Something’s in my attic.

My wife and I own our house. We are in our early thirties and worked hard to be able to afford it. It’s a good starter home in a nice suburban neighborhood and we thought we hit the jackpot when the sellers accepted our offer.

The sellers were quirky people, but nice enough. They gave us money for a new roof and even paid our closing costs. They didn’t make it obvious they were fleeing the house, but in hindsight, their willingness to pay for so much should have been a red flag.

The house itself is on a slab, so no basement, but there is an attic above the second floor with the only access being in the primary bedroom closet via a panel in the ceiling. The inspector had popped his head up into the attic and said it looked good before we bought the house so we thought nothing more of it. I should note that the panel opens up, so you have push the panel up into the attic and then push it to the side to get up there.

After we moved in, things were great. The house did make a lot of noise, but, being first time homeowneres, we just figured that’s what houses do when weather changes. The noises were always random and usually just happened once or twice a day. Nothing that really concerned us.

The first instance of something being off happened about a year after we moved in. One day when my wife and I were getting ready for work, we noticed some insulation on the floor of our closet. The panel to the attic was still in place and neither one of us had gone up there. We blamed it on the inspector trapping some insulation in between the ceiling and the panel a year prior that finally succumbed to gravity and put it out of our minds.

After that, I would occasionally look up at it and think that it looked slightly different than before; maybe the panel was shifted or it wasn’t completely closed. Things like that. However, I told myself I didn’t pay enough attention to it in general to really know if anything had changed, so I ignored the feeling about it being slightly off.

My wife became pregnant with our first child about 4 months ago. We were so excited to decorate the house’s second bedroom as a nursery for the baby. The previous owners used that room as a video game room so the internet router was installed in that room. One of the first things we decided to do to start the decorating process was to relocate the router.

We called the Internet provider and they assured us it would be a quick job for the technician to do and sent someone over the next day. He was nice enough when he arrived and was laughing and chatting with me as I showed him where the router was and where we wanted to move it. He had a difficult time finding the correct coax cable and decided to pop into the attic to see if it was left up there from when the cable dish was removed.

He grabbed a ladder and climbed up into the attic. He was up there for a couple minutes. I could hear him moving around and talking to himself. Then he stopped. He wasn’t moving or talking. He was so quiet that I thought he had just vanished into thin air. I was just about to call up into the opening when he appeared and began climbing back down the ladder. He nearly kicked me in the head when he came down. He climbed down the ladder so fast.

I asked him if he found what he needed and he didn’t answer. He folded up the ladder and left the closet. I followed him and when he got to the front door, he turned to me and said that he needed to go and that the router couldn’t be moved, at least not by him. He was avoiding my eyes and his demeanor had noticeable changed. He was no longer cheerful and chatty. He looked spooked.

I asked him to explain, but all he said was to call the customer service line and they could explain it. I was really confused because it happened so fast and he wasn’t giving me any answers.

I watched him put his ladder in his truck bed and leave. I remembered that he never put the panel to the attic back in place, so I grabbed a step stool and put the panel back. It was pretty unnerving. I looked up into the attic but it was pitch black. I thought about sticking my head up above the ceiling to see what all was up there, but I didn’t have a flashlight and honestly was too scared to have taken a look anyway. The technicians weird behavior was just so unsettling. He must have seen something up there. Maybe it was some sort of animal? Raccoons can be pretty vicious, right?

Well, that was yesterday. Today, when I went to get ready for work, the panel to the attic was open. There was insulation all over the floor. I have to assume that the panel was opened from the attic side as my wife said she did not open it. I don’t know what to do and I’m too scared to go up there myself. Something is up there. I can hear it.