I’ve been steadily losing most of my hearing from a very young age. I learned to talk and can still interact with people if I am wearing hearing aids but if I leave them out, I am totally deaf. Cannot hear a thing. Nada. Zilch. I used to have a roommate who would practice playing the tuba while I slept only ten feet away. This does suck sometimes because I can’t properly enjoy music (radio is just white noise to me) and it’s hard to hold down a job when your customers keep getting frustrated at your poor communication skills but usually I don’t mind it. I’ve always been the type who enjoys peace and quiet so when I’m home, I can take my hearing aids out and relax in total silence.
As you may have gathered from the title, the problem with this is it’s impossible for me to tell if that silence is empty or not.
I first started suspecting that something may be wrong the first time I had a woman over at my new house. It was a nice, medium sized dwelling in a small town that I inherited from my grandpa. I was in the bedroom and things were getting kind of hot between me and the young woman I brought home when she suddenly stopped and motioned for me to put my hearing aids in, which I did. She was scared when she spoke.
“I heard something downstairs. Can you go check?”
Truth be told, I was more than happy to stay in there behind a locked door. I may be deaf, but I’m not dumb. I’ve seen plenty of horror movies and we all know what happens to the one who goes off on their own to investigate a strange noise. Unfortunately for my well-being, my secondary brain was in charge then and it knew I wasn’t getting any if I didn’t go check things out.
I crept downstairs silently. Well, I think it was silent anyway. There was no one in the living room or kitchen and none of the doors or windows were open. Before I could finish checking, my date flew downstairs and ran out the front door before I could even register what had happened. She never again returned my texts and I haven’t seen her since.
A smarter man than me would have noped the fuck out of there once that happened but I rationalized it away and after a few weeks, I had all but forgotten about that incident.
The next big red flag came one day when I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on my computer in the living room(The only MMORPG worth playing in my opinion) when two police officers suddenly kicked in my door and pointed their guns at me. I didn’t have my hearing aids in so I just sort of froze there until one of them cuffed me and the other went upstairs. When he came back, they spoke to each other briefly and started asking me questions I couldn’t understand.
It took a while, but I finally convinced them to uncuff me so I could put my hearing aids back in. What they told me after I got them in chills me to this day.
Apparently, my neighbors heard screaming coming from the house and called 911. When those two officers arrived, they heard the screaming themselves and kicked in my door. The one who searched the house found no sign of anyone else being there. Since they had nothing on me, they eventually did just leave, albeit with a warning to keep my video game turned down (It was on mute, by the way).
That was when I finally started getting scared. I decided to leave my hearing aids in from now on.
Three days later, while I was making myself a nutritious dinner of ramen noodles, it finally happened. I heard footsteps upstairs. It sounded like someone was running back and forth between rooms. Even then, I tried to rationalize it away. I told myself it was probably the house making noise. I was always reading in books that houses made noise so that was probably normal house sounds that I never noticed before on account of being deaf. Then the toilet flushed and I heard more running footsteps.
Fuck. Never read about a self-flushing toilet.
I got a kitchen knife and went upstairs as quietly as possible. Yes, my dumbass probably should have called the police but what if they didn’t find anything like last time?
I checked the bathroom first and it was mercifully empty. Then the guest bedroom, which was also empty but something caught my eye… There’s a large dresser with a mirror on top in the guest room. It reaches almost to the ceiling. I never paid much attention to it before but something about it today seemed off. When I drew closer, it became clear what was wrong. The dresser was sitting on a slight angle. I’d never noticed before, but there were wheels underneath it and it made almost no noise when I pulled it away from the wall to reveal a large hole that opened up a room I never knew existed.
Inside the room was a pile of old, ratty blankets with a noticeable dent in the middle of them. Like a nest. Candy bar wrappers, empty potato chip bags and opened cans were strewn across the floor around the pile of blankets. There was a rusty old filleting knife in the corner, like the kind my grandpa used to own by the dozen.
As you can imagine, I decided that the best course of action then was to leave as quickly as possible. I left the guest room and headed towards my bedroom but I stopped in the hallway before I could get to it. The door was slightly ajar and I could see a shadow moving around in there. I walked slowly to the stairs and when I took the first step, I somehow managed to place my foot directly on the loudest creaky spot on the whole staircase. The noise was loud, even to me, and as soon as it was over, new sounds followed: horrible, piercing screaming and footsteps rushing towards me from behind.
I leaped down the stairs in two bounds and was out the door seconds later. Luckily the town was small enough that I was able to run all the way to the police station in only a matter of minutes.
They never did find whoever was living in my guest room. I’ve all but given up hope on finding a buyer for the place because sure as shit am not living there anymore. I guess the moral of the story is: wear your hearing aids, people.