The Thumping in the Floorboards

I was eleven the summer we moved into the old farmhouse on Bitterroot Lane. The place had been abandoned for years, and dust coated the windows like cataracts. My parents were entranced by the wraparound porch and the price, but I noticed the way the floorboards sagged in the center of my bedroom, as if something had been pressing down there for a long time.

The first night, my father had me read a passage from the family Bible before bed, as was our tradition. I remember the words about David and Goliath as I shut the heavy book and placed it on the nightstand. I turned off the lamp, and the room went dark except for the faint silver of the moon through the rippled glass. I laid back, pulling the quilt up to my chin, and closed my eyes.

Then I felt it: a pressure, like a fist, pushing up against the mattress from below. It was directly under my lower back. I froze, thinking it was my imagination, but it repeated, a slow, deliberate push, then release, push, release, as if something was testing the give of the springs. My heart hammered. I sat up and fumbled for the lamp. The sudden light made me squint, but I saw the spot on the mattress where I’d been lying — the depression was still there, slowly rising back. I watched it as it returned to normal. I called out for my parents, but my voice was a squeak. The house was silent except for the ticking of the grandfather clock downstairs. I must have convinced myself I’d imagined it, because I finally laid back down, leaving the lamp on all night.

That happened again, two more times over the next few weeks. Each time, it was under a different part of the bed: once at my feet, once near my shoulder. Each time, I turned on the light and watched the mattress move. The last time, I gathered the courage to look under the bed. I leaned over the edge, heart racing, and saw only the bare floorboards and a couple of dust bunnies. But then I noticed something odd: on the floorboards, right under the center of the bed, was a circular stain, dark and old, as if something had been rotting there. And the boards themselves seemed to dip slightly, as if worn by pressure.

One night, I decided to stay up and wait. I pretended to be asleep, but I kept my eyes barely open. After about ten minutes, I heard a low, rhythmic thumping starting from the floor beneath my bed. It was like knocking, but slower, heavier. Then the mattress began to rise. I watched as a point in the center of the mattress pushed upward, forming a small mound. I could see the impression of something like the knuckles of a huge fist, pressing from below. It stayed there for a moment, then retracted. The thumping stopped. A faint odor, like decayed leaves and old soil, wafted up.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I slid off the bed and ran to my parents’ room, but they were asleep. I didn’t wake them. I just stood in the hallway, shivering, listening for any further sounds. The house was still. When I finally returned to my room, the Bible on my nightstand was open to a page I hadn’t turned to: the book of Ezekiel, chapter 37, about dry bones coming to life. I hadn’t opened that page. The bookmark was misplaced.

After that, I refused to sleep in the bed. I slept on the floor with my back against the wall, and the thumping continued, but now it came from directly beneath me, through the floorboards. I could feel the vibrations in my spine. I became convinced that something was buried beneath the house, trying to rise. I told my parents, but they dismissed it as an old house settling.

On the night before my birthday, I woke to a violent shaking of the entire room. The bed was hopping up and down, and the floorboards seemed to bulge upward in the center. I screamed, and for the first time, my parents burst in. The shaking stopped as soon as they arrived. They examined the room and found nothing. But my father noticed a crack in the floorboards that hadn’t been there before, running from the center of the room to the wall. He knelt and pressed his ear to the floor. He said he could hear a low moaning, like wind, but we were all standing still. That night, I slept in their bed.

The next morning, my father pulled up a section of the floorboards where the stain was. Underneath, we found a layer of brick, and beneath the brick, a hollow space. Inside, we found the skeleton of a large animal, perhaps a deer, but the bones were arranged unnaturally, as if they had been forced into a twisted shape, and they were bound with old leather thongs. There was also a small, tarnished silver locket, inscribed with the name ‘Elias.’ Our landlord was a descendant of the previous owner, a reclusive farmer named Elias Bitterroot, who had gone insane and disappeared in the 1920s. The locals said he believed the dead could be raised through the soil. We moved out the next week.

Now, twenty years later, I am back in that town for my father’s funeral. I drove past the old farmhouse. It was derelict, but I saw the upstairs window of my old room glowing with a faint, blue light. And as I sat there, I felt a familiar pressure, a fist-like push against the driver’s seat of my car, from beneath the asphalt. I did not wait to see more. I sped away, and I have not stopped driving since. But at night, when I pull over to rest, I can still hear it: a slow, rhythmic thumping, coming from beneath the ground, as if something is still trying to rise.