A Promise I’ll Keep
My parents divorced, and my mom always used to talk about my dad’s house, more specifically, “the back room”. The house was located in a super small town in middle America. It was a super old house with an addition. The new addition was “the back room”. My dad always kept it sealed off.
It was full of boxes and had a bedroom attached. The back room was fantastic as a kid because there was so much stuff back there. There were boxes full of old toys, papers, weird stuff, fishing lures, books, etc. All the things that had been “stored”. But it had a dark side, too.
My mom would always tell us that she put her guitar back there and would always hear it being strummed at random times, day or night. It would sound as if someone was running their hand across all the strings.
We always had really minor weird stuff happen at that house, but nothing that would make me say there was a severe issue. There were footsteps, the occasional bang, and stuff being moved. When I turned 11 or 12, I decided that since nobody was using the back room, it should be mine.
My dad agreed. It was later at night, so I moved a mattress in on the floor, determined to set up the room as my own the next day. This was a dreadful mistake. That night, I went to bed and woke up really late in the night.
It sounded as if a thousand birds were in the room, all flying around and smacking into walls, or a thousand hands all over the walls, hitting them. I could hear it a foot or so above my head. I put the blankets over my head, which lasted for at least another 30 minutes.
I finally mumbled, “Let me sleep tonight, and I’ll never sleep here again”, and it stopped. The next day, I didn’t say a word. I was terrified, but I was also scared of being laughed at by my dad for being a baby or something.
The day passed, and at night, I was freaked out at going back in there, but I still said nothing to my dad about what had happened. As I started to go back to bed, my dad opened the door and said, “If there’s something back here bothering you, you don’t have to sleep back here”.
I immediately got up and slept in another room. Story credit: Reddit