I recently went to visit my parents who still live in my childhood home. The house, unlike most others in my old neighborhood, sat at the end of the block, demanding attention with its lopsided appearance, large size, and ancient Victorian architecture. My parents bought it before I was born, refurbished it, and moved into it just as my mother was going into labor.
Ever since I was little, I had a deep uneasy feeling about the building and the energy that sheathed the entire property around it. Long shadows filled the halls. Strange and unearthly noises weren’t uncommon at late hours. Night terrors disturbing beyond my years plagued my sleep. On multiple occasions when I was in grade school, I experienced deep feelings of dread both day and night while being in the house, and apparently so did my friends. We never hung out at my place, which was just fine with me.
The kids on the block always believed my house was haunted. I always believed there might’ve been some truth to what they said, and this recent trip to my house proved them dead right.
As my parents and I walked through the windowless corridors, I remember running my fingers over the familiar ugly yellow wallpaper that occupied almost every wall of the damned structure. The pattern consisted of a vertical bar wrapped in vines next to brown flower etchings that stacked on top one another, reaching all the way to the ceiling. That continuous bar-flower pattern would repeat, trailing into maddening repetition. Finally, my parents had led me to my old room. The room, the most decently bearable one in the house, had one window, one dresser, and one bed. An old leather teddy bear I barely remembered was perched on the dresser. I sat my luggage down and slumped onto the bed as my parents walked away. I vividly remember the summer evening sun shining through the window as I unpacked my suitcase.
After laying around for a while and settling in, I registered how nasty I felt after such a long day. I took my toiletries into the bathroom next to my room.
You had to exit the bedroom and then use a door to the right on the same wall. Why hadn’t the architects connected the bedroom and bathroom? Who knows.
I undressed to get into the shower. The tub was an antique porcelain whatnot with brass feet designed to look like claws holding glass orbs. A shower head had been installed sometime after my parents had moved in.
Something strange happened when I turned on the faucet and the sound of the backed-up pipes echoed through the walls. I hadn’t even pulled up the shower trigger yet. Red-stained water started spraying in random directions from the faucet. I thought at first that since my parents lived on the other side of the house, the plumbing had simply been neglected, causing a buildup of rust or debris.
The pressure eventually released when a piece of pink muscley meat fell from the faucet and into the tub. It looked like a piece of raw chicken. I remember being taken aback, confused and grossed out. The faucet continued to gurgle, releasing more contaminated water until it started to turn clear. I stood in the tub, cold and terrified, staring at the slab of flesh. I made up an excuse in my mind that some animal must’ve been caught up in the pipes. I disposed of the meat in the toilet, washed my hands, then stepped back into the tub, turning on the faucet for a few minutes to let the hot water flush the pipes out. I showered, got dressed, and tucked myself into bed.
I sat on my phone for a while scrolling through Snapchat. As time passed, I slowly got that sense of dread that I had always gotten staying up late at night when I was a child. I glanced up at the leather teddy bear. The beady eyes stared back at me. I shuddered, then hid myself under the covers, drifting into slumber.
I woke up in the middle of a peaceful sleep. My phone read 2 o’clock AM. My entire body was in a cold sweat. I covered myself so the only thing uncovered by the heavy pink blankets was my face.
I relaxed for a while, trying to fall back asleep.
A screaming that sounded like a woman going through childbirth rang from the bathroom. The screaming intertwined with a frantic gargling sound. I remember tensing up and lying still.
The fear of the situation disappeared when I realized that my mother might’ve hurt herself in the bathroom. I got out of bed and walked out of my room, going to the shut bathroom door. The screaming had stopped before I went in. I opened the door to a single warm-colored lightbulb illuminating the room. The bathtub was full of blood. The entire room stank of a mixture of raw meat, fried fish filets, and herbal hand soap. All of that combined with the offputting dark red paint on the walls made me feel sick. I felt a strange empty late-night panging in my stomach. My mind was filled with questions.
The blood in the tub was being disturbed the slightest bit.
A long cut of pink raw meat with strands of fat attached to it twitched its way up the side of the tub, making a wet squinching noise. As it did this, something round bobbed up to the surface of the bathtub. It appeared to be a human head stripped of the skin layer. It had no eyes, and its toothy mouth was gaped open, blood running from between its teeth and into the tub. I could see the exposed tendrils of muscle from where I was. It was floating sideways, and while I was staring at it, the flesh chunk slapped onto the tile, splattering blood and other fluids onto the floor. The meat strip twitched like its muscles were firing at random, creating small indentations on its slimy surface. I threw up the remnants of my dinner onto the floor in a steaming heap. The meat thing was crawling towards me. The head still bobbed sideways in the blood. I had come to my senses and started running. I ran through the halls until my head hit something hanging down from the ceiling with a crack. I blacked out.
I woke up the next morning. My parents stood by my bed. I sat up and looked at them. They comforted me and explained what had happened last night after I hit my head.
It went something along the lines of this.
“We woke up in the middle of the night to a loud bang from your side of the house,” my mother said, “When we went to go look, we found you unconscious in the hall. Your head was hurt, so we patched it up and took you to bed the best we could. On our way there, we passed by your bathroom. We found a pile of vomit in there, the tub was also running. I turned off the faucet and started to clean the mess up, and oddly enough, when I finished and went to check on you, the bathroom door was shut. What happened last night, Sammy?”
Even though my mom was no stranger to the probability of the house being haunted, I made something up.
“I woke up, got sick from a night terror, and panicked I guess. It’s all a blur,” I replied.
“It’s funny that you mention night terrors now, because you used to have them all the time,” my dad chimed in.
“Yep. Strange,” My mom said with a complex look on her face.
I felt my bandaged forehead and sighed. Later that afternoon, I packed my stuff, gave my parents an excuse that I was feeling sick, and left.
It took a long time of processing and acceptance for me to be able to write this story in such vivid detail. Even then, I avoided eating meat for about a month after the encounter, and still have trouble stomaching it.
To this day, I have no explanation for what happened that night, other than the supernatural.