I think my childhood home wants me back
My childhood home sat at the end of a dead-end road in a rural town, where the trees grew so thick they seemed to swallow the sky. The house itself was old even when we moved in: two stories, white paint peeling in long strips, black shutters hanging crooked, and a wraparound porch that creaked beneath every step. Behind it stood a barn that was slowly collapsing into the earth, and a rusted swing set that groaned whenever the wind picked up. The realtor told my parents the property had “been in the family for generations,” saying it like that was a comforting thing. My father loved old things. My mother loved cheap things. So when they found a five-bedroom farmhouse on ten acres for less than the price of a new car, they bought it without hesitation. I was eight years old, and at first it felt like the greatest adventure of my life.
My younger sister Lily was five. We raced through the empty rooms, our voices echoing off faded wallpaper and polished hardwood. We claimed bedrooms, explored every closet, and dared each other to go into the attic. The attic stretched the full length of the house, filled with dust, trunks, and broken furniture. At the far end, where the roof slanted low, there was a small door set into the wall. It was only about four feet tall and sealed with a tarnished hook-and-eye latch instead of a knob. My father said it probably led to a crawlspace and thought nothing of it. He never opened it.
For the first few months, the house seemed normal. It groaned and creaked like all old houses do. Pipes knocked at night. The wind hissed through the windows. Then Lily got an imaginary friend named Thomas. At dinner she asked if Thomas could have his own plate. She scooted over on the couch to make room for him and whispered to herself in corners of the house. My parents thought it was adorable. I didn’t. One afternoon I asked her what Thomas looked like. She thought for a moment and said, “He’s old. Older than Daddy. And he looks like he forgot where his skin goes.” She said it with the same casual tone she might have used to describe someone wearing mismatched socks.
Not long after that, I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of footsteps in the upstairs hallway. They were slow and uneven. Thump. Drag. Thump. Drag. I assumed it was my father until the steps stopped directly outside my bedroom door. I waited for the knob to turn, but instead I heard breathing. Wet, congested breathing, like someone trying to inhale through a throat full of mud. I pulled my blanket over my head and stayed there until sunrise. My parents dismissed it as a nightmare. Lily only smiled and said, “Thomas likes your room.”
The first impossible thing happened during the winter. A heavy snow had fallen overnight, covering the yard in untouched white. My father was the first outside. Minutes later he shouted for my mother. There was a trail of bare footprints beginning at the tree line behind the barn. The prints crossed the yard, climbed the front porch steps, and ended at our front door. There were no footprints leading away. My father tried to explain it away, but even he looked shaken.
That night the footsteps returned. They stopped outside Lily’s room, and she began screaming. My parents rushed in while I watched from the doorway. Lily was sitting upright in bed, sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. “He wants to go upstairs,” she cried. “He says you locked him out.” The next day my father finally opened the small door in the attic. Behind it was a cramped dirt crawlspace. At first glance it appeared empty, but after several minutes my father backed away, pale and trembling. He said there were deep scratch marks in the dirt, as though something had clawed its way out. That same evening he nailed the little door shut.
For a while, the house quieted. Lily stopped talking about Thomas. The footsteps ceased. My parents relaxed. Then my mother found a collection of black-and-white photographs hidden in a kitchen drawer. They showed the house in every season and across many decades. In each photograph, someone stood in the upstairs window. The figure was blurry, but in one stolen photo I could make out a narrow face, hollow eyes, and a mouth stretched unnaturally wide. The skin around the neck hung loose, like wet fabric. I burned the picture in the backyard, but I could still see it every time I closed my eyes.
The following summer, Lily vanished for two agonizing hours. We searched the entire property while my mother screamed her name. Just as my father reached for the phone to call the police, we heard Lily singing from above us. She was in the attic, curled beside the small nailed-shut door. “Thomas wanted me to see where he sleeps,” she said. My father tore the door open that night. This time the crawlspace did not end after a few feet. It stretched deep into darkness, far beyond where it should have. My father crawled inside with a flashlight. We heard him muttering, then silence, and finally a sharp cry. He scrambled back out with bloodied elbows and refused to tell us what he had seen.
The next day he hired a contractor to seal the opening permanently. The contractor spent less than five minutes in the attic before descending the ladder and refusing the job. As he drove away, he told my father, “You should leave.” My father changed after that. He began sleepwalking. My mother found him standing in the hallway with his eyes closed, facing the ceiling and whispering to himself. He scratched his arms until they bled. One night I woke to find him at the foot of my bed. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Let him wear you.” In the morning he remembered none of it.
By autumn the entire house felt wrong. Rooms remained cold no matter how high we set the heat. The walls smelled damp and earthy. Doors drifted shut on their own. At night we all heard something crawling inside the walls, moving slowly from room to room. Thump. Drag. Thump. Drag. One evening my mother finally snapped. She packed our suitcases and announced we were leaving for my grandmother’s house. My father refused. They argued in the kitchen until my mother screamed that the house was changing him. My father slapped her across the face. The moment he did it, he looked horrified. He stared at his own hand as if it belonged to someone else. Then he whispered, “It doesn’t want us to go.”
Before dawn, my mother loaded Lily and me into the car and drove us away. My father stayed behind to “take care of a few things.” He promised he would meet us by dinner. Two days later, police found him dead in the attic. The official cause was a heart attack, but a detective quietly told my mother that my father had been found halfway inside the crawlspace. There were gouges in the floorboards where he had clawed desperately for purchase, as if something stronger had been pulling him inward.
We never lived in the house again. It changed owners several times, and no family stayed longer than a year. Eventually it was abandoned. Local teenagers broke in and spread stories about the figure in the upstairs window. Three years ago, the house burned to the ground. Everyone assumed whatever had haunted it was finally destroyed.
Last month, after my mother died, I found a cardboard box labeled OLD HOUSE among her belongings. Inside was a VHS tape with a note written in her handwriting: PLAY ONLY IF YOU NEED TO KNOW. I bought a secondhand VHS player and listened. The recording was my father’s voice, shaky and exhausted. He said that deep beneath the crawlspace he had discovered a hidden chamber lined with photographs of every family who had ever lived there. In each picture, one person looked wrong. Their skin hung loose. Their mouth stretched too wide. My father believed the thing beneath the house chose one person from each family and slowly learned to wear them.
Near the end of the tape, my father’s breathing became frantic. “I can hear it now,” he whispered. Then another voice spoke from somewhere near the microphone. It sounded exactly like my father, but the tone was wet and gurgling. “Thank you for keeping the house,” it said. The tape ended.
The next morning I searched online and found photographs of the burned property. Most of the structure was reduced to blackened beams and ash. But in the center of the attic floor was a small rectangular opening. The crawlspace had survived.
Yesterday, a padded envelope arrived with no return address. Inside was a single photograph. It showed my apartment building, taken from across the street. In the upstairs window of my unit, behind the curtains, someone was standing. The image was blurry, but I knew that face. Hollow eyes. Mouth stretching wider than any human mouth should. Skin hanging loosely around the neck, as if it had been put on in a hurry.
I haven’t slept since. Every few hours, I hear footsteps in the hallway outside my apartment. Slow and uneven. Thump. Drag. Thump. Drag. Tonight, they stopped directly outside my door. A voice I know as well as my own whispered through the wood.
“I finally found you.”