During my first week in this old apartment building, I noticed the footsteps coming from upstairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every night at 11 p.m., they would start, right on time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThump\u2026 thump\u2026 thump\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014repeating the cycle until 1:00 a.m., when it finally stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s probably just the pipes in this old building,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But water pipes don\u2019t move to a human rhythm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014that wasn\u2019t the sound of shoe soles tapping against the floor at all; it sounded more like\u2026 the muffled thud of bare feet stepping on wet mud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I rushed upstairs and pounded on the door. It wasn\u2019t locked; it swung open with a creak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They weren\u2019t shoe prints.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They were barefoot\u2014the shape of the toes was clearly visible, and there were faint dark red wet marks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I crouched down to touch them, but just as my fingertips made contact, the wet streak suddenly moved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was as if something were crawling up from beneath the floor, inch by inch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hanging upside down from the ceiling was a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No, not a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And its feet were stepping on the floorboard at the eleven o\u2019clock position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThud.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I fled back to my room, locked the door, and buried my head under the covers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But tonight, the footsteps didn\u2019t start at eleven o\u2019clock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At 11:03, they began coming from under my bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThud\u2026 thud\u2026 thud\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This time, they were coming up from below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Footsteps Upstairs at 11 p.m. Every Night<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[18,22],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-suspense","tag-story","tag-suspense"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}