The Sunken Room

The day we first saw the house on Maple Hollow Lane, the sky was a washed-out gray, and the air smelled of damp soil and cut grass. My mother, Elara, had been humming to herself as we pulled into the driveway, but her tune died the moment she stepped onto the porch. I felt it too—a weight pressing down on my chest, a sudden, inexplicable sorrow that made my eyes sting. My father, Marcus, paused with the keys in his hand, his brow furrowed.

‘Do you feel that?’ he asked, not looking at us but at the dark windows ahead. The house itself was only about twenty-five years old, a modest two-story with beige siding and a white picket fence, but it seemed to swallow the light. Even though the sun was high, the interior was dim, as if the rooms were reluctant to let in the day. We walked through the living room, where the air was cool and still, and I noticed that the corners of the ceiling were slightly stained, like dampness had seeped through. But the oddest thing was the feeling that we weren’t alone—not in a threatening way, but as if residue of someone else’s life clung to the walls.

I decided to explore upstairs while my parents talked to the landlord. The stairs creaked under my feet, and the banister felt smooth and worn, as if touched by many hands. At the end of the hallway, my bedroom door was ajar. I pushed it open and found a small, square room with a single window that looked out onto the backyard. In the corner, a built-in closet with sliding doors stood half open. I slid it fully open and froze. The walls inside were covered in writing—scrawled in faded crayon and pencil, some in neat lowercase, some in shaky capital letters. Names, dates, and phrases were scratched into the wood. But what caught my eye was a large, bold script in the center: ‘SALAMAT SA LAHAT’—’Thank you for everything’—and beneath it, in smaller, more frantic handwriting, ‘PERO KAILANGAN NA KONG UMALIS.’

We moved in a week later. The sorrow never left me, but I grew used to it, like a background hum. My younger brother, Nico, was only six then, and he was the first to notice the noises. At night, he’d complain of tapping on his window, even though it faced the empty backyard and no trees grew nearby. I’d check his room, and he’d sit up in bed, pale, saying, ‘It’s coming from the closet.’

After a few months, strange things began to happen with our belongings. Objects would move, not dramatically, but always to places we didn’t leave them. My mother’s keys, which she always placed on the kitchen counter, would end up in the bathroom sink. My father’s toolbox, locked in the garage, would appear in the hallway closet. The most unsettling was when we set the table for dinner, and one extra chair would be pulled out, as if waiting for an unseen guest.

One evening, I was alone in the house, reading in my room, when I heard a faint crying from the closet. I opened it, and the writing on the walls seemed to have changed. New words had appeared in a child’s hand: ‘BAWAL LUMABAS’—’No one is allowed to leave.’ I felt a cold draft, and the room darkened, as if a cloud passed over the sun, but the sun was already down. I slammed the closet shut and ran downstairs, heart pounding.

When I told my parents, they dismissed it as my imagination. But that night, my mother dreamed of a child sitting in the corner of her room, weeping. The child looked up and said, ‘Ayaw ko nang mag-isa.’—’I don’t want to be alone.’ My mother woke in tears, and for the first time, she admitted that she felt the sadness too, more than she had let on.

Months passed. The events escalated. One night, we all heard a crash from the kitchen. We found the refrigerator door open, and all the magnets had been rearranged to spell out, ‘TAKEN.’ Nico started drawing pictures of a woman in a white dress, her face hollow, standing at the foot of his bed. He would wake up screaming, claiming she was telling him to come with her. My father, a rational man, grew increasingly agitated. He tried to sage the house, but the smell of burnt sage only seemed to intensify the heaviness.

Finally, we couldn’t ignore it anymore. We began to research the house’s history. We found out that a family had lived there before us, and their six-year-old daughter, Amara, had died in a drowning accident in a nearby pond. The family had moved away, but the house had been rented out to several families since, each leaving after a few years, never talking about why.

We decided to leave. The decision brought a strange sense of relief, as if the house knew our intentions. But the morning we were packing, I decided to go into my closet one last time. The writing had changed again. It now read, ‘SALAMAT SA LAHAT NG SANDALI’—’Thank you for the time’—and beneath it, ‘NANDITO PA RIN AKO’—’I’m still here.’ I felt a wave of sadness so profound that I doubled over, and I knew it wasn’t just mine. It was the house’s, Amara’s, a lingering presence that had latched onto us.

We left that day. We never looked back. But even in our new home, I sometimes feel that weight settling on my chest, especially when I’m alone in a dark room. And last week, I found a small drawing under my mattress—a child’s drawing of a house with a smiling family in the window, and a small figure standing outside, alone. At the bottom, in crayon, were the words: ‘SALAMAT SA LAHAT.’