When I was a kid, I punched through a wall in my childhood bedroom. I didn’t remember doing it, and insisted I hadn’t, and tried to prove it because there was blood on the broken drywall and none on my hands. My parents didn’t believe me. My father patched up the hole, though poorly, and the spackle left an odd-looking ripple pattern.
I felt something strange when I looked at that ripple in the wall. It was a nameless, seething rage. I had to cover it with posters, or a shelf when I was a teen, just to feel at peace. I’m twenty-five now and have long since moved out of my parents’ house in the country. I had no reason to go back. The city had my university and later my job, and all my childhood town did was descend into poverty.
A few years ago, having sworn off roommates, I moved alone into a high-rise with my dog. One day, out of boredom and curiosity, I started researching my childhood home and stumbled across a website with a rather uncreative name - www.diedinhouse.com - that would tell you if someone had died in your house. I put in my childhood address and paid the fee.
Someone had died. And it had happened right before we moved in. Within a few minutes of intense googling, I found a newspaper article that fit the neighborhood and year of death. It seemed the family who lived in that house before us had killed their foster daughter – sad, but not as uncommon as you’d think. I called my mother.
She already knew. This upset me because I feel like someone being murdered in your house is kind of important, you know? She said she hadn’t wanted to scare me. My parents were poor when I was little, so buying a highly discounted house was a dream come true for them, even if the discount was because someone was killed there.
As she told me what she knew, it made sense. This was why there were cameras in my room when we moved in, which my mother quickly took down. This was why my windows were nailed shut, and with so many nails we could never get them all out. This was why there was that odd smell in the carpet we could never afford to replace, and the smell of must and decay in the walls.
My childhood bedroom was the murdered girl’s bedroom. My bedroom was where she had been trapped for days, starved, killed, and then left to rot. Her last attempt to escape was to break through the wall, but she wasn’t strong enough to get all the way through.
When we got off the phone, I felt sick. My dog, who was also my childhood dog, came up to me to comfort me. I should note that strange things tend to happen around my family. Maybe it’s because we buy houses where people have been murdered - big surprise - but I assumed I had escaped all that by moving to the city. But three nights ago, I woke up around 4:00 a.m. to my dog barking at the wall.
She had barked at random things before - chairs, my piano, even me from a distance, but she was senile and blind so I didn’t take it seriously. But she had never barked at night, and the only other wall she had barked at was the wall I’d punched through as a kid in my childhood bedroom.
“What is it, girl?” I asked, groggily working my way out of bed to comfort her.
I turned my light on, and beside my bed was another hole in the wall, the size of a fist. Blood was streaked around it, but my hands weren’t bleeding, just like in my childhood bedroom.
“Hello,” I said. She was there. I could feel her rage and desperation. I heard that sometimes, the only part of someone that survived death was their strongest emotions.
There was a slight breeze, then a whisper. “Hello.” I could feel breath against my ear. I told myself I was dreaming, but I was sure I was awake.
“You followed me,” I said, looking straight ahead. My dog was barking like mad now and running in little circles, I wanted to reach down and pick her up (she was tiny and fragile and I was sure she’d run into something) but I was too scared to move. Then, my dog lowered her old body to the ground and growled at something right next to me.
“I want to live,” she said. “You escaped.”
I felt an icy hand on my collarbone, fingers tracing my neck before resting on my shoulder. “I didn’t escape, I–” I stopped myself. Maybe I had escaped that small town. But whatever this girl had become, it was obvious her reality, her perception, were different from mine, forever warped by the pain and anger she felt in her final days. Reasoning with her was pointless.
My dog was both growling and coughing now, and the room was like a winter’s night.
“If I can’t live, neither can you,” she said. At first, there was knocking on the wall to my right, then three loud bangs. Three more holes, rimmed in blood, broken plaster falling into the wall space and onto the floor. I hated that my first thought was I would never get my security deposit back. My dog was going mad on the floor.
My heart pounded. With that kind of strength, the spirit could kill me if it wanted. It could “Then live through me,” I said without thinking. “See my life, see what you should have had!”
And just like that, the presence was gone. But the four holes in the wall remained.
I didn’t know why I said what I did. I also didn’t really understand what it meant, but I had a feeling I had made a mistake the next night when I woke up in a club on the other side of the city with no recollection of how I got there. And it wasn’t like I woke up from sleeping - I was standing and wearing a yellow coat that wasn’t mine. It was as if I had sleepwalked all the way there.
Someone offered me a drink. I took it. These people knew me, but I didn’t know them. It was obvious at that point the girl had taken my words as an offer to possess me.
After shaking off these new “friends” I didn’t know while also trying not to sound insane, I Ubered home, sweaty and covered in glitter. I wasn’t a partier. I liked to stay home, cuddle with my dog, and read my books, and the stress of that strange night was getting to me. I opened my apartment door, and my dog was hiding under my desk, tail between her legs. She growled at me.
“It’s ok, it’s ok,” I said, but I couldn’t get her to come near me for a walk. I walked into my room, running my fingers across the holes in the wall, which formed a near-perfect line.
“I felt bad for you,” I said to nothing in particular, hoping the girl would hear. “But you went too far.”
No response.
“You’ll get me killed,” I said. I took off the coat. It smelled like cigarette smoke. I coughed – had I been smoking, too? “This city isn’t safe. You were only fourteen when you died, and it’s gotten more dangerous since then. You can stick around if you don’t cause trouble, I don’t want you to possess me.”
No response.
I began to fidget, thinking about this deal I may have accidentally struck with her. I’d heard of people making deals with devils. Is that what she was now? A devil? Angry spirit? Forever tormented by the pain of her final days? Whatever the case, I wasn’t sure this deal could be undone.
“Please,” I said.
No response. But she was there. I could feel her anger, her seething rage.
This happened about two years ago. She’d come and go, leaving me at gas stations and in taxis with no idea how I got there. I thought she was gone when she didn’t possess me for a few months, but then she came back last week.
I came to awareness at the bottom of a flooded canal a few blocks from my apartment. I don’t know what she had done to get there, but she must not have known how to swim, because I was sinking, being swept away by the torrent.
I realized at the ER that night, half-drowned, that I had to do something. I was too kind to the girl, I made a mistake. Maybe I need an exorcist or a priest, but if this girl tries to live her life through me for much longer, I’m sure she’ll kill me.