the silence. More footsteps followed, and they were tracking a direct path toward me. I looked around the brightly lit living room, but obviously, I saw nothing. I held my breath, waiting, and the footsteps suddenly stopped dead.

Then came a sharp, agonizing creak from the kitchen floorboards.

I stood up slowly, my muscles tense, and tiptoed into the kitchen. I flipped the light switch. The room flooded with a harsh glow, illuminating clean counters, an empty sink, and absolutely nothing out of place.

New place, new sounds… I thought, rubbing my eyes. Or I am finally losing my mind.

Chapter Two

I checked my phone on the nightstand. The screen flared to life, casting a cold blue glow across the blankets: 12:00 AM.

The witching hour, as some might call it. But those kinds of old wives’ tales had never bothered me; I wasn’t the superstitious type. Deciding that my mind was simply overtired, I turned off the lamp and resolved to get some sleep.

But sleep refused to come.

I rolled from my left side to my right, tossing and turning as an unexplained, icy breeze suddenly drifted across my face. I sat up, shivering, and re-checked the bedroom window and the hallway doors. Everything was sealed tight against the night air. Yet the cold remained, hanging heavy in the center of the room.

The moment my head hit the pillow again, a sharp, distinct crack echoed from the bathroom next door—the unmistakable sound of fiberglass shifting under sudden weight, as if someone had just climbed into the bathtub.

I froze, my breath catching in my throat.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Then, the pipe groaned, and the sound of rushing, pressurized water exploded through the wall.

What on earth?!

I bolted out of bed and sprinted down the short hallway, flinging the bathroom door open and slapping the light switch. The harsh fluorescent glare burned my sensitive, sleep-deprived eyes. I blinked rapidly, waiting for the room to focus, expecting to see a flooded floor or a spinning faucet handle.

Nothing.

The porcelain basin was bone-dry. The chrome tap wasn’t even damp.

I stood there in the silence, the echo of the rushing water still ringing in my ears, as a vivid, unbidden memory flashed through my mind: a scene from Th13teen Ghosts. I had watched it years ago, a movie about a house where spirits were locked behind shifting glass walls—present, angry, but completely invisible until it was too late. One ghost in particular, bloodied and bound, had haunted a bathroom. I had always hated horror movies for exactly this reason; the images stayed buried in your subconscious, waiting for a dark, quiet night to claw their way back to the surface.

Eventually, sheer exhaustion wore down my panic, and sleep finally took over. But it brought no relief. My subconscious twisted the night’s events into a chaotic, vivid nightmare—blood-slicked specters chasing me through endless, unfamiliar corridors, balanced only by the sudden, blinding appearance of armored angels swooping down to pull me from the dark.

When my alarm woke me the next morning, I forced a laugh at my own expense. I came to a simple, logical conclusion: I was reading far too many fantasy novels and letting old cinematic jump-scares get the better of me.

A few days later, nature decided to match the turbulence inside my head.

A tremendous, violent storm broke out over the city. The sky turned an ominous, bruised shade of purple, and the air grew thick and electric. Then, the first crack of thunder split the heavens, rattling the glass in my apartment windows as jagged bolts of lightning began to tear through the dark…

Chapter Three

I was sitting right in front of the television when the world went completely black.

The storm outside had finally knocked out the local grid, the sudden silence punctuated only by a distant, booming roll of thunder. I didn’t feel truly frightened—though the sudden darkness did make me jolt a little in my seat. Standing up carefully, I set my dinner plate down on the coffee table and reached for my phone, switching on its built-in flashlight. I navigated my way to the hallway DB board, keeping my fingers firmly crossed that the main switch had simply tripped from a power surge.

No such luck. The lever was up; the municipal power was entirely dead.

Using the beam of my phone light to guide my fork, I sat back down and finished my dinner. Yet, the blacked-out apartment felt smaller now, and I couldn’t shake the prickling sensation that I was no longer alone in the dark. A cold chill ran straight down my spine. I pitched my ears and listened intently, but there wasn’t a single sound to be heard except for the metallic scrape of my fork against the ceramic plate and the deep, rhythmic roar of the thunder outside. The doors and windows were definitely still closed; I had double-checked the locks myself.

After finishing the last bite, I guided myself to the kitchen with the flashlight beam and placed the empty plate into the sink. There was no use staying awake in a dead apartment, so I decided to take a quick shower and head straight to bed.

But as I stepped out of the kitchen and into the short hallway, the beam of my phone light caught something.

I froze solid, the breath dying in my throat.

There stood a man.

He was completely, solidly black—a silhouette carved right out of the darkness. No matter how hard I stared, I couldn’t make out a single facial feature. He just stood there, towering in the narrow corridor.

“W… what… what are you doing in my house?” I rasped, my voice trembling as I tried to force a sense of authority I didn’t possess.

There was no response. The figure didn’t blink, didn’t breathe, didn’t move.

Summoning every ounce of courage I had left, I lifted my phone a bit higher to cast the beam directly onto his chest. But the moment the brightest point of the light hit the space where he was standing, the air cleared. He was gone.

Terrified to move, but driven by a sudden spike of adrenaline, I launched into a frantic search of the apartment. It wasn’t a large place, and if he had been a real intruder, he couldn’t have gone far. I checked behind the curtains, inside the wardrobes, and behind the shower screen.

Absolutely no one was there.

“It’s just my mind playing tricks on me,” I muttered to the empty rooms, my heart still racing. Maybe the relentless pressure of working all the time fresh out of university was finally catching up to me. I was exhausted, and an overtired brain can do strange things in the dark.

But deep down, something felt entirely off.

After finally convincing myself that it must have been a trick of the shadows, I took a quick shower in the dark, using my phone light to illuminate the steam, and crawled into bed. But sleep was a distant memory now. I lay there in the quiet, my mind obsessively looping back to the image of the silhouette.

The more I thought about it, the more specific details began to crystallize in my memory. The shadow hadn’t just been a generic shape. He had been wearing a very distinct, long, heavy winter overcoat that flared slightly at the bottom, and a tall, rigid top hat. It was almost as if a silhouette of Abraham Lincoln had suddenly come to life right in my small hallway.

Nobody dressed like that anymore.

I jumped out of bed, ignoring the cold floorboards, and grabbed my laptop. Thankfully, the battery was fully charged. I booted it up, connected it to my phone’s cellular hotspot, and opened Google.

My fingers flew across the keyboard, searching through historical fashion timelines, old dress styles, and 19th-century men’s tailoring. Then, I pivoted my search toward the apartment block itself. I typed in the address, scouring old local news archives, digital property deeds, and any suspicious activities or historic deaths the search engine could give me.

I didn’t believe in ghosts. I wasn’t superstitious, and I certainly wasn’t crazy. But I needed peace of mind. And if I was going to share my new apartment with a man from another century, I had to know exactly who he was.

Chapter Four

The blue light of the laptop screen illuminated the dark bedroom as I scrolled through decades of digitized archives. Most of the early search results were broad and fragmented, but they provided a grim foundation.

Years ago, a brutal, historic battle had raged across these exact grounds. Local historical societies believed that many soldiers had died right where my living room now stood, their remains buried hastily beneath what would eventually become the foundations of the modern apartment block. Unsurprisingly, the local newspaper archives were riddled with sensational headlines over the years, detailing a long history of tenants claiming to live in “haunted apartments” and reporting strange, unexplained phenomena.

But as I dug deeper into the building’s specific occupancy records from the late 19th century, one specific name leaped off the screen.

John Robert Brown.

I stared at the name, a strange sense of clarity washing over me. Right then and there, I decided to call my shadow John.

According to an archived obituary and a few scandalous local society columns from the era, John had been a well-known British soldier who had served with distinction before retiring from the military. He had moved to this area to pursue a quiet life as an artist, but the transition to civilian life had been unkind to him. His paintings never sold, he became a severe alcoholic, and he spiraled into a deep, inescapable depression.

The article concluded with a grim detail: broke and destitute, he had hung himself inside this very building.

An old, grainy sketch from a local newspaper archive accompanied the text. It showed a man from the mid-1800s, dressed in a formal, heavy wool overcoat, holding a tall, rigid top hat in his hands.

He ticked every single box I had created to match my ghost.

I leaned back against my pillows, closing the laptop and letting the darkness reclaim the room. I still didn’t entirely believe in the supernatural, and I wasn’t prone to superstition. But as I looked toward the empty hallway, the fear was gone, replaced by a profound, heavy sadness. John wasn’t a monster from a movie. He was just a man trapped in a loop of his own tragic history, pacing the floorboards of the only place he had left.

I pulled the blankets up to my shoulders and closed my eyes. “Goodnight, John,” I whispered into the quiet apartment.

And for the first time since I moved in, the cold breeze in the room felt entirely peaceful.

Chapter Five

The peace didn’t last.

Soon, the stranger, more aggressive anomalies began to bleed into my nights. It started with a voice—faint at first, but crystallizing into a clear, sharp whisper that cut through the silence of my bedroom.

“Emily…”

I sat up, the sound of my own name vibrating in the quiet. It sounded exactly like my father’s voice, carrying the familiar, protective cadence he used when I was a child. But I knew it was impossible. He didn’t live with me; he was miles away. To hear his voice echoing in this empty apartment made my skin crawl in a completely new way.

Then, the technology in the apartment began to warp. Every time I plugged my phone into the wall charger on my nightstand, the device would go haywire.

Ping—charging. Ping—not charging. Ping… ping… ping…

The screen would flash relentlessly, the digital chime echoing like an erratic heartbeat in the dark. It wouldn’t stop until I physically hovered my palm directly over the screen, my hand acting as a shield. The moment I covered it, the frantic pings would abruptly die, leaving the room in a heavy, suffocating silence.

On the inevitable rainy nights, when the lowveld storms rolled in and the shadows lengthened, I would still see him. John would stand tall and motionless in his 19th-century overcoat and top hat at the end of the narrow corridor. By then, the initial shock had worn off. I would simply nod, offer a quiet, “Hi, John,” and walk right past him, going about my evening business. He wasn’t a malicious bother, but the sheer, unnatural wrongness of his presence still managed to frighten me from time to time.

Until the warm summer night when the boundaries broke entirely.

I had been out late with a group of friends, laughing and dancing, completely shaking off the tension of the past few weeks. I came home utterly exhausted, kicked off my shoes, and fell into a blissful, heavy sleep. Because it was a stifling, humid night, I had left my feet sticking out from underneath the edge of the duvet, searching for a cool breeze.

Deep in the middle of my sleep, a physical sensation jolted me awake.

A single, ice-cold finger slowly slid across the bottom of my bare foot. It was deliberate. Flesh-and-bone real.

I shot straight up in bed, my blood turning to absolute ice in my veins. A cold, frantic sweat broke out across my back, and every single hair on my body stood on end. My skin erupted in severe goosebumps as I stared into the pitch-black room, completely paralyzed by terror.

What on earth was that?!

That was the absolute last straw. I was completely, fundamentally freaked out. The fragile truce I had made with the history of this place was shattered.

The very next morning, as soon as the sun broke through the window, I called my realtor and told her flatly that I was breaking the lease. I packed my immediate essentials into a few suitcases and retreated straight to the safety of my parents’ house.

A week later, the day arrived to finally fetch the rest of my furniture. The movers were busy carrying the heavy boxes out to the truck, leaving the apartment echoing and bare. Before I walked out for the last time, I stepped away from the noise and stood alone in the short, narrow hallway. The exact spot where the shadow of John Robert Brown used to manifest.

I looked into the empty space, took a deep breath, and spoke aloud, as if he were standing right in front of me.

“I am sorry, John, but I can’t live here anymore,” I said softly, my voice catching in the empty apartment. “I really hope you find peace, and that you can finally move on from this place. I wish you well. Goodbye, John.”

I turned on my heel, walked out the front door, and never looked back. I never uttered a word about what I saw to the landlord or the next tenants, and I never found out if John finally managed to cross over.

But as the heavy door clicked shut behind me, the air in the hallway finally went still.