The Silent Return

I’m a psychiatric nurse, and early in my career, I worked at a remote mental health facility. One of our residents was a seven-foot-tall man named Marion Duchene. He never spoke—never made a sound—but his presence was impossible to ignore.

His backstory was bizarre. He’d vanished from his military base a decade earlier, declared absent without leave and eventually presumed dead. Then, ten years later, he walked into a Veterans affairs hospital wearing the same dusty uniform he disappeared in and declared, “My name is Marion Duchene. I’ve been dead for ten years.” Those were the only words he ever spoke.

His family refused to acknowledge him, insisting their son was gone. To them, this silent, towering figure wasn’t the man they’d lost.

At the facility, Marion paced endlessly, lips moving as if in conversation with something unseen. His most unsettling habit was throwing his head back in a soundless laugh, eyes crinkling with eerie delight—yet the room stayed oppressively silent.

No medication worked. No therapy reached him. He was a hollow, restless presence, more specter than man.

On my last day at the job, I saw him pacing alone in the parking lot under a flickering streetlight. His head snapped back into that grotesque, silent laugh one final time.

I drove away without looking back—but even now, in the dead of night, I sometimes feel like he’s still pacing... still laughing... just outside the edge of the light.