The Unwelcome Runner

I was thirty-eight when I finally admitted to my brother, Leo, that I still couldn’t sleep without a light on. It was the summer we returned to our hometown to clear out our childhood home after our mother passed. The house on Maple Street had stood empty for years, a gabled Victorian with peeling paint and a sagging porch. Leo and I had both dreaded this task, and as we stood in the dusty foyer, the familiar weight pressed down on us.

‘Do you remember the running?’ I asked, not looking at him. ‘Up the stairs. Every night for a while, then nothing for months. And then it would come back.’

Leo’s face went pale. ‘I thought I’d imagined it. That it was just childhood fear.’

But we both knew it wasn’t. We were the only kids in the house, and our parents were always downstairs in the living room after dinner. I could still feel the icy terror of lying in my bed, hearing those rapid footsteps thundering up the staircase, knowing full well that everyone else was asleep. The sound would stop right outside my door, and I would hold my breath, waiting for the knob to turn.

It never did. But the fear was visceral, and it never fully left me.

Our mother used to insist on a game she called ‘cuckoo’ whenever we had to go upstairs alone. We’d have to shout ‘Cuckoo!’ from the bottom of the steps, and she or Dad would call back ‘Cuckoo!’ from wherever they were, to assure us that we weren’t alone. Even in daylight, the upstairs felt wrong, heavy, as if the air itself was watching us.

The house had its own personality: sometimes benign, even warm, but often malevolent. The hallway that connected the living room to the kitchen was particularly bad. I remember the day I was walking down that hallway to get a glass of water, and I felt a presence right behind me, so close I could feel the cold breath on my neck. I spun around, but there was nothing. The feeling was so intense that I ran back to the living room and refused to go back all day.

Leo had his own stories. He told me about the night he woke up to find his bedroom door open, and a shadowy figure standing in the doorway, just a silhouette, but with a white face that seemed to glow. It stared at him for a long minute, then vanished. He didn’t sleep for a week.

Our parents never spoke about it directly, but we knew they felt it too. Dad once muttered about ‘that damn house’ when he thought we couldn’t hear. And we had a visitor once—a distant aunt who came to stay for a weekend. She left after one night, saying she felt ‘sick’ and couldn’t sleep. Later, she confessed to Mom that she had heard the running upstairs, and it had terrified her.

Now, as Leo and I sorted through the boxes in the attic, we found an old photograph album. Among the pictures was one of a young woman in a white dress, standing at the top of the stairs. The date on the back was 1910. Our house had been built in 1905, and the first owner was a doctor who had a wife who died young. Some said she had fallen down the stairs, but others whispered she had been pushed.

That evening, we decided to stay the night in the house, despite our nerves. We set up sleeping bags in the living room, and for a while we talked and laughed, trying to dispel the gloom. But as the night deepened, the air grew heavy. The hallway light seemed to dim on its own.

At around 2 AM, I was dozing when I heard it: the rapid thudding footsteps running up the stairs. My heart lurched. ‘Leo, do you hear it?’ I whispered. His eyes were wide, and he nodded.

The steps reached the top of the landing, then stopped. There was silence. Then we heard a child’s laugh, high and eerie, from the direction of the hallway. Leo grabbed my arm. ‘We have to get out.’

We scrambled to the front door, but it wouldn’t open. The knob turned, but the door was stuck. We pulled and pushed, fear flooding our veins. Then we heard the steps again, this time coming down the stairs, slowly, as if something was descending.

We ran to the kitchen, hoping to escape through the back. But the kitchen door was also stuck. We were trapped.

The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs and began moving down the hallway, toward the kitchen. Leo and I pressed ourselves against the wall, our hearts pounding.

Through the open doorway, we saw a figure: the woman from the photograph, but with a face contorted in rage. She pointed at us and whispered, ‘You should not have come back.’

The lights flickered, and the temperature plunged. I felt a force slam against me, and I was thrown against the fridge. Leo was on the floor. For a moment, I thought we were going to die.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the presence vanished. The door to the backyard creaked open on its own. We didn’t need a second invitation. We stumbled out into the cool night air, gasping.

We never returned to that house. We hired a realtor to sell it, and it was eventually demolished. But even now, as I sit in my safe, well-lit apartment in the city, I sometimes hear that sound—rapid footsteps running up the stairs—and I freeze, waiting for it to stop outside my door. It always does. But the fear never goes away. Some things are never truly exorcised.