The Doont

My earliest memories are of the old farmhouse on Cinder Lane, a place my family moved to when I was four. It was a sprawling, two-story structure with a wrap-around porch, and its foundation was made of fieldstone that wept moisture even in the driest summers. My brother, Leo, and I shared a room on the second floor, at the end of a long, drafty hallway. Our window overlooked the wild, overgrown back garden, and beyond that, the dark line of the woods.

It was the autumn of 1982, and I was seven. Leo was nine. One evening, as the wind rattled the windowpanes and the furnace groaned in the basement, we were playing with our toy cars on the braided rug. The house was full of its usual sounds: the creaking of old timbers, the distant clank of pipes, the occasional scurry of a mouse in the walls. But then came a sound that made us both freeze.

It was a scraping, a heavy, slow drag of something across the concrete floor of the basement. It lasted only a few seconds, but it was unmistakable. Leo looked at me, his eyes wide. ‘You heard that?’ he whispered. I nodded. We waited, listening, but the sound did not repeat. We tried to go back to our game, but our attention was fractured.

Then we heard it again, but this time it was a distinct ‘doont’. A wooden chair leg striking the concrete floor, sharp and resonant, as if someone had deliberately placed a chair and then stood on it. The sound came from directly beneath us, from the cold, unfinished part of the basement that we were forbidden to explore. Leo and I exchanged a look. ‘What was that?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ Leo said, but his voice was thin.

We decided to investigate. We crept down the stairs, our bare feet cold on the wooden steps, and peered into the dim basement. The only light came from a single bulb at the foot of the stairs, casting long shadows. The unfinished area stretched out before us, filled with old furniture, cardboard boxes, and my father’s workbench. In the corner, half hidden in the gloom, was a wooden chair. It was the same chair that had been there for as long as I could remember, but now it was different. It had been moved from its usual spot against the wall, and it was facing the main part of the basement.

We stood on the bottom step. ‘There’s nothing,’ Leo said, but his voice betrayed his fear. Just then, the chair moved. It didn’t just slide; it tilted back on its two rear legs, as if someone had leaned back in it, and then it slammed down with a loud ‘doont’ that echoed through the basement.

We ran upstairs, our hearts pounding. We told our parents, but they dismissed it as the house settling, or a draft. But we knew what we had seen. The chair had moved on its own.

That night, as we lay in our beds, we heard the sound again, but this time it was not from the basement. It was from the hallway outside our room. A slow, heavy scraping, followed by a ‘doont’. And then another. And another. It was as if something was walking down the hallway, dragging a chair behind it.

Leo and I held each other, trembling, as the sounds approached our door. The scraping stopped outside, and we heard a single ‘doont’ that seemed to shake the floorboards. Then silence. We waited, hardly daring to breathe.

The door creaked open slowly. No one was there. But on the floor, in the shadows, we could see the faint outline of a chair leg, as if something was sitting there, invisible, watching us.

We screamed for our parents, but they took a long time to come. When they finally did, they found us huddled together, crying. They didn’t hear anything, and the chair in the basement was back against the wall. But we knew.

From that night on, the sounds never fully stopped. Sometimes they would come from the basement, sometimes from the attic, sometimes from inside the walls. And every once in a while, we would hear a ‘doont’ right outside our door, and we would lie awake, staring into the darkness, waiting for the door to open.

We moved away a year later, and I never spoke of it again. But even now, decades later, when I hear a certain kind of scrape, or a heavy thud, my heart still races, and I feel a chill that has nothing to do with the cold. Because I know that somewhere, in some forgotten corner of that old farmhouse, a chair is still waiting, and it’s still making its slow, deliberate ‘doont’. And it knows my name.