The basement

February 24, 2025

by Macie

Hey everyone! I keep telling myself I’ll share more of my stories, but I didn’t think I’d be posting about something that just happened last night. Honestly, I didn’t think anything would happen at all.

If you knew my town, you’d know it has a long, deep history. It’s no surprise that strange things happen here. My house? Definitely haunted. But whenever we do any kind of repairs, the activity gets worse.

A few weeks ago, we found out the kitchen floor was rotting underneath. Water damage. The whole thing had to be torn up and replaced. As soon as I heard that, I knew I was in for a rough time. But I didn’t expect things to start before the work even began.

Last night, I stayed up late getting things ready for the next day. Around 2 AM, I went to the basement to switch the laundry. I had fallen asleep earlier in the recliner, so I was groggy, just wanting to get it done. I put my earbuds in, listening to music like I always do.

From the second I stepped down there, I felt it. Someone was close. Too close. If I turned around, I knew I’d bump into them. The air felt thick, like the room itself didn’t want me there. But I ignored it, hurrying through my task.

When I finished, I stood by the stairs just long enough to set a timer on my phone. That’s when I felt it—something right next to me. Then, in the quiet hum of the basement, I heard a whisper.

“Where?”

I didn’t stop to think. I bolted up the stairs, slammed the door, and locked it. My whole body was shaking. It felt like something was right behind me, inches from grabbing my shoulder.

I rushed through the rest of my chores, heart pounding, trying to shake the feeling. The entire time, I felt watched. Followed. Whatever was down there hadn’t stayed in the basement.

And the renovation hasn’t even started yet. I’ve got at least another week of this. Wish me luck.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Lily on the Landing

The first time I saw her, I was six, standing in the hallway of my grandmother’s farmhouse in the hills of Appalachia, the bathroom door ajar behind me. The house had a smell of damp wood and dried herbs, and the hallway was lit by a single bulb that cast long, wavering shadows. She sat […]

The Porcelain Doll

When I was sixteen, my family lived in an old farmhouse at the end of a long gravel road. The house had been in my mother’s family for generations, and it was full of nooks and crannies that seemed to breathe with history. My bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of a […]

The Room That Swallowed Light

In the autumn of 2004, I moved to a small desert town called Pinyon Ridge, a place where the sun bleached the sky and the mountains stood like silent watchers. I knew no one. On my first day at Pinyon Ridge High, a girl named Rosa introduced herself, and we became inseparable. But that same […]

The Stairwell That Breathed

Mara never believed in ghosts. Not until the night she heard the stairwell breathe. She and her partner, Elias, had moved into the old Harlow house on the edge of the dying town of Crestwood, a sprawling Victorian that had been gutted and renovated into a family home. Their daughter, Lily, had been born three […]

The Loom of the Drowned Orchard

I grew up in the arid folds of Arizona, where the sun bleached the world to bone and the only ghosts were the heat shimmers that danced on the asphalt. As a child, I chalked up my uncanny perceptions to a too-vivid imagination. But now, at thirty-two, stationed at the rust-belt post of Fort Drum […]

The Last Ember of the Lantern

In the village of Ashford, nestled between the crooked pines and the fog-choked river, there was a house that smelled of old wood and colder winters. I lived there with my grandmother, Elara, after my mother passed from the wasting sickness that took her voice before her breath. I was eleven, with eyes that saw […]

The Thirteenth Door

I work the night audit at the Meriwether Title Company, which squats in what was once the scullery wing of the old St. Dymphna’s Hospital for the Indigent Women. The main building, a hulking brick monolith, throws its shadow over our smaller annex, and the whole complex has the feel of a mausoleum that forgot […]

The Lantern of Persistent Motion

Marta and I had just settled into our new apartment above a shuttered cannery in the small coastal town of Dunmore. The place was a relic, with peeling paint and a view that stretched across gray rooftops to the restless Atlantic. That evening, we were washing the last of the dinner dishes, the clatter of […]

The Red Door Game

I was eight when I first saw the boy in the attic. My grandmother had passed, and my parents were clearing out her old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The attic was a dusty, cobwebbed place, smelling of mothballs and old paper. I was supposed to be sorting boxes, but I found a small, […]

The Mannequin in Ward C

I was a night janitor at the Meridian Medical Research Center, a sprawling complex on the edge of the city that mostly emptied after 11 p.m. My shift ended at 1 a.m., and on that particular night, October 12th, I was making my final sweep of the basement corridor, a long stretch of sealed labs […]

The Cartographer’s Folly

The Ironwood Greenway, a sliver of ancient forest threaded through the sprawl of Meridian City, was my childhood’s forbidden borderland. We called it the ‘Hollow Way’ for the way the canopy swallowed light, and the stumps of felled giants, some as wide as a car, ringed with growth like buried crowns. Every kid knew the […]

The Stairwell’s Debt

I was only seven when the house on Maple Hollow started to feel wrong. It wasn’t the creaking pipes or the drafty windows—I was used to those. It was the way the air thickened at the top of the staircase, as if someone was holding their breath, waiting. My room was on the second floor, […]