My mom was the president of the PTO when I was a kid, so I got to spend a lot of time exploring my elementary school after hours. The school was originally built in the late 19th century as a high school for a small village in rural Ohio. As the district grew, so did the school. By the time I attended, the building had become a sprawling and irregular complex filled with hidden rooms, twisting narrow corridors, and dramatically varying room sizes which resulted from decades of crude architectural expansion.
The place was ripe for adventure in my young active mind, and my friends and I would spend hours exploring its various quirks. The oldest parts of the building were always the most interesting. Evidence of the past fueled our imaginations; an old gym floor peaking through a tear in the carpet of the 6th grade class room, or the names of past students scrawled in a long abandoned room only accessible by ladder and usually off limits during the school day. It also gave the building an eerie feeling, especially when the halls were empty and the drafty uneven temperature of the place was more noticeable. This only added to the sense of adventure as bravery became a necessity.
The building’s old bones were always creaking. Whether it was the boiler room, a leaky ceiling, withering floorboards, or the old plumbing, each sound felt like an attempt by the structure to communicate, guiding us deeper into its long forgotten recesses.
It was on one of these after hour explorations that I first felt the playful eeriness of the building turn sinister.
My friends and I decided to play hide and seek while we waited for our parents to finish their PTO meeting in the newest section of the building. I was one of the older kids and I was more familiar with the building than most, so I built up the courage to explore hiding spots in the oldest parts of the building all alone.
As I searched for hiding spots, I remember actively thinking about how brave I felt. I was a 5th grader now. It would take more than a few creaky floorboards to scare me.
That’s when I first heard a small skitter echoing in the halls. Being an old building surrounded by corn fields, it wasn’t uncommon to hear mice making their homes in the buildings walls and rafters, but something about the sound didn’t feel right. It carried too much weight. The nature of the sound suggested something small, like a field mouse, but it enveloped the entire wing of the school.
There was also something else peculiar about the pitter-patter. It didn’t have the sharpness that would usually suggest the little claws of a field mouse. It felt softer, like the sound a bare human foot would make if we were the size of a field mouse.
I was trying to convince myself that this was normal and that I was brave when I first heard it speak. It seemed to come from everywhere and mirrored the small but powerful nature of its skittering footsteps. Slightly above a whisper, its voice was gravelly and shrill, but also playful in a way that seemed intended to taunt and terrify me. It seemed to savor my panic as its words slithered through the halls with a slow, measured cadence.
“Come find creature.”
I froze in terror.
My frenzied desire to run and my body’s refusal to obey caused desperation similar to the experience of sleep paralysis, but I had been wide awake. It seemed aware that my panic had rendered me immobile, like a spider, aware that its prey has become hopelessly ensnared in its web. It seemed to sneer as it continued to taunt me.
“Come find creature.”
The spell finally broke and in a blind panic I tore through the twisted narrow corridors of my elementary school as it continued to taunt me.
“Come find creature.”
Each moment of my hysterical retreat felt like an eternity. I eventually made it back to the relative safety of my peers in the newer section of the building, where the torment finally came to an apparent end.
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I never told anyone about what happened, and the school was torn down in 2006. I never doubted my experience, but it also didn’t define me in the way that other traumatic childhood experiences did. It was like the experience was too much of an outlier to take a place of importance in defining my daily reality.
After the school came down, I would sometimes think that the skittering of mice in the walls of childhood home would take on a similar nature to the skittering I heard in the school that day. This would only happen at night when I was about to fall asleep, and I never heard the voice again, so it was easy to write off as an invention of my dreamy mind.
It wasn’t until a couple years ago, while living in a 19th century homestead on a ranch in western North Dakota that the creature presented itself to me again.
I was battling a high fever and awoke from a fitful sleep in the middle of the night to the same skittering sound. The old wooden chair that I had kept in the corner and mostly just used to pile laundry on was now directly beside my bed, facing me. The chair appeared empty, but as I became fully awake, the skittering stopped and the chair creaked as if straining under a great weight.
It was then that I heard the same shrill voice I had heard all those years ago in the halls of my elementary school. It had the same measured and taunting tone only this time its words felt more immediate. It was still barely above a whisper, but it felt more demanding than playful this time. It felt intimate. It didn’t feel like it was a disembodied voice coming from the within the bones of the building, the words felt like they spoken directly into my ear from a very close distance.
“Come. Find. Creature.”