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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/BlairDaniels on 2024-10-13 03:04:51+00:00.
We’d given up our dream of ever owning a house long ago.
We’d been priced out post-covid, plain and simple. I’d accepted our fate—we’d be renting a three-bedroom ranch from some old guy named Leonard that measured the nicks in the wall with a micrometer. We’d keep forking over cash every month, year after year, always treading water, in danger of drowning at any time.
But then we found 27 Hillside Lane, and all of that changed.
It was priced way below market value. I should’ve known then there was something wrong with it—water damage. Fire damage. Wasps in the walls. Maybe even a ghost or two. But the house passed inspection, and it was now or never.
We bought the house.
It was the biggest mistake of our lives.
*******
I first noticed it when I was cooking dinner on Day 4 in the new house.
As I lay breaded chicken into the oil, cursing out my picky kids who would only eat the most time-intensive of meals, I felt a soft breeze on my arm.
I dismissed it—until I turned around felt it a second time, across the middle of my back. Like someone was reaching out and caressing me.
I held my hands out and closed my eyes, focusing on the feeling. But there was no denying it—there was definitely a breeze.
I checked the vent-hood-thing—something our previous kitchen didn’t have, something that was still utterly perplexing to me. “Eric! Did you turn the vent on?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“I feel a breeze.”
It couldn’t be the heating system—it was an old house, with baseboard heat and unit air conditioners, built around the 1930s. The real estate agent never told us the exact year, and the Trulia listing played that nasty trick where someone had entered the year it was renovated as the year it was built.
“Looks like it’s off,” Eric said, checking the hood.
“Do you feel it, though?”
He stood still in front of me, concentrating. “Yeah, I guess I do,” he said, finally.
So that was it, then. We’d bought a drafty old house with shit insulation. Of course, there had to be somethingwrong. We’d bought the house in September, when it was still warm; now, well into October, we were getting those bone-cold nights where the air just pulls the warmth out of your skin.
We were going to be in for a terrible winter—and terrible heating bills—if this was really how drafty the house was.
Except.
Except the breeze didn’t feel cold.
It almost felt… warm?
The chicken was starting to burn. I ran over and grabbed it out of the oil with tongs. “Ava! Hayden! Dinner!”
As I picked off the burnt pieces of breading, I forgot all about it.
***
That night I couldn’t sleep, because I went down what I call the “OCD spiral of death.”
When I find that one thing wrong, and convince myself someone’s going to die, or we’re all going to die, or the world’s going to implode.
Here’s how mine started: I googled random breeze in house, and one of the results talked about a gas leak.
I had replayed Ava and Hayden’s funerals in my head three times before I picked up the phone and called the gas company. The kids were already asleep, and it was after hours, but I didn’t care.
I would not be sleeping until I was sure the house was safe.
***
The guy that rang the doorbell was a young, spindly guy of maybe 22. He wandered in, carrying a heavy toolbox. Eric had already gone back to bed, thoroughly annoyed that I’d called anyone in the first place. You’re overreacting. We’re not going to die. Do it in the morning. Normally, I’d snipe back at him, but in the interest of time I simply ignored him.
“So where do you feel the wind?” the young guy asked, getting set up.
“The kitchen.”
He pulled out some sort of meter. It let out a beep. He roamed around the room, then went upstairs, and down. Pulled out another meter and did the same thing. “No gas leak,” he told me, as he set down the meter, pulled out his phone, and shot off a text to someone.
I hope he knows what he’s talking about.
“But everything else looks normal?” I pressed.
“Uh, oh yeah, your CO2 levels are a little high. How many people you got living here?”
“Four.”
“Really? Just four? Any pets?”
“No.”
“I guess it’s poor ventilation, or something. Everything else is normal though. Radon, natural gas, VOCs…”
He started telling me how I could buy an air quality meter on Amazon, but I wasn’t listening. Because I felt it again. The breeze. It was against the nape of my neck, against my ears and my cheeks. Fluttering all the little flyaways that had escaped my ponytail.
And I realized something.
The breeze was changing direction.
The little hairs on the nape of my neck fluttered one way. Then, a few seconds later, they fluttered the otherway.
What the hell?
“Do you feel it? Right now? The breeze?”
“Uh… yeah, I do feel it, actually.”
“Does it seem to be going… opposite directions? Like in, out, in, out…” I trailed off, swallowing. “Like someone’s right here, breathing?”
He stared at me.
Then he lowered his voice. “Did the real estate agent tell you what happened in this house?”
My throat went dry. “No.”
“The family that lived here before you,” he said, taking in a breath. “Found dead. All four of them. Hanging from that tree outside.” He pointed towards the backyard.
My stomach fell through the floor.
“No one would buy the house, because everyone thought it was haunted. That’s why it was so cheap.”
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t say a word. I choked on air.
And then—
The guy let out a wheezing laugh.
“I’m just playing with you!”
I felt the heat rise to my cheeks.
“Sorry. Wait, really, I’m sorry. You’re not going to report me to my boss or something, are you?”
I forced a smile. “No. It’s fine.”
Damn kids.
“Okay. Thanks, thanks so much.” He packed up. “So you’re all good, right?”
I nodded. “Thanks for coming out so late.”
He stepped out into the darkness.
I slammed the door, my whole body shaking.
***
Breathing.
That’s really what it felt like.
It wasn’t all the time. Sometimes I couldn’t feel it. Sometimes I could feel it, powerfully.
I ended up taking the guys’ suggestion and buying an air quality meter. He was right—the CO2 levels werereally high. So I opened some windows. To ventilate, and because it was a lot less disturbing when the windows were open.
As it turned out, however—the breeze was far from the only thing wrong with this house.
On Tuesday afternoon, I decided to do some unpacking while Eric was at work and the kids were at school. I was feeling frustrated, both with my work (I was editing photos after one of my family photo sessions) and because it seemed like I’d misplaced my engagement ring for the umpteenth time.
Besides—the house was really bothering me. Everything felt too blank, too sterile. It wasn’t ours yet, without the ceramic red chicken in the kitchen, or the collage of family photos on the wall, or my photo of an autumn forest hanging in the foyer.
So I got out the studfinder, some nails, and got to work.
The studfinder was one of those magnetic ones that you hang from a string, to find the nails in the studs, so I’d be nailing into wood rather than flimsy drywall. So there I stood, swinging the studfinder back and forth on a piece of tye-dyed yarn in front of the wall, like some kind of weirdo.
I waited to feel a tug, waited for it to catch.
Nothing happened.
I stood there for fifteen minutes, repositioning the studfinder, walking closer and further away, holding it at an angle, swinging it fast and slow.
The studfinder never found a nail.
Am I using it wrong? But I’d hung up stuff a few times before. I never had this much trouble.
I tried different rooms, but it never caught on anything. I finally gave up. Instead, I went to get the mail, before the kids got home and everything descended into chaos.
When I turned around, I looked at the house—really looked at it. It was an odd-looking house, that much was true: a small Victorian, scalloped shingles painted robin’s-egg blue, with stark white trim. A porch with engraved support columns, bare except for an old rocking chair the previous owners had left. A turret in the west corner, with a little spire that poked into the deep blue September sky.
The turret was just a façade, sort of. It was just a small outpocketing in the living room, like a bay window, almost. All of the turret that extended taller than the height of the house was just part of the attic. People always picture some sort of medieval tower with spiraling stairs—I know I did—but it isn’t true.
I headed back inside, sifting through the mail as I went. But when I got to the front door, I stopped dead.
I was locked out.
“For fuck’s sake,” I said under my breath.
I tried the door a few more times. Then I went around the back, but that door was locked, too. I sighed and stared up at the old house.
Eric wouldn’t be home for a few hours. Even if he could leave work early, I couldn’t text him—I didn’t have my phone.
As I paced around the house a second time, I noticed one of the windows was open in the living room. Of course. I’d left them open to ventilate! I started popping the screen out. The yard sloped gently back, though, so the opening was actually a few feet higher than a normal first story window.
Which would make getting in a challenge.
I set the screen against the side of the house and started to pull myself up. Making a complete fool of myself, I hung on for dear life and scrabbled to swing a leg over the windowsill.
I slipped and fell into t…
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