The House

When my parents got married, they managed to buy a small, old house in a very strange part of town. The house was located maybe ten feet from the local cemetery. In fact, and entire street was right next to the graveyard, including our house. We were just closer than the others. The place had been renovated and expanded for five years, and it roughly stopped when I was born. Somehow, it took my mom five years to get pregnant with me, even after she was told she could not bare children. Anyway, allegedly, strange things happened in that house, mostly to my mother, but they all stopped when I arrived to the family.

My Dad worked a lot. Over the day he ran his own, small, import-export company, mostly dealing with chemicals needed to make pharmaceutical drugs. But, over the night, he was a musician; an excellent guitarist. He had tons of gigs, and at that point of my parents' lives, that's exactly from where most of the cash was coming from.

Anyway, that kind of work (as a musician) obviously made him stay out very late, sometimes even coming home in the wee hours of the morning. So, my mother was home alone a lot. She had friends over and stuff, but that wasn't a daily occurrence, of course. But when she was alone, she claims that, exactly at midnight, she would hear a knocking noise at the far end of the living room. That part was facing the front fence, which was pretty high (about seven feet), and just right to the fence was the entrance to the graveyard. She never took much heed of it, at first dismissing it as a stray cat, because we did get a lot of animals there, but later on, she got even a little frightened, as the experience continued night after night, and she thought it was some weirdo from the graveyard, because drunkards and druggies were also quite often there.

The house was pretty well secured, even after you'd pass the front gate. The doors were full oak, with a one-touch-lock system integrated within the wood, and it was also bullet proof. And the windows were pretty thick, plus double layered. One night, however, the knocking intensified. Being the nut my mom is, by then she had had enough and unlocked the front door, exited the house, moved around it and came to the external point of where the knocking was coming from. But nothing and nobody was there. She stayed out for several more minutes, eventually coming back into the house. The moment she locked the door, the knocking reoccurred. For the first time, she says, she was frightened. She called the establishment my dad was in and told him to come home as soon as possible. The knocking sounds continued till the point of his arrival. Then they mysteriously stopped. My mom was sitting in the living room when he finally returned from work. Dad asked her what was wrong, but she said she just needed to sleep. After all, it was three in the morning.

The next few days, after hearing the story, my dad insisted on staying home, blowing off two more gigs. And in those two nights, nothing happened. On the third night, he had left again, and at twelve am, the knocking started again. My mom says she got used to it, eventually. As I said before, it stopped when I was born.

But there were more strange things in that house, such as footsteps heard in the attic, before my dad turned it into a kind of penthouse room (to that point, it was a one floor house, but the attic had high ceilings, so it could be used nicely), or things disappearing and being found in the most unusual of places. Sometimes they could hear water running, but all the taps were closed.

I myself, however, have had only one thing happening to me in that place.

When I was around 5 or 6, it was one of those nights where my dad had to go out working again. It was a storm outside, so I couldn't sleep. My room was upstairs, and my door faced the staircase. It was open, so I'd get a little hall light in. I remember looking at the digital watch next to my bed. It read 12:01 AM. At that point, I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I thought it was my dad coming home, because my mom was sleeping fast in the next room. I was young then, and didn't realize that my dad usually, on nights like those, wouldn't come home till at least 4 AM. As the footsteps became louder, the figure became more visible in the dim light. The shape was so dark, I couldn't make anything out except its outline and its eyes. Its eyes? its one thing I'll never forget. They were blood red, and menacing, horrible and evil. I've never been so scared before. Then, I knew it wasn't dad. I closed my eyes, thinking I was imagining it. But it was coming closer and closer, just its legs moving, nothing else, and then it came to the side of my bed. Closing my eyes one last time, and reopening them again? it was gone! I never saw it again, and I've even forgotten it happened for some time. We moved soon after that, but for other reasons. To this day, it still haunts me. To this day, I still don't know exactly what it was.