Stories

One evening, while sitting in my car, I saw that many of friends were commenting on my Frank’s Facebook wall. Saying things like rest in peace, and words of goodbyes. My friend was dead.

I couldn’t get myself to comment on his wall, but I did message back and forth with his mom and his brother. My best friends have reached out to me to hang out and talk about the whole thing, but I’m not ready.

I was supposed to meet him that day. We were supposed to hang out, but I chose to stay in. I don’t know, I just didn’t want to go out, I felt tired and got a headache trying to come up with an excuse not to go.

Now, looking at the last conversation I had with him, I just see his “whatever man, I’ll text you later”. That was his last message to me.

We were supposed to check out the new coffee shop by our high school. They were hosting an open mic night. It was supposed to be a good night, but instead he called up one of his other friends, and got in a car accident and died.

Two nights after he passed, the events started.

My phone would ring at 3am, a phone call from an abnormally long number. I picked up the first couple of times, but all I could hear was static. Once I stopped answering, I started getting random text messages from those similar numbers, but with jumbled up text characters. Like the kind you see on a corrupted computer file.

This went on for three weeks before things got scarier.

One night, I felt someone tug on my sleeve and heard my name being whispered while I was trying to sleep and my phone started ringing once again. It all happened so fast, that I thought I must have still been asleep.

Half awake, I answered it, and I heard my name being whispered. This must be some type of prank, I remember thinking. When I hung up, I kept my eyes open toward the ceiling, barely illuminated by the light coming from the window, when I heard the soft calling sound when you’re the one calling someone and are waiting for them to answer.

I was dialing some number by accident. When I checked who it was, it said I was calling Frank. Instinctively, I tapped on the button to see my call history. I was shocked to see that I had two phone calls with him in the past five minutes. One outgoing, which was my accidental dial, and one incoming, which I had apparently answered earlier. A 14 second phone call. The one where he whispered my name.

I opened up my Facebook Messenger app and tapped on his name. I stared at our last conversation on there. We were talking about some girl he was seeing. His last message on the app was him saying how I was right and that he wasn’t going to call her back. But then…

The three dots appeared. Frank Rosen is typing… then stopped. Then typing again.. I put my phone down and turned on my lights. I wanted him to send the message. Frank, I’m sorry buddy. I wanted him to know that I was going to miss him, even though we never told that to each other, ever.

He stopped typing.

“Frank, I’ll miss you man. Rest in peace.” I typed and hit send.

Since then, I haven’t been woken up by any more calls or messages.

I started writing down my dreams after looking up a dream that I had in a book that would tell you the meanings behind your dreams. I remember that met an old lady, who would come up to me, open up her coin purse, and give a dollar. Sometimes it would be in quarters, sometimes it would be a dollar bill, but I remembered counting it and it was always exactly one dollar.

It happened so often that I started looking up the meaning of the coins, the meaning of money, and the meaning of old people in my dreams. They mentioned positivity and wisdom, but it surely didn’t feel like that. The old lady had no eyes and no teeth, and her purple hand and black veins would be cold as ice when she would place the money in my hand and close it for me into a fist. That feeling still gives me the creeps.

When I told my friend about it, she said that I should start writing these down. To which I replied that it would be of no use since I would forget most of the dream right away. She convinced me to try it anyway, so I grabbed a cheap paper notebook and put it next to my bed. I fell asleep listening to my window fan.

I woke up suddenly, with the noise of cars and honking still in my head from the dreams slowly fading away when I wrote down the following entry:

My taxi driver dropped me off to pick up some flowers to take for his dead brother, I couldn’t say no to the pit stop even though I was in a hurry. He gave me a $20 dollar bill and asked me to pick them up from the flower shop. No parking. Old woman gave me the change. $1. I got to my apartment and he left for cemetery.

Who knew I could remember these things? It’s like a whole other world that makes no sense.

The second morning, I wrote a shorter entry:

I’m sitting waiting for my mom at the laundromat. Playing with a toy gun that shoots rubber bands. It broke and I was trying to fix it. Old lady comes by and says “well aren’t you a good boy?” and gives me a dollar, she closes my hand. Another woman comes in yelling frantically. Her baby has been taken from her car and she was panicking.

And so I kept writing every morning, sometimes in the dark, writing as fast as possible before forgetting what the dream was, and yes, the old lady would always be there.

After about a month, I noticed that the dreams had recurring characters. Sometimes the woman yelling for her baby would run into me as I was leaving for work, or the same taxi driver would pick me up from a meeting. Sometimes I would enter the same flower shop, but in a city I didn’t recognize.

Even in some of the weirder dreams, with impossible scenarios or with my parents driving me somewhere as a child, I would notice the same places. My entries became more detailed, sometimes two or three pages long. I got into the habit of recording them on my cell phone and then passing them onto paper right away.

I became obsessed. These dreams were trying to tell me something, of this place I didn’t know. My friend suggests that I stop writing. Whenever I see a yellow cab, I look for the driver’s face to see if I recognize him.

But I can’t stop writing.

The unknown city in my dreams is familiar now, and I know the names of the streets now. I see the same deliverymen, and the same old lady over and over again. I’m afraid that I’ve created a different world for myself when I sleep. Like I’m living in someone else’s life.

Where is this place and who are these people? What do they want?

I’m afraid that I’ve gotten into something not many people have experienced. I’m forced to turn off my cell phone and wifi at night while I sleep after the most bizarre incident happened about six months ago. You just… never know who is listening, or maybe you don’t want to know what you can’t hear.

There is an application for iPhone that can tell you about your sleep quality. I believe you can also integrate it with your Apple Watch, but I don’t have one, so I just use the phone app itself and rely on the information it gathers. Everything was fine and I was tracking my sleep patterns, until I noticed that the app itself was requesting access to my microphone.

I found it odd, but then the app explained that it doesn’t save recordings and it doesn’t send them anywhere, so I agreed and went to sleep.

In the morning, there was a new notification saying that I snored, and I was curious enough to check them. Sure enough, there I was, at 1:20am, some snoring. I never knew that I snored, but it was good to know.

There’s something eerie about listening to yourself sleep. I kept on with the app as usual. Normally you have to set it right before you go to sleep, and it wakes you up to an alarm at an optimal time, supposedly to prevent you from waking up feeling tired.

One morning, I woke up earlier than usual. Way earlier, actually. At 4:45am. I wasn’t feeling tired, so I went to the bathroom, then for a drink of water and got back to my room. It was still dark out. That’s when I noticed the app had several recordings caught overnight. More snoring.

Curious, I clicked on the first one, at 2:14am, and there I was… breathing loudly. But then, I gasped. In my sleep. I couldn’t believe it, so I replayed the 15 second recording only to hear another voice in there. The voice was a woman’s voice saying “all alone”. I replayed the audio more than 10 times before moving onto the second one.

“Not like that” “All alone”

It kept replaying, over and over. The next recording said the same thing, but the last of the recordings was what really got me. It was… singing.

It was a lullaby. I could hear it faintly, like the wind.

The Backstory For This Episode

Never record yourself while you sleep if you’re not ready to see yourself unconscious, or in a semi-conscious state. We behave differently under varying circumstances, and I guarantee you that you do not behave the way that you expect to. When I was a kid, I used to wake up to the sound of my own voice, mentioning names and warning others to watch out for the “woman with the hat”.

Though there are things that are called “sleep studies” that are meant to help you analyze various medical conditions and are completely normal, it is something very different when a professional is analyzing this versus you analyzing seven to nine hours of dark footage, with the known creep factor. Several documented stories have been told over the years, some passed down, and some shown with hard evidence (video footage). Just how creepy can this get? Let’s find out.

What Happens When You Record Yourself Sleeping

For some, nothing occurs. You twist and turn at night, you may snore for a little bit, and you may hum or sleep-talk. These things are somewhat normal, but during the research for the previous story, I found a few more disturbing cases.

Sleep walking is known to happen to around 3.1% of the population, according to a Sleep Foundation article, so it is something paranormal necessarily, but waking up and standing while fixated on the wall or a window for a period of time may actually be something else.

In this case, a woman in her twenties decided to put a camera, plugged in to her computer with external storage, and set on the night-vision setting (the green-ish footage you see for night recording on TV and Youtube), before going to sleep because she was finding things moved around when she would wake up in the morning. Things like her cell phone would be unplugged and on top of her television, her curtains were wide open, and other things like that.

What she discovered was that in the middle of the night, around 2 or 3am, she would move the blankets from on top of her, sit on the edge of her bed and stare at the wall, then go back to sleep. Then she would wake up again, walk over to the window, open up the curtains, and stare out the window while making some hand gestures that she has no explanation for.

She went to get help from a sleep doctor, but she was happy that it wasn’t anything ghost or haunt related.

Another case that I read about was the woman who would wake up with bruises and scratches. She set a camera at the end of her bed, and went to sleep. This case, however, had a much more sinister explanation, or lack thereof.

As it turns out, the camera caught, over the span of three nights, a scream right before shutting off inexplicably, right around the same time at 3am. There was no explanation of the scratches or bruises, but the scream was not Susan’s (the woman with the issue), but rather a much deeper voice. She still suffers from this and is seeking an explanation.

What is it about 3am?

3am is known as the time that pure evil makes itself known, according to paranormal experts. Some say that the time is mocking the death of Jesus, who died at 3pm in the afternoon.

Should you record yourself sleeping at 3am? You should not record yourself sleeping at 3am if you fear that something paranormal is happening. You may not like what you see.

Should You Record Yourself Sleeping?

There is nothing inherently wrong with recording yourself sleeping, and it might satisfy your curious mind. Keep in mind that your subconscious and unconscious minds may do things that you are not aware that you are capable of doing, such as sleep walking, sleep talking, sitting up on your bed without an explanation, or doing odd things like staring at your partner or at the wall.

There is something mysterious about the realm of sleep that attracts us. In this state, our conscious mind does not pass along judgement and we may discover things about ourselves that we do not normally allow our minds to even see.

But are you ready to see items move next to you, your blankets pulled from the edge of your bed, or a shadow figure sliding out from under your bed and standing next to you while you sleep?

Just kidding.

Or am I?

A few months ago, I helped my mom’s friend Martha move to a new house around exit 78. She said she was happy to finally be moving out of town and joining the life in rural America. Our town wasn’t too big to begin with, but whatever.

We made two trips back and forth, moving boxes and small furniture. When it started getting dark, she pointed out some lights that appeared to be yellow headlights off into the distance. She told me that the strange lights would sometimes blink, turning on and off, on and off, many times as she passed by. Then they would turn off and not light up again. They were not blinking when we passed by.

We unloaded my truck and put the boxes in her living room, but then we agreed to make our next trip the following day instead. It was getting late and she was tired. On my way back, looking off into the distance, I noticed the lights. On and off, on and off. They were the high beams blinking. That crazy lady was right, I thought. And kept driving.

I told her about it the next morning after we finally finished moving her in. She suggested we go check it out, saying that it was part of the fun of being out in the country. I was curious so we both hopped into my truck and headed down the road. The dirt trails were rough, but we could both see a large metal structure off into the distance, like where cattle is kept. There is no way this place was operational, but we kept driving.

As we got closer, we saw what seemed like a junk yard, with old cars and broken down fencing. See, this belonged to the McCabe people. They’re long gone now, Martha said. I remember the McCabes story on the news, they were involved in gangs and illegal activities a long time ago. Kind of famous in our small town. I still remember the story.

There was a piece on the news released in the 80s about a missing man by the name of James who was thought to have been murdered. He was a family man and it turns out that he was a close friend of my parents. They even wanted him to be my godfather back when I was born.

They looked for his body in the hills and in the forest, but after many years, the searches stopped and the family was forced to live with all of those questions. He used to unload trucks for grocery stores, and he was actually supposed to be working the day he was last seen.

He was instructed to empty out one of the older trucks, a trailer with empty boxes and old cement blocks. The owner had been trying to get rid of it for quite some time, and was happy to finally have a buyer. James had actually introduced them two, saying that they knew each other from some past businesses they had worked on together.

The trailer was driven off the lot, but on the way to the buyer’s yard about ten miles down the road, it shut down. Feeling tricked, the buyer, a close friend to the McCabe’s got two of his buddies to take him back to the seller’s business and demand his money back.

There was an altercation there and the buyer took out a gun and shot the seller along with James, dragging their bodies onto a car and throwing them off on the side of a road. The seller’s body was found a couple of days later, but the body James was never found. Or so the story used to go.

We were ready to leave the junkyard after making a couple of circles around the property when suddenly, clear as day, we heard some short, sporadic deep honking.

I was scared, since nobody should be there and there was zero chance that any of the cars there would be in working order, but the honking became longer and harder to ignore. We both looked at each other, waiting for the other to say something.

I was going to find out what that was. I got out of the truck, and Martha followed behind me. We went around the structure, coming closer to the honking, when we spotted a small truck with a trailer off a few yards away. Then the noise stopped.

We looked at each other again. Honestly, I was glad someone was there with me.

As I inched closer to the truck and into the driver side’s door, I heard the honking begin again and then fade and then stop. When I turned my back on the truck, it made clicking sounds. Some type of animal must be hiding under the hood.

Suddenly, I heard the back door of the truck swing open. It was Martha, being the crazy woman that she’s always been, poking her nose in everywhere.

After the second door swung open, she screamed. Inside the truck, by the door, was a dried up corpse. All curled up.

Reports later found that it was the body of James. A block had struck him in the head. He had regained consciousness after the matter but was unable to open the gate from the inside. All that was left of him after thirty years, was a shriveled up body… that, and the will to someday be found again.

I don’t really know how to use this, but somebody told me about you and I would like my story told. The neighborhood kids opened up a Twitter account for me, but I forget how to send a Twitter, and my photos won’t show up. They were nice enough to let me borrow a cell phone that can send them, with a color screen, and can take photos too. The whole thing is really quite impressive.

My normal phone has been ringing every single night at around 2am, for the past month. I always answer, since it would be rude not to –plus, it could be someone I know in an emergency.

The first couple of times, they didn’t say anything. Even though I said hello? over and over.

Around the fifth call, they finally said something: Deborah, my name. It was the voice of a woman.

Not long after that, she started saying full sentences to me, but would ignore all of my questions and hang up suddenly. I’ve come to expect these phone calls now, even though I’ve tried ignoring them after a call last week. It worked for a while but now, the phone keeps ringing until I answer it. I don’t have an answering machine anymore.

The things she has told me are things that nobody else would know about me. Nobody that’s still alive, that is.

I grew up in a small town a couple of states over, and back then I was a bit of a troublemaker. Mostly petty theft and some vandalism charges followed me around. There was one event, though, that made me change my life for good.

One of my best friends at the time had just gotten a car and we would drive off into the woods with some drinks and take along whoever wanted to come with us for the night almost every Friday night. A man we had met through my friend’s job was coming with us one a particular evening, and he invited one of his friends. His friend seemed like a nice gentleman, and frankly, I found him to my liking.

We went toward one of the viewpoints that was usually empty around this time one night, and parked the car. I was in the driver’s seat. As the night went by and our radio played loudly, we kept laughing and talking about work and somehow the topic of prison came up. I had only been in holding cells, but all of the others had crime stories. They were going around until they got to the coworker’s friend, who whispered something I couldn’t hear.

I asked what he had said, and I watched his lips as he said the word “murder”.

He said it with a menacing look in his eye, and I was scared. He started laughing, and we all started following along nervously. Then he took out a knife from his pocket and said to my friend “there’s nothing to be afraid of, love”.

He grabbed my friend by the arm and she screamed. Let her go! I yelled, and my friend’s coworker reached for the knife. My friend screamed in pain as he stabbed her over and over. I started the car and set it in drive when the man threw himself toward the driver’s seat. I didn’t know what to do, I opened the door and forced myself out only to watch the car slowly moving forward, until it rolled off the cliff and down into the rocky hills. The car sped up and I heard screams, but suddenly there was a loud crash and all of the screaming ceased. All I could see was smoke in the distance. All of them perished that night. A body had been thrown out the windshield and landed twenty feet away.

It has been a long time since then, so I’ve left out many details that I can’t remember. I never told anybody about these events, and the story of the killer in the car lived only in my hometown but soon became forgotten.

The phone calls said things about that night. Like the Lucas brand beer we used to drink. Or “turn up that thing, thing, thing”, a drunken phrase my best friend used to say. Sometimes I think it’s my friend who has been calling me from beyond the grave. All of the word choices seem to be hers.

But now I just don’t know. Last night the phone rang again. I said said “what?” and I heard the familiar voice as she took a deep breath. The woman’s voice grew deeper as she said hello. She said “There’s nothing to be afraid of, love.”

I had a winter job as a driver helper for UPS back when I was 19 to make some extra cash near the end of the year. It was an easy gig, though physically demanding. My job was to run packages to the houses, get people to sign or scan the boxes, and run back to the truck.

The managers were not cool. I’ve had a lot of random jobs here and there, but the managers were straight up rude there. One particular manager called me at 4:00am once to tell me that I needed to be at work in half an hour if I still wanted to stay in. It made no sense. Another manager yelled at me for something that someone else had messed up.

The sun used to set earlier in the day, I remember the creepy apartment complexes I had to deliver to. Sometimes, the UPS driver would stack up a cart and would have me walk around two complexes delivering packages while he did the following blocks. They were old apartments out at the end of a lonely street.

One Thursday evening, the truck driver I was working with and I met up with another driver behind a Wendy’s restaurant to split some packages. Basically, the other guy was new and delivering by himself. He needed help or he wouldn’t be able to get back home until 9pm. Apparently it’s something common that UPS drivers do to help each other out.

As they kept passing boxes onto our truck, I heard my driver say “Ah, come on man! Again?” I later found out that the truck loaders had been messing up and gave some of our packages to the other guy, so those boxes would be way off of the other driver’s route. No wonder the guy had such a hard time. He was supposed to sort his own packages too, so he was partly to blame.

After around 10 minutes, the truck was mostly empty but we had a pile of around 40 boxes left to deliver when I thought we were all done. My driver said we would follow the same plan, that he would drop me off at the group of apartments at the end of that one street, and he would zig zag through the other blocks to deliver the rest. He would then come back to pick me up.

Those old apartments had overgrown bushes and dead trees, the trash cans reeked of poop and urine, and the people who lived there would walk around in silence. I would normally just see them walk to the trashcans or to the laundry room. They would always avoid me or they would step out toward the trees to let me pass.

No hello, no good evenings.

The driver dropped the dolly and stacked up the boxes in order for me, gave me the scanner, and asked me to start at the far end. It had something to do with how he sorted it. He apologized, but was in a hurry, so I didn’t say anything. Normally you would distribute as you go deeper into the complexes, that way you return with an empty dolly instead of having to carry everything and empty it as you come back.

There were some random ice chests, with I’m assuming had medicine, some tubes, and oddly shaped boxes. With all the potholes in the parking lot, as I was approaching complex C, my dolly’s right wheel got stuck and the whole thing shifted and my boxes fell. All of them.

A man came out from around the corner of the building and asked if I was okay, and he picked up some of the packages. He was pale, bald, and skinny. Something was off about this guy. He was helping me stack them back up, but he was also looking through them. Sometimes even flipping the boxes over to find the label. I asked him if he was expecting a package and he grabbed one, said, “this is mine” and put it under his arm.

I had finished stacking my now unordered dolly, when he started walking away. I asked him to stop and to let me scan it. He said that I didn’t have to, that it was okay. I said no. But he hurried off and opened up his apartment door, number 3, and shut the door right in front of me while I just stood there, without knowing what to do. Was I supposed to leave my boxes unattended in the parking lot and go talk to the guy?

It was dark out, and only the orange street lights that still worked illuminated the empty parking lot. I figured I would come back to his apartment and ask to scan the box. I need to scan the boxes otherwise customers can claim that it never got delivered and they get their money back. And it would be my fault.

On my way to the end of the whole property, around building H, I called the driver but he didn’t answer his phone. I started scanning, knocking, and handing packages to the people in the apartments. Nobody seemed to have families, and apparently they didn’t like to keep their lights on. Every apartment was dimly lit.

I had two packages left, one for complex C and one for an apartment located at the front, by the gate.

I checked the package, Charles Smith, Apt 3. Either that crazy guy had another package, or he grabbed the wrong one. I went to the apartment and knocked on the door. I heard shuffling inside, and he opened the door quickly. He seemed stressed out and said, yes yes yes, this is it, this is it, yes yes yes. He had a sinister look in his eyes and the strangest smile you can imagine. He reached for the box, which I had already scanned, but I held onto it tightly. I told him that I needed to scan the label on the other box.

“For what?” He asked.

I didn’t want to explain myself, but I did anyway. He really didn’t want to bring out the box. I told him he was stealing and that I would have to report it. That seemed to scare him, but he became nervous and started stuttering even more. He said the address had been messed up, and lots more that I couldn’t really understand. My phone started ringing and I saw that it was the driver I was working with. I answered it there in front of the crazy guy, which he took as an opportunity to shut the door. I tried to explain to the driver what was happening and he told me to give him the building and apartment number.

“Building C.. number 3.”

He said he would be right over.

Still with that box in my hand, I went over to the front building and delivered the last package and waited for the driver. He showed up right away and we both walked over to the apartment. On the way, the driver took my scanner thing and pressed some buttons. He said that there was one last package to deliver. I had already scanned apartment 3’s package, the only one missing was the one that the crazy guy had. He had the package for his neighbor in apartment 4.

I warned the driver that the guy was creepy and had something weird going on inside of his apartment.

When I knocked again, he seemed to be right by the door because he opened it immediately and practically lunged himself toward the box. He wasn’t wearing a shirt now and he was sweaty. It was pretty nasty. I was able to hold onto the box while the driver tried to explain what was happening, basically telling him that he had the wrong box.

He went inside and left his door open. I took a look inside the apartment. There were red lights, like the kind you’d find in an old photo development lab. I kept hearing muffled voices. Suddenly, he came out with a jar, stuck his hands in, and sprayed us with the liquid. I felt it sting my eyes. He started chanting and laughing, turning around to say Jacqueline enough! Jacqueline be quiet! He kept chanting while we took steps back, blocking our faces with our arms.

Then he closed the door, and started laughing hysterically once he got inside. He got the box from me, which was fine since it was his. But he didn’t return the package he stole. The driver said we would just leave a note with his neighbor about the missing package, and that he would report the box as stolen or missing.

We hurried back to the truck, both of us wiping our eyes from what had just happened. The shift was over. The ride back to the parking lot was quiet, both of us were trying to process what had just happened. I signed my time sheet when he dropped me off, and I got into my car.

I went to grab a bite to eat and then straight back to my dorm. The building was mostly empty, except for other students taking winter classes. My roommate was out and with his family. I took out my Carl’s Jr burger, ate it, and sat in front of the TV. Before I knew it, I fell asleep but I was woken up by loud static noise from the TV, but my eyes wouldn’t open all the way. All I could see was the blue light from the screen through my eyelids, and I started to panic. I heard laughter and more static.

What was wrong? Why couldn’t I open my eyes? I wanted to scream but my mouth wouldn’t make a sound either. I felt my face stretch downward. It was the strangest feeling.

I decided it was best to stop fighting it and just try to relax and try to go back to sleep, that everything would be fine. I had countless nightmares in the span of 5 hours that seemed to last forever.

I woke up at 4:30am to a text message from the UPS driver. I was feeling tired, but somewhat normal again.

“Not feeling good. Take the day off. I’ll write down your hours.”

The next day, I got a call from a manager. They said I was being transferred to another UPS driver. I asked why, but he didn’t offer an explanation. Typical managers.

I texted my old UPS driver asking him what happened. He told me that part of his face had gotten paralyzed and that he went to the doctor to get it checked out. He would be back to work in a couple of weeks.

It didn’t click then, but later on I realized that my face had gotten paralyzed. That same night. What had that guy done to us?

I got reassigned and everything went back to normal. My new UPS driver had a different route, but one time, we got some packages by mistake. This guy was quick, so we had more than enough time to deliver to those addresses.

There they were. Packages to the same apartment complex. Charles Smith.. Complex C. Apartment 3. Jacqueline Stewart, Complex C… Apartment 4.

Arriving in a new town and not knowing anybody feels great at first, but then gets lonely. I had arrived in a city full of retirees in the coast of Florida and had nowhere to stay. I was in my early twenties at the time and was there for an internship.

I was staying at a Motel 6 next to a Waffle House while I looked for a place, and while searching craigslist, I found a condo by the beach, very close to where I was going to be working.

I didn’t know much about the place, but it looked nice in the photos and the owners rented it out to me AirBnB style, but before the app existed. I transferred the money via PayPal and I got a key code so that I could access the place. I never met the owners.

It was a nice, one-bedroom condo that was recently remodeled.

There were a few weird things about the place. For example, there would be a loud tapping at almost all hours of the day coming from the bathroom. In the bathroom, there was a large box, with a lock on it. I had 4 keys in my keychain, and tested every single one, but could never open it.

I figured it was just some owner’s storage area, and I shouldn’t be going through other people’s stuff, so I just let it be.

But that tapping sound bothered me, it sounded like roaches or rats in there. The tapping would stop when I got nearby, so I kind of knew that it was some type of live insect or animal crawling under the floors that would detect when I got close. I wasn’t sure if it came from inside the box.

The next door neighbor told me that that the house was owned by an older couple who had a daughter that suffered from drug addiction, but didn’t want to tell me more. I was surprised at the amount of details that the neighbor knew, but she refused to tell me the whole story. I think she wanted me to keep asking, but I let it go.

Nights were weird in the place. I would have nightmares almost once a week, and they were of vivid scenarios where I would step out into the beach, then begin gasping for air as everything turned dark. I would be drowning in my dreams.

I blamed the nightmares on my messed up sleep schedule, since I had to be ready to go to work at 4:45am. I had no car and I was forced to carpool with two other engineers from work at that time. But it wasn’t the sleep schedule. It was the apartment.

One afternoon, as I was sitting in the living room eating a sandwich, the house became silent. The tapping stopped finally. I was genuinely surprised. Then I thought I heard my toilet flush in the bathroom. Someone was in the house.

I went to the bathroom and opened the door, but there was nobody there.

Then I heard someone knock on the kitchen window, and I went straight to the kitchen without hesitation. It wasn’t the first time someone knocked on that window and it really got me angry. I always went to it to see who was there, but I never found anybody. It was a clear knocking, so no, it wasn’t some tree branch tapping against the window or some animal scratching at the door. It was knocking. Knuckle-against-the-glass knocking.

This time, I saw a young woman wearing dark jeans and a white shirt that was way too big for her, running away toward the washing machines that were in a little building outside.

I opened up the door, and ran toward her. I had so many questions. Why would she come by to bother me like that? Who was she? I got to the washing machines but she was no longer there. When I turned around, I saw her go running straight for my kitchen door, turn the doorknob and get inside. My lights were all on, so I saw her run straight toward the living room and into my bedroom from the outside. I ran right behind her, not knowing exactly what I was going to do once I got inside. I should have called the police.

I heard shuffling inside, and then sounds of beating on something, like with a hammer. As I stepped toward the bathroom, I saw her head bent toward the box as she was beating it with plunger, trying to break open the lock. She didn’t even seem to notice I was there. Growing concerned, I grabbed my cell phone from the kitchen table, went outside toward the front door, and called 911. The police officers showed up in what seemed like five minutes, and the girl, who now looked to be in her thirties, with an older-looking face, was now sitting next to the box with the plunger in her hand when we all walked in. I guess she looked younger from behind since she was abnormally small and thin.

She calmly told the police officers that she would get out of there, that this was her parent’s house. Wait. This was the daughter? They asked her to leave, and she kept saying that she needed to get into the box. The police asked me if I could open it and I gave them the keys the landlord gave me telling them that I didn’t have the key to that box.

They tried out all of the keys and none fit the lock. That’s when the woman started having some type of panic attack and started yelling at everybody, but she didn’t resist when they escorted her outside. All of the neighbors had come out to see the commotion, some I had never seen before.

Apparently she was on drugs that night. They asked me if I wanted to press charges and I said no, that she probably didn’t even know what she was doing and she didn’t really cause any damage.

I was sitting in the living room with the door still open, the cops had just left, and I was trying to piece things together, when I heard the neighbor say “knock knock” and I asked her to come in. We started talking and later she asked me what had happened, and if I was okay. I said I was just confused.

She looked down to the floor for a while and then looked me in the eyes. She said that she wanted to tell me the story of what happened, and for me to be respectful of the whole situation.

In May of that year, around two months before I got there, the owner’s daughter went out to the bar on the corner of the main street and my street to get high one night, and walked straight back to the condo I was renting. Exterior cameras caught her taking her baby daughter’s stroller toward the beach, which was one block away, but the cameras didn’t show the stroller, nor the baby, come back to the complex.

The next day, she reported a kidnapping, and the case went on file, missing child alerts were everywhere and she moved out to live with her boyfriend. Apparently someone had stolen the baby from her as they went for a walk. The neighbor started to cry, and I was sitting there trying to process the whole story. She wanted me to understand the woman’s pain of losing a child, and said she was glad that I didn’t press charges. That her drug addiction got the best of her.

I tried to keep up with the conversation, but my mind was elsewhere. I ate some of the cookies that she brought over, but couldn’t really taste them. It was almost 11pm and I would have to be up in around five hours, but I wasn’t tired.

Rebecca, the neighbor, left. I went to take a shower, lost in my own thoughts. I climbed into bed and stared at my ceiling fan. Then the tapping started again.

I dozed off a couple of times, woken up by the nightmares of not being able to breathe, feeling the cold dark water all around me. Gasping for air, I felt the saltwater sting inside my lungs. I coughed the water out, only for them to be filled up by more burning water. My legs went numb. Then my arms.

Another nightmare.

It was 3:30am. It always seemed to be 3:30am when I woke up. I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. I fell asleep again.

The dark water. A baby crying. Splashing. Crying. A stroller sinking into the sand. I woke up shaking. It was 4:00am now. The tapping still coming from the box in the bathroom.

I stood up to turn on the light, but the tapping got louder and I went toward the half-opened bathroom door instead. It creaked as I opened it. The smell of death filled the room.

The moonlight from the window lit up most of the bathroom now, including the box. But the tapping wouldn’t stop, but now it became clear what the sound had been all along.

It was the lock.