I started getting calls from a boy named Tommy sometime in February. The first one came while I was washing dishes after dinner. I almost ignored it because I didn’t recognize the number.
When I answered, there was a few seconds of silence.
Then 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 had gotten my number. He said it was written on a piece of paper beside the telephone. I assumed he was a kid playing a prank, so I told him to stop calling.
He went quiet.
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 difficult to ignore. Sometimes Tommy called while I was working. Sometimes it was 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 anyone else had experienced something similar.
Most of what I found was ridiculous.
There were stories about haunted telephones, dead relatives, and people receiving calls from numbers that supposedly belonged to cemeteries. I didn’t believe any of it.
The calls bothered me for another reason.
Tommy never threatened me.
He never screamed.
He never said anything dramatic.
He simply sounded like a lonely child 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 several seconds.
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 told her the boy’s name, her expression changed.
“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.
She said the house had been blue when she first moved into the neighborhood. 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 before eventually moving away.
I asked what had happened to him.
My neighbor shook her head.
“Nobody ever found him.”
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 in the property records, but I eventually found 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 realizing what I was doing.
“Hello?”
Tommy sounded different this time.
His voice wasn’t whispering exactly, but it 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 it 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 putting my things into boxes.
I hadn’t decided whether I was really going to leave, but packing made me feel less trapped.
While clearing out the hallway closet, I noticed something underneath a loose floorboard.
It was an old piece of blue wallpaper.
I pulled it out.
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 several minutes.
Then my phone rang.
I almost didn’t answer.
It was Tommy.
Before I could say anything, he spoke.
“You’re in my room.”
I looked toward the end of the hallway.
There was a door there that I’d always assumed belonged to a storage room.
It had been painted shut before I moved in, and I’d never bothered trying to open it.
The paint was cracked now.
The door was slightly open.
I didn’t go inside.
I called my neighbor instead.
I asked her what had been behind that door.
She told me it had been Tommy’s bedroom.
Then she said something that made my stomach turn.
“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.
I stayed with my sister for several days before returning. When I finally went back, 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.
My old landline number was written across the middle.
Underneath it were three words in childish handwriting.
Can you hear me?
I stared at the paper for a long time.
Then the phone on my desk rang.
I didn’t have a landline anymore.
I didn’t answer.
It rang again.
And again.
Finally, the ringing stopped.
My phone screen lit up with a notification.
I had received a voicemail.
The message was only three seconds long.
I pressed play.
At first, there was silence.
Then I heard a child’s voice.
“Mrs. Carter?”
I froze.
That wasn’t my name.
But Tommy had never called me by my name.
He had always asked for Mrs. Carter.
And suddenly, I understood why.
He hadn’t been looking for her.
He had been trying to find the house.
I deleted the voicemail and changed my number the next morning.
For several years, nothing happened.
I thought it was finally over.
Then, one winter night, I received a message from an unknown number.
There was no text.
Just a photograph.
It showed the old blue house.
The picture had clearly been taken from across the street.
In one of the upstairs windows stood a little boy.
I zoomed in.
It was Tommy.
He was looking directly at the camera.
Then I noticed something beside him.
A telephone.
I haven’t returned to that neighborhood since.
Sometimes, when I hear a phone ring late at night, I still think about the house.
And I remember something I found while packing before I left.
A second child’s drawing.
This one showed a woman standing beside a telephone.
Underneath it, someone had written:
Mrs. Carter is home.
That’s when I realized Tommy hadn’t been calling me from the past.
He had been calling from inside the house.
And somehow, he still is.
