ChatGPT said:
We sat there for what felt like an eternity, staring at the door he had just walked through. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Finally, my uncle broke the silence.
“Who invited him?” he asked, his voice tinged with unease.
No one answered. One by one, we all admitted that we had no idea who the man was or where he came from. My mom, still visibly shaken, finally spoke up.
“That candlestick,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “It was my grandmother’s. She… she gave it to me before she passed, but it wasn’t meant to stay with me. She always said it carried a legacy, and I was supposed to pass it on.”
“Pass it on to who?” my sister asked, her brow furrowed.
“I… I don’t know,” Mom admitted, clutching her napkin. “I never understood what she meant, and I kept it because I thought it was just an old family superstition.”
The air in the room felt heavier now, as if the stranger had left behind an invisible weight. My dad stood up and peered out the front door, but the man was gone—no car, no footsteps in the driveway, nothing.
“Maybe he was a… messenger,” my grandmother said softly, her voice quivering. “You know, someone sent to… to remind us of something important.”
“A messenger from who?” my cousin asked, his face pale.
We had no answers. The rest of the evening was subdued, the usual laughter and banter replaced with whispers and uneasy glances. After dinner, we all started digging through old family albums, looking for any trace of the man who had been at our table.
That’s when we found it.
In a faded black-and-white photograph from the 1940s, there he was. The same weathered face, the same piercing blue eyes, the same faint smile. He was standing beside my great-grandparents at a family gathering, his hand resting on the silver candlestick.
The room went silent again as we all stared at the photograph, chills running down our spines. My mom turned it over, and on the back was a handwritten note: “For the keeper of the candlestick – a legacy must never be forgotten.”
None of us slept well that night. We don’t know who—or what—the man was, but his presence left a mark on all of us. The candlestick now sits in a glass case in my mom’s living room, a constant reminder of that eerie Thanksgiving night.
Every year since, we’ve left an empty chair at the table. Just in case he decides to return.
