The Witching Hour
My wife and I were living in an apartment when my great aunt was looking to sell her home. The house was built in the 50s and needed some work. My aunt didn’t feel like taking care of it, so she suggested she take the apartment, and we buy the house. It was a good deal that worked out for everyone.
The house was always full of people. We had friends live with us for a while, then my brother, then we had kids. After moving in, though, things went slowly downhill. First, I started sleep-walking. Once, I actually opened up the basement door and fell down a flight of stairs.
Every once in a while, we would get creeped out or hear a strange sound, but it was nothing really noteworthy. It could usually be explained as someone else making noise. My great aunt passed a few years later, and then things started getting really strange. My wife would hear voices.
My son, who was two or three at the time, started waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning, crying. The cat would go into his room and stare at the top corner of his wall. The dogs would growl outside the door. However, it was all pretty explainable so far. My wife was getting nervous, but I just laughed it off.
I figured it was due to the fact that we lived close to the neighbors, my son was hitting a developmental milestone, or maybe squirrels were getting into the attic. Then, things got VERY creepy.
One day, we were watching my nephew. I heard giggling in my son’s room—it was my nephew. I walked in, and he pointed at the corner the cat used to stare at. The cat had passed before my nephew was even born. My nephew was just creepy giggling.
My son started saying things like, “I don’t want to go to bed. He gets mad” or “The shadow went over there”. I still laughed it off out loud but was getting truly creeped out. That uneasy feeling that “someone’s here” kept hitting, harder and harder.
Soon things started happening at 3 AM—“the witching hour”. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, which was no big deal, except falling back to sleep was tough because I felt like someone was watching me from a corner.
Then, for absolutely no reason, at 3:01 AM, my smoke detector started going off. “FIRE. FIRE. FIRE”. It went off three times, then stopped. I checked the house, and there was nothing. I changed the batteries and went back to bed.
The next morning at 3:01 AM, it went off again three times—“FIRE. FIRE. FIRE” then stopped. I got up again—nothing. After the fourth night, I was totally spooked. Then, inexplicably, it stopped. We ended up moving shortly after. We moved into an 1850s farmhouse. I never felt safer.
There were no creepy feelings, the kids were sleeping better, and I even stopped sleepwalking. The people that bought our house never even moved in. They put it back on the market, where it sat for almost a year. Story credit: Reddit / FynnCobb