I recently moved back into my childhood home. Now that me and my siblings are all grown up, my parents decided to go travelling for a few months, and since I had to move out of student accommodation for the summer, I volunteered to house sit while they’re gone. There are a few points I should explain before getting into what’s been happening to me these past few weeks. Some of these might seem trivial, but I promise everything is relevant.
I live in a country where the concept of having milk delivered by a milkman is really, really uncommon. There’s a few supermarkets do it as a part of their home delivery service, but normally you’d have to get more groceries to make it worth their while, not just milk. And they’ll generally only deliver to elderly, disabled or sick people who live in the arsecrack of rural nowhere.
The house in question has a really long, winding driveway. It takes about 5 minutes to actually get to the front door from when you turn in off the main road, and that’s by car. It takes 10 minutes minimum to walk it. The turn-off is also a little overgrown and hard to spot, so unless your a family friend or postman who’s been given very detailed instructions, it’s near impossible to spot.
I lived in this house from when I was an infant up until the end of summer after I graduated from secondary school two years ago, and in those 19-ish years, myself and everyone else in my family experienced a lot of your run of the mill haunted house phenomena. Nothing ever life threatening, but the kind of stuff that makes you feel vaguely unsettled every now and then. I’m not going to go into it here because I honestly don’t think what I’m about to talk about is at all related, but if anyone would like me to chronicle my early childhood in a haunted house another time, I’d be happy to.
We have a dog called Toby, he’s an overly friendly retriever/lab cross, and it is almost impossible for anyone, regardless of if they are a family member, friend, or stranger, to get past him without anyone in the house hearing his loud, excited barks.
Okay, so getting back to the main event. The first week in the house was fine. A friend of mine was staying with me that week, and absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened. We went to the beach most days, and settled down in the evenings to have a few drinks and watch Love Island. She left late on the 16th of June, and it was the next morning that everything started.
I was in the kitchen making myself breakfast when I heard a single knock at the front door. This was already a little weird as I hadn’t heard any car approaching, or Toby’s barking, but I assumed he could have been off somewhere else in the garden or surrounding fields, so I pushed that feeling away.
I made my way to the front door, and opened it to see a glass bottle of milk sitting on the doormat. I looked up and barely caught a flash of a white uniform disappearing around a bend in the driveway. I think I shouted something like: “Sorry, mate, you’ve got the wrong house!” But they were gone. I just shrugged and picked the bottle up to bring inside.
I’m not stupid, so I wasn’t going to add the mystery milk to the cup of tea I had been making when I heard the knock. I called my dad to see if he or my mom decided to have milk delivered to me, they’re always nagging me about adding more calcium to my diet so it wouldn’t be absolutely absurd, but neither of them had. Maybe the guy just had the wrong address? I decided to pour the milk down the sink and just forget about it. I left the now empty bottle on the draining board and I went about my day.
I ended up going into town to meet another friend for coffee. It was around 4:30 when I got home and Toby came to meet me as I got out of the car. I’m the kind of person to talk to my pets, so I asked him why he wasn’t around that morning to let me know The Milkman was there (In the kind of voice you’d use to talk to a small child, of course.) Obviously I got no reply. I unlocked the door and started heading to the kitchen to start dinner, but what I saw made me stop in my tracks. The glass bottle was exactly where I left it, on the draining board, but two crucial details had changed. I had put it top-down so any excess water left from rinsing it could drain out. It was now sitting the right way up. And it was now full of milk.
After a moment of just staring at the bottle I had a worrying thought: The milk couldn’t have refilled itself, right? The only thing I could think to do was grab a poker from beside the fireplace and inspect every inch of the house to make sure there was no one waiting for me to let my guard down so the could do much worse than refill a bottle of milk. I found nothing. I even checked my own carton of milk in the fridge to see had any been taken out of it, and of course none had. I could hardly call the police and say “Hi. I think someone’s after refilling a bottle of milk in my house.” So I just locked myself and Toby into my room and stayed up watching Netflix.
I was actually drifting off to sleep the next morning when I heard it. The same knock at the front door as yesterday, but this time it was repeated once more. I rushed to unlock my bedroom door and get down the stairs, but by the time I got the front door open, whoever it was that knocked was making their way around that exact same spot in the bend. I ran after them, but I got around the bend and there was just no one. No car, no Milkman, no one. This was wholly impossible. If someone was walking down the drive, even running, even if they had made it to a vehicle, I would have seen them. Like I mentioned, our driveway is really, really long, and in the 15 seconds it took me to run to that spot, no one could have gotten back to the main road, and I would have seen them making their way down the drive. Toby had followed me down the stairs, and he just stood behind me staring in the direction of the road, not making a sound.
I took the bottles inside, and grabbed the one from the previous morning on my way to the back door. I didn’t care anymore, this fucker could bring me as many bottles of milk as they wanted, every single one was going to go in the rubbish bin out back. I resolved to wait at the door that night to try to catch The Milkman out. The night passed painfully slowly, but as soon as my watch changed to 8:30, I heard the knocks, this time three of them in quick, even succession. In literally the half second it took me to jump to my feet and wrench the door open, all while screaming my tits off and shouting every profanity in the book, The Milkman had once again evaded me, and again all I could see was that flash of white turning the bend.
That morning there were three glass bottles on the doorstep. For the next week the number of knocks increased by one each day, but then The Milkman started making multiple visits. At first it was just one in the morning and one in the evening, but that too began to increase. Yesterday It came 42 times. Not just to the front door anymore either. It comes to the back door too now, and sometimes It’ll knock at a window. I still haven’t seen It, and I also haven’t seen Toby in a while. I think he might have drank some from a bottle I smashed trying to open the door.
I can’t fit all of the bottles into the bin anymore, and I’d hate to clutter my parents house, so I think it’s time for me to start drinking.
At least I’ll be getting some more calcium into me, just like mom and dad always wanted.