I went to visit my parents a few months back. They still live in my childhood home. The house sits at the end of our block in a cul-de-sac. Unlike a lot of houses in my old neighborhood, it demands attention with its lopsided appearance, large size, and ancient Victorian architecture. My parents bought it before I was born, refurbished it, and moved in just as my mother was going into labor with me. Ever since I was little, I had an “off” feeling about the place. Long shadows filled the halls. Strange 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 being in the house, and so did my friends, apparently. We never hung out at my place, which was just fine with me.
It’s strange, because most people tend to hold memories of their childhood homes close to their hearts. I don’t.
Schoolkids and adults alike always gossiped about our house. Creepy and offputting. Some might even say “haunted”. I always believed there might have been some truth to what they said—and this recent trip—
We had just finished dinner. Baked chicken, beans, rice, asparagus, very good. As my parents and I walked through the windowless corridors, I remember being drawn toward the distantly familiar yellow wallpaper that made up almost every wall of the damned structure. The paper’s pattern consisted of a vertical bar wrapped in vines, brown flower etchings that stacked on top of one another, reaching all the way to the ceiling. That continuous bar-flower pattern would repeat, trailing into maddening repetition. Hideous. We were winding through parts of the manor I didn’t recognize. Finally, we arrived at an old room. The room, a barely-used guest suite, had one window, one dresser, and one bed. An old leather teddy bear 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’s sun shining through the window as I unpacked my suitcase.
After settling in, I registered how nasty I felt after such a long day. It was dark out by this point. I took my toiletries to the bathroom next to my room. Annoyingly, you had to exit the bedroom and then use an access door from the hall to get to the bathroom. The two rooms were adjacent. Why weren’t they connected? Who knows.
As a matter of fact, I never recalled seeing the bathroom before that day. Growing up, I had always lived in a bedroom situated towards the front of the house, a door away from my parent’s room, actually. The rest of the house was unfamiliar to me. Even my childhood curiosity had understood that exploring the manor was a dumb idea. On top of that, my parents were quick to forbid me from wandering. Both my parents and I had an emotional understanding, but not a true understanding of why.
I undressed myself to get into the shower. The tub was an antique porcelain whatnot with brass feet designed to look like claws holding glass orbs. A modern shower head and faucet knobs had obviously been installed at some point during renovation. Anyways. Something strange happened when I turned on the faucet. The sound of the aging 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 because my parents lived on the other side of the house, the plumbing had simply been neglected, causing a buildup of rust or debris. I was more so confused when the pressure eventually released, and a piece of pink muscley meat fell from the faucet, into the tub. It looked like a slimy piece of raw chicken. I remember being taken aback, confused and disgusted. The faucet continued to gurgle, releasing more contaminated water until it started to turn clear. I stood in the tub, cold, staring at the slab of flesh. I figured that some animal must’ve been caught up in the pipes. I disposed of the meat in the toilet, flushed the toilet with my foot, 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 mindlessly. As time passed, that sense of dread that I had always gotten staying up late at night as a child crept back into my life. I glanced up at that leather teddy bear. Beady glass eyes. I eventually fell asleep.