Forum:Why I Moved Out of My First House in Less Than a Month

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Why I Moved Out of My First House in Less Than a Month

A few years ago, I moved into my first house. It was a small two-story house, but it was only me and my wife Avery who were living there, so we decided to buy it. When we finally arrived there, I noticed a little door screwed into the coat closet by the front door. While I initially brushed it off as an unusual choice by the previous owners, I noticed that every single closet in the house had one of these odd doors in it. Curious as to what their purpose was, I opened one connected to a bedroom closet on the second floor, only for it to reveal a small dark room filled with insulation and large aluminum pipes. While my curiosity was sated, for the time being, I found it odd that not only did the first floor have these doors, but only the ones on the first floor were locked. When I pointed this out to Avery, she had a baffled look on her face for a moment before saying that it was likely just a leftover from an old house renovation and nothing more.

Now, these doors didn’t look like normal doors. Rather, they looked like cupboard doors, similar to the one in Coraline. Avery had lived in a house with similar doors on the second floor, and she said that they produced a rattling noise late at night. When I questioned her on what that noise could be, she said that her parents told her that it was just the house settling at night, although the look on her face clearly showed that she didn’t believe that theory at all.

I hadn’t heard a peep from those doors until a little over a week later. As we went to sleep in the master bedroom, I heard a faint thumping noise coming from the one in our closet. As I was about to get up and investigate it, it suddenly moved to the guest bedroom upstairs, where it stayed for close to 30 seconds before disappearing entirely. I looked at the digital clock on the dresser next to me. 1:34 AM. Realizing that I had been lost in my thoughts the entire night, I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep.

The next day, I woke up to see Avery no longer next to me in bed. Panicking, I rolled over and looked at my alarm clock. 10:44 AM. I relaxed, knowing that she always gets up around 8:00, so she (obviously) wouldn’t be in bed. I slowly got out of bed and meandered over to the kitchen, where I saw her pouring herself a cup of coffee. She looked over at my disheveled self and chuckled.

“Well, looks like someone got a good night’s sleep! You want me to pour you a cup of coffee, babygirl?” With a faint blush creeping onto my cheeks, I smiled and rolled my eyes.

“Don’t call me that, you know how it gets me. And yes, I would like some coffee. Do we have any creamer?” With an infectious smile and a nod, she looked into a box and pulled out a giant tub of small creamer packets that she likely stole from numerous breakfast places.

“Of course we do! Let’s see, we have Hazelnut, French Vanilla, some Irish Crème I got fro-”

Thump. Thump. Thump.

As the thumping continued, my eyes moved towards the direction of the noise. It stopped less than 10 seconds later, just as suddenly as it had started. As Avery looked at me in a mixture of confusion and fear, I shakily stirred a packet of French Vanilla creamer into my coffee.

“… That didn’t happen during the day in my old house.” I put my coffee down and hugged her, as I could tell she was about to go from confusion into full-blown panic.

“It’s probably just some old pipes in the house, don’t worry.” With this, she relaxed and kissed me on the cheek. As she smiled, I smirked and said, “And if it ends up being some demonic entity, I’ll protect you from it.” She gave me a glare that would have been threatening had her adorable smile not been there, and she gave me a light slap on the cheek that felt more like she patted me than anything threatening.

“Don’t make me worry like that! I already do enough worrying for the both of us.” She gave me a concerned glance. “And, uh, I didn’t hit your cheek too hard, right?” I shook my head no, and with that she skipped away, humming to herself. While I had said it as a joke, the thought did strike me: what if it was some demonic entity haunting the house?

After that, we didn't hear any more thumping noises. However, I realized a few days later that, rather than stop entirely, the noises were now the sound of something scratching at the door, kind of like a cat that had been put outside and wanted to come back in. After several days of this, Avery got so terrified that she refused to sleep in any of the bedrooms, opting to sleep on the couch instead.

Finally fed up with them, I vowed that the next time I heard them, I would grab my baseball bat and give whatever the hell’s in there a good beating. That night, when I heard the noises, I immediately grabbed my bat and forced the door open, expecting there to be something in there. Instead, there was nothing but a small, empty black room with some insulation. Baffled, I flailed my bat in the room, expecting to at least hit something. As I closed the door, from the corner of my eye, I saw a black figure dart from one side of the small room to the other. Not wanting to investigate any further, I ran to the living room where Avery was sleeping, and slept on the floor next to her, with my bat beside me for good measure. As I started to drift off, I started to wonder how a room like that could exist, when I knew for a fact that the wall was one of the exterior walls of the house

Halfway through the night, I woke up in a cold sweat from a nightmare that I don’t remember anymore. My panicked state had woken up Avery as well, who asked me what was wrong. Without hesitating, I told her, “We have to move out.” And so we did. In the short time span of a week, we re-rented our old apartment and crammed what few belongings we had into our car. We just moved in, and even though I still like it, I can’t say I like the changes that the landlord made to the place.

For starters, they’ve put a small door in the back wall of the closet.

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