An Almost True Short Story
They kept her in Room 4B. Top floor, corner unit, facing the flagpole. It had one of those narrow hospital windows, the kind that only opens an inch, like the building doesn't trust you.
She came in winter, 1924. No visitors. No luggage. Just a pale woman in a buttoned coat, breathing shallow and blinking too slow. They logged her as Eleanor Finch, but the file was thin. The address was a boarding house that had burned down the year before.
Nobody noticed her at first. That year, the hospital was full of them... half-sleepers, they called them. Encephalitis lethargica. A flu, or maybe not. A virus, or maybe not. People went stiff. Silent. Froze like clocks with no hands, no tick. They could breathe. Sometimes eat. But mostly they just sat. Days passed. Months. Some of them for years.
Eleanor wasn’t like the others. She didn’t fall asleep. She didn’t speak much, either. She just watched. Her eyes tracked nurses, birds, dust motes. The orderlies didn’t like to linger in her room. Said it felt like a trick. Like she was waiting for something.
Nurse Calley broke two fingers trying to wheel her tray cart past the threshold. Said the door jammed, or her hands slipped. She never came back.
The only thing in Eleanor’s room besides the bed was a small brass music box. Unlabeled. Always wound. Sometimes it played on its own. Three slow notes, then silence. Dr. Hollenbeck pried it open once—nothing inside. No gears. No spring. Just air and the smell of old metal.
She never reacted. Not even when it played.
After a year, they moved her downstairs. Said she made the staff uneasy. Said they were imagining things. Hallucinations were common, he reminded them. Grief, too. A whole ward full of statues, and they were projecting.
But even Hollenbeck avoided Eleanor’s eyes.
By 1927, most of the sleepers were gone. Some recovered. Most didn’t. Rooms emptied. Beds stripped. Names forgotten.
Eleanor stayed.
In 1931, an intern named Reese tried to discharge her. Said she wasn’t sick. Said it was all psychosomatic, some kind of prolonged trauma response. She wasn’t catatonic, he pointed out. She blinked, she followed conversation, she once flinched at a dropped tray.
They found Reese two weeks later. Room 4B. Standing at the window. Not catatonic, just... still. Breathing shallow. Blinking too slow.
They moved Eleanor back upstairs.
The music box stayed.
It’s still there. Or it was, last anyone checked. The hospital shut down in ’71. Budget cuts. Structural damage. They were supposed to clear the rooms, but nobody wanted 4B.
The last security guard said the flag outside never moved. Not even in wind.
Said he once saw two women in the window. Both wearing the same buttoned coat.
And sometimes—when it’s quiet—you can hear three slow notes, then silence.
Just like that.
Then again, that’s just what I was told.