A bedtime mystery for brave hearts who drift best on whispers of secrets.
Once upon a moody October night, the oak trees of Pendleton University rustled with secrets. Beneath them, cloaked in ivy and centuries-old arrogance, stood Sigma Delta Phi—an old fraternity house with creaking floorboards, dusty trophies, and whispers that never quite left the walls.
It was Hell Week. The pledges were worn thin. Bloodshot eyes, whisper-laughter, dares and flashlight scars in the night. Most of them wanted in. One of them wanted revenge.
The brothers—upperclassmen in blazers and half-finished souls—had crafted elaborate rituals. Nothing dangerous, they insisted. “Tradition,” they called it. “Bonding.” And so the pledges obeyed.
But on the fifth night, the coldest night, someone didn’t come back.
Eli Ramsey, sophomore, clever but quiet. Found in the supply closet with a candle still burning next to him. Mouth open. Eyes wide. The fraternity pin shoved down his throat.
The campus police chalked it up to misadventure. “He was probably proving something,” they muttered. “A dare gone wrong.” But Jonah—one of the new pledges—knew that wasn’t it. He had seen Eli cry two nights earlier after being locked in the laundry chute. Eli wasn’t proving anything. He was surviving.
Jonah couldn’t sleep. Not that night. Not the nights after. Because there were details that didn’t match. Like the antique candle found burning next to the body—it came from the attic storage, reserved only for founders’ ceremonies, never touched by pledges.
Or the coded message scrawled in pencil behind the closet door:
“He who lights it, burns next.”
Jonah showed no one. Not yet.
Instead, he began to watch. He noticed how Brother Marcus twitched when asked about Eli. How the Chapter President, Holden Grieves, carefully deleted camera logs from the hallway server.
He searched. He found more candles. Six of them, lined in the attic like little headstones. Each with a name etched into the wax. Names of pledges who had left school suddenly, unannounced, over the past ten years.
Jonah’s name was on the seventh.
He planned carefully. On the last night of Hell Week, he placed a camera inside the supply closet. He left the door ajar. He lit the seventh candle.
And he waited.
What the footage showed later was quiet. Too quiet.
Brother Marcus, in a trance. Walking, barefoot, mouth whispering something in Latin. He carried a box of pins. He stopped at the candle. Stared. Then looked directly into the lens of the hidden camera—as if he knew.
Then darkness. The candle snuffed. A scream. The footage ended there.
Marcus was found in the woods two days later. Covered in wax. Raving about “a brotherhood beneath the floorboards.” He never returned to campus.
Jonah? He transferred. Left a note:
“Not all traditions are sacred. Some are just secrets dressed in robes.”
The fraternity was disbanded quietly. The house remains. Empty. Except for the supply closet, where sometimes, when the wind is just right, a candle flickers.
Waiting.