I never had any issues with my wife, Susie, until we started house hunting. Before that, she had this romanticized idea that an old house with decades of history in the walls would be a great place to settle down and finish raising her daughter and our boys, but I never took it seriously.
I guess that was my mistake. As soon as we started looking for whatever we could find in our price range, Susie's daydreams became an obsession. Anything that didn't look and feel like an old house was immediately disqualified, regardless of location, size, or anything else practical. The rest of the family's wishes- the twins wanting their own rooms for once, Kiera's demands for a larger bedroom, my hope that we could get a place with a garage- were nowhere on my wife's radar.
Then, when the stress of it all became nearly unbearable, we found the house. In a quiet little neighborhood just beyond the city limits of Portland, we found the place, surrounded by trees so dense that we could only see the turret peak from above them.
The roofed porch nearly surrounded the entire front and right side of the house, the walls a pale yellow, the fence a weathered white. The inside was better kept, clearly worked on some time in the last decade. The staircase didn't creak, the wallpaper wasn't peeling away, and the kitchen seemed fully modernized. The upstairs, specifically two of the bedrooms and the turret, still needed work. Beyond that one issue, it was like a normal house wearing an old home's face.
None of us loved the house, but we could appreciate how it felt like an impossible compromise had fallen into our laps. The twins, Kevin and Jason, would still share a room, but it was even bigger than our old master bedroom, so they each had their personal space. I didn't get a garage, but there was enough room on the property for me to eventually build one. Kiera decided to convert the basement into a bedroom until I finished renovating one of the upstairs rooms. Susie didn't like how "fresh" the inside of the house felt, but she adored the view from outside, and spent a lot of her free time relaxing on a rocking chair on the porch.
It wasn't perfect by any means, but we could all settle on it without too much complaint.
The issues didn't start until a few nights after we all moved in. We weren't even done unpacking when Kiera started wandering around the house in the middle of the night.
The first time I noticed, I'd fallen asleep while watching TV in the living room. I was woken up by odd thumping sounds from near the kitchen, and when I got up to see what they were, I realized that they were coming from the door to the basement.
I opened the door, and it was completely black. Before I could turn on the light, I saw something shifting in the dark below, and was so startled that I almost jumped. I turned on the light, the sudden brightness stinging my eyes, and when I looked down, Kiera was halfway up the stairs, shielding her eyes from the light.
"What the hell are you doing?" I asked her.
She kept crawling for a moment, then gave up. "I can't make it," she muttered. "I'm too weak."
I walked down to her and held out my hand. "Come here, kid," I said, pulling her up when she took my hand. I brought her to the living room, where I sat her down on the couch. I was about to ask her what was going on when she passed out. I wanted to wake her back up, but she looked so peaceful, so I decided to deal with it in the morning.
That was... not a fun conversation. I told Susie about what happened first, and instead of asking me what I thought we should do about it, she stormed downstairs and accused Kiera of taking drugs. That alone was bad, and Kiera's expletive-filled response didn't make things better. Susie got so caught up in grounding Kiera for the cursing that she completely dropped the original issue.
We didn't get time to completely forget it, however, as Kiera's nighttime wanderings continued. Sometimes she'd simply walk around the first floor, falling back asleep somewhere in the living room or occasionally on the kitchen floor. One morning, we found her dead asleep, halfway up the stairs to the second floor. Another morning, we couldn't find her until Kevin went outside to check the mail and nearly had a heart attack when he saw her sleeping on Susie's rocking chair. We knew there was a problem, but after Susie searched through Kiera's room while she was at school and found no drugs, we had to start considering other options.
It all came to a head after about a month of this, a few days before we were going to bring Kiera to a doctor to see if she had some kind of sleepwalking disorder. Kevin was woken up by the sound of something in the kitchen shattering. He ran straight to our room, telling me that he thought someone was in the house.
I ran downstairs and found Kiera kneeling the ground. She held her hands out to me, showing me shards of a broken plate, and smiled. "Don't worry. I'm cleaning it up. See?"
I brought her to the trash can, where she let the shards fall out of her hands and into the bin. Her palms had small cuts all over them, like she'd been holding the glass together.
"What were you doing down here?" I asked her.
She just smiled. "I didn't mean it," she said before wandering towards the living room, where she would again pass out for the night.
Susie took the news of the accident badly. She wouldn't listen to reason when I told her that the cuts were clearly not meant to be some sort of self-inflicted wound. I asked her to keep an eye on Kiera while I was at work, and she agreed that we would decide what to do together when I got home.
Instead, Kiera was gone by the time I got back. Without consulting me, Susie had her committed to a hospital downtown. I tried to convince her that it was a horrible thing to do, and that Kiera wasn't suicidal. Susie shrugged off my concerns, telling me that she wasn't willing to risk her daughter's life- emphasis on her daughter.
That was the first time anyone had used that against me. Honestly, after everything that's happened since, I don't know if I can forgive her for that.
Things were getting tense around the house again, and not just between Susie and me. The twins wouldn't stop arguing, and in a huff, Jason decided to spend the night in Kiera's room so he could have some peace and quiet. He would have taken the couch, but I'd been sleeping down there since Kiera was committed.
I was woken up by the sound of Jason screaming. I ran down the steps to the basement, terrified, and found the room empty. "Jason?" I called out, and to my relief, he crawled out from under the bed.
I helped him up. "What are you doing down there, buddy?" I asked him, checking to make sure he wasn't hurt.
He tried to say something, but couldn't get it out, crying into my pajama shirt instead. I grabbed a blanket and carried him up to the living room, where I got him to the couch.
When he got back to sleep, I returned to Kiera's room and started looking through the place, driven by a paranoid idea that she'd been hiding something down there and Jason had sampled some of her stash out of curiosity. Not my proudest moment, I know, but it made the most sense at the time.
I didn't like being in the room. Besides the obvious feeling that I was invading a teenage girl's private space, something in the air felt wrong. I couldn't give the feeling any clear shape, but it felt... oppressive. Whatever was going wrong in this house- other than my wife's less than stellar decision making- was centered around this room. I needed to know if Kiera had something to do with it.
Beyond the shelves that were built into the walls, Kiera didn't have much in the way of furniture, so there weren't a lot of options as far as hiding spaces were concerned.
I turned the place upside down and found nothing. I even pulled up the mattress and searched under the bed frame, but I couldn't find anything at all to fit the drug theory. All I'd done was make a mess that I'd have to clean up later and violate my stepdaughter's privacy just like her mother had done before.
Defeated, I returned to the living room and napped on my recliner while trying to keep an eye on Jason.
That morning, I asked Jason what had happened, not bothering to bring it up with Susie first. Jason couldn't remember much, only that he saw shadows moving and thought he wasn't alone in the bedroom anymore. He tearfully insisted, however, that it wasn't a nightmare. "I saw it, then I hid, and then you found me. It was real, Dad, I promise. Please don't send me away."
Hearing that broke my heart. I told him not to repeat what he saw to his mother or Kevin, and that I'd be able to keep him safe. I didn't have any say in whether Kiera would come home, but I wouldn't let either of my boys get taken away as well.
During a lunch break at work the next day, I visited Kiera at the hospital. She only agreed to see me if I promised to not bring her mother with me, terms I gladly agreed to. She looked tired, but otherwise healthy. "You look better," I said, trying to break the ice.
"Well, it sucks here, but at least no one think I'm a druggie," she snapped.
"That's fair. Listen, I need to ask you about what you experienced."
Kiera grimaced. "Oh, did you pivot to me being crazy, yet? My doctors keep circling back to that one, so it wouldn't surprise me."
I rubbed my eyes, frustrated with her frustration and exhausted after spending half the night trying to sleep on a recliner. "I don't think you're crazy, I think something's happening at home. Whatever it is, you were unlucky enough for it to happen to you first, but then Jason had... an episode... after sleeping in your room last night. He-"
"Why was he in my room?!" she snapped, and I saw the childish territorial anger that I'd missed since she'd been committed. A teenager being a teenager again, if only for a moment.
"He wanted a room for himself for the night after an argument with Kevin, but that's not the point, okay? Jason said he saw something in the darkness, and it scared the hell out of him. I need to know what's going on, and your room seems to be at the center of it, so I need to know if you saw anything like that."
"Jason?" The anger was replaced by concern. "Is he okay?"
"He had a rough night, but he's fine, just worried about this whole thing. Anyway, I need to know-"
"I didn't see anything," Kiera interrupted. "Maybe the first couple nights, I don't know. I kept feeling light-headed before going to sleep, but things didn't go weird until I started wandering around. And no, I don't know why I did that. I felt like I was being pulled along, like I was sleepwalking, but I could see it happening. I don't know why, but it wasn't some shadow things and it definitely wasn't drugs."
"Okay, thank you," I said, accepting what she was saying. "The issue, then, is what's behind this whole thing. If it's not drugs or shadow things, then what is it? Something in the walls? Some kind of mold?"
Kiera shook her head. "I don't think so. The basement was worked on before we moved in, so I'm sure it up to code or whatever. It gave me weird vibes, so I didn't like to be down there unless I was going to bed, but it looks nice." She considered it for a moment, then laughed. "Hey, maybe Mom got lucky and it's haunted or something."
"Maybe," I agreed, perhaps taking that idea too seriously.
We spent the rest of our time talking about Kiera's experiences in the hospital. She'd made some friends with other girls, and while it was sad to hear that there was a whole community of young troubled kids for her to meet, I was happy to hear that she had people to bond with, that she wasn't alone.
I promised her that I'd try to get everything figured out, both with the family and the house, and hugged her goodbye. Fuck whatever Susie says, I thought to myself, this girl's my daughter.
When I got home that night, I replaced the doorknob to the basement with a knob that locked from the other side, keeping the only keys for myself. Whatever was going on in the basement, I wouldn't let anyone get hurt by it.
Kevin watched me install the new lock, and laughed at it. "Is that for Kiera?" he asked.
"That's not funny, kid," I snapped.
"Sorry, Dad." he said. "So what's it for?"
I pointed down the steps. "There's something wrong with that room, and I don't think it's safe," I admitted. "So I'm locking it up."
Kevin laughed again. "Yeah, but if a burglar comes through that door, couldn't they just unlock it from their side?"
"I- shut- go to your room." I said, flustered. Kevin slunk away, and I returned to my work.
I spent my free time over the next week looking into the house, but the information was sparse. The deed seemed to spend most of it's time in the hands of real estate companies, but ownership briefly hot-potatoed between a few companies and a man named Theodore Howard in the 70s before some woman named Muriel Grady bought the property and held onto it for decades. She sold it off to another real estate company in the early 2000s, and since then, it stayed off the market until we bought the place from them.
The strangest thing is that, despite my suspicions, I didn't find anything connected to this house. No murders, no violent happenings, nothing at all that would lead to a haunting of any kind. For all I could tell, no one had even lived in the house before we did. Whatever was coming from that basement, it didn't seem to have a trail for me to follow.
Something had to be done, and whatever it was, it had to be taken care of before I could even try to bring Kiera home. Frustrated with the lack of clarity my research had given me, I grabbed my blanket one night and went into the basement. If nothing else, a night down there would allow me to understand what Kiera and Jason had gone through.
It still felt as unwelcoming and intrusive as it did before, but I tried to ignore the feeling. The mess I'd made was still there, so I put everything back into place. Laying my blanket on the ground (using Kiera's bed would have felt too intrusive, even after previously trashing her room), I tried to calm my beating heart down and let myself fade off to sleep.
The light-headed feeling came to me after what felt like hours. I wasn't drifting off to sleep, but I was well on my way. The uneasy feelings were fading away.
A surprising wave of boredom came to me, and I wanted nothing more than to find something interesting to do. It almost felt like a sugar rush, or like I'd taken a moderately effective edible, something I hadn't done since I was Kiera's age.
I held strong, instead focusing on where I was and what I wanted to do. I stared at the ceiling, and as my eyes continued to adjust to the dark, I could see the general shapes of the room around me in my peripheral vision. The darker parts of the darkness started to sway- move, even- and I could feel the reverberations of their movement through the floor. It was like my decision not to wander lead to the rest of the room doing so instead.
The shadows shrank and grew, pushing together and pulling apart from one another. I could feel a childlike terror building as the darker darknesses seemed to get deeper, closer, but I wouldn't let myself budge.
Then the whispering began. Different voices, all coming from the far end of the room, opposite the door to the stairs. The shadows danced, as if preparing to welcome some great and terrible thing, and I couldn't help but crawl to my feet. I didn't realize until I was standing up that my face was covered in sweat, my pajama shirt stuck against my chest.
A pounding sound came from the wall, and I ran for the door, flicking the light switch for the stairwell. Light poured over me, stinging my eyes. "No, goddammit," I grumbled, willing myself not to run away.
I turned around and took another step in the room, holding onto the door frame like my life depended on it. From the other side of the room, I heard the voices again. The wall pounded again, shaking the pictures Kiera had hung near the bookshelf, and then silence.
Then, from the darkness, four simple words. "I see a light."
Screaming, I ran up the stairs and flung the door open. Without looking back, I slammed the door shut, pulling the keys from my pajama pocket and locking it. After considering what Kevin said earlier, I grabbed a chair from the dining room and jammed it against the door.
"What's going on?" Susie called out to me from the stairway to the second floor. "Why are you so sweaty? What's with the chair?"
"We're leaving," I said. "Get dressed and pack some things. I'll make sure the boys are ready."
"But what-"
"Now!" I roared at her, my fear and impatience getting the best of me. After a moment, I held up a hand. "Sorry, but it's not safe here, okay? We need to go."
We made quick work of getting our things together. Within ten minutes, Susie already had the boys in the car and a few suitcases full of clothes in the trunk. Before I left the house for the last time, I pressed an ear against the door to the basement and listened. There were no thumps, no whispers, nothing.
Nothing, as still as any empty room- or grave- should be.
We didn't return. I paid a moving company to pack our things while we stayed at a hotel, and after a few weeks of searching, we moved back into an apartment even smaller than the one we'd originally moved out of. It was cramped, especially after I convinced Susie to bring Kiera home, but we made it work.
The house is up for sale again, but at this point, I'll accept a loss if someone takes it off my hands. A few interested potential buyers have already contacted me, mostly real estate companies as well as a representative of a Grady family, though I'm not sure if there's any relation to Muriel.
Whoever puts ink to paper, I'll give them a heads up about the basement after the deal's done. It may be selfish to do so, but they'd be getting more warning than my family did.
I'm left wondering what the point of it all was. Did some force want us out of the house? Were they trying to pull my family apart? Honestly, whether it got what it wanted- or whether it even exists at all- I'll gladly close that door behind me and lock it for good.
My family's together again, and I won't let anything pull us apart.
