It started with the scratching.
At first, we thought it was mice. You know, the usual stuff—tiny claws scurrying behind the drywall, maybe looking for warmth. My older sister Jenna rolled her eyes and said it was “just old house noises,” but even she started to get nervous when the scratching turned into something else. Something more… intentional.
One night, I was lying in bed, trying to ignore the sound, when I heard three distinct taps from inside the wall. Tap. Tap. Tap. Not random like mice. Not scuttling or gnawing. It was rhythmic—like someone was knocking. I held my breath, heart pounding, and whispered, “Jenna… did you hear that?”
No answer. Her room was across the hall. I sat up, listening harder. The tapping stopped, and silence settled in thick like fog. I didn’t sleep much that night.
The next morning, I asked Mom about it over breakfast.
“There’s probably a raccoon or something in the walls,” she said, sipping her coffee. “This old house has enough gaps and crawlspaces to host a small zoo.”
“Can we call someone to check?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We’ll see.”
That’s how all problems went in our house—we’ll see. We’ll see if we have time, we’ll see if it gets worse, we’ll see if it goes away on its own.
But it didn’t go away.
By the end of the week, the noises had escalated. I’d hear scratching followed by that same three-tap pattern—tap, tap, tap—and then whispers. Actual whispers. So faint I couldn’t understand the words, but unmistakably human.
I recorded it on my phone one night. When I played it back, you could clearly hear it.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Then a pause.
Then the whisper: “Let me out.”
When I showed the recording to Jenna, she turned pale. “That’s fake,” she said quickly. “You edited that.”
“I swear I didn’t!”
She didn’t say anything more, but that night, she kept her bedroom light on.
Things got weirder after that. Sometimes, the tapping would start during dinner. It always came from the wall near the pantry. Dad, who barely noticed anything beyond his newspaper, finally raised an eyebrow.
“You kids up to something?”
“No!” I said. “It’s in the wall!”
He went over, tapped on the wall himself, and listened. Of course, there was nothing when he tried. The wall stayed silent, smug in its deception.
But at night, it came alive again.
We couldn’t ignore it anymore when the wall moved.
I woke up to a low creaking sound—like bending wood—and found a small bulge forming under the wallpaper in the hallway. It throbbed gently, like something breathing underneath. I stared at it, frozen, until it deflated again, disappearing into smooth plaster like it had never been there.
Jenna,” I whispered the next morning, “something’s living in our wall.”
She didn’t laugh. She looked tired, dark circles under her eyes. “I know.”
We both stayed up that night, huddled in her room with flashlights and a baseball bat. At 1:43 a.m., the tapping began again—slow and deliberate. Then came the voice, clearer than ever.
“I see you.”
That was enough for Jenna. The next morning, she told Mom we needed an exterminator. Now.
That afternoon, a man with a thick gray mustache and a giant toolbox showed up. He introduced himself as “Gary” and assured us he’d dealt with “everything from rats to raccoons to possums the size of Labradors.”
But when he started drilling a small inspection hole near the pantry wall, something strange happened.
The drill bit snapped. Then the wall screamed.
Yes—screamed.
It wasn’t human exactly, but it wasn’t animal either. A high-pitched wail that came from deep inside the house. Gary stumbled back, dropping his drill.
“What in God’s name—” he whispered.
We were all frozen. Mom looked like she might faint. Jenna grabbed my arm.
Gary didn’t come back. He packed up in silence and left without charging us.
That night, the house was dead quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that makes your ears buzz.
Around midnight, Jenna shook me awake.
“Come on,” she whispered.
We tiptoed to the hallway, past the pantry, and stood in front of the wall.
The wallpaper was rippling.
No joke—it was shifting like a pool of water disturbed by wind.
“We’re cutting it open,” Jenna said, holding a steak knife.
“Are you crazy?”
“We have to know what it is.
I nodded, heart hammering. She jabbed the knife into the drywall and began slicing a square. As the blade tore through, a foul, wet smell seeped out—like moldy wood and something worse.
We peeled the panel back.
And found an eye.
A huge, pale, lidless eye staring out at us from inside the wall.
I screamed. Jenna screamed. The eye blinked slowly, like it was waking up.
Then it whispered: “You let me out.”
We ran. Out of the house, into the street, barefoot and in pajamas. Our neighbors probably thought we were crazy.
The next day, Mom called a demolition crew.
She didn’t believe the whole “eye in the wall” story—but she had seen the wallpaper move, and she’d heard the scream. That was enough.
They tore the wall open that afternoon.
Nothing.
Just wood, insulation, and dust. No eye. No tunnel. No cavity where a creature could live.
But Jenna and I know what we saw. We heard it. We felt it.
That night, back in our half-gutted house, we lay in bed in silence.
Then the tapping began again.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
But this time, it came from the ceiling.
