Chapter 1.
For privacy's sake, I'm going to call my husband Matthew. And I won't say the city or state we live in. I will also try to make this as short as I can without leaving out any important details.
Let me start off by saying that Matthew and I moved into our dream home two years ago. It's an old, gorgeous house. With creaky hardwood floors, doors that stick in their frames, and a beautiful claw foot tub.
Living there has been perfect. Until January.
In January, on my 25th birthday, we had some friends over for a bonfire. And one of Matthew's friends decided to go exploring in the woods behind the house.
Matthew and I never went back there. Since we bought the house, I had only been a few feet in once.
So this friend ventures into the woods by himself. We had forgotten he was in there when we heard him yell. He yelled for Matthew, who rushed in with a flashlight.
Turns out Jake had stumbled across a body. A crudely buried, completely decomposed body.
The police came, and turned the woods, our yard, and our house into a crime scene. We stayed in a hotel the first two nights after that, and then we were allowed to come home.
That's when it first happened.
We were asleep in our bedroom when I was awakened by a loud scraping noise. I shook Matthew awake, and he got up and went through the house. Nobody was there. No animal scratching at the back door, no prowler trying to get in.
I should mention that we live on a few acres in the middle of nowhere. The closest neighbor we had was a mile away. So we always felt safe and secluded. But finding a dead body behind your house has a way of making you jumpy.
So after he comes back to bed, we are trying to go back to sleep, and we hear the noise again. We determined it was coming from the front hallway that ran in front of our room.
I opened the bedroom door again and saw that the window directly in front of me was open. Not wide open, but there was about three inches of space.
I ran to it, slammed it shut, and peered through. There was nothing on the front porch or in the yard. I locked the window, and went back to bed, shaken.
We don't open that window. Ever. It has been painted shut since we moved in and we could never get it to lift at all.
Over the next few weeks, the scraping noise and open window happened three more times.
Each time it happened, we locked the window. It didn't matter.
One night, I was sitting on the living room sofa watching tv and waiting for Matthew to get home from work. And I heard water running.
I went into the master bathroom, and saw the tub filling up. As I was standing there, turning the faucet off, I watched the stopper at the bottom pop up and out of the drain. The tub emptied, and I called my husband to beg him to speed home.
The next two weeks went by, and the tub kept filling by itself, the window kept opening, and Matthew and I got more and more creeped out.
During that time, the police determined the body in the woods belonged to a woman who lived in the house in the 50s. She had gone missing, and the police had never found her or her husband or their infant son.
At this point, I hadn't told Matthew about the bathtub. Or my worries that by removing the body, we had disturbed the dead woman, and that she was now haunting us. But I didn't have to tell him my suspicion, because he came to me about it three days later.
He told me that he had gotten out of the shower the night before and saw a person in the mirror while brushing his teeth. He had turned around to look where it appeared to be standing in the shower, and there was nothing there. But when he went back to the sink, it was still in the mirror, standing in the shower. He said it was only a dark figure, no distinguishable features. And while he was watching, it reached up a hand toward him. He had jumped and flew around, but there was still nothing in the shower. But this time there was a very clear hand print on the glass shower door.
We were so freaked out in our own home. We talked about the possibility of moving, but we hated the thought. This was our dream home. We wanted to stay. So we decided to put that thought aside and just hope whatever was bothering us would stop.
It didn't. It got worse. One night I was in the kitchen late, and heard the scraping noise at the front window. When I went to check, the window was completely open. This was the first time for that. It was typically only a few inches.
I shut and locked it, and for good measure, did the same for the front door. Matthew was working late that night and I was nervous about being alone.
I went back to the kitchen, only to be disturbed by the sound of the window opening again. Immediately followed by footsteps. I hurried to grab Matthew's shotgun from the hall closet.
I racked it, hoping the noise would scare off whoever was in my house.
When I crept around the corner to the front hall, I heard the footsteps again. The sound was clear, the person was walking down the hall that led from the front door, down the length of the front of the house. There was nothing at the end of that hall though. We thought it was really odd that the hall lead to nothing past our bedroom, but it was true.
I peered around the corner and saw nothing. There was no one there.
And then I heard the sound of a door opening and slamming shut at the end of the empty, dead end hall.
When Matthew got home a while later, I was sitting on the front porch cradling the shotgun.
I honestly felt like I was going insane. I had so clearly heard the footsteps walk down to the end of the hall, and then slam a door that didn't exist. But the window was wide open again. Right after I had locked it. That was the thing I held onto as a sign of my sanity.
That same night, when I told him about the door slam, Matthew walked to the end of the hall. He didn't think I was crazy, but he was showing me that there was nothing there. While he was standing there, he noticed that the floor was warm under his bare feet. The heat was on, because it was February. But there were no air vents in that hall. It was always freezing in the winter. He said he felt warm air coming from the space between the floor and the wall.
He tapped on the wall, and we both heard the hollow noise it made. So we tore down sheetrock.
Behind it was a door. It was identical to every other door in the house, with the white paint and glass doorknob. Terrified, we turned the flashlights on on our phones and opened the door.
It was a small, dusty old nursery. There was a crib in one corner, a rocking chair in another. It was unbelievably creepy. We looked around, and saw that the floor was splattered with old blood. I needed to get out of there. But when we turned to leave, my light hit the rocking chair. There was a woman sitting in it. She was crying as she looked up at me.
For as long as I live, I will never get her image out of my head. I will never be able to forget her gravelly voice as she said "where's my son? What did you do with my son?" She screamed.
Eventually we found out that they found the husband of the dead woman. He was old, in his nineties. And he confessed to killing her. In the nursery. They asked him why they put up a wall rather than just cleaning the nursery up, and he told them it was because every time he went in to clean up the blood, his wife was sitting in the rocking chair, crying.
