Hey, I know it’s been about a week since my first post but I thought I would give an update on my situation. I’ve been busy working remotely from the hotel room I’m in, I only took a couple days off to move things out of the house and haven’t had a chance to really gather my thoughts yet. First post here.
After that sleepless night when I first started playing that 20 Questions game I no longer felt safe staying in my parents’ house. I wanted to finish getting the house ready for sale as soon as possible so I could return to my home a few states away, but I felt obligated to clear up the break-in business before I left town. I have to admit that my own curiosity was preventing me from leaving as well, particularly the 20 Questions machine and that thing I saw. I don’t know if digging further was the right decision.
I did call the police after I had gathered my thoughts on the events of the night before, but since nothing was actually stolen, they weren’t keen on doing a complete investigation. I don’t think they believed me when I told them a man was staring at me through a crack in my door. The look on their faces told me that they thought I just had some kind of nightmare and that I was wasting their time, but it must have been a slow day because they granted my request to do a full walkthrough of the house to check anything I might’ve missed earlier that morning. They took maybe 10 minutes before coming back out and telling me everything was fine.
After they left I booked a room at a hotel across town. There was no way I was staying another night at that place, at least not yet. The events of the previous night were still fresh in my mind, but in my haste to leave I had left a few clothes and toiletries on my way out so I knew I had to go back eventually. Before I got there I picked up a few batteries to put into the 20 Question’s game. I needed to see if it would turn on, if there was perhaps something beyond our world that was speaking to me through it, or if it was some kind of glitch causing it to act so weird. I’m not quick to jump to supernatural suggestions, but I wasn’t going to ignore that option either. When I put the batteries in and flipped the machine on, I was sent back to the starting screen, where it scrolled through a few different categories to choose from before the questions began. The machine was still working as intended, which may mean it was something in the house that made it go haywire. Or I really did have the most realistic nightmare of my life and there was nothing else to be done but forget about it and move on.
Once I finally relaxed in my hotel room, I started to rethink the calls I was getting from my dad in the weeks leading to his passing. I assumed his paranoid ramblings were just a symptom of his illness, but now I was having second thoughts. I still had some of his voicemails saved in my phone. This might not make me look good but at a point I stopped answering a lot of his calls. For one he started to call way too often, forgetting that he had just talked to me a few hours ago and just repeating the same things we talked about weeks ago. If there were ever a real emergency my mom would call and I thought it best to discourage the constant phone conversations, especially since I simply didn’t have the time to talk to him all day.
I regret it now. I should have talked to him more, not just so I could have better understood the horrible things he was experiencing in that house towards the end of his life but also because those were the last times I could have talked to him before he died. I guess you really don’t know how to appreciate what you have until it’s gone. I had a few voicemails saved that I hadn’t even listened to yet, including one the night he passed. I only hope that he went naturally and that answering the call could have saved his life. I’ll transcribe the voicemails below so you can read what I listened to.
The first one I am listening to is three weeks before he passed. I did hear this one already, but it was the first one where the paranoia begins, and I wanted to listen to it again now that I had a new perspective.
“Hey son, I don’t know if I told you already, but I think something’s watching your mom and me. They’re not in the house. I think they’re watching from the walls. There’s like a scratching noise along the walls…it keeps waking me up.
Your mother doesn’t seem bothered. She keeps telling me to go back to bed, says it’s just the rain. But I hear more than the scratching. I can hear something breathing on the other side of the wall. Not just the walls but the floorboards and ceilings too. I know what I’m hearing is someone spying on us from inside our house. They think I don’t know but I…oops I woke your mom up, gotta-”
Paranoia, especially the “someone’s in my walls” belief, is a common symptom of dementia and hearing this, again, from my dad was nothing to worry about, at least that’s what I thought at the time. When I called my mother in the morning to see if my father was doing okay, she said he just had an episode last night and he was fine now, which was all I needed to hear.
The next voicemail I had saved was a little over a week before he passed. I hadn’t listened to this one yet because, if I remember correctly, I answered a call from him later in the day and assumed they were about the same thing. The voicemail was about a missing shirt. He has called me about missing items before that he or my mother would end up finding later, but for some reason this voicemail sounded a little different.
“Geoff, hey Geoff, I’m leaving Geoff a message, shh…sorry that was your mother. She keeps telling me I threw that shirt away already but I know I didn’t. That shirt was the one we both got each other as gifts that one year. Oh I didn’t tell you why I’m calling. I can’t find my shirt. It’s missing from my drawers and I was wondering if you had it. Remember, the one we somehow both got each other for Christmas a few years ago? Anyway, let me know if you find it son. Love ya.”
This message left me a little concerned because I know what shirt he’s talking about. It was the same shirt he was wearing when he passed. After rushing from my home in the middle of the night to make it to the hospital, I remember spotting it in the pile of clothes my sister was clutching while crying. Usually my mom or dad let my sister or I know when they had found one of the items that was missing, probably just as an excuse to talk to us, but I didn’t even know it was gone until I listened to that voicemail.
The next and only other voicemail I had before the one he sent the day he passed was dated two nights before. Here it is.
“Son I found…uh…what do you call it…the stuff that grows on the wall, stuff that makes you sick. I was looking behind the laundry machine for my uh…socks, and there was some of that stuff on the wall. I think it needs to be cleaned, how am I supposed to get rid of it? Can I clean it like normal or do I gotta call someone? Call me back.”
I remember my mother calling me about this, but she didn’t mention black mold or anything that would grow on a wall. All she mentioned was some damaged wallpaper in the basement and that my father was taking care of it. He would get his words mixed up a lot and maybe that’s what he had meant to tell me. That’s what I thought until I listened to the message he left me the night he died.
“Son…I don’t know where I’m at. It’s our house, but it’s not. They have the same furniture, same basement, but I don’t recognize anything. It’s dark…and cold. I found my shirt, the one I’ve been missing. I found it while cleaning the mold on the wall. The mold, the mold, something happened when I touched it.
I don’t know where your mother is. I don’t know where I am, I…I’m not alone. There’s someone else, I hear it above me…it’s turning the knob. There’s…someone crouching through the door up the stairs. He’s…he’s looking at me, he’s…”
There’s a scream at this point, my father, I think, and then I hear a thud, followed by silence. The rest of the message until the time runs out, all that can be heard is a slow, heavy breathing.
I didn’t know what to think at this point. What had happened to my dad? What the hell had happened to him? All I know is he had a heart attack in the middle of his bed that night and officially died at 10:07. This voicemail came in at 3:34 earlier that afternoon. It sounds like he saw the same entity I saw earlier this week. A tall, humanoid that just…stares. It ran from me, but what happened when my father saw it?
Next morning I contacted a friend of mine through Facebook who I knew still lived in the area, someone I used to hang out with all the time in middle school. After exchanging greetings and a bit of updates on our lives after not talking for so long, I lied and told him that I was worried about squatters breaking into my empty house while I was not there. After assuring him that all I wanted was for him to drive by the property the next few days, he agreed, as long as I paid for his drinks when we catch up in person later. I wanted to know if that thing I saw was still lurking around the property and if it had some other way of entering my home. As of today he told me he hasn’t seen any lights on and no damage to the exterior.
Right now I have too many questions and not enough answers. I feel like the only option I have is to go back in the house and inspect the “mold” my father was referring to. I wasn’t sure if I really needed to bring anything with me, I had a bunch of stuff packed away in boxes back at the house. What I am taking with me is the 20 Questions game. Whether it’s a conduit for the supernatural or not, it feels like a good luck charm and it had saved me once before. I’ll update you when I get back.