The Fifth Floor Tapping

I used to live in a sprawling Victorian house my grandmother left us, a place with creaking staircases and a turret that looked like a crooked finger pointing at the sky. My wife, Elena, and I had just moved in to help my aging father, and my younger brother, Mateo, was staying with us for the summer. My mother had passed the year before, and my father had grown quiet, wandering the halls at night like a ghost himself. When my eldest brother, Rafael, invited our father and Mateo to his place in the mountains for a week, Elena and I were left alone in that old house with our cat, Miso. The silence was a relief at first, but then the tapping began.

It was the second morning, around 5 AM, when Elena shook me awake. ‘Leo, do you hear that?’ she whispered, her fingers cold on my arm. I listened. Miso was skittering across the hardwood floor in our bedroom, claws clicking as he leaped from the dresser to the window seat. ‘It’s just Miso,’ I said, rolling over. But then I heard it: a rhythmic thumping, like a fist hitting the floor above us, exactly over our bed. Miso froze, ears flat, staring at the ceiling. The thumping continued, slow and deliberate, four taps, then a pause, then four more. I told Elena it was just the old pipes, but she shook her head. ‘Leo, Miso is on the floor right there, and the sound is coming from the ceiling. The attic is above us.’ My blood ran cold. The attic was sealed shut, the door nailed and painted over years ago. There was no one up there.

The tapping stopped as suddenly as it began. We lay there, hearts hammering, until the first light of dawn seeped through the curtains. I chalked it up to a raccoon or a branch, but as we got up, I noticed Miso refused to leave the bedroom, his tail puffed, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. That day, we tried to ignore it. We made coffee, read in the parlor, and I even called my father to check in. He said they were having a good time, but his voice sounded thin, like he was listening for something else. At night, we went to bed early, exhausted. The tapping returned at 3:07 AM, exactly. This time, it was faster, more insistent, and it moved. It started above the bed, then slid across the ceiling, following us as we sat up, terrified. I grabbed a flashlight and ran to the attic door. The nails were still there, the paint untouched, but the wood was warm to the touch, like a fevered skin. I pressed my ear to the door, and I heard whispering. Not words, but a hiss, like something breathing on the other side.

I told myself it was wind, but the air was still. Elena begged me to call Rafael and tell them to come home, but I didn’t want to ruin their trip. That night, we locked our bedroom door and placed a chair against it. Miso hid under the bed. At 3:07 AM, the tapping came, but this time it was on our bedroom door, right above the doorknob, four taps, slow, then a pause. My name, Leo, was spoken in a voice that was my mother’s, but wrong. It was too low, too wet. I froze, and Elena clutched my arm. The doorknob jiggled, but the lock held. Then silence. When we mustered the courage to open the door, the hallway was empty, but on the floor just outside, there was a small patch of dampness, like a wet footprint, but it was shaped like a hand, with fingers splayed.

We didn’t sleep the next day. We argued about what to do. Elena wanted to leave, but I refused. I was determined to uncover the truth. That afternoon, I took a crowbar and chiseled off the nails from the attic door. The wood was soft, almost rotten. The door swung open with a groan, revealing a narrow staircase that disappeared into darkness. The air that rushed out was cold and smelled like mothballs and old soil. I climbed up with a flashlight, my heart pounding. The attic was empty, except for a few forgotten trunks and a rocking chair that swayed by itself, as if someone had just risen from it. I searched everywhere. Nothing. No sign of life. But as I turned to leave, I noticed a small door in the corner, hidden behind a dusty sheet. It was tiny, child-sized. I pulled the sheet away, and there was a latch. I opened it, and inside was a narrow crawlspace. On the floor, there was a dusty old phonograph, its crank still intact. Next to it, a record sleeve. The label read, ‘The Fifth Floor Tapping.’

I brought the phonograph and record downstairs. Elena and I stared at it. The record was old, from the 1920s. I wound the crank and placed the needle in the groove. The sound that came out was not music. It was a rhythmic tapping, exactly the pattern we had heard. But then, a voice joined the tapping, a woman’s voice, singing a lullaby in a language I didn’t recognize. The voice rose and fell, and I felt a cold dread seep into my bones. Elena gasped. ‘That’s your mother’s voice,’ she said. And she was right. It was my mother’s voice, but singing a song I had never heard her sing. The tapping on the record was the same as what we had heard, but it was slower, as if it was a recording of the haunting, not the haunting itself.

We turned it off, and the house was quiet, but the weight of the discovery hung in the air. That night, we didn’t sleep. We sat in the living room, listening. The tapping never came. But at 3:07 AM, we heard the sound of my mother’s lullaby coming from the attic, sung in that same wet, guttural voice. We grabbed the phonograph and fled the house, driving to a motel. When we finally called my father, he told us that he had found something in Rafael’s attic, an old journal belonging to my grandmother. In it, she wrote about a spirit that had attached itself to the house, a woman who had been murdered in the attic and who lured victims by mimicking the voices of loved ones. The only way to stop it was to break the phonograph and burn the journal. But we had left the journal behind. We drove back that morning, determined to end it. When we arrived, the house was silent. We crept upstairs, and found the attic door open, the records scattered. On the floor, written in dust, were the words, ‘You can’t burn me.’ We found the journal, but as I went to light it, a cold breeze snuffed out my lighter. Elena screamed. Behind me, the rocking chair began to rock, and underneath it, a trapdoor opened, revealing a dark pit. I don’t remember what happened after that. I only remember waking up in the hospital, my wife beside me, her hand bandaged. The house burned down that night, an electrical fire, they said. But I know the truth. The tapping never stopped. It continues in the walls of our new apartment, in the rhythm of my heart. And sometimes, when I’m alone, I hear my mother’s voice singing, and I know she’s still there, waiting for me to come up and listen.

We moved far away, to a city with no attics. But the tapping followed us. It’s in the floorboards, the pipes, the hum of the refrigerator. I’ve learned to live with it. But every night, at 3:07, I wake up, and I hear four taps on the ceiling. I never look up. I just wait for the day when the door swings open, and she steps out, finally finished with her song. For now, I’m just a man haunted by a lullaby, my wife sleeps with the lights on, and Miso, our cat, refuses to enter any room with a closed door. The last thing we found before the fire was a photograph, buried in the attic floor. It was of a young woman in a white dress, standing in front of a phonograph. On the back, written in faded ink, was a date and a name: ‘Agnes, 1923. The Fifth Floor Tapping.’ We never found out who she was, but I know she’s still with us. She’s in the silence that follows the tapping, in the chill that runs down my spine, in the faint smell of mothballs that lingers in our hallway. And she will never stop.