The Haunting Tap Tap Tap

When I was a kid, my dad worked night shifts cleaning Oakridge Hall, an old community center that had been around for decades. He was the only one there most nights, so sometimes I’d tag along. One evening, my friend Emma came with me.

Oakridge Hall had a big event space, a bar area, and a smaller backroom people called “The Red Room.” That place always gave me chills. My dad told me it used to be a storage space, but some folks said it was once a morgue when the building had been a makeshift hospital during the war.

Emma and I were messing around near the storage door when I playfully knocked on it. Tap. Tap. Tap.

For a second, nothing happened. Then—Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

A different pattern.

We froze. I turned to Emma, my heart pounding. She didn’t say a word, but her wide eyes told me she’d heard it too. Before we could react, a sudden bang came from inside the storage room, like someone had slammed a fist against the door.

We bolted.

Just as we reached the doorway, Emma screamed. She fell to the ground, clawing at her leg. “Something grabbed me!” she sobbed, kicking frantically. I yanked her up, and we stumbled into the main hall. When we looked back, nothing was there—just the dark, empty corridor behind us.

Emma rolled up her pant leg. Bright red marks wrapped around her ankle.

After that night, we never stepped into The Red Room again.

But the ghosts of Oakridge Hall weren’t done with us.

A few weeks later, Emma, my sister, and I went back with my dad. This time, we were determined to see if something else would happen.

We were sitting in the old bingo hall when a sharp, ear-piercing screech echoed through the building. The sound sent chills up my spine.

We followed the noise down the main hall and peeked into the dance room. In the middle of the floor was a chair dolly, the kind used to move stacked chairs. But it wasn’t there earlier.

Behind it, deep scratch marks lined the wooden floor, as if it had been dragged by unseen hands.

I cautiously pushed the dolly a few inches. It made the exact sound we had heard.

We weren’t alone.

Later that night, we were in the basement, playing with an old copy machine, when my dad came rushing down the stairs, looking pale.

“You three were down here the whole time?” he asked.

We nodded.

He swallowed hard. “Then who the hell was flushing the toilets upstairs?”

We all went silent.

He told us that while we were downstairs, he had heard footsteps echoing across the empty second floor. He thought it was us… until the toilets started flushing.

One after another.

No one else was in the building.

That was the last time I ever went back to Oakridge Hall at night.

But to this day, I still wonder—who, or what, was in there with us?