Voices in the Walls

Voices in the Walls

Based on true events

When my wife and I first moved into the farmhouse, it felt like a dream. A quiet, two-story home just outside of town, surrounded by wheat fields, thick woods, and silence—real silence, the kind you only get far away from the city. It had an old-world charm: squeaky floorboards, crooked shutters, and the smell of wood and dust that only time can create.

The house had been on the market for nearly three years. The listing was vague, the price suspiciously low. But when I asked the realtor why, she only shrugged and said, “People don’t like the country anymore.” It made sense, I told myself. We weren’t superstitious. We just wanted peace.

The first few weeks were calm. We painted the rooms, repaired creaky doors, and laughed about how much space we had. Our daughter, Emily, who was six, immediately fell in love with the upstairs room. It had slanted ceilings and a tiny square vent just above her bed that led into the attic. She called it her “magic window.”

One night, a few weeks in, Emily came into our room clutching her stuffed cat.

“Daddy,” she whispered, “there are people talking in my wall.”

It was 2:13 AM. I sat up, groggy. “You had a dream, sweetheart. It’s just the wind.”

She shook her head. “No. They were whispering. They said my name.”

I got up and checked her room. Nothing. I leaned close to the wall, listened. Just silence.

Still, the next morning I checked the attic. It was cramped, dusty, filled with cobwebs and broken furniture. Nothing strange—except the walls didn’t quite match the floor plan. There was extra space between the walls that shouldn’t have been there. Narrow gaps. Cavity walls. I figured it was just part of the old architecture. I sealed the attic vent and forgot about it.

But the voices returned.

This time I heard them too.

It was almost like murmuring—just beyond understanding. Not loud, but rhythmic. Like a conversation happening behind a wall too thick to fully hear through. It came late at night, always after 2 AM. I walked through the hallway, trying to trace it. Sometimes it was in the kitchen. Sometimes behind the staircase. Sometimes it felt like it followed me.

One night I leaned close to the living room wall. That’s when I heard it clearly:

“He can hear us now.”

I froze. I backed away from the wall, heart thudding in my chest. I waited. Silence.

The next morning I ripped that entire wall open with a crowbar. I found nothing—just dust, dead bugs, and old insulation. But from then on, the house changed.

Emily started drawing things—people with hollow eyes, long arms, standing inside what looked like her room’s walls. She said they whispered games to her. She didn’t want to go outside anymore. She said she felt safer near “the watchers.”

I tried to keep calm, but even my wife was starting to hear things. One night she swore she heard crying in the laundry room. I found her standing in the dark, staring at the wall, tears in her eyes, but not from fear—from some strange, crushing sadness.

Then came the knocking.

It was never at the door. Always inside the house—on the walls. Gentle at first. A single tap-tap-tap. Then faster. Louder. At random hours. Always in different rooms. We tried to tell ourselves it was the pipes, the wood settling, anything but what it felt like: someone—or something—trapped inside the walls.

I called in professionals. Pest control. Structural engineers. Even a local historian. The pest guy found nothing—no rodents, no termites. The engineer said the walls had strange inner spaces, almost like hidden hallways or dead zones in the design, but nothing unsafe. The historian was the one who finally gave me some context.

He said the house had been owned by a family in the 1940s. The father was a carpenter who apparently suffered a mental breakdown. One night, he sealed off parts of the home, walling up narrow spaces and leaving behind journals filled with paranoid scrawls about voices, watchers, and “keeping the family quiet.” The family vanished soon after. The police never solved it.

That night, I stayed awake with a flashlight and a recorder.

At exactly 2:17 AM, the voices came back. But this time… they were screaming.

Not words. Screams. Dozens of overlapping voices shrieking in agony from inside the walls. My recorder died after four seconds. The batteries were full. It simply shut off.

I ran into Emily’s room. She was gone.

My heart stopped.

The bed was empty, the vent above it open again—despite being sealed weeks ago.

I scrambled into the attic, calling her name. I heard crying—faint, distant, muffled. It echoed from inside the walls.

Panicked, I tore open drywall with my bare hands. Inch by inch. Fingernails bloody. And then I saw it: a small crawlspace behind her room. A narrow passage, just wide enough for a child. It led to a hollow chamber between two walls.

Inside, I found her—sitting in the dark, rocking, whispering, “They don’t like the light.”

We moved out two days later.

I never told her the truth, but she doesn’t ask about the voices anymore.

The farmhouse was later condemned. I drove by last year and found it half-burned, its windows boarded. But sometimes… when I sit in complete silence, far from that place, I swear I can still hear faint whispers… like the walls remember me too.