It was the summer of 2014, I was fourteen at the time. My family lived in an old farmhouse in rural North America. My parents didn’t have a lot of money and it was the only house they could afford after the last one was burned to the ground.
There was no carpet, the floors on the lower level of the house were old floorboards that clearly had the carpet torn from them, but the floors upstairs were brittle plywood. The house, like any other nasty old house, would creak and groan frequently. Sometimes the sound of the house settling was so loud that I’d wake up in the middle of the night and pull my blanket up to my nose. Sometimes it would happen and my hair would be in my eyes, causing my heart to race as I scrambled to see nothing but the light of the moon shining through my open window.
One night the house settled, startling me awake. I brushed my hair from my eyes and tried to listen through the sound of my own heartbeat. I stared at the shadow of the tiny door to the attic that just so happened to be in my room since my little brother was the one that got to choose his room when we first moved in.
I stared into that darkness as my imagination tried to create every horror imaginable beyond that shadow. I couldn’t tell if the door was closed or not, but my mind told me it was open and that a ghost was going to pop out at any second, then drag me away. I folded the blanket over my head and closed my eyes. I was shaking in fear as the house started to settle, but this night was different. What I thought was settling turned into rustling from behind my walls. The thoughts of monsters from all of the movies and shows I’d watched began to flip through my head like a picture show. There was a loud knock followed by dead silence. I was on the brink of tears for what felt like hours as the rustling began again, keeping me awake.
Before I knew it, the light of the sun trickled through my blanket. When I pulled it off, I was relieved to see that the door was closed. The early august breeze poured cool wind into my room. Since I hadn’t slept that night, I dozed off for a short while.
Not too long after my nap, I was forced awake by my mother shouting from downstairs, “Ally! Breakfast! NOW!” I sat up, pulled my brush out of my nightstand and did a few quick strokes through my hair before shuffling downstairs like a zombie. Unfortunately whoever built that house had no idea what they were doing and I had to walk through my brother’s bedroom in order to get to the stairs. His room was tattered with dirty clothes and junk while the sound of gunfire blared from his headphones. He had no idea I was even there.
When I made it to the last few steps, I looked around and listened for the clanking of claws against the old wood floor. I loved our dog but for the love of God if he caught me at the wrong moment, I was getting tackled to the floor and bathed in slobber.
My dad was sitting at the dining room table while eating and looking at his phone. My mom was preparing my plate for me when I sat down at the table too. When he glanced at me, he asked,
“You alright sweetie? You don’t look like you’re feeling too good today,”
“No, I couldn’t sleep! it sounded like there was something crawling through the walls!”
He smiled before glancing back at his phone, “Probably just got a rat around here or somethin’, I’ll set a trap up in that attic when I get outta work.”
I sighed and sat my head on the counter for a bit before my mom brought my plate over.
“If we have rats, I want every single one of them gone and for YOU to find out where they’re coming from,” she said while pointing at my dad. He took a sip of his coffee replied,
“Yup.”
My mom sat down and started eating too, she asked with a mouthful,
“I saw Kaylee and her mom at Walmart the other day, Kaylee wants to see you again and stay here for a night or two, so she’ll probably be coming over in a few days, maybe you can actually get out of the house for once.”
I was pretty happy to hear that, sleeping in that room alone was getting harder every night.
Kaylee did end up coming over later that week, but every night before that was growing increasingly sleepless. The trap my dad set never went off and he ended up setting up several more to no avail. When Kaylee came over, we went out to the party store that was a pretty long hike after she got some of her things situated in my room. We got back a little before sunset while trying to finish our slurpees before they became sugar water.
When we got too tired to keep our eyes open, she set up her little personal fan for some noise since I texted her earlier in the week about how I wasn’t able to sleep too well. Later that night, yet again, I was awoken by Kaylee shaking my arm from the floor.
“Alessa! Alessa!” she whispered.
“What? It’s the walls, isn’t it?”
“No, that door just fucking opened!”
Those words sent a shiver down my spine and my heart started to crawl out of my throat. We could barely see that the door was cracked open. The attic door had an actual knob that I made sure was locked every night, so I knew that it was absolutely unlocked and then opened.
We stared into the shadow of the attic door for a moment, the moonlight casting a soft glow from the window before the slightest sound of that same rustling I’d heard for the past week caused us to blast through the door and down the stairs. We ran into my parents bedroom, I’m pretty sure we startled them too because my dad was on his feet in the blink of an eye, same with my mom.
“There’s something in the attic! Something opened it! The door! Something opened the door!” I yelled in a panic, Kaylee was yelling pretty much the same thing at the same time. My dad wasted no time, he didn’t understand us at first, but he was still making his way to my room when he asked, “Alright, one at a time, what’s going on?”
Kaylee started explaining really fast, “The door! I watched the door open and then I woke her up and then we heard a noise and ran down here!”
We followed him up the stairs and passed through my brother’s bedroom as my dad flipped every lightswitch on the way to my room. When we got to my room, my mom sat with us on the bed while my dad took a look at the door. The door was closed again and it was also locked. We pleaded with him that we both saw that it was open and he took a look around inside the attic for a while. When he came out, he told us,
“There’s nothing in there, but I guess I can take a look behind the walls. It’s late, so I’ll do it in the morning. You guys can sleep in the living room if you want to, I’ll get to it as early as possible.”
We slept in the living room on the couch that was right next to my parents bedroom. We had a hard time getting to sleep, but we eventually dozed off while my dog, Doug, crawled back and forth between us. In the morning, my dad got to work removing the trim around the wall next to the attic. We watched him for a bit before we got bored and went back downstairs. We jumped on the trampoline for a while as we blared my big radio as Doug sprinted around the backyard, stopping every now and then to bark at the animals just beyond the treeline that acted as a big privacy fence. There was no actual fence, so he could only run as far as his leash let him.
After an hour or two, a police cruiser pulled into our driveway and we watched two officers walk to the front. Kaylee and I glanced at each other for a second before running into the house. My mom wouldn’t let us go upstairs while my dad and the officers talked about something too faint for us to hear, my brother was downstairs too.
The officers came down and questioned me and Kaylee, asking things like,
“Have you seen anyone around the house recently? Maybe the same person multiple times?” and, “Have you been missing personal belongings? Or been putting things in the attic?”
I was scared and confused, I told them no and that I’ve had absolutely nothing to do with that attic and that I rarely leave my room.
After that, one of them explained that the wall my dad opened was hollowed out, and the other officer placed a few things on the coffee table. They were a few pieces of my clothes, an old brush I’d lost the week we moved in, and a picture of me, taken from only a few feet away while I was sleeping that was taken from our last house.
There was a badly drawn heart around my sleeping body.