My Daughter Said the Man in the Attic Was "Waiting to Be Let Down"

My daughter, four, was a great sleeper until we moved into the old house. There she began fighting bedtime, hard, every night, with the same reason each time, delivered not with tantrum energy but with a strange flat seriousness that unsettled me more than screaming would have.

She said there was a man in the attic. She said he was waiting to be let down. Not to come down. To be let down, as if he needed permission, or help. She said he stood right above her bed and waited, and that he had been waiting a long time, and that he wanted us to open the door.

Here is the thing. Her bedroom did not have attic access. There was no hatch, no pull-down ladder, nothing on that ceiling. I checked, more than once, standing on a chair, running my hand over smooth painted plaster. There was nothing above her room but roof, as far as I knew.

She kept saying it, calmly, for two weeks. The man in the attic is waiting to be let down. Finally, unnerved, I got a contractor to look at the roof space for my own peace of mind. He went up through the only hatch in the house, in the hallway, and crawled across.

He came down quiet. Over her bedroom, sealed behind a section of newer plasterboard that did not match the rest, there was an old boarded-up hatch, painted over from the room side so you would never know, that opened into the attic directly above where her bed stood. And in the attic, positioned to face that sealed hatch from above, sat a single small wooden chair.

We moved. I never opened that hatch. My daughter, once we left, slept fine and forgot all about it, the way children do. I have not forgotten. Someone put a chair up there, facing a door, waiting to be let down.