The Stained Floorboards

The moment I slid the key into the lock of apartment 3B, I felt a cold draft that smelled of formaldehyde and old lilies. The building had been a funeral parlor in the 1940s, and the basement still carried the memory of grief in its bones. I’m not a stranger to spirits—I’ve seen them in libraries, in forests, in the corners of my grandmother’s house—but this place was different. They didn’t just pass through; they lingered, watching with hollow eyes, as if they’d been waiting for someone new to notice them.

My apartment was a single room with a kitchenette and a bathroom, the walls painted a sickly green that might have been chosen to hide stains. The floorboards creaked underfoot, and I soon learned that certain boards were warmer than others, as if heated from below. On my first night, I lay in bed, listening to the building settle, when I heard a rhythmic tapping from the empty apartment across the hall. It was measured, like a heartbeat, and it didn’t stop until dawn.

The maintenance manager, a wiry man named Earl, was the first to mention them. I asked if the building was haunted, and he laughed dryly. ‘All the time,’ he said, not meeting my eyes. ‘But they’re mostly harmless. Just watch out for the ones in the bleed-out room across from you. They like to play tricks.’ I thought he was joking, but a week later, I understood.

The apartment across the hall was 3A. It had been the preparation room where bodies were drained and embalmed. The floor was covered in a cheap linoleum, but beneath it, I could make out the dark, irregular shapes of old bloodstains that had seeped into the wood. The current tenant was a young man named Darren, a student who kept to himself. At first, I only saw him in passing,mumbling about sleepless nights. Soon, he started knocking on my door at odd hours, his eyes wild, asking if I heard the scratching in the walls. I didn’t, but I could feel something watching from his doorway.

One evening, I heard a commotion from 3A. Darren was shouting, then silence. I cracked my door open and saw him standing in his doorway, pale as a sheet, staring at the floor. ‘They’re moving,’ he whispered. ‘The stains. They’re moving.’ I looked, and the dark patches on his floor had shifted, forming something that looked like a hand reaching for his feet. I pulled him into my apartment and made him coffee, but he wouldn’t stop shaking. ‘It started when I moved the furniture,’ he said. ‘I found a hatch under the rug. There’s a hole in the floor, and something comes up at night.’

He didn’t sleep that night, and neither did I. The tapping from his apartment grew louder, more urgent. By morning, Darren was gone. His door was unlocked, his belongings still there, but the floor in 3A was clean, as if it had been scrubbed. The stains were gone, too. Earl just shrugged when I asked. ‘He probably couldn’t take it. That room’s always been the worst.’ But I knew better.

A few nights later, I heard the tapping again, but this time it was from my own floor. I pulled up the loose floorboard by my bed and found a hollow space beneath, filled with old surgical instruments—scalpels, forceps, a rusted saw. And at the bottom, a small journal, its pages stuck together with something dark. I pried them open and found entries from a mortician who had worked here in the 1950s. He wrote about ‘the ones who aren’t dead yet,’ about how he heard them knocking from the coffin, but he was too afraid to stop. The last entry was dated a week before my grandfather’s funeral. He wrote, ‘I’ve buried them all, but they won’t stay put. I can hear them walking below.’

I closed the journal, my hands trembling. That night, the spirits were more active than I’d ever seen them. They filled the hallway, their translucent forms flickering like faulty bulbs. They weren’t just watching anymore—they were reaching out, their fingers brushing my arms, my face. One of them, an older woman in a tattered dress, pointed at the floor and mouthed something. I couldn’t hear her, but I understood: ‘They’re coming up.’

The next morning, I found another hatch in the floor of my apartment, hidden beneath the same loose board. I lifted it and saw a narrow shaft descending into darkness. I heard soft, rhythmic tapping from below, like something knocking on wood. I slammed the hatch shut and moved every piece of furniture over it, but the tapping continued, growing louder each night. Earl, when I confronted him, finally told me the truth. ‘This building was built over the old potter’s field,’ he said. ‘They’re not just the dead from the funeral home—they’re the ones they never buried properly. And that room across from you? It was the staging room for the ones they were going to ship off to the medical school. But some of them weren’t dead when they left.’

I moved out two weeks later. But as I was packing, I saw the stains on the floor of 3A reappearing, spreading like ink through the linoleum. And in the corner, I saw a young man who looked exactly like Darren, except his eyes were open, and he was tapping on the floor with a scalpel, motioning for me to come closer. I left without looking back, but I can still hear that tapping every night, no matter where I sleep. It’s in the walls, in the floor, in my bones. It’s the sound of the floorboards stained with something more than blood, and it’s waiting for me to come back.

I haven’t told anyone, but I think it’s following me. Last night, I found a small, dark stain on my new apartment’s floor, right in the center of my kitchen. And it’s growing.