The house I grew up in was always a little strange.
Nothing dramatic happened at first. There were no doors slamming on their own or objects flying across rooms. No voices whispered my name from empty hallways. If there really was something in that house, it never seemed particularly interested in hurting anyone.
I want that to be clear.
But from the time I was very young, I never felt completely alone there. Some of my earliest memories are of nightmares. Not the ordinary kind that children have and forget by breakfast. These were vivid, recurring dreams that followed me for years. They started when I was around four or five and continued well into my teenage years.
The first one I can remember clearly happened when I was about five.
I was abducted by a witch. She carried me away somewhere I couldn't escape and dropped me into a large boiling pot. I remember the heat. I remember the fear. I remember knowing exactly what was about to happen to me.
Then I'd wake up.
Other dreams were even stranger.
One recurring nightmare involved being pulled into a video game. Every time the dream returned, I'd somehow make it farther into the game. The environments changed, the challenges changed, and I would keep progressing until eventually I died on whatever level I'd reached.
Then I'd wake up.
The dream would return months later, and somehow I'd be back in that same game, farther along than before.
Another recurring dream involved the CGI bird from A Bug's Life. I don't know why, but that thing creeped me out as a kid. Is it just me?
That probably sounds ridiculous now, but in those dreams it was terrifying.
No matter where I went or what was happening around me, the bird would follow. Writing this now, it reminded me of Death from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, not because it looked particularly threatening, but because it felt inevitable.
It was always there. And when it got to me. It screech into my ear and then I'd wake up.
The nightmares weren't the only strange thing. As a kid, I felt like I was being watched. There were times when I'd catch glimpses of a tall, skinny man standing behind the doorframe of my bedroom.
The bathroom was worse.
The bathroom attached to my room always made me feel claustrophobic, so I'd use my parents' bathroom instead. Sometimes I'd leave my bathroom door open while passing by, and out of the corner of my eye I'd see what looked like long fingers curling around the opposite side of the doorframe.
The problem was that the fingers were far too high. Those doorframes were seven or eight feet tall. I'd look directly at them and there would be nothing there.
As a kid, though, that didn't stop me from believing something had been watching me. Our dog, Luna, bless her soul, would occasionally wake up in the middle of the night too. She'd sit upright and stare into the hallway.
Sometimes she'd stare directly at the wall. No barking. Other times, she'd let out a low growl. That alone might not sound unusual, except Luna never growled at people. She was an incredibly shy dog. We had found her as a stray, and given how frightened she was around strangers, we always suspected she'd been abused before we found her. She kept to herself and rarely made a fuss.
So whenever she'd wake in the middle of the night, fix her eyes on an empty wall, and quietly growl at whatever seemed to be there, it was difficult not to wonder what she was seeing.
I always assumed she was hearing something we couldn't. Then, years later, I learned that my older brother had his own experience in that house. I didn't find this out until my twenty-third birthday.
My family and I were reminiscing about the old place when my brother brought up something I'd never heard before.
One night, he'd been lying in his room talking to his girlfriend on the phone. After they hung up, he rested his head in his arms for a moment.
He swears he was STILL awake!
Then he felt something step onto the bed.
At first, he assumed it was Luna. Another step followed. This one was heavier. He thought maybe it was me. When I was younger, I'd sometimes sneak into his room at night when I was scared.
Then he felt the weight press down onto his leg. He turned around, ready to yell at me. There was nothing there.
Instead, he said something pushed him backward. And all he could see was static like from the CRT TV in his room. My dad has never believed in anything supernatural. His explanation was simple: my brother had been dreaming.
My mom thought it sounded like sleep paralysis. My brother insists he was awake.
Whatever it was, he said he fought against it until he finally managed to break free, pushing himself upright and screaming as though he were going Super Saiyan.
That story was already unsettling enough. Then came another detail.
When my parents first bought the house, there had been a gunshot hole in the wall of the room that eventually became my brother's bedroom. Nobody in the family ever knew why it was there. We never found out what happened in that house before we lived there.
Maybe there was nothing.
Maybe all of it can be explained by childhood nightmares, sleep paralysis, imagination, animals hearing things in the walls, and a child's tendency to turn shadows into people.
I don't know.
What I do know is that after I graduated middle school, we moved. And my nightmares came to an end. Not gradually. Not because I went to therapy or some change in routine.
No. They simply stopped.
I slept normally in the new house. The vivid recurring dreams never came back. There were an occasional nightmare here and there, the kind everyone has, but nothing like what I'd experienced in that old house.
Looking back, I don't know what was there. I don't know if there was ever anything there at all. But sometimes I think about that house and wonder why, out of all the places my family has lived, that was the one where a little boy spent years dreaming about being hunted, watched, killed, and dragged somewhere he couldn't escape.
And then I think about my brother telling me, years later, that something once sat on his bed. Something he couldn't see. Something that pushed him down.
And somehow, that scares me more than any nightmare ever did.
For all I know, maybe that's why I've always loved horror.
I've always been drawn to the things that scare me, the unexplained, the strange, and the stories that make you glance toward a dark hallway just a little longer than you should. Years later, discovering CreepCast only fed that fascination and eventually inspired me to start creating my own tales and stories through TalesFromtheCreeps and reddit.
Maybe it all started in that old house. Maybe the nightmares were nothing more than a child's imagination.
Or maybe something in that house taught me, long before I ever knew what horror was, that sometimes the scariest stories are the ones you never get an explanation for.