The Footsteps Always Stopped at My Daughter's Door

We bought an old house cheap, the kind of deal that should make you ask questions, and for the first month it was just a lovely old house. Then the footsteps started.

Every night, always after midnight, footsteps crossed the upstairs hallway. Slow, heavy, deliberate, the creak of old boards under real weight, from the top of the stairs along the hall. And every night they stopped at the same place: outside my young daughter's bedroom door. They would cross, stop, and there would be silence, a long waiting silence, right outside her room. Then nothing until the next night.

I did all the sensible things. I checked for animals, for settling pipes, for a branch on the roof. I set up a camera in the hall. The camera caught the sound, clear as anything on the recording, the footsteps crossing and stopping, but it showed the empty hallway the whole time, nothing walking, nothing there, just the boards flexing under weight that had no body.

Then my daughter, four, started doing something new. She began leaving her closet door open at night, insisting on it, crying if we closed it. When I asked her why, she said, simply, that she left it open "so he can get out." When I asked who, she said "the man who walks in the hall. He comes from the closet. He does not like it closed."

That was the night I really looked at her closet. At the back, low on the wall, in the old plaster below the shelf, there were handprints. Dark, worn into the surface, small and then larger, as if hands had pressed and dragged there many times over many years, at the height of someone crouched inside. They did not wipe off. They were part of the wall.

We moved within the month. I never learned the history of that house, and I decided I did not want to. Some deals are cheap for a reason, and some closets are left open for one.