Midnight Knocks in the Drywall
When we moved into the old house, the rumor about its bones was loud enough to hear in the fireplace. People spoke of echoes and cold drafts, but the true message arrived as a rhythm—at exactly midnight, a soft tapping behind the drywall that sounded less like wind and more like a conversation you forgot you were having with a stranger in the next room.
The first night, I dismissed it as a house warming prank from the previous owner’s imagination. By the second night, the knocks grew more confident, pacing the corners of the room like a heartbeat learning its own lullaby. It wasn’t long before the taps learned my schedule, tapping precisely when I lay awake with an open book and a mind full of questions I hadn’t asked aloud.
One evening I pressed my ear to the wall and whispered, “Who is there?” The wall answered not with words but with pattern—two quick taps, a longer pause, three taps, a sigh. I counted, then counted again. The sequence repeated, as if a ledger kept by someone who never slept. I mapped the rhythm with pencil marks along the baseboard, and that night the marks rearranged themselves into a sentence: “Let me out.”
Let me out, the wall seemed to murmur, and the hollow behind the drywall widened just enough for a hand to reach.
Curiosity, that dangerous thread, pulled at me harder than fear. I found a forgotten diary tucked inside a cavity behind a loose tile in the kitchen wall. The pages were damp and the handwriting slanted like rain on a window. It spoke of a family who rented the place long ago, of dinners that tasted of dust and conversations that ended in closed doors, and, most importantly, of a chorus—the house’s memory—hidden in every seam. The last entry listed a warning and a plea to the future tenant: listen, but do not answer.
The diary’s warning haunted me with each repetition of the midnight knocks. The house, it seemed, remembered every scream and kept them. The drywall was not a barrier but a skin, and the room behind it breathed with the names of those who disappeared here. When I spoke a name aloud—my own—the room exhaled, as if the walls had learned my voice and decided to keep it echoing inside me forever.
- The knocks follow a pattern you can learn, and perhaps misuse.
- Listening may reveal a history buried beneath plaster and paint.
- Answering might invite a presence you cannot uninvite.
Now, the house waits with patient certainty for the next visitor who will listen. The midnight chorus has grown quiet, almost respectful, as if it understands that I am listening not to get out, but to stay and become part of the room’s unending litany. The wall remains a doorway and a witness, and in the silence between knocks, I hear the soft breath of something waking just beyond the drywall’s pale edge.