My 5-year-old son started remembering a life that isn’t his. I think something is trying to take him back.

This is hard to talk about. I know how it’s going to sound. If I hadn’t lived through it, I’d scroll past this too. But if you’ve got kids—especially really young ones—maybe read this before you go to bed tonight. Or don’t. I wish I hadn’t waited.

My son, Jacob, is five. Smart kid. Sweet. A little obsessed with dinosaurs and drawing, like most boys his age. He’s never had any health issues. Never had night terrors. Until six weeks ago.

It started small. Stuff that’s easy to shrug off.

He woke me up one night around 2AM just standing in the hallway, staring into the dark. When I asked what he was doing, he said, “I was listening to the floor.” I laughed it off. Kids say weird things.

But then he started waking up with weird questions.
Like, “Where did the basement go?” or “What happened to the boy who used to sleep here?”

We live in an apartment. There is no basement. And Jacob’s had this room since he was born.

It got worse.

He’d cry when I tried to tuck him in and say stuff like “I don’t want to go back in the hole.” Or “He’s watching from the wall crack.”

I cut all screen time. No scary books. Asked his preschool if anything happened there. Nothing. He’s the happiest kid during the day. But every night, around 2:00–3:00 AM, I’d catch him awake. Talking to someone. Whispering. Always smiling.

Then he stopped calling me “Mom.”

He started calling me Elaine.

That’s not my name.

I asked him who Elaine was, and he said, “You. Before. When the house was still burning.” He said it like I should know what he meant.

A week later, I found his drawings.

Pages of stick figures. All normal except for one: a tall, stretched-out shadow with black arms that touched the ground and a wide hole in its chest. It appeared over and over. Always standing beside a little boy. Jacob called it “The Keeper.”

He said “The Keeper lives under where the bricks were.” I asked what bricks. He said:

“The bricks they buried me under.”

That night I barely slept. I did some digging the next day. Turns out our apartment complex was built in the early 90s. Before that? It was a group foster home.

Burned down in 1989.

Seven children died. All under ten. One body was never recovered.

His name was Eli Matthews.

I found a newspaper article. There was a grainy photo.

Jacob looks exactly like him.

Same chin, same freckles, same scar above the eyebrow.

I showed it to my mother without explaining, and she asked me when Jacob took “that old-timey photo.”

The next night I caught him digging at the floor of his closet with a spoon.

When I asked him what he was doing, he looked up and smiled. Not a five-year-old’s smile.

“He’s almost done fixing the hole. Once it’s open, I have to go back.”

I asked who.

He said, “The Keeper. He promised I’d get my real mom back.”

Last night, I got a phone call at exactly 2:13AM.

No caller ID. Just static and breathing. Then a voice—low, cracked, like it came from inside a wall:

“Elaine… he was never yours.”

I ran to Jacob’s room.

He was standing in the corner, facing the wall. Smiling.

He turned to me and said:

“He found the basement.”

There is no basement.

This morning, I checked his closet again.

I noticed the carpet was slightly raised in the corner.

Underneath it was a wooden trapdoor I swear wasn’t there before.

[UPDATE]

I opened it.

There’s a staircase.

And it goes down.

I’m posting this from my phone. I’m taking a flashlight. I’m going in. I don’t know what else to do.

If you don’t hear from me again—

Don’t let him leave the house.