HAUNTING STORIES: FROM THE CASE FILES OF STEVEN LACHANCE
Sunday, October 25, 2026
By Steven LaChance
I woke in the night, adjusting my eyes to the darkness of the room. A faint light filtered through the window, shadows moving when cars passed on the street below.
At first it was only noise, small shifts in the air that unsettled me. I sat up, looked around, found nothing. Lay back down, tried to steady my breath. A moment later the shadows danced again, and that’s when I saw him.
He stood barefoot in the far corner, arms wrapped around himself as if he were holding on for dear life.
“Sie haben unsere Schuhe mitgenommen,” he said. German, words I did not understand.
“What?” I stammered.
“They took our shoes,” he repeated, this time in English.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I am David,” he said.
And then he was gone.
It was our first night in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna.
We had come by train from Budapest, leaving behind a city thick with hostility. The mood in Hungary had been oppressive. The sorrow of the queer community there clung to me, the fear, the violence, the sense of being unwelcome in your own skin. Leaving felt like escape.
The train ride was beautiful, almost cinematic. Wooden compartments, curtains at the windows, countryside blurring past. I watched fields roll by, thinking how borders felt meaningless from a train window. Landscapes repeat themselves. One field looks like another. Humanity has divided the earth with lines on a map, but the land does not care.
When we arrived in Vienna, spring sunlight greeted us. The city radiated beauty, palaces, cathedrals, gardens, and coffeehouses humming with life. I wanted to lean into that lightness, but the memory of the night before clung to me.
Our apartment was on the fifth floor of a modernist building in Leopoldstadt. From our window we could see a neighborhood alive with Hasidic families, men in black suits and hats, women in scarves, children darting between bicycles. Rick and I watched the street below, and I said quietly, “This is a Jewish neighborhood.”
The name David whispered in the dark made more sense after that.
Curiosity turned me toward history. Leopoldstadt had been the heart of Vienna’s Jewish community for centuries. Then came November 1938, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Synagogues burned. Shops shattered. Cemeteries desecrated. Jews beaten, arrested, murdered. Thousands sent to camps. The neighborhood forever changed.
I hadn’t known this when we booked the apartment. But after the first night, and the ones that followed, it all seemed inevitable.
Each night I saw him again, barefoot, clutching himself, whispering about shoes. Each morning Rick woke with a sadness he could not shake, as if the walls themselves had pressed grief into his sleep. He told me he heard sounds, the doorknob rattling, movement in the dark. His daughters are Jewish, and he has studied the faith deeply. Perhaps that’s why he felt it so strongly.
“They took our shoes.” The phrase carried weight I did not fully grasp at first. Later, I remembered the images, piles of shoes left behind at camps, thousands of soles stripped from their owners. A detail so intimate, so human, it becomes unbearable. Shoes. Gone because their owners were gone.
In Leopoldstadt the memory is everywhere. Brass Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones”, mark the sidewalks, each small square a plaque for someone taken. A name. A date. A fate. Step by step, the dead rise beneath your feet.
Outside one synagogue we passed, soldiers stood guard with automatic rifles. Inside, prayers rose in Hebrew. Outside, the reminder that hatred still breathes. That even now, Jews here need protection to worship. History is not gone.
On our last morning in Vienna, we left our apartment with our luggage. A black car arrived to take us to the airport. As I waited, I glanced down. At the edge of the sidewalk, almost hidden, a Stolperstein glinted in the light.
We had missed it for two weeks. It marked the building we had stayed in.
IN MEMORY OF THE 30 JEWISH WOMEN AND MEN, AND THE 6 CHILDREN WHO LIVED IN THIS HOUSE AND WERE DEPORTED AND MURDERED BY THE NAZIS.
And below: names. Franziska. Koloman. Max. Mindla. Only four carved in brass, but they spoke for many more. Perhaps David among them.
As I stood frozen, the driver opened the door. I looked up and saw a rabbi across the street, dressed in black, white beard catching the light. He was watching me. Our eyes locked. His filled with tears. Mine matched them. We held that gaze a moment too long, until the driver urged me forward.
I slid into the car and turned back. The rabbi stood unmoving, tears glistening, until he disappeared around the corner as we drove away.
I do not know if he was real. Flesh and blood. A man on his way to prayer. Or something else, a messenger, a memory, a presence carrying grief across generations.
All I know is that David’s cry stays with me. They took our shoes.
History is not gone. It lingers. It imprints itself on walls and streets, on breath and sleep. Maybe that was the lesson of Leopoldstadt: that sorrow never vanishes. It waits, it lingers, and sometimes it finds a voice.
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