The Constant Tremor

I’ve spent many nights scrolling through this site, devouring every story you’ve all shared. I never thought I’d contribute my own, but what happened in that building won’t stop haunting me, and maybe writing it down will help me make sense of it.

This happened years ago, when I was about eleven. We lived on the second floor of an old, three-story walk-up in a city that never really sleeps. The whole building was family – my parents and I on the second floor, my grandparents on the first, and my aunt, uncle, and two cousins on the top floor. It was cramped but comforting, like a vertical community, with the constant murmur of relatives and the smell of my grandmother’s cooking floating up the stairwell.

Then my aunt’s family moved out – my uncle got a job in another state, and they needed more space. The apartment sat empty for a few weeks, and the building felt strangely quiet, as if it were holding its breath. Then, a new tenant moved in: a young woman, a friend of my aunt’s from work. Her name was Lena. She was quiet, kept to herself, and I rarely saw her except when she hurried up the stairs to her new home on the third floor.

From the very first night she moved in, something changed. I was lying in bed, drifting off, when I felt a low, persistent vibration, like a washing machine on spin cycle but deeper, coming through the floor. I sat up, thinking a train was passing (the subway ran a block away), but the shaking didn’t stop. It was constant, rhythmic, almost like a heartbeat. I pressed my hand to the floor; the tremors traveled up my arm. I got up and walked to the living room, where my dad was reading. ‘Do you feel that?’ I asked. He looked at me, puzzled. ‘Feel what?’ he said, but even as he spoke, I saw the lamp on the side table trembling, the shade rattling slightly. He dismissed it as a truck outside and turned back to his paper. But I knew it wasn’t a truck. It was coming from upstairs.

The tremors only happened at night, and only when Lena was home. During the day, the building was normal. But at night, once the last light in her apartment went out, the shaking would begin. It was always there, a dull, constant thrumming under my bed, making my teeth feel like they were vibrating. And then came the footsteps.

The first time I heard them, I was in the hallway, heading to the bathroom. It was around 2 a.m. The footsteps were heavy, unmistakable – a slow, deliberate stomp, like someone wearing boots, walking from one side of her apartment to the other. They were too heavy for Lena, who I’d seen had a delicate frame. And they seemed to go on for hours, back and forth, back and forth.

I told my parents, who thought I was having nightmares. ‘It’s just the old building settling,’ my mom said, but I knew she was lying because I saw her exchange a worried glance with my dad. They were feeling it too, I think, but they didn’t want to scare me.

One night, about two weeks after Lena moved in, the shaking was so intense that my bed was rattling against the wall. I couldn’t sleep. I got up and crept into the living room, which was directly below Lena’s bedroom. The floor was buzzing like a live wire. I put my ear to the floorboards, and that’s when I heard something that wasn’t footsteps or tremors – a muffled, rhythmic thumping, like something heavy being dragged across the ceiling, back and forth, back and forth. And then, a voice, low and guttural, speaking in a language I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Lena’s voice; I knew her voice from hearing her talk on the phone in the stairwell. This was a man’s voice, deep and gravelly, and it was chanting something, almost in a whisper, but the words were too distorted to make out.

I don’t remember going back to bed that night. I think I passed out on the couch from sheer terror. In the morning, I told my grandmother, who lived downstairs and was known for her old-country wisdom. She went pale when I described the shaking and the footsteps. She told me to stay away from the stairs and not to talk to Lena. ‘That girl, she has something dark with her,’ she said, and made the sign of the cross.

A few days later, I couldn’t resist. I was curious and scared, but I needed to know. I waited until I saw Lena come home from work, and I followed her up the stairs, staying a few steps behind, trying to act casual. She didn’t seem to notice me. She unlocked her door and slipped inside, but I lingered on the landing, pretending to tie my shoe. The door was ajar, just a crack. I could see into her living room – it was sparse, with a few boxes and a small table. But on the far wall, there was a huge, ornate mirror, one of those full-length antique ones with a gilded frame. She wasn’t in the room, but I could see the mirror’s reflection. In it, I saw not her reflection, but that of a tall, dark figure, its shape blurred, standing right behind where she would have been. It seemed to be staring directly at the mirror, at me, even though it couldn’t see through the door. I felt a chill, and without thinking, I whispered, ‘Hello?’

At that moment, the shaking started again, violent this time, causing the floor to sway. I stumbled back, nearly falling down the stairs. The door slammed shut, hard. I ran to my apartment, my heart pounding. I didn’t leave my room for days.

The shaking and the footsteps got worse. I could feel the vibrations in my bones even during the day, like the building itself was trembling in fear. My parents started sleeping in the living room on an air mattress, avoiding our bedrooms. I couldn’t sleep at all. I’d lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the footsteps to start.

Then, one night, I woke up to silence. For the first time in weeks, there was no shaking, no footsteps. I felt a cold dread, like the pause before a scream. I sat up, and I saw, through my window, a pale light coming from Lena’s floor. I crept to the hallway and looked up the stairs. Her door was wide open, and there, in the threshold, stood Lena. She was in a white nightgown, her hair disheveled, her eyes wide and vacant. She was swaying slightly, and from her lips came that same guttural voice I had heard before, but louder now, chanting in that unknown language. And behind her, in the shadows of her apartment, I saw the figure from the mirror – tall, black, its outlines flickering like a bad signal, and it was reaching out a long, thin arm toward her.

I scream. I couldn’t help it.

Lena’s head snapped toward me, and her eyes focused, suddenly human. She looked at me with terror and whispered, ‘Get out. Get everyone out.’

The figure behind her turned its head, and even though it had no face, I felt it look at me. The shaking returned, ten times worse, knocking me to the floor. I scrambled to my feet and ran down to my grandparents’ apartment, screaming for everyone to wake up.

My dad called the police, my mom tried to get upstairs, but the door was jammed. Through the door, we could hear a crash – the mirror shattering – and then a high-pitched wail, like a thousand voices screaming at once. Then, silence.

The police arrived, but they couldn’t get the door open either. They had to break it down. When they finally got in, Lena was gone. The apartment was empty, except for one thing: on the floor, in the center of the living room, was a small, old photograph of my aunt, her husband, and my cousins – the family that used to live there. It was torn in half.

We moved out a week later. I never saw Lena again, and I never learned what happened to her. But sometimes, late at night, when the building around me is silent, I still feel a low, constant tremor under my feet, like a heartbeat coming from below. And I know that whatever it was, it’s still there, waiting for someone else to move in.