Cliche, A Bump In The Night

Years ago my I had a friend named Josh. Josh and I had a ton of things in common such as video games, card games, running around outside and making up stories due to having overactive imaginations. We hung out most weekends and had always had a blast. His mother and father had unfortunately split years before so she was a single mother trying to support herself and her son financially. She would do odd jobs outside of work to bring in extra money. She used to house sit for a family in our church that traveled constantly all over the world sometimes being gone for weeks at a time. They had a massive house in a very affluent area near where I grew up. They were a part of a large stretch of road leading downtown that had these beautiful houses that were built in the 1700s by the people who originally settled in the area.

This house was a beautiful dark blue house with a brick fence around the property and large sprawling oak trees every few hundred feet. The property was beautiful and wealthy and even as a 9-10 year old I could appreciate its beauty. It was three floors tall and had been renovated on the inside with beautiful hardwood floors and no carpet to be seen in any of the rooms. The third floor was a vaulted attic type space but held a living area for the mother of the man who lived there. Unfortunately his mother had passed earlier that year. Soon after her passing they started renovations on the third floor, taking out the aging floors that had started to rot and moving all the furniture that was up there out of the house. Remember these details they are important.

There was a large vaulted library with a TV on the far end of the house where my friend and I used to play when I stayed over. He would plug in his PlayStation to the TV and we would play in that room for hours. I hated that room. The tall ceilings had books lined up all the way to the top with paintings mounted in a similar fashion. Looking back now it seems odd that they mounted paintings far above eye level but who am I to judge their decorating? Anyway these paintings were antiques, some of which had come with the house originally. No matter what you did it felt as if their eyes were following you. They were constantly watching and staring. There was a constant unending feeling of being watched in that room. Even if the lights were off and the only thing that illuminated the room was the TV and the paintings couldn't even been seen, the feeling persisted.

The second disturbing thing about that room was that there would be random pockets of cold that seemed to drift around it. You would be sitting on the couch and all of the sudden there would be a moving cold spot unlike any air-conditioning I had ever felt. This cold was almost chilling down to the soul. It would disturb me every time I felt it and the feeling of being watched would intensify so much during those moments. We would be sitting in that room playing games and hear footsteps approaching on the wooden floor and expect to see someone walk in. No one did. We brushed it off as hearing his mother walking around in another part of the house but looking back I know it wouldn't be her as these sounded like heavy shoe steps but his mom didn't wear shoes and really didn't even ever come back to the library to disturb us.

We would hear faint knocking on the walls occasionally. There were passages leading through the walls that were designed for the servants to go from different rooms to the kitchen without disturbing the owners of the house which the current owners used to store random boxes and such. We would hear random crashes and bangs from those corridors but his mom always had some explanation saying a box had toppled over. Looking back now I remember always being able to see a small amount of fear in her eyes that she tried to hide.

One night after playing games for hours we finally decided to head to bed. On the second floor there were four bed rooms. The layout of the second floor was interesting with the staircase being cutting through the middle of the floor and rooms surrounding it. Think of it this way: the rooms made a doughnut around the staircase that was in the middle of the house and zigzagged through the second and third floors. Anyway, typically we would sleep with the mother in the master bedroom in a sleeping bag or with her (give us a break we were kids) but that night we felt that we were too old and mature to be afraid of the dark. The room we were staying in had two twin beds and a couch and looked like it had at one point been a kid's room.

At about 3 AM after my friend and I had fallen to sleep I was awoke by a thud. I was groggy and unable to distinguish the sound I had heard and didn't hear it again. Being awake I realized I had to use the restroom. The restroom was at the end of the steps that lead to the third floor to the right of the master bedroom. I opened our door to the pitch black hallway. The wood was cold on my feet and the house felt unseasonably cold for being the middle of July. I moved to the bathroom looking in at my friend's mother as I passed her room and she was clearly asleep in her bed. I then went into the bathroom to relieve myself.

As I sat there on the toilet my blood ran cold as I felt a slight cold breeze cut through me. As I sat there I heard directly above me three distinct steps. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. Right above my head. I can still hear the sound now as I write this story, echoing in my brain. It was the distinct sound of boot steps walking on a wooden floor. My mind raced and I knew that there was no one up there. The owners had roped off the third floor stairs so no one could go up there. I sat there trying to explain it in my mind and then it hit me... They had taken out the hardwood floors in the rooms on the third floor. There were no floors to walk on up there. It was literally impossible for someone to walk around up there as all that was there were the exposed support beams that older houses used to frame the floors. I broke out in a cold sweat as I realized that what I had just heard couldn't have happened.

It's a good thing I was on the toilet already. I finished up and sprinted back to our room, glancing in to confirm his mother was still asleep and she was. I got into the room and, just like the cliché stories you hear, tried to tell my friend what happened but he was too groggy to hear anything I said. I then proceeded to push the small sofa that was in the room in front of the door, barricading us into the room (as if that would do anything). I crawled back into bed hiked the covers over my head and proceeded to not get a wink of sleep.

Now I know this might not seem scary to many of you and there are plenty of stories on here of full body apparitions and such but this did indeed happen and there was no doubt in my mind that I heard boots walking around on the third floor that night on a floor that wasn't there. Oh by the way, the room above the bathroom... That was the room that the mother of the man had died in.