When I was little my family moved to a rural town out of the city, in this new house I would hear knocking in the ceiling sometime between 11pm-2am every night. This knocking would sound like someone lightly but firmly punching the ceiling in a slow steady rhythm. It would always last for a few minutes then suddenly just stop. Sometimes the knocking would have an irregular pattern but most nights it was just five knocks after each other then a pause then five again until it stopped. Most nights the knocking would happen at three minutes before midnight then stop right at midnight but it did sometimes started earlier or later.
At first this knocking didn’t bother me since I knew that my oldest sister’s room connected to the attic stairway so I assumed she would just be doing something noisy up there. It went on for years where I spent every night assuming it was her. The only time I would question it was when my sister would come and knock on my door asking me to quiet down since she was trying to sleep early; she was a known light sleeper so even having my DS’s sound on would annoy her. I remember even making rebuttals like “I’ll stop once you stop that loud knocking every night” and she would be confused then do what a big sister does, tell me to shut up. I spent years not being too bothered by this noise, until my oldest sister moved out to college and the knocking still went on. I don’t know how many nights it took for me to put together that it continued in her absence but once I did, I remember becoming very terrified in my bed and holding the blankets up to my face like a shield.
Once I figured out that it wasn’t my sister annoying me on purpose, I did as any scared child would do and told my parents. Now I love my parents but all they said was things like “Oh it’s just the house settling” or “The cats are probably just making weird noises while playing” and in their mind after saying things like that, the ordeal was finished. Meanwhile I spent every night absolutely horrified and couldn’t sleep until I heard the knocking. In my young mind once the knocking finished I could start to relax since whatever was doing it would either go away or go to sleep after it finished its nightly ritual. While I could get an okay sleep if the knocking started at its most common time of 11:57, some nights I would be exhausted waiting for that stupid noise until 2. I woke up disgruntled and mad quite a few times then would complain to my parents about the noise then insist they listen to it with me. Of course my parents just thought their only son was a coward imagining things in the dark. Honestly the logical side of me agrees with their hasty assessment but till this day I still get shivers and goosebumps recounting my memories of the last night I would hear that knocking.
In my room there was the only computer that my family owned. It technically wasn’t my computer and my family could have moved it somewhere else. The reason it was there was that at our old house my parent’s office became a mix of my bedroom once I was born since we didn’t have enough rooms so the tradition of keeping the computer in my room persisted to this house. My family all liked using the computer to pass time, my sisters usually played the sims, I would play flash games, my dad would browse news websites, and my mom would play solitaire or this game with a frog statue that shoots colored balls into a line of moving balls. One night my mom stayed up late in my room playing that frog game while I was trying to sleep, she for some reason got obsessed with beating this level she was stuck on before going to bed. At this point it had been many months, maybe even a year or two since my sister left for college so I was finally getting used to that knocking. It still scared me too much to sleep before it finished but I would be able to go asleep right after it finished for the night. Since I had some sort of a routine with it by then, I stopped complaining to my parents and gave up on trying to convince them that it was real. But since it was well past midnight as my mom cursed under her breath at her frog this fateful night, the knocking was far from my mind when suddenly it started like normal and my mom went “What is that noise?”
When she said that suddenly I remembered it’s not normal to wait for supernatural knocking to finish to let you sleep every night. I suddenly talked really fast expressing all the frustration building up all this time and urged her to go check it. My mom still insisted there must be a logical reason to this noise so she agreed to go check it out. We both got up, went into my sister’s empty room and opened the door leading to the attic stairs. The attic always sorta scared me because of the noise and the darkness coming from it seemed oppressive even with my mother standing between me and its beginnings. My mom turned the attic lights on and walked up there and urged me to come as well.
Now our attic’s layout was a little strange, up the stairs was a big windowless square room with a closet and a door that led to the actual normal attic area that went all the way around the square room with nothing to walk on except for the side roof attic rafters and the house’s insulation. I hesitated as my mom went up to the big square room and waited for her to give an all clear signal before I agreed to go up. Inside the square room was nothing abnormal and the knocking was finished by now. My mom went “oh well” and started to head back down. I begged her to check the actual attic space even though she would have to walk on the rafters to properly see all sides but she reluctantly agreed to do this after some persuading since it was so important to me. She grabbed one of the emergency flashlights that was located in the room, the room had no windows so my parents kept two flashlights up there in case my sister got trapped in the dark up there, then she walked out the main room’s door and started to step onto the attic rafters to see around the sides of the room. I stayed glue to the doorway leading to this attic space and kept asking her for updates as she got further away.
My mom got increasingly more annoyed as she went out of my eyesight around the corner and told me there was nothing unusual there. We continued this as my mom slowly walked down the rafters further and further to the opposite end of the square room when suddenly she stopped responding to me. I got more and more terrified as she refused to answer my calls asking her what was wrong. I slowly crept up to the corner and placed a foot carefully on the rafter then peeked around with my flashlight aimed all the way down. I could see my mom with her back turned towards me facing the far corner with both her feet on a rafter staring at something on the opposite end with her flashlight hanging loosely in her grip pointed at the ground. At this point I was in tears begging her to say something and wishing with all my might she would move like normal again. I was full on sobbing at this point when I decided I couldn’t leave my mother there any longer so I carefully started to step on each rafter, approaching her as I whimpered for her to please move or respond or do anything. In what seemed like forever I reached her and she still wasn’t doing anything when suddenly I saw something move in the far end of the attic space.
I was shaking, crying, and whimpering incoherently as I struggled to force myself to aim my flashlight at the thing moving in the attic. I could see the shape was vaguely humanoid and as I put the flashlight’s beam on it, it seemed to reflect it right back like a mirror but the light came back to me much much stronger than it should have been. It looked like a brilliant white light as strong as the sun was being aimed right back at me. This light overpowered my vision and I couldn’t see anything. Suddenly the light went away and I was back in my room, standing upright in the middle of the room next to my bed, I could see beams of sunlight coming from the window in between the shutters and my face felt suddenly dry. I was still shaking with fear but the tears and snot covering my face were absent which made me feel confused as I surveilled my room. My room seemed ordinary and was brightly lit from the windows like it was daytime. I went to my window and opened the shutters and found out it was indeed daytime. I checked the time and it was my usual wake up time of 7:30 am to get ready for school. Confusion replaced my fear so I went downstairs and found my mom was making breakfast. I immediately asked her about what happened. She looked confused and said “Oh you must mean when we checked that noise.”
I said “of course I mean that! What happened?! Why was someone in our attic?!”
My mom froze for a second then smiled and said “What do you mean? We found out it was just some old pipes that needed tightening when we checked.”
I was in disbelief and kept trying to question her but she shooed me away with a plate of food and told me to hurry to get ready for school.
I asked her several more times over the course of that week what she meant and tried to explain I don’t remember anything about pipes but the more I pushed, the more my mom insisted it was nothing. Eventually I stopped asking and ever since that night happened, the knocking never returned.
Now I’m 27 years old, I have seen horrible things in my life and I don’t want to sound arrogant but I feel like I’m a brave person when compared to most. Yet even today the memories of that one night makes my stomach churn and I start shaking all over like a scared kid. If I really imagined it and it was just some pipes, then why do I feel this way? Anyways that brings us to today, I thought about that night like I sometimes do and I had trouble sleeping since I felt so scared. So I called my mom and asked her “Do you remember the knocking I complained about as a kid? I think this was just a nightmare but I have this vivid memory that we went up to the attic together one night and what I saw terrified me. You usually shrug it off when I asked as a kid but I seriously have this terrifying memory that haunts me till this day about that night. Do you remember what happened exactly?”
My mom went from being chatty and excited to have me call her to completely silent. She was silent for so long I even asked if she was still there then suddenly she responded in a completely normal tone “What do you mean? Don’t you remember? I was in your room playing on the computer when I heard the noise, we went up to the attic together and walked onto that side area. Then I found a pipe knocking on the far end so we tightened it together and we both went to bed. It was perfectly mundane, I don’t get why you would have such a terrifying memory of it.”
When she said this my blood went cold, I know I asked for it but how does her memory of that night seem to be so exact up until that far end of the attic. Why would I remember everything up until that fucking end of the attic. I can’t sleep right now, I’m terrified of whatever that figure was in the dark, I know what my mom said and I know this defies all logic but in my mind I see that large shape in the darkness of the attic still. And I’m sure it wasn’t human.