The following is shared with full permission of the author, Reddit user Aeboco. Originally posted here in NoSleep:
The property that my father built his house on is haunted. That has never been in dispute. The property has been owned by my family since at least the early 1800’s. Several of my ancestors are buried on the property, although no one is quite sure exactly where. The notes in the family bible are vague: “We buried Grandma Polly under her favorite oak tree -September 1851.” Any markers that might have once existed are long gone now.
At the edge of the property is the state road, and beyond that is the subdivision built on an old graveyard that I’ve spoken of before. My father’s house sits on a clearing 500 yards east of that subdivision and 200 yards west of a large creek. And it seems to be where any restless entities like to gather.
My father is a no-nonsense, ex-military, down to earth kind of guy. But while building the house in 1989, something happened. He has never spoken of it to me, I only know that before we moved in the house, it was blessed. And I’m not talking about your traditional “Watch over and bless all who live here” prayers.
My father gathered seven ordained ministers. They blessed the house, anointed the walls inside and out with holy water and remained in the house praying from sundown to sun up. Incense and sage was burned. These were all men that my father knew personally, a couple of them were his close friends. Not a single one would ever set foot back on the property after that night, nor speak of what might have happened.
The first night in our new house, I was 12. As everyone settled down for the night, my father came in my room to say goodnight. We chatted for a few minutes, about the house and move before he became quiet. We sat in silence for a moment, then he took a deep breath and began to speak very seriously.
“I want you to know that you are safe here.” He paused a moment before continuing, “You might hear or even see things here, things that might frighten you. But you need to know that as long as you are in the house, you’re safe and nothing can hurt you.” His gaze drifted to the window and the pitch black outside it.
“We can’t keep everything out, there’s too much here. But we made sure the bad ones can’t get in.” He was talking more to himself at this point and I’m not even sure he realized that he was speaking out loud. He stared at the darkness outside so long that I looked too, expecting to see something outside. But the night was so dark, the glass only acted as a mirror. Finally, he seemed to rouse himself and looked at me again.
“No matter what you see, or what you hear, as long as you are inside it can’t hurt you. Nothing bad can get in here. But if you ever hear anything outside in the dark, you come get me. And whatever you do, don’t look at it and don’t EVER speak to it.”
He looked at me and I nodded, but that wasn’t enough. “Promise me! You’ll never speak to anything that’s out in the dark! And never go out after dark alone!” His insistence frightened me, but I agreed in a trembling voice. He smiled weakly and squeezed my shoulder.
After he left, I found myself staring at the window, trying to see past the reflection of the room into the dark. It was a long time before I drifted off that night.
I did see and hear many things at that house. And true to my father’s word, everything that I saw inside the house seemed harmless. There was a man dressed in old fashioned clothes that I would see standing behind me in reflections. He never seemed sinister, just watched me as though wondering who I was. When I would turn around, no one was there. Sometimes, I would hear a woman humming or even quietly singing the hymn “Amazing Grace”. Or during the night, I would hearing what sounded like a child sobbing in my closet.
When the moon was full, you could see them outside – shadows of children running through the yard at the edge of the woods , or the man in the white shirt who walked slowly along the creek, back and forth all night. I was always alone when it happened and passed it off to an overactive imagination for years. Until I heard the same stories from others, some who lived there while I did, some who moved in long after I’d moved out. I never spoke of anything that happened there until many years later.
On nights when there was no moon though, something else walked outside. I never saw it, but I heard it many times. It seemed to take a special interest in me. It would beat on the wall, the sound of angry knocking. Sometimes, it rapped on the window; a window that was 15 feet off the ground. Other nights, I would hear it walking on the roof, slow, heavy clunking steps from one end of the house to the other. As if it were searching for a way in. In the beginning, I would wake my father when it happened. But after a year or so, I just began to ignore it. I think that made it angry. I also began to think of it as something weak. That is a mistake that I have always regretted making.
It was my father, stepmother, older stepsister and I for the first year or so. At one point, my 15 year old step cousin came to stay with us – his parents couldn’t keep him out of trouble and thought my dad could help. None of my step family ever mentioned encountering anything strange; my father simply warned them of the wild animals in the nearby woods and that seemed to keep them indoors at night.
Until one night, a bunch of the adults decided to go out together and somehow decided that our house was the best place for all the kids to hang out.
My dad gathered all of us in the living room and admonished us not to venture outside. “There are dangerous things out there – mountain lions, bears, copperheads and such.” I locked eyes with him and nodded slightly. He had just silently put me in charge of keeping everyone inside and safe.
It was me (14/F), my stepsister, Sally (17/F), my step cousin, Will (15/M), Kelly (13/F), Stacy (13/F) and Stacy’s younger brother, John (12/M).
Fortunately, it was cold that night and no one had any interest in going outside. This was in 1992 and there was no cable TV in our area. We made nachos and argued over which movie to watch. We tried playing a board game and ended up in the kind of argument that only Monopoly can produce. Finally, Kelly and Stacy suggested telling ghost stories. At first it was fun, until we realized that no one had any stories the others hadn’t heard before. Then Sally decided that we should have a seance.
Now, you would think that the idea of communicating with the dead, in a house that I knew was haunted, would frighten me. But remember, I had been assured that nothing evil could get inside the house (and to this day, that seems to be the truth). We all thought it was a great idea. We pulled the coffee table to the middle of the living room, and placed lit candles on it. We turned off all the lights and sat in a circle on the floor around the table.
Sally began, calling out to “whatever may be on the other side of the veil”. She asked the kind of silly questions that you’d expect, “Who will I marry? Does John have a crush on anyone?”, etc. Then Will chimed in, pretending he was possessed by the ghost of Julia Childs (and doing a creepily accurate imitation of her). We were all rolling with laughter.
Then Sally gasped and dramatically announced that she sensed an evil spirit. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to scare the younger kids. I chimed in, “Yes…yes, it wants something….it wants….souls.” The younger kids giggled nervously as Sally and I “communed” with the evil spirit.
“No,” Will corrected, “it wants one of us. Mwahaha!”
“Yes! Yes!” Sally hissed. We were really getting into it now. I closed my eyes and rocked back and forth.
“It’s watching you. It knows what you did. It knows what you are. And its coming for you…” I was proud of the creepy whisper effect I’d produced. I could hear one of the younger kids gasp. Sally began to hum, a low, steady buzz. I continued to rock and repeat “It’s coming for you.” in my creepy whisper. Any second now, Will would do the jump scare and I steeled myself for it. I figured he’d yell boo and smack the table.
Instead, he let out the most gut wrenching scream that I’ve ever heard. That scream was pure, unadulterated terror. I opened my eyes and looked over at him. He was staring past the younger kids, out the window. His face was white and he was trembling, his breath coming out in grunts.
We all turned to the window in unison. The candlelight faintly reflected us against the glass, but beyond the window was pitch black darkness. There was nothing there, but we all stared as Will shakily whispered, “Did you see it? Did you see it?!? It looked right at me!” We turned back to him shaking our heads, we’d seen nothing.
“Jesus Christ, what was it, IT LOOKED RIGHT AT ME!!!”
Will jumped up and began turning on the lights. He paced back and forth, clearly upset. The rest of us just looked at each other uneasily. It was clear that this was no longer a joke.
Will mumbled to himself as he paced and no longer seemed to be aware of the rest of us. His pacing took him farther across the house each time and he was becoming more and more agitated. As he paced into the kitchen, we all looked at each, unsure what to do. And that’s when we heard the back door open, then slam shut. I ran to the door, hoping to catch Will before he was too far away. I turned on the porch light, illuminating a large portion of the back yard. I thought I saw movement at edge of the light, but it was gone before I could be certain.
I opened the door and called out for Will, being careful not to cross the threshold. The others crowded around me in the doorway and called out. We listened but there was only silence. For about five minutes, nothing moved or made a sound.
And then a loud crash came from the woods. It moved along the creek, sounding like something was knocking down trees as it went. Outside the small circle of light the the porch light provided, the darkness was unbroken. We couldn’t see what made the noise, but it sounded huge.
Then we heard Will scream. It was an agonized wail, that didn’t seem like it would ever end. And then the sound began to move, as if something had him and was speeding off into the woods with him. His screams continued until they were too faint to be heard.
We stood there in the new silence, hearts racing, pale and shaking. I closed the door and locked it. And then I locked all the other doors. We sat in the living room, silently staring at the floor until our parents arrived a couple of hours later. The others babbled incoherently about a monster as they tried to explain Will’s disappearance. I just sat quietly, ashamed.
I should have known better.
I should have closed the curtains.
I should have said no to the seance.
I should have kept my mouth shut when Sally spoke of evil spirits.
I should have kept them safe.
The adults wanted to search for Will, but my father assured them that he was just acting out again, trying to scare us and that he would come back when he got cold or hungry. He finally convinced them all to go home. My stepmother and stepsister finally went to bed; it was obvious that both knew something was wrong, but they trusted my father to take care of it.
I sat on the couch in silence and watched as my father got out his hunting rifles, inspecting each one carefully. He never spoke, but I could feel his disappointment rolling off of him in waves. We sat in the dark, watching the windows. But nothing ever came back.
At some point, I fell asleep and my father carried me to my bed. I woke up late the next day, so I only know what my stepsister told me.
My father went into the woods after sun had risen. It took him nearly an hour to find Will. He was sitting under an oak tree, rocking and whispering to himself. He wouldn’t acknowledge my father at all. My father had to half carry him back to the house. The entire time he whispered incessantly, “it’s looking at me, it’s looking at me, it’s looking at me.” As far as I know, that’s all he ever said from that day on.
He was taken to the hospital, where they ran tests. After several weeks, they finally diagnosed him as having had a schizophrenic break. He was committed to a mental ward.
Things were tense for a long while at home. I withdrew from everything and my family worried about me. But I couldn’t talk to them, not even my father. Every night, the same thoughts ran through my head.
I should have known better.
I should have closed the curtains.
I should have said no to the seance.
I should have kept my mouth shut when Sally spoke of evil spirits.
I should have kept them safe.
I waited for the knocking sounds each night. But days went by, then weeks and then months without them. I slowly came out of my shell. I began to convince myself that Will had been mentally unstable. The sounds we heard in the woods were made by him, as he ran from the imagined terrors in his troubled mind.
I began to ignore the strange things that I heard and saw in the house. I told myself they weren’t real and eventually, they stopped happening. I did develop recurring headaches after that, but headaches seemed like a fair trade for not being crazy. Because I had finally convinced myself that I had made all of it up. And since my father didn’t speak if it anymore, that was easy to believe.
Until the fall of 1997. I was getting ready to start college and life was wonderfully hectic. I stayed up late one night and finally passed out from sheer exhaustion. I was sound asleep when it rapped at my window. My window that is 15 feet off the ground.
If there’d been no moon, I wouldn’t have looked, so ingrained was the superstition even though I no longer believed it. But the moon was full and there was plenty of light. Even so, I couldn’t see it at first. It’s outline seemed to shift and sway, as though it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. I tried to convince myself that it was the shadow of a tree blowing in the wind. But then it tightened into a solid figure.
And there at my window, stood Will. Except it obviously wasn’t Will, this thing looked like 15 year old Will, not the 20 year old he actually was. It smiled at me, its lips pulling back farther than humanly possible. Its eyes were swirling black and it had more teeth than my brain could process. It spoke then, and its gravelly voice will haunt me to my grave.
“I’m looking at you now.”
I hid in my closet for the rest of the night. As soon as dawn broke, I went to my parents room, but they are already gone. I got in my car and drove straight to the college. When my parents called, I expected to be lectured for leaving without saying goodbye. But they wanted to apologize for not being home. Sometime during the night, they’d received a call. Will had passed away in his sleep. I wasn’t surprised.
That night, something rapped at my dorm window. It knocked for hours, but I hid my head under the covers. I didn’t sleep. The next night, it happened again. My roommate arrived the next day and I hoped her presence would keep it at bay.
But the knocking came again that night. My roommate didn’t hear it. I tried to ignore it. But after weeks of the knocking, every night, I couldn’t go on. I dropped out and went back home. My father welcomed me back. My stepmother did not. She didn’t understand and we wouldn’t explain. Their marriage eventually fell apart. I wanted to feel guilty , but nothing could have pried me from that house, where I knew I was safe.
Its been almost twenty years. My father showed me how to protect a house, so that it can’t get in. We suspect it has to be invited in, but I take no chances. I was finally able to move out on my own. But I cannot go outside before sunrise and must always be back before dusk.
Only my father knows the truth. Everyone else thinks I’m nyctopohobic. But I’m not afraid of the dark.
I’m afraid of what walks in the dark, rapping at my window and wearing other people’s faces.
I’m afraid, because it’s looking at me now.
The Favored One 