So, I’m writing this now just in case something bad happens while I head off on an adventure of sorts, but we’ll get to that. Honestly, posting it here to /r/NoSleep so if anyone stumbles upon it that knows me will just think it is a story and not that I am literally insane. I am definitely not insane, or at least I never considered myself to be until the last couple of days.
A little context about who I am. I’m your pretty standard 27 year old guy from Canada. I have an awesome dog, and two cool cats. I live in an, admittedly, shitty one-bedroom apartment in an older building with my Fiance Amanda. We got engaged right before the pandemic hit and have still been waiting to pull the trigger on that wedding because of it. I never thought we would be engaged longer than we were dating beforehand.
You should also know that I am chronically ill. I don’t think this has any role in the story I am about to tell you, but it will likely shape how difficult this will be for me in the coming days. I have some kind of autoimmune disorder and it can make just living a normal life a struggle. It really started to get bad around the time we moved into this building in April of 2020. I won’t bore you with the details, but I spend a lot of time sleeping or in a constant state of pain or nausea. It can be difficult. Scratch that, it really fucking sucks. There have been times where I was convinced I was on the precipice of death because of it. Luckily I have an appointment this fall to get some answers.
Since last night, however, there has been something else entirely occupying my mind. Amanda had been late getting home from work last night. She is a cat/dog groomer and does house calls for her clients. Sometimes this means she is working decently late into the night compared to what you may expect out of someone running a brick-and-mortar salon.
I was home, laying around in bed getting over a killer headache I had been dealing with since I woke up in the morning. Around 10:30, Amanda called me to let me know that she just finished up with her last appointment, shaving down a couple of difficult puppers and was finally on her way home. The nearby, lakeside community she was in was about 40 minutes from our apartment so I decided to stay on the line to keep her company as she was driving home. One thing led to another, and before long we were fantasizing about what we would do when she got back. More specifically, about what we wanted for dinner. Being lazy and spent from a day of chronic illness on my side and dog grooming on hers we opted for the quick and simple drive-thru run.
After going back and forth for the duration of the call, we finally settled on a place we wanted to go and grab some grub. It was a bit further than our building so I decided to join her for the ride and bring along our jack russell, Harlow, for the trip. Also because he started howling at me when I tried to slip out the door without him noticing. Yeah, that absolutely never works.
Still on the phone, I head out of our home with the dog on his leash. Because I haven’t got as much movement in as I wanted to today, I thought it would be a good idea to skip the elevator ride and take the stairs down from the seventh floor. Plus, Harlow likes to show how obedient he is by waiting for me at the top of each set of stairs as we make our way down. For an annoying, loud dog he is actually pretty great.
As we made it to the top of the stairs going from the second floor to the first, I noticed something incredibly odd. Where there was normally a patch of tile below the second floor landing, was another staircase leading into a basement that I didn’t know our building even had. Still on the phone with Amanda, I let out a faint “What the fuck?”
“What’s up?” she responded, hearing the anxiety in my voice she seemed a bit concerned.
“There must have been construction going on in the building or something because there is a random staircase leading down on the first floor.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know what else to say. There is literally a staircase leading down into a basement on the first floor of our building. The stairs over by the garbage area.”
“Are you messing with me?”
“No, I swear to god. It looks like it hasn’t been used in years. Maybe they had it covered with, like, a removable section of floor or something?” I was grasping at straws, but to give you a little bit of an idea of what this thing looked like, it was a dark staircase leading down below the building, opposite the direction of the exit door on the east end of our apartment complex. To get into it, you’d have to essentially crouch to get past a section of wall that overhangs it below the next set of stairs. It looked incredibly odd and incredibly dark.
“Maybe it is just some kind of storage space.” Amanda responded, breaking my nearly entranced stare into the dark abyss beneath our home. I noticed that Harlow was pulling away from the stairs, towards the door to the outside instead of sitting patiently at the top of the weird stairs like he had at all the other floors on our way down. Strange, but he probably just wanted to get outside, and honestly, so did I. Something about a random staircase showing up is incredibly unsettling, even if it has a perfectly reasonable explanation.
I headed outside and got into the car. As we drove to get dinner we talked about how weird it was that we never realized our building had a basement in the two years we lived here. As we accepted it, we considered that it was likely there really was a removable section of floor there and one of the unmarked doors in the hallway right next to the staircase were probably some kind of normal entry points to this storage area and they just needed to remove the flooring when they were moving larger things around.
The thing that really pissed us off was that no one had ever told us there was some kind of storage space in the basement that we could be using. Like I said, we live in a tiny, cramped one bedroom and could really use the extra space to store some of our things piling up in our closets. Like, it would be pretty excellent if we could have somewhere other than our pantry to keep our winter tires.
Anyways, we got dinner, ended up having to go somewhere else because Google lied about the hours of the place we actually wanted to go and took a bit longer getting home than we expected. Tired, we took the elevator back upstairs to our apartment and quickly got settled in for the night after eating.
The next morning, this morning to be precise, I woke up just before Amanda was heading out to work at her day-job. She had to leave a bit earlier than normal because she was picking up a coworker who was having car troubles. Things were normal, we said our I love yous and goodbyes and she was out the door. It was only a couple minutes later that she sent me a text that really confused me. Not a paragraph, a sentence, or even a word. Just an image of the ground floor and the staircase to the basement. At least, the section of floor where just a handful of hours back the staircase to the basement had been.
Here is a screenshot of the messages. For those using text-to-speech, I will transcribe our following conversation. By the way, my name is Sam, so any of the messages marked S are mine and A are Amanda’s.
S: WTF. Are you fucking with me? This isn’t funny. Is that in the other staircase?
A: No, it’s literally the one near the garbage.
S: I’m really confused. Did it look like there was some kind of lip or something? Like that crack on the back wall.
A: Yeah like the back wall could probably be moved. You’d have to go check it out and tell me.
S: Okay, fair enough. Must be removable or something. I’ll send pics when I get a chance.
A: For sure.
S: Super fucking weird.
A: Agreed.
S: I love you, baby. Have a good day at work!
A: I love you tooooo!
To be entirely honest, I was super fucking confused. How and why would building management remove a section of floor leading to a weird dark staircase and then have it covered back over at some point in the middle of the night. It just wasn’t adding up to me. About an hour later I decided to get dressed and check it out for myself. I walked down the stairs and upon reaching the ground floor something dawned on me as I stared into the same dark staircase I had seen the night before. Amanda was goofing on me. I took a picture of the stairs and texted it to her. Here is the screenshot and the conversation that followed.
S: Lol, okay. You were just fucking with me.
[Picture of the staircase]
S: Don’t feel like going into it because you’d kind of have to bend over to get under the edge and it’s hella dark down there. You had me fucking terrified. When did you take that picture?
[An hour passes until Amanda gets a break to respond]
A: What???? This morning. Take another picture of it.
S: I’m currently taking a deuce but I will check it out after.
A: Are you fucking with me?
S: I assure you, this poop is definitely real.
A: Ha ha. Not what I meant.
S: I know, I’m just heading down now :p
I finished my, ahem, business, and made my way down the stairs. I was definitely not ready for what was waiting for me when I got back to the ground floor. It is making me feel sicker than I normally do to just think about this. As I come down from the second floor landing I see that, once again, there is absolutely no staircase leading down to any sort of basement.
Here is another screenshot with another picture.
I am really fucking confused and more than a bit concerned here, but there is likely a perfectly reasonable explanation to what is going on. I will write an update for this as soon as I can, but the one thing I know for sure is that I am not waiting for the next time I see this mystery staircase. I’m going to head in and see exactly what is going on here. Wish me luck, /r/NoSleep!
