I started getting calls from a boy named Tommy sometime in February. The first one came while I was washing dishes after dinner, and I almost ignored it because I didn’t recognize the number.
When I answered, there was a few seconds of silence before a child said, “Is this Mrs. Carter’s house?”
I told him he had the wrong number.
He apologized in a surprisingly polite voice and hung up.
He called again the next evening.
This time, I asked where he got my number. He said it was written on a piece of paper beside the telephone. I assumed he was a kid playing around, so I told him to stop calling.
He went quiet for a moment.
Then he asked if I knew where Tommy was.
I thought he meant another boy, so I said no and hung up.
The calls continued.
They never came at the same time, which made them harder to ignore. Sometimes Tommy called while I was working. Sometimes just after midnight. Once, he called at six in the morning.
He always asked about Mrs. Carter.
Eventually, I searched the number online and found nothing useful. One night, I started reading scary short stories online because I wanted to see if other people had experienced strange calls like these.
Most of what I found was ridiculous.
There were stories about haunted phones, dead relatives, and people receiving calls from numbers that supposedly belonged to cemeteries. I didn’t believe any of it.
The calls bothered me because they were too ordinary. Tommy never threatened me or said anything dramatic. He just sounded like a lonely kid who couldn’t understand why nobody was answering the phone.
One night, I asked him what Mrs. Carter looked like.
He said she had gray hair and always wore a green sweater.
That meant nothing to me at the time.
Then he asked, “Are you still living in the blue house?”
I looked around my kitchen.
My house wasn’t blue.
I told him that.
He was silent for a moment.
Then he said, “It used to be.”
That was the first call that actually frightened me.
I hung up and blocked the number.
The next morning, I mentioned the calls to my neighbor. She had lived on the street for more than thirty years.
When I described what had been happening, she asked me to repeat the boy’s name.
“Tommy?”
She stopped what she was doing.
Then she told me there had been a boy named Tommy who lived in my house when she was young.
I thought she was joking.
She wasn’t.
The house had been blue when she moved in, she said. An older woman named Mrs. Carter had lived there with her grandson.
Tommy disappeared one summer when he was around nine years old.
His grandmother stayed in the house for several years afterward before moving away.
I asked what happened to him.
She said nobody ever found out.
I went home and searched the property records that evening. The previous owner was indeed listed as Margaret Carter.
I couldn’t find anything about Tommy, but I did find an old newspaper archive that mentioned his disappearance.
The article was from 1987.
Tommy had vanished from his grandmother’s house in February.
The same month the calls had started.
I stopped answering after that.
For almost two weeks, there was nothing.
Then my landline rang at 2:13 in the morning.
I had forgotten I even still had one.
I picked up before I realized what I was doing.
“Hello?”
Tommy sounded different.
He wasn’t whispering exactly, but his voice seemed much closer to the phone.
“Did you find Mrs. Carter?”
I said no.
He asked me to look in the hallway.
I didn’t.
Instead, I asked him where he was.
He didn’t answer.
I could hear something in the background.
It sounded like an old television.
Underneath that was a faint ticking noise.
Then Tommy said, “She’s waiting for you.”
The line went dead.
I stayed in bed until sunrise.
The next day, I started moving my things into boxes. I hadn’t decided whether I was actually leaving, but packing made me feel less trapped.
While clearing out the hallway closet, I found an old piece of wallpaper underneath a loose floorboard.
It was blue.
Behind it was a child’s drawing.
It showed a house with three windows and a telephone beside the front door.
Underneath the drawing was a name written in pencil.
Tommy.
I sat on the floor for a long time looking at it.
Then my phone rang.
I almost didn’t answer.
It was Tommy.
Before I could speak, he said, “You’re in my room.”
I looked toward the end of the hallway.
There was a door there that I had always assumed belonged to a storage room. It had been painted shut before I moved in, and I’d never bothered with it.
The paint was cracked now.
The door was slightly open.
I didn’t go inside.
I called my neighbor instead and asked her what had been behind that door.
She told me it had been Tommy’s bedroom.
Then she said something I still think about.
“There wasn’t a telephone in there.”
I asked what she meant.
She said the only telephone in the house had been in the hallway.
I looked at the phone in my hand.
Tommy was still on the line.
I could hear him breathing.
Then he said, very quietly, “You found it.”
The call ended.
I left the house that afternoon and stayed with my sister for several days.
While I was there, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. I searched for explanations and ended up reading scary short stories online again, but none of them made sense of the calls.
My sister asked what I was looking at.
I told her I was trying to find a logical explanation for everything.
She laughed and told me I was making myself more frightened by reading scary short stories online at three in the morning.
I knew she was probably right.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tommy wasn’t calling randomly.
When I finally returned home, the door to the old bedroom was closed again.
I had a locksmith remove the handle, but there was nothing unusual inside.
Just an empty room.
A cracked window.
And marks on the wall where something had once been hanging.
I eventually sold the house.
The buyer told me he planned to renovate it.
I never told him about Tommy.
A few months later, I received a letter at my new apartment.
There was no return address.
Inside was a single sheet of paper with a phone number written across the middle.
It was my old landline number.
Underneath it, in childish handwriting, were three words.
Can you hear me?
I stared at the paper for several minutes.
Then my phone rang.
I didn’t recognize the number.
I let it ring.
It stopped.
A few seconds later, it started again.
This time, I answered.
There was silence on the other end.
Then I heard Tommy breathing.
“Mrs. Carter?”
I didn’t answer.
He said my name.
Then he whispered, “She’s home.”
The call ended.
I never heard from Tommy again.
But sometimes, late at night, I still hear a telephone ringing in my apartment.
I don’t have a landline anymore.
I don’t answer it.
I just sit there and listen until the ringing stops.
A few years have passed since I left that house. I still have the child’s drawing I found beneath the floorboard.
I keep it in a box that I rarely open.
The strange thing is that I never noticed something written on the back until recently.
I turned the paper over one night and found a sentence written in faded pencil.
Mrs. Carter is waiting by the telephone.
I don’t know who wrote it.
I don’t know how it got there.
And I don’t know why Tommy kept calling me.
But I finally understand one thing.
He wasn’t asking me to find Mrs. Carter.
He was warning me about her.
And somewhere in that old blue house, I think she’s still waiting for someone to answer.
