The Secret Below

In the fall of 2018, in a sleepy town just outside Asheville, North Carolina, a young couple—Adam and Rachel Morgan—moved into a charming but timeworn two-story house built in the early 1900s. They were drawn in by its creaky character, wraparound porch, and rustic wooden floors. The house had been vacant for two years, owned previously by a reclusive elderly man who died with no next of kin.

The Morgans didn’t believe in ghosts, but they appreciated old houses and quiet neighborhoods. Their first few weeks in the home were peaceful. They spent weekends painting rooms, cleaning out dusty closets, and discovering odd bits of history tucked away in drawers and attic corners. They even found a collection of faded photographs in the basement—sepia-toned portraits of stiff-faced people from decades past. Rachel found them oddly beautiful. Adam, on the other hand, found them unsettling and boxed them away.

But around mid-November, something changed.

It started subtly. At night, they began to hear faint tapping noises, like someone drumming their fingers under the floorboards. At first, Adam chalked it up to the old wood settling. But Rachel, a light sleeper, began to notice patterns in the sound—three quick taps, then silence, repeated exactly every few minutes.

“Weird, right?” she asked one night, pulling the covers closer. “It’s like Morse code.”

Adam smiled. “If the floorboards start sending messages, I’ll be impressed.”

But the pattern persisted. And then it began to change. The tapping turned into scraping. Long, slow scrapes beneath their bedroom floor that would last for minutes at a time. The couple eventually pulled up a few floorboards one weekend to check for rodents or broken pipes. They found nothing but dry earth.

A week later, Rachel started waking up with bruises—long, narrow ones that wrapped around her calves like fingers. She dismissed them at first, blaming furniture or maybe clumsy movements during sleep. But then one morning she found a mark that looked unmistakably like a handprint.

They installed a camera in their bedroom, hoping to catch some rational explanation. But for three nights, the footage showed nothing but still frames—then, on the fourth night, the video glitched from 3:12 to 3:33 a.m. When it resumed, Rachel was sleeping on the floor beside the bed, perfectly still, eyes wide open.

They called an electrician, thinking perhaps EMF from old wiring was interfering with the camera and possibly causing hallucinations. But the electrician found nothing out of the ordinary.

Things escalated.

The sounds beneath the floor returned, louder and more erratic. Rachel swore she saw shadows move in the corners of her vision. She began to spend her days outside the house, sitting for hours at a time at the local library, unable to explain the anxiety growing inside her chest. Adam, more skeptical, tried to stay rational, but even he began to feel the weight of something watching him, especially in the narrow hallway upstairs.

One night, Rachel finally broke.

She woke up screaming, clawing at her legs. Adam flipped on the light and found her with fresh bruises forming in real-time. In a panic, he rushed her to the hospital. Doctors were baffled. There were no signs of self-inflicted injury, no toxins in her blood, no signs of psychological disorder. They kept her for observation overnight.

That night, Adam stayed home alone.

At 3:14 a.m., his phone buzzed with a notification from the bedroom camera. Motion detected. When he opened the app, the screen showed the bed—empty, lights off—but the tapping was back, louder than ever. Then the screen blurred, and for a split second, he saw something crawling out from beneath the bed. A human hand, bone-thin, gray, with nails far too long. The app crashed before he could screenshot it.

Adam didn’t sleep that night.

The next day, he returned to the library where Rachel had been spending her time. He asked the staff if they knew anything about the house’s previous owners. An older librarian remembered the place and reluctantly pulled an archived newspaper article from 1972.

According to the article, a young woman named Evelyn Bright had gone missing from the same house in 1969. She was 24, newly married, and had reportedly been hearing “voices under the floor.” Her husband claimed she had become mentally unstable, but neighbors testified to hearing screaming at night. Evelyn was never found. Her husband later hung himself in the attic. The case had gone cold.

Chilled, Adam dug deeper. He found that over the last 50 years, four separate couples had lived in the house—and all left within a year. One couple divorced after the wife developed “night terrors.” Another sold the house abruptly and moved across the country.

Armed with this disturbing history, Adam returned to the hospital and begged Rachel to move. She agreed instantly. They left the house the next day with nothing but a suitcase each, abandoning furniture, photos, and even their cat, who had vanished two nights before.

The house has remained unoccupied since.

Locals whisper that it’s cursed. That whatever lives beneath the floorboards doesn’t want to be disturbed. Some say it’s the spirit of Evelyn, twisted by years of rage and isolation. Others think it’s older—something ancient that has nothing to do with people, only places.

As of 2025, the property is listed for sale. Cheap. Beautiful on the outside, with hardwood floors and original detailing. But every showing ends the same way—agents complain of headaches, clients feel unwelcome, and some swear they hear tapping during the walk-through.

No one stays long.

And every few months, the neighborhood kids dare each other to run up to the porch at night. None of them go inside, of course. But some swear that if you press your ear to the boards, you can hear something breathing just beneath your feet.