During my first week in this old apartment building, I noticed the footsteps coming from upstairs.
Every night at 11 p.m., they would start, right on time.
“Thump… thump… thump…”
Slow and heavy, as if someone were wearing hard-soled shoes, walking step by step across the wooden floor. From the bedroom to the living room, then back again—repeating the cycle until 1:00 a.m., when it finally stopped.
I knocked on the door upstairs, but no one answered. The landlord said that apartment had been vacant for nearly half a year; the previous tenant had moved out without even claiming their security deposit.
“It’s probably just the pipes in this old building,” he explained.
But water pipes don’t move to a human rhythm.
The following week, I started recording. At 11:03, the footsteps began right on time. I stared at the spectrogram on my phone screen, my heart racing—that wasn’t the sound of shoe soles tapping against the floor at all; it sounded more like… the muffled thud of bare feet stepping on wet mud.
I rushed upstairs and pounded on the door. It wasn’t locked; it swung open with a creak.
The room was empty, with only moonlight seeping through the gaps in the tattered curtains. A thick layer of dust covered the floor, but along the path from the bedroom to the living room, there was a clear trail of footprints.
They weren’t shoe prints.
They were barefoot—the shape of the toes was clearly visible, and there were faint dark red wet marks.
I crouched down to touch them, but just as my fingertips made contact, the wet streak suddenly moved.
It was as if something were crawling up from beneath the floor, inch by inch.
I jerked backward, knocking over the old wardrobe by the door. As the wardrobe fell, shards of glass from the mirror reflected the ceiling behind me—
Hanging upside down from the ceiling was a person.
No, not a person.
Its neck was bent at an impossible angle, its face pressed against the floorboards above my head, its eyes fixed intently on me, and the corners of its mouth stretched all the way to its ears.
And its feet were stepping on the floorboard at the eleven o’clock position.
“Thud.”
I fled back to my room, locked the door, and buried my head under the covers.
But tonight, the footsteps didn’t start at eleven o’clock.
At 11:03, they began coming from under my bed.
“Thud… thud… thud…”
This time, they were coming up from below.
