The Ghost in the Field

It began in 1917. Our father, Jeremy, had been gone two years, serving in the Great War. We received messages from him via military mail throughout his first eighteen months. The excitement of receiving those letters was beyond any I have felt before or since. To know he was alive and well. And then the letters stopped. And the mist came. My mother said that there were many campaigns being fought all over the world and that it was not easy getting mail out from some places as it was from others.

So we waited.

And we waited.

While we waited, my older brother, only eleven years old at the time, began to see things. Believing our father to be alive and fighting to get home, he would stand at his bedroom window every night in the hope of seeing the lights of a car coming down our driveway. But all he saw was mist. Every night, it would descend across the fields between our house and the farm across the way. And in the mist was a shadow.

I never saw such things. I was younger and more prone to tiredness. He was braver than I and would run outside as soon as the shadow presented itself, but when his foot hit the field, the mist would dissipate. His vehemence for what he saw was such that I could not disbelieve him. Every night, he saw the same thing: mist and a shadow. With each night, the shadow would get closer. Closer. To the point where my brother swore he could see our father’s medals glinting on his lapel.

I awoke one morning to find my brother out in the field, asleep, freezing, his hands covered in mud. He had spoken with our father, he said. “Dig,” he was told. “Dig.” And dig he did. But he found nothing. The next day, our mother presented us with a letter informing us that our father was missing in action, presumed dead. Only a handkerchief bearing his initials and spots of blood was found and now presented to us along with the letter. My brother, as expected, was distraught. But his belief that our father was alive was total.

And so, night after night, out into the field he would go. My mother took to locking our door and windows, but my brother would not be deterred. He said our father was trying to communicate. If not his body, then his spirit. To tell us where he was. And then one night, my brother did not come back.

We searched the field and nearby farms, but there was no sign of him. Except the handkerchief. In the center of the field it lay. I ran to it and tried to claim it, but a gust of wind lifted it and blew it away from my grasp. And so it was gone. My mother was broken by my brother’s disappearance. We engaged with the local townsfolk in the search. We scoured the land and water but found nothing. I went to bed that night in tears, missing my big brother. A well of emptiness suddenly dug into my chest, the weight of nothingness crushing me down.

Then I woke, feeling hands over my eyes in the manner in which Leonard had done in play so many times. I pulled the spectral hands away, hope upon hope that I would see the mischievous face of my brother.

But there was no one.

What was there, under my pillow, was the handkerchief. I went to the window and saw the mist that had so haunted my brother. And in the mist, I saw two shadows. I opened the window, and the handkerchief was whipped from my hand by that same gust. I ran downstairs to retrieve it, and it led me on a merry dance across the field.

And then the night became still. The handkerchief was laid on the ground. I picked it up, and underneath was my father’s medal, covered in mud. Even at my young age, I understood that the most likely way in which the medal had arrived at this spot would be in my father’s hand. And in turn, this meant that he had to have come home. So I dug. The earth was loose and easily moved, but I was only eight years old and it took till sunrise to reach the depth needed to reveal the horror that I hoped I would not find.

The dead bodies of both my father and brother.

As the sun rose and the mist left, I heard a voice. I turned to see what I thought must be my father. I saw the shadow, and for a moment, the emptiness that had weighed so heavily upon me was lifted. But for just a moment, I quickly realized my mistake. It was not my father. It was my mother. She had watched me all this night as I dug and revealed her crimes. She stood over me with my father’s service revolver. I asked her why she had done what she had clearly done. She said that before the war, a woman’s life—where men ruled and women obeyed—was no life at all, and she refused to return to it now that the war was almost over. So upon receiving word of our father’s return, she met him on the outskirts of town. She implored him to leave so we could continue as we had been these past years. He refused, and she stabbed him. She buried him in the farmer’s field, but while his body lay beneath, his spirit walked above. And my brother knew it.

My mother, haunted by her murderous act, thought her crime had been uncovered when she saw someone digging where the body was buried. She shot the person, only seconds later realizing it was her own son. And now it was me that she was faced with. She begged my forgiveness before she turned the gun upon herself.

I never saw my father in those fields again and moved from the area when I came of age. But Leonard and my mother, I see them sometimes, standing in the distance, far apart. One asking why, while the other begs forgiveness. That emptiness still lingers within me. I feel it is something connected to their plight. And so I hope that in the telling of this story, they find some peace. My life is waning, and I fear if they do not find it before my death, they never will. Nor will I.

About the Author

Mark is an award winning writer of stage and screen. His latest feature film Dead on the Vine won Best Film at Kevin Smith’s Smodcastle Film Festival and has been distributed by horror legend Brian Yuzna’s label Dark Arts Entertainment. His new film Video Killed the Radio Star is due out in 2026.