Something is wrong with the house next door and I think my daughter has been talking to it

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Throwaway. My wife doesn’t know I’m posting. I’ll probably delete this.

We’ve been in the house since September. It’s a rowhouse. Narrow, three stories, shared walls on both sides. On the left side is a nice older couple, Ray and Denise, they gave us banana bread when we moved in. On the right side is the house I’m writing about. Empty since we moved in. Empty for a while before that, from what I can tell.

The curtain has not moved in seven months. That’s the first thing. I’m going to sound like an unhinged person and I’m sorry but that’s the first thing.

I noticed it sometime in October. I was sitting on our stoop having a beer and I looked over at their front window and I thought, huh, that curtain looks exactly the same as it did the day we moved in. Same fold. Same slant. I have walked past that window hundreds of times. Same fold. Same slant. Seven months. Wind doesn’t touch it. Weather doesn’t touch it. Sometimes I check just to see. It has never moved.

I told my wife once. She said “maybe it’s weighted.” Cool. Sure. Maybe.

The dog is the second thing. We have a lab, Minnie, she’s four, dumbest animal you’ve ever met, she loves everyone including the mailman including the squirrels she can’t catch including literal traffic cones. One day in November I’m walking her and she stops in front of that house and lies down. Not sits. Lies. Belly on the concrete, ears flat, whole body low. I pull the leash and she won’t move. I have to pick her up. Forty-five pounds of dog, I’m standing there on the sidewalk carrying her past the house, and once we’re past it she wriggles out of my arms and shakes herself off and is fine.

Now she crosses the street. Every single time. She drags me into the road to avoid walking past it. I’ve asked the vet about reactive behavior in dogs and they said sometimes there’s a smell we can’t pick up, like a dead animal in a wall or something. I said okay, that makes sense.

I don’t think it’s a smell.

—

The third thing is the knocking. This is the part where I stopped sleeping.

Sometime in January I started waking up at 4 AM. Just waking up. Not to pee, not because the baby cried (we don’t have a baby), not because my wife rolled over. Just awake, eyes open, heart already going. Four AM on the nose, or close to it. I’d get up, sit on the couch, scroll my phone, eventually go back to bed around 5.

After a couple weeks of this I started noticing a sound. Faint. I thought it was the radiator at first, we have old cast iron radiators and they click and bang. But this was regular. Spaced. Like somebody tapping on wood. I could only hear it if I was downstairs, in the kitchen, which shares a wall with their kitchen.

I counted once. I don’t know why. I was sitting at our kitchen table drinking water and I just started counting. It went on for nine minutes. 135 taps.

I thought, okay, that’s a weird number. Whatever. Pipes are weird.

Next time it happened I counted again. 135.

Next time. 135.

I started a note on my phone. I have twenty-three entries. Every single one, where I stayed awake long enough to finish counting, was 135. Same spacing between each tap. Always starts between 4:00 and 4:01. Always ends between 4:09 and 4:10.

I tried to record it on my phone. Three different nights. The recording picks up the fridge, the furnace, my breathing. No taps. You can’t hear them on the recording. I swear to god you can hear them in the room.

I asked Ray next door if he ever hears anything weird at night. He’s in his seventies, he’s up at weird hours. He said “oh we sleep like the dead, hon” and laughed. I said have you ever heard anything coming from the other side, the empty house. He said no, that place has been quiet for years. Then he kind of looked at me and said “you okay?” and I said yeah, sorry, bad dreams, and he let me change the subject.

—

So I went over there. Last Saturday. My wife was out running errands and I just walked over there, walked up the three steps, and I stood on their stoop. I didn’t have a plan. I was going to knock, maybe. See if anybody answered. I don’t know.

I didn’t knock. I bent down and looked through the mail slot.

There was no mail. That’s the thing I can’t get past. It’s been empty for years but there was no mail on the floor. No flyers, no junk, no nothing. The hallway was clean. There was a little rug runner. There was a side table with a bowl on it. There was a coat on a hook. Somebody’s coat. Hanging there like somebody was going to come back for it.

I stood up. I looked at the door. The doorknob had no dust on it. I don’t know what I expected. Dust, I guess. Cobwebs. Something that said nobody’s been here.

I went home and I sat on my couch and I opened the property records on my laptop because I needed to do something that felt like a normal thing to do. The house last sold in 1994. Couple owned it. Husband died in ’03. Wife lived alone there until 2019. She died “at home.” No listed heirs claimed it. It’s been in probate for six years.

Somebody is paying the taxes. Somebody is taking in the mail. Somebody hung up that coat.

—

Here is the part that made me start writing this post.

Last night my daughter, she’s five, she came into our bed around 2 AM because she had a bad dream. She curled up between us and went back to sleep. My wife was out, my wife sleeps through the apocalypse. I was awake because I’m always awake now.

At like 3:55 I felt my daughter sit up. She was next to me in the dark and she just sat straight up. I said hey bud, you okay. She didn’t answer. She was looking at the bedroom door. Our door was open a crack, the hall light was on, and she was looking at that crack.

Then the tapping started. 4:00 AM. Right on time.

She started whispering. I couldn’t hear what she was saying at first. I leaned over. She was counting. “Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three.” She was counting the taps. With them. In time.

I grabbed her shoulders. I said baby, what are you doing.

She looked at me. In the dark, in our bed, she looked at me and she said “I always count with him, Daddy. So he knows I’m listening.”

I said how long have you been doing that.

She said “since my old room.”

We moved. In September. She had an old room. In our old house. Forty minutes from here.

I said sweetheart, is he here. Right now. Is he in this house.

She thought about it. She actually thought about it, like I’d asked her what she wanted for breakfast. Then she said “no, he’s next door. He can’t come in unless we let him.”

I said have you let him in.

She said “not yet.”

—

I carried her to her room. I sat in the chair next to her bed until the sun came up. The tapping stopped at 4:09.

This morning she was fine. She ate her waffle. She asked for more syrup. She doesn’t remember any of it, or she’s saying she doesn’t. I asked her at breakfast who the man next door was. She looked at me like I was speaking Portuguese. I asked about the counting. Nothing. My wife gave me a look and I shut up.

I spent the whole day going back through her drawings. She draws a lot. We have a bin of them. I was looking for something specific and I didn’t know what until I found it.

Three drawings. All from the last couple months. All have the same figure in them. A tall shape, black crayon, no face, standing next to a house. In one of them the house is ours. In one it’s just a house. In one there’s a smaller figure holding the tall one’s hand and the smaller figure has her hair color.

On the back of that one she wrote a number. Just the number. 135.

She can count to 135, I guess. She can’t write half her letters but she can write 135.

—

I don’t know what to do with this. I’m not a guy who believes in this stuff. My wife’s family is religious and I’m the one who rolls his eyes. I’ve been trying all night to come up with the explanation that makes this make sense. Maybe the tapping is something with the plumbing and my daughter is a weird perceptive kid who picked up on my anxiety about it and incorporated it into her sleep talking. Maybe the house next door has a caretaker who comes in the daytime when I’m at work and that’s why there’s no mail. Maybe the coat is just left over from the old lady and I’m projecting.

Maybe.

It’s 1 AM. I’m in the kitchen. I’m writing this on my laptop at the kitchen table. I’m on the side of the house that shares a wall with them.

I can hear her through the wall.

I don’t mean the tapping. The tapping isn’t until 4. I mean I can hear something else, something I haven’t heard before, something I could not hear any of the other nights I sat down here. It’s quiet. It sounds like somebody moving around slowly in the next room. Like somebody who has all the time in the world. A footstep. A pause. Another footstep. A pause.

I just went and checked on my daughter. She’s asleep. She’s fine.

Her bedroom is on that side of the house.

Her bed is against that wall.

I’m going to go sleep on her floor. I’ll update if there is anything to update. If anyone has had anything like this, if anyone knows anything about a house sitting empty with somebody still in it, please message me. I don’t care how crazy it sounds. I’m past that.

I just heard her laugh in her sleep.

She hasn’t laughed in her sleep in her life.

**EDIT (4:11 AM):** It didn’t happen tonight. The tapping. 4:00 came and went. 4:05. 4:09. Nothing. I sat on her floor the whole time with my back against her bed.

I was relieved for about thirty seconds.

Then I realized what it means.

It means he’s not next door anymore.