Title: The Third Floor Window
There was an old boarding school in Maine, a sprawling Victorian building surrounded by foggy woods. Most of the students were gone for the summer, except for a girl named Lena, who had nowhere else to go. She stayed behind with a few staff and a couple of other students.
One evening, Lena was studying in the library when she glanced out the tall window and saw a pale face staring at her from the third-floor window of the East Wing—a part of the school that had been abandoned for years after a fire. The face vanished the moment she blinked, but it had been there. Watching.
She told the night janitor, Mr. Harrow, but he just laughed. “Old buildings like this have memories,” he said, his mop sloshing water. “That wing was closed after a girl disappeared. Never found her. Folks say she still wanders, looking for her way out.”
That night, Lena couldn’t sleep. At 3:17 a.m., she woke to the sound of footsteps above her. Her room was directly under the East Wing. Curious—and stupidly brave—she crept upstairs with a flashlight.
The door to the East Wing, normally padlocked, hung open.
Inside, the walls were scorched and peeling. Her flashlight flickered. She heard humming, soft and tuneless, coming from a classroom. As she approached, her light died.
But in the dark, she could still see—a figure at the window, the same face she had seen before, except now the eyes were bleeding. It turned slowly toward her.
Lena ran, tripping and scraping her knees. Behind her, the humming grew louder, more like weeping now. She slammed the door shut and fled to her room, locking herself in.
The next morning, the East Wing was padlocked again. Mr. Harrow said nothing—but his mop leaned against the door, dripping blood instead of water.
Lena left the school the next day.
The girl in the window still watches. And every summer, when the halls are nearly empty, she chooses someone new.
