The lease was too good to be true, and Maya knew it. A two-bedroom apartment in downtown Portland for eight hundred dollars a month? In this market? There had to be a catch.
The Whispers in Apartment 7B
A short scary story
The lease was too good to be true, and Maya knew it. A two-bedroom apartment in downtown Portland for eight hundred dollars a month? In this market? There had to be a catch.
“Previous tenant left suddenly,” the landlord had explained, not quite meeting her eyes. His name was Gerald, a stooped man in his seventies with liver-spotted hands that trembled as he turned the key. “Place has been empty for three months. I just want someone reliable in here.”
Maya should have asked more questions. She should have wondered why Gerald seemed so eager to hand over the keys, why he’d approved her application within hours, why he’d waived the security deposit entirely. But she was desperate. Her previous roommate had moved out with two weeks’ notice, leaving Maya scrambling to find something—anything—she could afford on her barista salary.
The apartment was on the seventh floor of the Grandview Arms, a pre-war building with an ornate but crumbling facade. The elevator groaned and stuttered as it climbed, and Maya tried not to think about safety inspections as the cables creaked overhead.
Apartment 7B sat at the end of a dim hallway, the overhead lights flickering in a rhythm that almost seemed intentional. Gerald unlocked the door and stepped back, gesturing for Maya to enter first.
The apartment smelled like copper and old paper. The hardwood floors were scuffed but intact, and the crown molding spoke to an era when craftsmanship mattered. Large windows overlooked the street below, letting in weak afternoon light that barely penetrated the gloom. The walls were a peculiar shade—not quite gray, not quite green—that seemed to shift in the changing light.
“Utilities included,” Gerald said from the doorway. He wouldn’t step inside. “Trash chute is down the hall. Quiet hours after ten. Any problems, call my cell.”
“What about the previous tenant?” Maya asked, running her hand along the kitchen counter. “Why did they leave?”
Gerald’s jaw worked silently for a moment. “Personal reasons. Nothing to do with the apartment.”
That was a lie. Maya could tell. But she was also three days away from being homeless, so she signed the papers Gerald produced from his jacket pocket, took the keys, and watched him shuffle away with what looked like relief.
The first night was quiet.
Maya had very little furniture—just her mattress, a folding table, and three boxes of clothes and books. She ordered Chinese takeout and ate it sitting on the floor, her back against the wall, watching shadows creep across the ceiling as the sun set.
The building was old, so it made old-building noises. Pipes clanged. Floorboards creaked. Somewhere above her, someone dragged furniture across their floor in rhythmic scrapes that went on for twenty minutes before stopping abruptly.
She fell asleep around midnight, exhausted from the move.
The whispers started at 3:17 AM
Maya woke to the sound of voices—soft, urgent, just barely audible. At first, she thought it was neighbors, sound bleeding through the thin walls. But as she lay there in the darkness, she realized the whispers were coming from inside the apartment.
From the walls themselves.
She sat up, heart hammering. The mattress squeaked beneath her. The whispers stopped immediately, cut off like someone had pressed mute.
Maya reached for her phone, turned on the flashlight. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating nothing but empty rooms and bare walls. She got up, checked the front door—locked and chained. The windows were all closed. She was alone.
She chalked it up to the unfamiliar acoustics of a new place, the way strange buildings can play tricks with sound. But as she lay back down, pulling the blanket up to her chin, she could have sworn she heard it again: a whisper, so faint it might have been her imagination, forming words she couldn’t quite catch.
The second night, the whispers came earlier.
Maya had spent the day unpacking and trying to make the apartment feel like home. She’d hung curtains, assembled a bookshelf, positioned her few possessions to fill the empty spaces. The place looked better with her things in it, less like a crime scene, more like a home.
She made pasta for dinner and ate while reading on her phone. Outside, the city hummed with evening traffic. Inside, the apartment was warm and quiet.
Until it wasn’t.
At 10:47 PM, as Maya brushed her teeth in the bathroom, she heard them: whispers, coming from the wall behind the medicine cabinet. She froze, toothbrush halfway to her mouth, listening.
It sounded like a conversation—multiple voices, overlapping, urgent. She couldn’t make out the words, but she could hear the cadence, the emotion. Fear. Pleading. And underneath it all, something else. Something that sounded like laughter.
Maya pressed her ear against the wall. The whispers grew louder, more distinct. She could almost make out words now—
“Don’t—”
“Please—”
“—too late—”
She jerked back, dropping her toothbrush. It clattered into the sink. Silence flooded back instantly.
Maya stood there for a full minute, listening to her own ragged breathing. Then she checked the wall. Solid plaster. No vents, no pipes, no rational explanation for voices.
She didn’t sleep well that night.
On the third day, Maya decided to do some research.
The Grandview Arms had a Wikipedia page—apparently, it was built in 1924 and had been home to several minor celebrities over the decades. Maya scrolled past the architectural details to the section labeled “Incidents.”
There it was, buried in the third paragraph: In 1967, a murder-suicide occurred in apartment 7B. Resident Margaret Chen, 34, killed her husband Thomas before taking her own life. Neighbors reported hearing arguments for weeks prior to the incident.
Maya’s stomach turned cold. She kept reading.
In 1989, tenant David Reeves died in the same apartment under mysterious circumstances. The death was ruled accidental, though investigators noted unusual aspects of the scene.
In 2003, Sarah Mitchell was hospitalized after a mental breakdown while living in 7B. She claimed the apartment was “full of voices” and refused to return.
In 2019, Christopher Lang disappeared from apartment 7B. His belongings remained in the apartment, but he was never found.
Maya closed her laptop. Her hands were shaking.
Christopher Lang. That must have been the previous tenant.
She should leave. She should pack her things right now and find somewhere—anywhere—else to stay. But where would she go? She’d paid first and last month’s rent. She had three hundred dollars in her bank account. Her credit cards were maxed out.
She was trapped.
The whispers came every night after that.
Always after dark. Always when Maya was alone. They grew progressively louder, more distinct, until she could make out fragments of sentences:
“Help us—”
“—can’t get out—”
“—it won’t let us leave—”
Maya tried everything. She played music to drown them out. She slept with earplugs. She stayed up until dawn, thinking maybe they only came when she was sleeping. But the whispers persisted, seeping through every defense she erected.
On the eighth night, she heard her name. “Maya.”
It came from the wall behind her bed, crystal clear. A woman’s voice, young and terrified.
Maya shot upright, pulse thundering in her ears. “Who are you?”
Silence. Then, slowly, the whispers resumed, building like a chorus:
“Maya… help us… trapped… won’t let us go… it keeps us…”
“What keeps you?” Maya’s voice cracked. “What are you?”
The whispers rose to a crescendo, dozens of voices overlapping until they became a cacophony of sound that filled the apartment, pressing against her ears, her skull, her very thoughts. She clapped her hands over her ears, but it didn’t help. The voices were inside her head now.
Then, cutting through the chaos, one voice—deeper, darker, nothing like the others:
“MINE.”
The word resonated through the apartment like a physical blow. Pictures fell from walls. The windows rattled in their frames. And then, as quickly as it had begun, everything stopped.
Silence crashed down like a wave.
Maya sat frozen on her mattress, tears streaming down her face, too terrified to move.
She called in sick to work the next day. And the day after that. She barely left the mattress, existing in a state of numb terror, waiting for night to fall.
The whispers had changed. Now they came during the day too, soft and constant, a background murmur she could never quite escape. Sometimes she’d catch words: help, please, trapped, forever, it hurts, make it stop.
She tried to leave once. Made it as far as the front door with a hastily packed bag. But when she reached for the doorknob, the whispers exploded into screams—anguished, desperate, furious. The lights flickered. The temperature plummeted. And she felt something—a presence, massive and malevolent—press against her back.
The message was clear: she wasn’t allowed to leave.
Maya dropped her bag and backed away from the door. The screaming stopped. The presence receded. She was learning the rules.
On the fourteenth night, Maya did something desperate.
She’d found candles in the building’s basement laundry room, left behind by someone who probably had their own supernatural problems. She arranged them in a circle on her living room floor and sat in the center, her grandmother’s rosary wrapped around her fist despite not having been to church in a decade.
“I want to talk,” she said to the empty apartment. “To whoever or whatever is here. I want to understand.”
The candles flickered, though there was no breeze.
Then the whispers came, but different this time—organized, focused, as if the voices had finally found a way to communicate clearly.
“We lived here,” a woman’s voice said. It might have been Margaret Chen. “We died here. It won’t let us leave.”
“What won’t let you leave?” Maya asked.
“The building,” a man’s voice—Thomas Chen? David Reeves?—answered. “It’s hungry. It’s always been hungry. It feeds on us. On our fear, our pain, our memories. It takes and takes until there’s nothing left but echoes.”
“It wants you too,” another voice whispered. Sarah Mitchell, maybe. “It won’t let you go. Not now that you’re here.”
“There has to be a way out,” Maya said. “There’s always a way out.”
Laughter—bitter, hollow. “Christopher thought that too. He tried to burn it down. Now he’s part of it. Part of the walls. Part of the whispers.”
Maya’s blood ran cold. “I’m not staying here. I refuse.”
The deep voice returned, the one that had said mine, and when it spoke, the candles went out all at once, plunging the apartment into darkness.
“YOU WILL STAY. YOU WILL JOIN THEM. YOU WILL FEED ME.”
The walls began to breathe.
Maya could see it now, in the faint light from the street—the wallpaper expanding and contracting like a massive lung. The ceiling pressed down. The floor seemed to shift beneath her. The apartment was alive, and it was closing in.
She ran for the door, but it was gone. Where the entrance had been was just wall, solid and impassable.
She ran to the windows, but her hands passed through them like they were mist. They weren’t real. Maybe they never had been.
The whispers rose around her, a symphony of the trapped and the lost:
“One of us… one of us… one of us…”
Maya screamed. She screamed until her throat was raw, until her voice gave out. But no one came. No one in the building could hear her. Or maybe they just knew better than to investigate.
Gerald received a call four weeks later from Maya’s mother, asking if he’d seen her daughter. She wasn’t answering her phone. She hadn’t shown up for work. Her friends were worried.
Gerald drove to the Grandview Arms with a pit in his stomach. He’d known this would happen. It always happened. But he needed the money, and the building needed feeding, and really, what choice did he have?
He unlocked apartment 7B with shaking hands.
The apartment was empty. Maya’s belongings were still there—her mattress, her books, her phone on the charger—but there was no sign of the girl herself.
Just that smell: copper and old paper.
And if you listened very carefully, with your ear pressed against the wall, you could hear them. All of them. The voices.
Including one new addition, a young woman whispering the same words over and over:
“Help us… please… don’t let anyone else in… please…”
Gerald closed the door gently. Locked it. Put a new listing online before he even reached his car.
Charming 2BR apartment in historic building. Downtown location. $800/month. Utilities included. Available immediately.
The applications would start coming in within hours. They always did.
The Grandview Arms was hungry again.
Related article:
Ghost Stories: The Last Passenger
