The Footsteps Stop at the Nursery

I want to lead with the architectural fact, because it's the whole problem: we live in a single-storey bungalow. There is no upstairs. Above our bedroom ceiling is a shallow, uninhabitable roof void — I've been up there, it's insulation and cobwebs and a crawl-height gap you couldn't stand in, let alone walk across.

Something walks across it. Every night, between roughly 1 and 2 a.m., slow, deliberate footsteps cross what would be the landing if we had one — heel-toe, heel-toe, the unmistakable gait of a person, not the skitter of an animal or the tick of cooling timber. They start above the living room, cross above the hall, and stop, every single night, directly above the nursery door. And then nothing. No return journey. They simply arrive at the nursery and cease, as if whoever it is stands there, listening, the way I stand there when I check on my daughter.

I've done everything. Recorded it — the recordings have it, heavy and rhythmic, and every skeptic says 'expanding timber' and every skeptic has never heard timber walk with a limp, because there's a hitch in it, a slight drag on every fourth step. Went into the void mid-footstep with a torch, heart in my mouth, and found the insulation undisturbed, the cobwebs unbroken, nothing capable of bearing weight and nothing bearing it. Set up a camera in the void: it records the sound, on nights I'm lying in bed hearing the same sound live through the ceiling, but shows nothing moving.

The previous owner, when I finally tracked her down and asked with as much dignity as the question allows, was quiet, then said: 'Does it still stop at the small back bedroom?' The nursery is the small back bedroom. She didn't elaborate beyond that, except to say her children were grown before they told her they'd heard it too, and that it never came down, and never did any harm, and that she'd chosen, in the end, to think of it as 'someone checking the children were tucked in.'

That's what I think now too. I have to. My daughter sleeps under those final footsteps every night, and I've decided the thing that walks a landing we don't have is doing exactly what I do — arriving at her door, making sure she's safe, and going no further.