I have always been a woman of science. I’m a pharmacist. I deal in milligrams, chemical reactions, and tangible proof. If I can’t measure it, weigh it, or see it under a microscope, I generally don’t worry about it.
So, when my five-year-old son, Ethan, started talking about the “New Friend,” I reacted the way any tired, modern mother would. I bought him a nightlight and blamed it on too much sugar before bed.
It started on a Tuesday in November. We had just moved into the new house in Connecticut—a beautiful, sprawling colonial that was slightly over our budget but perfect for growing old in. It had creaky floorboards and drafty windows, but it had character.
I was tucking Ethan in. The room was painted a soft blue, filled with Lego sets and dinosaur plushies.
“Mom,” Ethan whispered, grabbing my wrist just as I turned to leave. His grip was surprisingly strong. “Don’t go yet.”
“It’s past bedtime, sweetie,” I said, smoothing his hair. “School tomorrow.”
“He’s sitting under there,” Ethan said. He didn’t point. He just stared at the gap between the bed frame and the floor.
I sighed, smiling patiently. “Ethan, we talked about this. There are no monsters. Just dust bunnies.”
“He’s not a monster,” Ethan corrected me, his voice deadly serious. “He’s a friend. But he’s shy. He doesn’t like it when you look.”
That sentence sent a weird, prickly heat down the back of my neck. He doesn’t like it when you look. It was such a specific, odd phrasing for a five-year-old.
“Okay,” I said, dropping to my knees. “Let’s check. For peace of mind.”
I lifted the duvet.
Underneath were two plastic bins of Hot Wheels, a lost sock, and a lot of carpet lint.
“See?” I smiled, standing up and brushing off my knees. “Empty. Just toys.”
Ethan didn’t smile back. He pulled the blanket up to his chin. “He hides in the dark parts, Mom. He makes himself flat.”
I kissed his forehead, dismissed it as the active imagination of a creative boy, and turned out the lights.
“Goodnight, Ethan.”
“Goodnight, Mom,” he whispered. Then, quieter: “Goodnight, Mister.”
I froze in the hallway. I told myself he was talking to a teddy bear.
I went downstairs, poured a glass of wine, and watched Netflix with my husband, Daniel. I didn’t mention it. Why would I? Kids say weird things.
Chapter 2: The Escalation
By Thursday, the “Friend” wasn’t just a bedtime topic. It was an obsession.
Ethan started refusing to play in his room during the day. He would drag his toys out to the landing or the living room. When I asked why, he said, “The Friend is sleeping. I don’t want to wake him up. He gets grumpy.”
“Ethan, this has to stop,” Daniel said at dinner that night. Daniel was a structural engineer. He was even more pragmatic than I was. “There is no friend. You’re scaring your mother.”
Ethan looked at his peas, pushing them around with a fork. “I’m not trying to. But he asks questions.”
The table went silent. The clinking of silverware stopped.
“What kind of questions?” I asked, my voice trembling slightly.
“He asks why Daddy yells at the football games on TV. He asks why you smell like vanilla. And he asks when he can come upstairs.”
I dropped my fork. It clattered loudly against the china.
“Upstairs?” Daniel frowned. “Ethan, his ‘room’ is under your bed. You’re already upstairs.”
Ethan looked up, his big brown eyes filled with a confusion that looked entirely genuine.
“No, Dad,” he said. “He lives under the house. He only crawls up to my room at night. Through the wood.”
That night, Daniel inspected the floorboards in Ethan’s room. He checked for loose panels, rot, or holes.
“Solid oak,” Daniel declared, stomping his heel on the floor. “Nothing can come through here, bud. It’s safe as a bank vault.”
Ethan just watched from the doorway, holding his favorite stuffed triceratops. “He’s listening,” Ethan whispered.
“Enough,” Daniel snapped, tired from work. “Go to sleep, Ethan. No more stories.”
We put him to bed. But that night, at 3:00 a.m., I woke up to Ethan standing by our bedside, staring at me.
“Can I sleep here?” he begged. “He’s breathing too loud. I can’t sleep.”
I let him in. I cuddled his warm little body, smelling his shampoo. He fell asleep instantly.
But I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, straining my ears to hear what he heard.
The house was silent.
Or was it?
Faintly, rhythmically, I thought I heard a thump… thump… thump coming from down the hall. Like someone tapping a finger against a hollow wall.
Chapter 3: The Camera
By Sunday, I was a wreck. Ethan looked pale. He had dark circles under his eyes.
“Is the friend a boy or a girl?” I asked him while driving him to school.
Ethan thought for a long time. “Not a grown-up,” he said finally. “But not a kid either. He’s… old. But small.”
That description made me nauseous.
Daniel laughed it off again. “You’re watching too many true crime documentaries, Sarah. The kid is playing us for attention.”
“I’m buying a camera,” I said.
“Fine,” Daniel rolled his eyes. “If it makes you sleep better. Get one of those motion-sensor ones.”
I bought a high-end indoor security camera. It had 1080p resolution, night vision, and a two-way microphone.
I set it up on the bookshelf in Ethan’s room. I angled it specifically to capture the entire bed and the gap between the mattress and the floor.
“Look, Ethan,” I explained that night. “This is a magic eye. It sees everything. If the Friend comes, we will see him. And if he’s not real, the camera will show us.”
Ethan looked at the camera lens. He didn’t look relieved. He looked terrified.
“He won’t like that,” Ethan whispered.
“Too bad,” I said firmly. “My house, my rules.”
Chapter 4: 2:41 A.M.
The first night, Monday, nothing happened.
I checked the app on my phone the next morning. A timelapse of a sleeping boy. He tossed, he turned, he kicked off the covers. The space under the bed remained black and empty.
“See?” Daniel smirked over coffee. “Nothing.”
I felt better. I really did.
Then came Tuesday night.
I woke up naturally around 2:30 a.m. Call it a mother’s intuition. I reached for my phone on the nightstand and opened the camera app.
The live feed loaded. It was in black-and-white night vision.
Ethan was asleep, curled into a tight ball in the center of the bed. The room was still.
I watched for a minute, feeling foolish. I was about to close the app when the notification banner popped up at the top of the screen.
SOUND DETECTED – 2:41 A.M.
My heart skipped a beat.
I turned the volume up on my phone and held it to my ear.
At first, just the static hiss of the room tone. Then, the sound of fabric rustling.
And then… a voice.
It wasn’t a whisper. It was a wet, raspy sound, like air being forced through a crushed windpipe. It was quiet, but because the room was dead silent, the microphone picked it up perfectly.
“…don’t look down…”
I froze. My blood turned into ice water.
I replayed the last ten seconds.
Rustle.
“…don’t look down…”
And then, five seconds later:
“…I’m here…”
It was a man’s voice. Definitely male. But it sounded… wrong. It sounded parched.
I didn’t wake Daniel. I didn’t think. Instinct took over.
I jumped out of bed, grabbed the heavy flashlight from the nightstand, and ran down the hallway. I didn’t care if I was overreacting. There was a man in my son’s room.
I burst through Ethan’s door, slamming the light switch on.
“Get away from him!” I screamed, wielding the flashlight like a club.
Ethan bolted upright, screaming in terror at my sudden entrance.
“Mom?!”
The room was bright.
Empty.
The window was locked. The closet door was shut.
I dropped to my knees and shone the light under the bed.
Nothing. Just the toy bins.
I stood up, panting, my chest heaving. Ethan was sobbing now, terrified by my reaction.
“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” I said, rushing to hug him. “I thought I heard… I thought…”
I looked around the room, feeling like I was losing my mind. Had the camera malfunctioned? Was it interference from a radio?
Then, I looked at the floor.
Right next to the bed. On the thick, plush beige carpet.
There were two indentations.
Deep, circular depressions in the carpet fibers.
They looked exactly like knees. As if someone had been kneeling by the bedside, their face inches from my sleeping son, and had stood up the second I ran down the hall.
And they were fresh. I watched as the carpet fibers slowly, agonizingly, bounced back up.
“Mom,” Ethan whimpered, pulling on my sleeve. “He’s mad.”
“We’re leaving,” I said. “Now.”
Chapter 5: The Threat
I dragged Ethan into our room. I woke Daniel up. I was hysterical.
“There was someone in there! Look at the carpet!”
Daniel went to check. By the time he got there, the carpet had bounced back. He checked the windows. Locked. He checked the attic access. Sealed.
“Sarah, look at the footage,” he said, trying to be the voice of reason. “Did you see anyone?”
We watched the clip together on my phone.
2:40 A.M.: Ethan sleeps. 2:41 A.M.: The Audio. “…don’t look down… I’m here…”
But the video?
Nothing.
No figure. No shadow. Just the audio.
“It’s… it’s interference,” Daniel said, though he looked pale. “Maybe a baby monitor from next door? Crossing frequencies?”
“Next door is half a mile away, Daniel!” I screamed. “And the carpet! I saw the knee prints!”
“We are not leaving the house at 3:00 a.m. over a radio glitch,” Daniel insisted. “Ethan stays with us tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll call a security company. Okay?”
I didn’t sleep. I sat up in bed, holding Ethan, watching the door with the flashlight in my hand.
The next morning, the sun washed away some of the fear, as it always does.
Ethan sat at the kitchen island, eating toast. He seemed eerily calm.
“Mom,” he said, not looking up from his plate. “He talked to you last night, didn’t he?”
I stopped pouring the orange juice. “Who?”
“The Guest,” Ethan said. “He told me he likes your voice. He said you scream pretty.”
I dropped the pitcher. Orange juice exploded across the floor.
“Ethan,” I said, grabbing his shoulders. “What exactly did he say?”
Ethan looked at me. “He said if you keep the camera… he’ll sit on the bed next time. He wants to be seen.”
I packed a bag right then. Daniel was at work. I didn’t care. I wasn’t staying another night.
I went upstairs to get Ethan’s clothes. I walked into his room.
I looked at the bookshelf where I had placed the camera.
My breath caught in my throat.
I had placed the camera facing the bed. I had used double-sided tape to secure it so it wouldn’t fall.
But the camera wasn’t facing the bed anymore.
It had been physically wrenched around.
It was facing the wall. specifically, it was facing the corner where the shadows were darkest.
I pulled out my phone to check the live feed history to see who moved it.
I scrolled back.
8:45 A.M. (Just ten minutes ago, while we were downstairs eating breakfast).
The video showed the empty room.
Then, suddenly, the view shifted.
It wasn’t a hand that grabbed the camera.
The camera just… slid. It turned slowly, grinding against the shelf, fighting the tape, until it faced the wall.
And then, a whisper, so loud it distorted the microphone speakers.
“Now it’s just us.”
I grabbed the clothes. I grabbed Ethan. I ran.
We are staying at my mother’s house tonight. Daniel is furious, saying I’m overreacting. He’s at the house alone right now.
He just texted me.
“Honey, stop being crazy. I’m in Ethan’s room. It’s totally quiet. Wait… did you leave the closet door open?”
I haven’t replied.
Because I know I shut that door.
Part 2: The Mimic in the Walls
Chapter 1: The Longest Twenty Minutes
I stared at my phone screen until my vision blurred.
“Honey, stop being crazy. I’m in Ethan’s room. It’s totally quiet. Wait… did you leave the closet door open?”
That was the text Daniel had sent at 9:42 a.m.
It was now 10:05 a.m.
I was sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, clutching a cold cup of coffee. Ethan was in the living room watching cartoons, blissfully unaware that his father was currently trapped in the house of horrors we had just fled.
I typed: NO. GET OUT. DANIEL, ANSWER ME.
Delivered. Read.
No reply.
“Sarah, you’re going to burn a hole in that phone,” my mother said gently, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Daniel is a big guy. He’s probably just checking the fuse box or… well, you know how stubborn he is. He’s probably fixing the closet door hinge right now just to prove a point.”
My mother didn’t know the whole story. She thought we had a “gas leak scare.” I couldn’t tell her that her grandson was communicating with a raspy-voiced entity that lived in the floorboards.
I opened the camera app again.
Connection Error. Camera Offline.
My stomach dropped. The camera I had left in Ethan’s room—the one that had turned itself to face the wall—was dead. Either the battery had died (unlikely, it was plugged in) or someone had unplugged it.
“I’m going back,” I said, standing up and grabbing my keys.
“Sarah, don’t be ridiculous,” my mother started.
Then, my phone rang.
It was Daniel.
I swiped answer so fast I almost dropped the phone. “Daniel!?”
“I’m coming,” he said.
His voice wasn’t the calm, rational engineer’s voice I knew. It was high, tight, and breathless. I could hear the roar of wind in the background—he was driving with the windows down, or he was driving very, very fast.
“Daniel, what happened? Why is the camera offline?”
“I ripped it out,” he snapped. “I ripped the whole damn cord out.”
“Why? What did you see?”
“Not on the phone,” he said. “Don’t… I don’t want to talk about it until I see you. Just… keep Ethan away from the windows. Don’t let him look outside.”
“Daniel, you’re scaring me.”
“Good,” he said grimly. “You should be scared. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Chapter 2: The Skeptic Breaks
When Daniel’s truck screeched into my mother’s driveway, he looked like he had aged ten years in an hour. His skin was gray. His hands were shaking so badly he struggled to get the keys out of the ignition.
I ran out to meet him. He grabbed me and hugged me so hard my ribs cracked. He smelled like cold sweat and adrenaline.
We went into the guest room, away from Ethan and my mom. Daniel sat on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands.
“I went into the room,” Daniel began, his voice trembling. “After I texted you. The closet door was open a crack. I knew I shut it before I went to bed the night before, but I thought… maybe the latch is loose. Old house, right?”
He laughed, a dry, humorless sound.
“So I walked over to close it. And then I heard you.”
I froze. “Me? I was here.”
“I know!” Daniel looked up, his eyes wide and bloodshot. “But I heard you. Clear as day. Coming from inside the closet. You whispered, ‘Daniel, help me with this box. It’s heavy.'”
A chill went down my spine that made the hair on my arms stand up.
“It sounded exactly like you, Sarah. The pitch. The tone. Even the way you say my name. I actually reached for the handle. I thought maybe you had come back and were playing a prank, or I was losing my mind.”
“Did you open it?” I whispered.
“I didn’t have to,” Daniel said. “Because then it giggled.”
He shuddered.
“It wasn’t a human giggle, Sarah. It was… wet. It sounded like air bubbling through liquid. And then the voice changed. It wasn’t you anymore. It was that voice from the recording. The raspy one.”
He closed his eyes, reliving the moment.
“It said: ‘Daddy doesn’t believe.’“
“And then the door slammed shut. By itself. Bam! Right in my face. And then… something hit the door from the inside. Hard. Like a sledgehammer. The wood splintered, Sarah. Look at my arm.”
He rolled up his sleeve. There was a long, jagged scratch running from his elbow to his wrist, welting red.
“I didn’t wait to see what came out,” Daniel whispered. “I grabbed the camera cord because it was in my way, ripped it down, and ran. I didn’t even lock the front door.”
He looked at me, tears forming in his eyes.
“You were right. There’s something in there. And it knows us. It knows our names.”
Chapter 3: The Blueprint
We couldn’t just abandon the house. We had our entire lives in there. Our clothes, our documents, our savings invested in the down payment.
But we couldn’t go back. Not yet.
“We need to know what we’re dealing with,” I said. “Ethan said it was ‘old but small.’ You heard it mimic me. What is that?”
“A demon?” Daniel asked, the word sounding ridiculous coming from his mouth.
“Or a squatter,” I said, my pharmacist brain trying to find logic. “Some deranged person living in the walls who is good at voices?”
“A squatter doesn’t slam a door with enough force to crack the frame without a handle,” Daniel argued.
We decided to do the one thing we hadn’t done before buying the house. We went to the town records office.
The clerk, a chatty woman named Brenda, pulled the file for 42 Oak Street.
“Oh, the Henderson place,” she said, adjusting her glasses. “Beautiful structure. Shame about the history, though.”
Daniel and I exchanged a look. “History?”
“Well, you know,” Brenda licked her finger to turn the page. “The tragic accident in the 50s. The boy.”
“What boy?” I asked, my voice tight.
“Thomas,” Brenda read. “Thomas Henderson. Five years old. Same age as your little one, right? He went missing. They thought he ran away into the woods. Massive search party. They never found him.”
She paused, looking at a faded newspaper clipping in the file.
“The parents were never charged, but… rumors were they kept him locked up. He was… different. Deformed, the papers said. ‘A sickly child who could not be seen in sunlight.’ They say he used to hide in the crawlspaces to escape his father’s temper.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
Not a grown-up… but not a kid either.
He hides in the dark parts.
“Did they ever find a body?” Daniel asked.
“No,” Brenda said closing the file. “The parents sold the house in ’65 and moved to Florida. People have lived there since, of course. But nobody stays long. They always say the plumbing is noisy.”
Chapter 4: The Return
We had to go back.
We needed our social security cards, our laptops, and frankly, we needed to confront this. If there was a squatter—or a child—living in our walls, we had to know.
We went at noon. High noon. The sun was blazing. Shadows were minimal.
We brought my brother, Mike, who is a cop. He brought his service weapon. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but he believed in intruders.
“I’ll sweep the house,” Mike said, entering first with his gun drawn. “You guys stay on the porch.”
We waited. Ten minutes passed.
“Clear!” Mike yelled. “House is empty. But you got a serious pest problem, Danny. The smell in the upstairs hall is awful.”
We walked in. The house felt heavy. Oppressive.
We went upstairs. The door to Ethan’s room was closed.
Daniel reached for the knob. His hand shook. He turned it.
The room was destroyed.
It wasn’t just messy. It was tossed.
The dresser drawers were pulled out. Clothes were shredded. The bed…
My heart stopped.
The mattress had been dragged off the frame and propped against the window, blocking out the sunlight. The room was in twilight darkness.
And in the center of the floor, where the bed used to be, two floorboards had been pried up.
A black, gaping hole stared up at us.
“Mike,” Daniel whispered. “Get the light.”
Mike clicked on his tactical flashlight and shone it into the hole.
It wasn’t just a crawlspace. It was a tunnel. A space between the floor joists that ran deep into the wall cavity, far larger than it should have been.
“Jesus,” Mike hissed. “Someone’s been living down there.”
He knelt and reached in. He pulled something out.
It was a collection.
A nest.
Made of dryer lint, shredded t-shirts, and… hair.
And in the center of the nest lay a pile of objects.
My missing earring. Daniel’s watch. And dozens of Ethan’s Hot Wheels cars.
“He’s been coming up,” I whispered, nausea rolling over me. “He’s been coming up every night to take things.”
“Look at this,” Mike said, his voice grim.
He pointed the light at the underside of the floorboard he had removed.
There were scratches. Deep, gouged scratches in the wood.
And writing. Scratched with a fingernail or a knife.
MOMMY. DADDY. ETHAN.
MINE.
Chapter 5: The Thing in the Vent
“We are burning this house down,” Daniel said flatly.
“We need to leave,” Mike said, standing up and holstering his gun. “This is… this is beyond me. You need a priest or a demolition crew. Or both.”
We turned to leave the room.
Creeeeaaak.
The sound came from above us.
Not the floor. The ceiling.
The air vent directly above Ethan’s bed frame rattled.
We all froze.
“It’s in the HVAC system,” Daniel whispered. “It moves through the walls.”
Mike drew his gun again, aiming at the vent. “Come out! Police!”
Silence.
Then, a sound that I will hear in my nightmares until the day I die.
It wasn’t a roar. It wasn’t a scream.
It was a recording.
Perfectly mimicked.
It was Ethan’s voice.
“Mommy? Can I sleep in your bed? He’s breathing too loud.”
I sobbed, covering my mouth. “That’s… that’s what Ethan said to me three nights ago.”
Then, the voice changed. It dropped an octave. It became the raspy, dry thing from the camera.
“He’s not your Ethan anymore.”
The vent cover exploded downward.
A cloud of black dust and insulation poured into the room, blinding us.
“Run!” Mike screamed.
We scrambled for the door. I felt something cold—freezing cold—brush against my neck. It felt like wet, dead fingers.
I didn’t look back. I didn’t look down.
We tumbled down the stairs, coughing, Daniel dragging me, Mike covering the rear. We burst out the front door into the sunlight, gasping for air.
We ran to the truck. We drove away. We didn’t stop until we were three towns over.
Chapter 6: The Aftermath
That was two weeks ago.
We are staying at a hotel. The house is currently on the market, listed “as is.” We disclosed “structural issues.” We didn’t disclose the other thing.
We hired a contractor to board up the windows and weld the doors shut before we listed it.
The contractor called me yesterday.
“Mrs. Reynolds,” he said, sounding confused. “We welded the back door shut like you asked. But when we came back this morning… the welds were broken.”
“Broken?” I asked, gripping the phone.
“Yeah. From the inside.”
I hung up.
I looked over at the hotel bed where Ethan was playing. He was lining up his new Hot Wheels cars in a perfect row.
“Ethan?” I asked gently. “How are you sleeping?”
“Good,” he said, not looking up.
“No more… friends?”
Ethan stopped playing. He turned to me. His eyes were dark.
He smiled. But it didn’t look like his smile. It looked a little too wide. A little too old.
“He says he misses you, Mom,” Ethan whispered.
Then he turned back to his cars.
And under the hotel bed…
I heard a soft, wet giggle.
THE END.
