There’s really nothing special about my town at all. Just another sleepy little factory town among the dozens scattered between the rows of endless corn and soybeans in the Ohio valley. Once upon a time it was a happy, dozy little place. Kids ran around the neighborhoods while their parents worked in the factory. Everyone had enough money to live comfortably. Old folk retired and sat on their porches, neighbors helped each other out when it was needed, and everyone’s doors were unlocked, but there were downsides too. I guess we should’ve seen them coming, but hindsight’s’ always 20/20 right?
Factory work leads to back and knee pain, which leads to Percocet prescriptions. Then the factories started shutting down. Which led to poverty, poverty and Percocet prescriptions created a perfect breeding ground for heroin. Which in turn led to a perfect breeding ground for crime, and one day kids stopped playing outside. Folks stopped talking to each other, Doors stayed locked, and people became leery of their neighbors.
But still, nothing special about that. From here to the old Coal towns of West Virginia, to the Farm towns in Indiana it was the same song and dance. Small towns were dying, and most death is slow and ugly. Our little town was no exception to the changing tides. I really started noticing the struggle around 2010.
I guess that’s when we all started noticing “Knock-Knock” too.
Believe it or not Small towns have a homeless population just like big cities do. It’s not as vast. There are no giant ramshackle camps off of railroad tracks, no Skid rows or anything like that, but we got them. They hang out at the twenty four hour gas stations after hours. Sleep in tents under bridges if they can’t find a motel or a shelter to lay their heads down at night. They wander up and down the main drags in the same clothes with the same defeated looks on their faces. I guess in a way it’s worse in the small towns than in the big cities. The saying about every small town is that “Everybody knows everybody.”
And that’s no lie. That homeless women you see shambling around main street at eleven in the evening used to babysit you when you were a kid. Her mom goes to your church, her kids go to school with you. It really puts a whole new level of sad reality onto the forlorn faces of homeless people you see in these small towns. It’s a sad thing to witness.
For everyone except “Knock Knock” of course.
No one recognized him. No one knows who he is, where he came from, why he’s homeless. Not even the other homeless folk. As a matter of fact they actually tend to go out of their way to stay away from him. I guess everyone does now, but at first, we noticed it with them. If he was on one side of a street they were quick to find their way to the other side of the street. They didn’t talk to him, or even look at him. Some of the younger more volatile ones would even treat him with hostility. You’d see them pointing off in a different direction while shouting at him while he just did that crazy little laugh he always did.
He was one ugly fucking fish. No nice way to say that. Big guy with uncombed hair and a scraggly beard. He had two lazy eyes that kind of went off in opposite directions at all times that seemed even more separated by the huge scar he had in the middle of his face. Like the one’s you’d see on the old lumberjacks that weren’t careful with their chainsaws. He wore the same clothes every single day. Which I guess in retrospect isn’t too surprising. It was more of the outfit that he’d chosen to live in that constantly raised an eyebrow.
He wore this huge trench coat. Even in the summer. Torn jeans and these big ratty boots that seemed to accentuate the limp he had in his stride. Visible dirt was always on his face. I don’t think he ever showered. Not even creek or fountain baths, both of which were more than possible. He just kind of chooses not to. I’d be a liar if I’d said his demeanor wasn’t unsettling, but what was even more unsettling was that fucking laugh.
He was always laughing. Constantly, sometimes it’d be a low and awkward sounding chuckle, and sometimes it would be this maniacal incessant bellowing of laughter. You’d be woken up at three in the morning to the sound of “knock knock” going down your street laughing at the stars. No nice way to say it, dude was as creepy as they get.
Initially though we had no idea just how creepy things would get.
He got his nickname around 2012, 2013 maybe. It was late in the evening and John Pershing had just put his kids to bed when he got a knock on the door.
He opened it to see “Knock Knock.” His crazy laugh in that steady low chuckle. In his hand were three big round point shovels that he’d obviously stolen out of someone’s garage, maybe multiple someone’s. Who knows? They were never returned. Before John can say anything “Knock Knock” just hands him these three shovels, turns around and saunters off. Laughing that mad laugh of his until he was out of sight.
John was perplexed, and a little unsettled of course. Who wouldn’t be? But ultimately, he just chalked it up to crazy homeless people being crazy. He put the shovels in his garage, told himself he’d file a police report tomorrow after work, and try and get these shovels back to their rightful owners. What more could John do other than just kind of forget about it?
John was a welder by trade, and a damn good one. I remember him showing me the wood burning furnace he’d made and installed in his house. How he bragged about all the money he saved on his gas bill, and how it kept the house so much warmer than your standard central heating ever could. I would be a liar if I said it wasn’t an impressive project, and he was right. The house was a lot warmer than mine was for sure.
But I guess even the most masterful craftsmen make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are big ones.
Poor John. He was just about to finish up his shift for the day when he got the phone call from his neighbors. Sometime in the course of the day his house had caught fire, and by the time the fire department got called and made it out to his place the entire house was up in flames. I’ll never forget the sound that John Made when he pulled up to his completely engulfed house and realized that his daughters weren’t outside with the other neighbors.
Stacy, Lydia, and Malorie. All three of them were younger than fifteen. They were good kids. No one knows why they couldn’t make it out of the house. The coroner’s best guess is that because the fire started in Johns Furnace in the basement. It caused a whole lot of smoke to pour through the ducts and into the house. Poor kids probably succumbed to asphyxiation before they even knew that there was a fire.
John was never the same after that. How could he have been? Having to bury one child would be enough to break a man, but three? And having to bury them because something you created killed them? To lose your entire house and life on top of all that? I could never even begin to imagine. We did what we could for John, but in our hearts we kind of knew it was pointless. He killed himself a few years later.
A couple weeks later Nancy Palmer got a knock on her door. Same time. There was “Knock Knock.” Those crazy eyes and that wild laugh. He handed her an empty bottle of Aspirin and took off into the night. Nancy was a little more concerned than John had been though. She called the police immediately, but ultimately there’s nothing illegal about handing someone a bottle of over the counter medication, and even if there was no one had the slightest clue where “Knock Knock” slept at night. It was a lost cause.
Nancy’s daughter discovered her mother dead on the kitchen floor some two days later. Heart attack. Sitting on the counter was a spilled bottle of Aspirin she must’ve tried to take before she collapsed.
Just a little while after that Kurt Masters got a similar pounding on his door. “Knock Knock” handed him a ragged life jacket he’d probably pulled out of some dumpster. Laughing that laugh of his the whole time before leaving Kurt standing on his porch completely unsettled and bewildered.
It took the police awhile to find Kurt after he went missing. It was ultimately a group of fishermen that found his body stuck in a pile of lilies in our local fishing pond. Best guess is that he slipped off of his boat and hit his head on some rocks in the fairly shallow waters and drowned.
Small towns have small ears, and small ears have small mouths. It didn’t take too many more of these random deaths for the residents of our town to start putting two and two together. When “Knock Knock” visited your house. Bad things were soon to follow.
People started speculating, thinking that “Knock Kock” was somehow killing these people. That he was dropping these crazy and vague clues to indicate just exactly how he was going to do it, and then making it come to fruition by his own hands, but it didn’t take too much thinking to conclude just how impossible that was. How do you knowingly give someone a heart attack? How do you follow someone three miles outside of town on foot, climb into their boat and push them overboard? With a limp on top of that. It just wasn’t possible.
It was after Jared Cash fell into the molten glass reservoir after “Knock Knock” handed him an old ice pack not two days prior that we really started to suspect something that honestly might’ve been more impossible.
Somehow, someway “Knock Knock” was predicting our futures. Seeing our deaths. Like some sort of fucked up nonverbal harbinger. At first, we laughed that off. I mean why would we? That’s crazy.
But then Kaitlyn Althouse Got hit and killed by a drunk driver after being gifted an empty bottle of Kamchatka.
Tyler Flora Was crushed by a tractor after receiving a toy Dollar Tree John Deere mower.
Levi Riley was mauled by a stray dog while out hunting after “Knock Knock” handed him a dog collar.
The police decided to launch an investigation, and after talking to a few of the homeless residents it was discovered that “Knock Knock” had been associated with random deaths way longer than initially thought. He would hand Junkies old syringes, and days later they’d be found Overdosed. The reason the other homeless stayed away from “Knock Knock” wasn’t just because of his unsettling looks. People who spent any amount of time at all around “Knock Knock” were sure to die.
It wasn’t long before Wanted posters started posting up all over town. Of course he wasn’t in any database, and no actual picture of him could be found anywhere so they were all artists’ renditions, but still. I guess when you’re so distinctly unsettling it’s hard to miss your features. The drawings were spot on.
The police looked everywhere for “Knock Knock.”. Nothing, nothing at all. It’s like he just appeared and disappeared whenever he brought these crazy omens with him. You’d think something would’ve caught him. An eyewitness reports. CCTV catching him dumpster diving for these horrible talismans, but it’s like he just . . . Didn’t exist until he did.
The whole town stayed hidden, no one opened their doors for anything. Especially after dark. It didn’t matter though. He’d simply leave the object on the porch to be discovered in the morning. Everyone knew that it was him because they’d hear that incessant, endless laughter outside of their doors.
It was last night when I got the knock on my door. . .
I didn’t answer it, of course. Who would be dumb enough to do that at this point?
To try and be safe I didn’t even leave my house for two days after “Knock Knocks” visit. Thinking that somehow that would make it all less real. That if I didn’t see whatever it was for long enough then I’d be able to dodge the omen gifted to me.
But eventually I had to leave . . . You can’t just hide in your house all day every day after all. Even if you think your life depends on it. There’s only so long you can realistically go without having to buy groceries. Or having to go to work, get your mail.
As I opened the door sitting right in the middle of my porch in plain sight was a handful of rusted nails, tied neatly together with a rubber band . . .
I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but no one. Not a single person in my town has been able to escape “Knock Knocks” prophecies. No matter how careful they’ve been. As I’m sitting here typing this it’s like I can almost hear that wild laughter just outside my window. Cackling at my pathetic attempts to dodge my inevitable future.
Give me prayers, give me good thoughts, give me some kind of way out of this. I don’t want to die. . . But I know a pattern when I see one, and when he knocks on your door your days are short. . .
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/11pry8s/theres_someone_in_your_town_who_knows_things_he/