Prince Charming

The house we were moving into was small and crudely put together. It seemed as though the original owner had built it himself. The floors, cabinets, and walls were not completely straight. The original hardwood floor was cracked and filled with crumbs and dust. Needless to say, it was creepy right off the bat. Living alone was new to me. I had always lived with my family, friends, or a significant other. But recently I had left him and me and our two small children moved into our own home.

The first night I spent there I tucked my daughter into bed and had an uneasy feeling about the closet in her room. But I wrote it off as first night jitters and climbed into bed myself. The unsettling feeling of being watched continued with the closet in her room and also the closet in my own room, the basement and the kitchen right in front of the basement door. Whenever I was in the kitchen it felt as though someone was standing in that doorway watching me. When I opened either closet I also felt piercing eyes on me. Going down the basement to do laundry was the worst. I always felt like someone was in the back of the basement near the crawlspace watching me and then it would follow me, so close, as if it were breathing on my neck, up the stairs until I shut the door. Still I justified it, telling myself I was just afraid of being alone for the first time.

Two weeks into living there my eighteen month old daughter told me she was afraid of the man in the kitchen. She pointed to him and said his name was Charming and that he lived in the basement. That's when I decided there was something in the house. Weeks later on the drive home from my parents' house she asked me if we were going back to HIS house. I told her we were going back to our house. She said "No Mom, that's HIS house." At this point, nothing strange had happened. No swinging cupboards or doors left open. Just eerie, uncomfortable feelings. I came to the conclusion, whatever, or whoever he was; he meant no harm to us. But that night when I tucked her into bed and turned on her radio, like I always do, the volume was so loud it startled me and instead of music it was deep, rough male voice. Demonic, almost. I listened for a moment but I couldn't understand what it was saying. As if it was in another language. I quickly tuned the radio to another station and spent the rest of the night trying to justify the voice. Maybe it was a different electronic communication devise getting its radio signal mixed up.

After that, nothing else happened for months. My boyfriend moved in with us and I had explained a little about Charming and the things that I felt but he never believed in any of that stuff anyways. Weeks after he moved in I came home from work and he was outside waiting in the driveway. He said he didn't feel comfortable going back in alone. Our bedroom door never stayed open. It didn't close all the way but it swung back and stayed half open. I'm sure it was because the house was so lopsided. So we kept an old boom box radio in front of it to hold it open. He told me he placed the boom box in front of the door, walked through the house and went outside for about five minutes and when he came back in the bedroom door was closed all the way and the boom box was on the inside.

Days later I was in the shower and I heard someone walk pass the bathroom door 3 times. Once from the bedroom the kitchen, then back, then back to the kitchen once more. When I got out of the shower I went into the bedroom where my boyfriend was twisted up in all the blankets, sound asleep. I shook him awake and asked what he was looking for in the kitchen. He said he hadn't been in the kitchen. He was asleep in bed the whole time. Later that week as he was leaving for the store, I watched the car pull out of the driveway and speed down the road. I headed into the basement and was putting laundry into the dryer when I heard footsteps upstairs. When I went up there, no one was there. Shortly, my boyfriend returned and I asked him if he had come back and then left again. He said he hadn't. Throughout the next couple of weeks we would hear small noises at night. The magnets from the entertainment centre cabinets clicking together and apart but not opening. The TV turned on a couple of times. There would be footsteps in the attic. Small things that didn't faze me.

We tried to take pictures of eerie places around the house to see if maybe something would appear, but to no avail. It wasn't until my boyfriend moved across the state that things started happening again. It was my birthday, my plans got ruined and I was sitting home alone, sad, with all the lights off. I started hearing this very loud banging sound. At first I thought it was fireworks, because it was July. But the sound was far too loud and close by to be fireworks. I figured out that it was coming from the attic. Nothing too strange ever happened in the attic before, just footsteps every so often, so I was slightly alarmed. It sounded like a hammer banging on wood. After a few minutes the banging stopped and it sounded as if something large and heavy was being dragged across the floor of the attic to the opposite side of the house. Moments later footsteps walked from that side of the attic back to the side where the banging had been. The process started again, banging, dragging, footsteps again and again. I went outside and called a friend over but by the time she got there it had stopped.

A week or so after that, I was lying in bed alone and I felt him standing close to my bed. He has never been in my room when I have been in bed before. It was probably the creepiest moment out of all the things that happened during that year and a half. That was also the last. I moved out of the house two months later. I've been back a couple times. No one lives there still and during the day you can look and see in all the windows through cracks in the shades. At night if you look in from the side of the living room you can see a light flickering like a flame from under the door of what used to be my kids room.