Whispers Beneath the Floorboards

There’s a house in Pine Hollow that no one wants to buy.

It’s been on the market for twelve years—price slashed again and again, as if it were rotting from the inside out. And maybe it is. Locals say it whispers at night. They say it listens.

When Anna and Michael Leary moved from Boston to the quiet town of Pine Hollow, they weren’t looking for a haunted house. They just wanted peace, a cheaper mortgage, and somewhere their daughter Emily could grow up away from the chaos of city life. So when their real estate agent offered a four-bedroom Victorian farmhouse for under $150,000, they thought they were dreaming.

They were.

And it was about to become a nightmare.

The house on Bitter Elm Lane was odd from the start.

The air inside seemed… heavy. Not musty or stale, just thick. Emily, only seven, said she didn’t like the upstairs hallway because “the walls talk when no one else does.” Anna brushed it off as imagination—kids are dramatic, especially during big changes.

But it wasn’t just Emily.

Michael would wake at 3:17 every morning, no matter what time he went to bed. The floorboards creaked in patterns, always the same: three slow steps, a pause, then two quick ones. They tried telling themselves it was just the house settling.

That worked—until the drawings started.

Emily had always loved to draw, but after a week in the house, her art changed. No more rainbows and stick figures. Now it was people with hollow eyes, teeth like needles, and long, contorted arms that reached from beneath the floor. She named them “The Crawlers.”

“They live under us,” she said one night at dinner. “But they’re not dead. They just forgot how to sleep.”

Anna found the first real clue when she was cleaning out the attic.

Behind a pile of rotting cardboard boxes, she found a trapdoor. It wasn’t on the blueprints. It wasn’t supposed to be there. Curious, she opened it.

The hole led to a hidden crawlspace between the floors, full of dusty toys, old bones—animal, she hoped—and journals. She brought one down.

It belonged to a girl named Lily Camden. 1893.

The entries started sweet—stories of summer, baking with her mother, chasing fireflies.

But halfway through, Lily’s handwriting changed.

She wrote about voices under the floor that whispered secrets to her while she slept. She wrote about how her brother stopped speaking. How her parents began locking the bedroom doors at night.

Then, she wrote about the thing that lived under her bed.

The final entry read:

“They say if you listen too long, it finds a way in. Through your thoughts. Through your dreams. I tried not to listen. But it knows me now. It wants me to join them beneath the floor.”

Michael didn't believe Anna. “It’s just a story. Like Bloody Mary or the boogeyman.”

But Emily stopped sleeping altogether.

She sat up each night, staring at the floor. “They’re louder now,” she said. “They want me to help them open the door.”

Then the voices came for them too.

Michael heard them first. A woman’s voice, faint, behind the wall:

“You brought her here. She’s ours now.”

They ripped up the floorboards that night. Under Emily’s bed, they found a second trapdoor—identical to the one in the attic.

Beneath it was nothing but black.

Emily stood by silently, watching. “They said we’re the last piece. They need three.”

“What are you talking about?” Anna asked, heart racing.

Emily’s eyes were dull. Not tired—blank. Like someone else was inside.

“I’m the key,” she whispered. “You’re the sacrifice.”

Then she pushed.

Anna hit the bottom hard. There was no light. No air. Just the sound of something moving—wet, scraping, hungry.

She screamed. But no one heard.

Michael had fallen too, but Emily had vanished. Above them, the trapdoor slammed shut.

Darkness swallowed everything.

🪦 Epilogue

The Learys were reported missing three days later. Their house was empty—pristine, even. Except for a single drawing left on the living room floor.

A little girl, standing beside a trapdoor.

Smiling.