The Hollow Beneath the Floorboards

When Marcus called to say he’d found the perfect apartment, I pictured sunlit rooms and creaky charm. I was a junior transferring to a state college in a town known for its apple orchards and autumn fog, and the idea of starting fresh with him in a place we could call our own felt like a promise. The day I arrived, I barely let the car stop before I was out, bounding up the porch steps of a narrow Victorian house that had been divided into flats. The landlord, a woman named Mrs. Kessler with eyes the color of old pennies, handed us the keys with a smile that didn’t quite reach her face. ‘You’ll be cozy here,’ she said. ‘Just mind the floorboards in the parlor. They like to settle.’

We moved in that weekend. The apartment spanned the entire second floor, with tall windows that overlooked the orchard and a fireplace that we never used because the chimney seemed to breathe cold air even in summer. Marcus was in his final year of law school, always buried in books, while I took shifts at a small café downtown. We were happy in a quiet, unassuming way. At first, the only oddity was the faint smell of rot that wafted up from the crawlspace beneath the building, especially on humid days. Marcus dismissed it as old plumbing. I tried to ignore it.

But there were sounds. Not loud, nothing that would make you call the police. Just a rhythmic thumping from under the parlor floorboards, like a heartbeat. It happened mostly at night, when the house had settled into darkness and the only light came from the streetlamp outside. I’d lie in bed, listening, and the thumping would sync with my pulse until I couldn’t tell if it was my own heart echoing through the wood. Marcus slept through it, his breathing deep and even.

One evening, I decided to investigate. We had no basement access from our flat, only a trapdoor in the parlor closet that Mrs. Kessler had mentioned was for ‘storage.’ When I lifted it, a gust of stale air hit my face, carrying that smell—wet soil, damp wood, something vaguely sweet, like decay. I armed myself with a flashlight and descended the rickety stairs. The crawlspace was low, barely three feet high, so I had to crouch and shuffle forward. Cobwebs brushed my face. Dust coated my fingers. In the corner, I found a child’s shoe—a small, scuffed sneaker, size even. It was caked in mud, as if it had been buried and then unearthed.

I brought the shoe upstairs and showed it to Marcus. He frowned and said, ‘Probably just something left by the previous tenants.’ He suggested we call Mrs. Kessler in the morning. But that night, the thumping grew louder, more insistent, like fists beating from underneath. It was no longer a heartbeat but a frantic, panicked drumming. I pressed my ear to the floor, and that’s when I heard it—a child’s voice, muffled and desperate, crying, ‘Let me out, let me out.’

I scrambled back, my heart racing. Marcus woke with a start. ‘What’s wrong?’ I told him what I heard. He listened, pressing his ear too, but there was only silence. ‘You’re exhausted,’ he said gently. ‘Maybe you’ve been reading too many ghost stories.’ But I hadn’t been reading anything. I knew what I heard.

The next day, I dug into the house’s history at the local library. The house was built in 1923 by a family named Harlow. They had a son, Thomas, who went missing in 1937. The official reports claimed he ran away, but his body was never found. The Harlow family sold the house a year later, and it had passed through many hands since. I read about a gardener who had committed suicide in the 1960s, and a woman who had claimed to hear ‘scratching’ from the floorboards before she moved out in a hurry.

I returned to the apartment with a sinking feeling. When I entered the parlor, the trapdoor in the closet was open. I hadn’t left it that way. Marcus was at school. The flashlight was still on the floor, its beam pointing down into the darkness. I called out, but no one answered. Heart hammering, I crept down again, the smell of rot stronger than ever. This time, I noticed the earth in the corner looked disturbed, as if something had burrowed up through it. And there, in the loose dirt, was a tiny hand—a child’s hand, small and gray, reaching up as if grasping for air. I screamed and scrambled backward, hitting my head on a floor joist. The next thing I knew, I was in our bedroom, Marcus shaking me awake. ‘You were having a nightmare,’ he said, his face drawn with worry.

But when I looked at my hands, they were stained with dark, wet soil. And in my pocket, I found the tiny sneaker, now dirtier than before. I knew it wasn’t a dream.

I begged Marcus to move out. He resisted at first, saying we had signed a lease, but the terror in my eyes must have convinced him because he finally agreed. We packed our essentials and left the next morning, dropping the keys through Mrs. Kessler’s mail slot without a goodbye. We moved into a sterile one-bedroom near campus, and for a while, I convinced myself it was over. But the sounds followed me. Not in the apartment, but in my head—the thumping, the crying, the feeling of something beneath my feet, wherever I stood.

Two months later, I read in the local paper that the old house had been demolished. A construction crew had found ‘a small skeletal remains’ under the floorboards, along with a child’s shoe. The cause of death was undetermined, but the remains were believed to be decades old. I didn’t need to read further. I knew.

Marcus and I broke up soon after. He said I was never the same, that I’d become obsessed with the past. Maybe he was right. But there are some things you can’t unsee, some screams you can’t unhear. Even now, when I stand on solid ground, I sometimes feel a vibration, faint and rhythmic, like a heartbeat from deep below. And I know, in my bones, that the earth doesn’t forget what it holds. It just waits.