I lived with my parents for a little over 20 years. When I say parents I mean my mom and stepdad, as my mother and real father separated when I was just 2 years old. My relationship with my dad is great, but I lived with my mom and stepdad growing up. Point is, I lived in their house for a long time and I know it like the back of my hand. Except for one area.
The house has an extensive basement that is entered through the garage. The front part of the basement is finished and quite opened up. However, at the back of this section, is my step dad’s office which has a locked door that leads to a sketchy section of basement consisting of winding hallways and unfinished rooms. Picture a miniature version of the French Catacombs, without all the skeletons. Anyway, I was always told this all supposedly leads to a dank, dark sump pump room. I didn’t know personally for most of my time living there; I only ever slightly opened that locked door to peer behind it. I’ve always had a fear of basements for some reason, and whatever was beyond that door gave me some real bad vibes as a kid. For those wondering how I know the layout of this unfinished area so well; our house has schematics and old pictures that I used to sneak out of my step dad’s office for some looks. The pictures were dark and ominous, but gave me a good idea of what was behind the door. Other than that, you’ll understand why I know so much later (Note I am speaking in the past tense for the most part when discussing the area).
Why this seemingly ordinary ranch home in suburban NJ had such an enormous basement always confused me. Trying to look any history up online was pointless, as nothing would come up. Sometimes, it almost felt like the basement extended far longer than our property did. The most unnerving part for me (aside from the fact that this bizarre basement even existed) was that my bedroom was supposedly sectioned above a large portion of the unfinished area. This meant that I was pretty much directly above that terrifying, dark abyss I had not dared enter. Many times, in the dark of the night, I would hear noises. Not just one kind either. At times it would be creaking, and often it would be thumps and low groans. Groans that straddled the line between a ship scrapping against rock and, I don’t know, maybe some sort of animal. I’m not kidding, one time it even sounded like there were voices coming from below me. It’s all hard to explain and always was, but I knew then what typical house noises sound like, and that wasn’t it.
Whenever I would bring this up to my step dad (since he was a carpenter and knew the house better than I did), he would always tell me it was probably just the house and sump pump making noise. This never sat right with me though. For one, that underground area is supposedly huge, so how the heck could my room be situated above a sump pump that is all the way at the end? And for two, never once had I seen my step dad actually go behind that door. Other than me sneaking the key into the latch and stealing peaks, I never saw anyone interact with that door. You see, we already had a sump pump in the finished area of our basement, and my step dad would routinely perform maintenance on it, to make sure the basement would not flood. Why had he never gone to check out this other sump pump? Well, I never really thought about it too much, since I would have ended up wanting to move out at age 10 out of sheer anxiety. The point is, there were noises. Noises that did not have an explanation in my opinion. Let’s fast forward a bit and get to why I’m writing this.
I recently moved out of my parents house into an apartment. This involved a lot of packing which had me spending a decent amount of time in their basement. Since my time in that home was coming to an end, and I was now an adult, I decided to be a little ballsy. See, I work from home and have ample time without anyone else around to pry in my activities. As such, I decided that one day, when my parents were at work, I would open up that locked door and do some exploring. Maybe I could finally find that sump pump room. In hindsight, I don’t know what was wrong with me, but hey, that’s what I decided to do.
So one day, I opened the infamous door and walked through. It was dark, so I used the flash light function on my phone. From what I could tell, the floors were unfinished cement and quite damp. The hallways were narrow and smelled of must and something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something unpleasant. Occasionally, the hallways would open into small rooms with more hallways that eventually ended in dead ends. From what I could tell, the area matched the schematics. I was absolutely certain at this point that this basement did not fit on our property. As unsettling as this all might sound, the trip through the unfinished section of the basement was mostly uneventful. I heard a faint noise and turned my flashlight off to hide, but eventually found my way to what I can best say was a false wall. I had to crawl to get under it, and presumed this led to the sump pump room. It didn’t. It led to a cramped alcove with a door. It was the only door I had come across since I first entered the dark abyss. The door had no lock, so I opened it.
Immediately behind the door was a set of cement stairs leading down. This shocked me and made me extremely uneasy. I can still remember the feeling. Why was there a staircase going down in the basement? I walked the stairs down and counted 50 before I hit the bottom, where I was met with another door. This door was locked, like the original one. This definitely was not a sump pump room. A sump pump wouldn’t be 50 flights of stairs under basement level. I remember suddenly realizing something as I shone my phone light on that locked door; there were two keys hidden in my step dad’s office. I used the first one to unlock the door in his office. And all those years I never knew what the second was for. Well, now I do.
After realizing this, and getting way too freaked out, I ended up leaving the unfinished basement and continuing to pack. Eventually, I mustered the courage to ask my step dad if there were any other stairwells in our basement and he obviously said no. I also managed to find a way to ask him about the two keys in his office without giving myself away. He told me one unlocks the door in his office, and the other, he has no idea. I’m no expert but he didn’t seem to be lying about this. I figured to press my luck more and tell him I went into the unfinished area. I did, and asked him why I couldn’t find a sump pump. He was a little confused as to why I wanted to know where the pump was, but outright told me there was none. As far as he knew, that unfinished basement section was just an empty set of halls that came with the house. He told me there was a pump as a kid so I wouldn’t stay up all night scared of noises. That wasn’t very assuring. I had one final question I wanted to ask. Are there any false walls or crawl spaces in our basement? He laughed and said not as far as he knew. Then he asked me why I was asking all these questions. I just said I was curious, and I guess that was good enough for him. My stepdad is an upstanding man with no red ink on his ledger, I have to assume everything he told me is the truth. So basically, there was a false wall, crawl space, and door in his basement he had no idea about leading down a huge staircase to a mysterious locked door.
Fast forward to now. I’ve been sitting on that locked door down there for a while. I really don’t know what to do. Like I said, opening the first door always gave me bad vibes, and those vibes were even worse when I found that second door. I now have to believe that my parents know nothing of this. Should I bring it up to them, or should I see what’s behind the second door myself? Do I even want to play with this fire? They’re probably going to sell the house soon, so my time to figure things out is running thin. What should I do?
EDIT: Part 2