About five years ago my family’s house burned down in the CARR fire in California. I still think it was sort of a blessing in a really twisted way, it’s never affected me the way it affected everyone else in my family. I never liked that house. My brother and I weren’t allowed to close our doors at night, let alone lock them… Things would get into my room often and the house was just overall anything but charming, and we’d been planning to move for years anyway. Following this, around the time my mum, brother, father, and myself were all homeless, my uncle on my mother’s side died, and shortly after that we rented a home in a convenient spot in town, I was able to bike everywhere, it was great.
But the house was off.
I didn’t recognize it at first, but my brother is much more in tune with shit like that than I am. He hated the place even before we set foot inside. He started saying really weird things about it like “imagine if someone was killed in there,” or “some weirdos lived in this place before,” and he’d recount weird dreams he was having about getting up and walking around the house at night on a regular basis. Then he started having hallucinations.
He suddenly started getting really paranoid, when we were at the house, he’d tell me I shouldn’t go into certain rooms at certain points, he’d avoid the kitchen like it was the plague or something for days, and one day that week he started having deja Vu, and he thought our mum was going to die if things kept playing out the way he was thinking they would happen. She ended up being fine. I genuinely thought he was fucking with me. Then one night I went to be extremely early, at around 9 or 10pm, and it couldn’t have been more than an hour later that I woke up to the lights turning on in the hallway, footsteps, and then a scream that stopped so suddenly followed by muffled sobs and muttering. I was fully awake faster than you can imagine. My brother rarely cries, and when he does it’s for good reason, I thought he was severely injured or something. He was in the hallway, collapsed against the wall, staring at something near the kitchen and crying. I ran over to him and helped him up and he kept muttering something, I don’t know what, and I looked over to whatever he seemed to be looking at and there was nothing, I eventually got him to snap out of his fear and tell me what happened.
He told me he’d seen our uncle, and he seemed perfectly fine, but his face was horrifically disfigured. He said he looked like he was in pain. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell our mum and that he wasn’t going to tell her either. Neither of us have brought it up since.
Things kept getting weirder after that though. The house always made some funky noises. The pipes were shit. I was the lucky bastard that got to sleep in the room attached to the garage and the wall opposite of the one my bed was against was where the water heater was. So there were constantly these fun little noises happening throughout the house, and they were more noticeable at night of course.
I always told myself that it was just the house settling, but it sure as hell wasn’t.
My brother knocked on my door one morning to tell me about something that had happened the previous night, and I told him that it was just a dream, he swore and still swears to this day that it wasn’t, and he didn’t seem at all phased by it. He said that he woke up to go get water and for some reason he went into the garage (he said “for some reason”) and when he went in there, an empty cup fell off of one of the beams that were up there. Up there was an incomplete attic, so half of it from the garage door to the door from the garage to the house, had the beams covered, and the other half didn’t. He told me that when the cup fell someone up there asked for him nicely if he could fill the cup back up and give it to them. He went and filled the cup up with water, and then put the cup on top of one of the shelves in the garage since there was no way for him to get up to the beams, the voice thanked him, and he went to bed.
When I went to the garage that day just for the hell of it, I saw a little red plastic cup that I’d never seen in the house before then, laying on the garage floor.
That night the concerning noises started. I’ve always been an insomniac, it was perfectly normal for me to be awake at late hours of the night staring up at the ceiling blankly and just waiting for morning. This particular night it was anxiety that kept me awake. Just this unshakeable fear that something bad was going to happen, but I didn’t know what, I thought it was just a panic attack coming on, but then i heard a tapping/clicking noise… I’ll never forget that noise… It started from the kitchen, I’d heard it quite a few times before in the kitchen, but this time in particular caught my attention, because this time when it happened, the noise got closer. It started slow, clicking in the pipes coming from the kitchen, probably the sink, into the walls of the hallway towards my room, they’d creep slowly to about where the garage door started, then quickly rush back, then start again. This noise always kept me awake, it was worse than the creaking, moaning, and popping noises the water heater made because I understood where those came from…
The noises kept happening for months, around the time we started planning to move and started house hunting. Then about a month before the lease was up, which was when we were going to move and when we’d found a house, the noises started getting closer. Byt this time I was accustomed to hearing the noises. I’d count them as I went to bed, like counting sheep, but this time there were too many clicks and i confirmed that by the fact that they got louder. They always retreated though. One night however, they didn’t. My mum was at work that night, and it was later at night and because of how paranoid I’d become of the sounds that happened at night and wasn’t quite accustomed to being left alone with my brother at home overnight, so I had every single light in the house on, and the security lights, hoping that would ease my anxiety. It did.
Around midnight, my brother was up playing his videogames, and I was playing my guitar and singing in my room. The clicking noises started in the kitchen, and then they got unusually close to my door… right outside of it, and they stopped. I sat staring at my door as my blood went cold, and I took a breath that I didn’t realize I’d been holding when I realized it was fine. Then, BAM
Something had slammed against my door. I hadn’t only heard it, I’d seen it, I saw the doorframe, hell, the whole wall shook. Like a grown person had slammed themselves or been thrown into my door. I humoured myself that it was just my brother fucking around with me or something, and lustened closely, heart in my throat, and heard him clicking away at his keyboard and talking over the mic… I felt sick, my ears went hot and I started to panic. I sat staring at my door in shock, I started to convince myself that it was just paranoia, maybe I had imagined it- BAM Something was trying to get into my room. I jumped up off my bed and onto my feet, feeling dizzy with adrenaline and anxiety and held my guitar up like a bat. I cautiously walked up to my door and pressed my ear against it, bracing myself for potential impact. Nothing.
I opened my door swiftly and jumped out from behind it ready to swing at whoever or whatever was on the other side. Nothing. My blood went cold and my mouth was dry as I searched the whole house. Every single corner, nook and cranny, hell I opened the little door by the bathroom which only had an electrical panel underneath. I checked drawers, cupboards, closets, every room except for my brother’s because I figured he’d best not know about this… I checked every door in the house, that leads outside, they were all locked, including both the sliding doors. I checked under the sofas, checked under my mum’s bed, I checked in the garage several times. Nothing. I went back into the room and started to calm down slightly. Breathing and heart rate starting to slow, relief washing over me causing me to feel exhausted and sore as the adrenaline left my body. Whatever was there before was gone- BAM BAM BAM I ran to the door and opened it, nothing, once again. I ended up staying in the room the rest of the night, blasting music and singing loudly. Whatever that was stopped happening and eventually I managed a couple hours of sleep.
I never figured out what it was.
The noises kept coming up next to my door, they’d stop for some time, then quickly retreat back to the kitchen, and at one point a few days after the door slamming, I found a dried, decent sized streak of blood on the wall on the wall of the hallway where the tapping kept stopping. Fortunately we were leaving the house soon.
Things got worse though. My brother kept saying a humanoid demon was following him around in the house and he became unphased by this rather quickly. Noises in the garage besides the water heater kept happening throughout the nights. The house was always too hot or too cold, it was never the right temperature, the water pressure got worse, scratching noises kept happening in the kitchen cupboards and they would open on their own. One night I heard footsteps run across the roof, and convinced myself for years that it was a cat.. now I’m not so sure about that….
The day we left the house was the final and one of the most concerning occurrences in the place. My mum was going in and out of the house moving stuff from her room, my brother and I had finished moving all of our stuff out of our rooms and into the truck my dad had brought to help out and our mum’s SUV. We were both sitting in the living room, and our mum came from outside to grab something from her room at the back of the house. Once she got to her room, me and my brother both turned our heads in shock as we heard footsteps slap across the kitchen tile then run across the carpet and into the hallway. Neither of us saw anything, and we both laughed and laughed, because it was such a relief to be getting out of that place… It’s still haunting though, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget about it…