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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Hidebehind_389 on 2024-09-30 08:37:39+00:00.
I recently went to visit my parents, who happen to still live in my childhood home.
The house sits at the end of our block in a cul-de-sac, and unlike a lot of houses in my old neighborhood, it demands attention with its lopsided appearance, large size, and ancient Victorian architecture.
My parents bought it before I was born, refurbished it, and moved in just as my mother was going into labor with me.
Ever since I was little, I had always experienced an “off” feeling about the place. Long shadows filled the halls. Strange noises weren’t uncommon at late hours. Night terrors disturbing beyond my years plagued my sleep.
I constantly experienced deep feelings of dread both day and night being in the house, and so did my friends, apparently. We never hung out at my place, which was just fine by me. Actually, I often looked for excuses to get out of my house anyhow.
Most people tend to hold memories of their childhood homes close to their hearts, but I really don’t.
Schoolkids and adults alike always gossiped about our house, calling it a ‘morbid’, ‘creepy’ ‘eyesore’, some might have even said ‘haunted’.
A lot of what I think contributed to my childhood fears of the house extended from two episodes of some children’s shows I used to watch. One being an episode of Curious George where George imagines hellish faces in his room after visiting a cave. The other was from Caillou, an episode where Caillou’s parents checked on him every night, but he was convinced they were monsters watching him from his doorway; these horrible silhouettes with cartoonishly white eyes. All of these episodes I watched in the dark of my living room, all of them made me cry so bad.
Another point, I had found a half-decayed squrriel on the property one time, one that I used to feed. It was stuck under a wheelbarrow. Its skin had been peeled away, its eyes popped, and its little mouth grimaced with rotting teeth. That messed me up, I cried for days. The smell, I would find after the incident, was a lot more common in the house.
With my active imagination, experiences, along with the rumors, now it came as no surprise as to why I was always afraid. Now that I’m grown up, you would think it would be easier to forget those fears. They were just kid’s shows, a natural cycle of life. But not with this house.
We had just finished dinner.
Baked chicken, beans, rice, asparagus.
As my parents and I walked through the windowless corridors, I remember being drawn toward the distantly familiar yellow wallpaper that made up almost every wall of the damned place. The paper’s pattern consisted of a vertical bar wrapped in vines, brown flower etchings that stacked on top of one another, reaching all the way to the ceiling.
That continuous bar-flower pattern would repeat, trailing into maddening repetition. Truly hideous.
We were winding through parts of the house I didn’t entirely recognize.
Finally, we arrived at an old room. The room, a barely-used guest suite, had one window, one dresser, and one bed.
An old leather teddy bear was perched on the dresser. Not mine. I didn’t know why it was there.
I sat my luggage down and slumped onto the bed as my parents walked away. I vividly remember the summer evening’s sun shining through the window as I unpacked my suitcase.
After settling in, I felt nasty after such a long day. It was dark out by this point. So, I took my toiletries to the bathroom next to my room.
Inconveniently, you had to exit the bedroom and then use an access door from the hall to get to the bathroom. The two rooms were adjacent. Probably a botched late edition to the house.
As a matter of fact, I never recalled seeing that bathroom before that day/night.
Growing up, I had always lived in a bedroom situated towards the front of the house, a door away from my parent’s room, actually.
The rest of the house was unfamiliar to me. You wouldn’t find me exploring it, at all.
Even my childhood curiosity had understood that exploring the manor was risky, somehow.
On top of that, my parents were quick to forbid me from wandering if it even appeared that I would, which I wasn’t inclined to anyways.
Both my parents and I had an emotional understanding, but not a true understanding of why this was.
I undressed and got in the shower. The tub was an antique porcelain whatnot with brass feet designed as claws holding glass orbs. A modern shower head and faucet knobs had been installed at some point during a renovation.
Something strange happened when I turned on the faucet. The sound of the aging backed-up pipes knocked through the walls. I hadn’t even pulled up the shower trigger yet. Red-stained water started spraying in spastic directions from the faucet. I thought at first that because my parents lived on the other side of the house, the plumbing had simply been neglected, causing a buildup of rust or debris.
I was more so confused when the pressure eventually released, and a piece of pink muscley meat fell from the faucet, into the tub.
It looked like a slimy piece of raw chicken, pre-prep. I remember being taken aback, confused and disgusted.
The faucet continued to gurgle, releasing more contaminated water until it started to turn clear and calm. I stood in the tub, cold, staring at the slab of flesh.
I figured that some animal must’ve been caught up in the pipes.
I took a thick wad of toilet paper, disposed of the meat in the toilet, flushed the toilet with my foot, washed my hands, then stepped back into the tub, turning on the faucet for a few minutes to let the hot water flush the pipes out.
I showered, got dressed, and tucked myself into bed.
I sat on my phone for a while, scrolling through Snapchat mindlessly.
As time passed, that sense of dread that I had always gotten staying up late at night as a child crept back. I glanced up at that leather teddy bear.
Beady glass eyes.
The few furnishings in the room made shadows; faces.
I eventually fell asleep.
I woke up in the middle of a peaceful sleep. My phone read 2 AM. My entire body was in a cold sweat. I covered myself so the only thing uncovered by the heavy pink blankets was my face, like a nun.
I relaxed for a while, trying to fall back asleep.
Screaming, like a woman going through childbirth, rang from the bathroom next door. The cries were intertwined with a frantic gargling sound. I remember tensing up and lying still.
A portion of the fear of the situation disappeared when I realized that my mother might’ve found herself in the bathroom, slipped, fell, hurt herself.
I got out of bed and jogged out of my room, to the bathroom. The screaming had stopped before I went in. I opened the door to a single warm lightbulb illuminating the room.
Reddit, what you are about to read is up to your interpretation.
The bathtub was full of blood. The entire room stank of what I can best describe as a mixture of raw meat, fried fish, and hand soap. All of that combined with the offputting dark red paint on the walls made me sick.
The entire situation felt like it was designed to be nauseating.
This was all added with that strange, empty late-night panging in my stomach.
The blood in the tub was being disturbed the slightest bit by movement underneath.
A long cut of pink raw meat, strands of fat attached to it, twitched its way up the side of the tub, making a wet squinching noise. As it did this, something round bobbed up to the surface, appearing to me as a stripped human head. It had no eyes, and its toothy mouth was gaped open, thick blood running between its teeth and into the tub. I could make out the little details of multifaceted tendrils of muscle from where I was. It was floating sideways, and while I was staring at it, the flesh chunk slapped onto the tile, splattering blood and other fluids onto the floor. It twitched, muscles firing at random, creating small indentations on its slimy surface.
I threw up the remnants of my dinner onto the floor. The meat thing was crawling towards me. The head still bobbed sideways in the blood. I came to my senses and started running. I ran through the halls until my head hit something hanging down from the ceiling with a crack, and I blacked out.
I woke up the next morning. My parents stood by my bed. I sat up and looked at them. They comforted me and explained what had happened last night, from their view, at least.
They explained how they had woken up to a loud noise from the other, my, side of the house. They cautiously approached, my father with a handgun fearing burglars, but found me, unconscious. Asleep, they said. I asked if it looked like I was hurt. They said ‘no’, and that they had simply carried me back to bed after I did not wake up despite their trying to get me to.
They also explained how they had found, in passing, vomit on the floor of my bathroom, as well as the faucet running for the tub.
My mother and father continued by asking me what had happened that night, I told them that I didm’t remember anything.
My father decided to do a short concussion test on me, then they left.
Later that afternoon, I packed my stuff, gave my parents an excuse that I was feeling sick, and left.
Every detail about this bothers me. A waking dream, food poisoning, a gas leak would be a hope. A hope.
My parents refuse to budge, they love the place.
As well as my mind refuses to budge from the idea of an other, because as I was unpacking the other day, I found a squelch of blood on my pajamas from that night. It looked lie the shape of the tendril.
—T. Terrence of Warren County, NJ