Whispers Beneath the Floorboards

Whispers Beneath the Floorboards
Secrets Buried in Silence, Waiting to Be Heard

The house on Windmere Lane had been empty for years, its once-vibrant windows now clouded with dust, the paint on its frame curling like dried leaves. Neighbors whispered about the place in the same way children whispered about monsters—soft, careful, half-believing.

When Clara inherited the house from her grandmother, she hadn't expected anything more than a dusty old structure in need of repairs. She was used to old buildings. As a freelance writer with a love for vintage aesthetics, she saw charm in the creaking floorboards and cobwebbed corners.

But something about this house was different.

From the first night, Clara heard it: faint murmurs just beneath the edge of hearing. At first, she blamed the wind, maybe mice in the walls. But no wind whispers names. And mice don’t say “help me.”

She lay awake in the upstairs bedroom, covers pulled up to her chin, as the noises came again. Soft. Insistent. Almost human.

Whispers beneath the floorboards.

The next morning, Clara began her inspection. Her grandmother had sealed off the basement years ago after an old heating system collapsed. The floorboards in the living room were oddly new compared to the rest of the house—sanded and varnished, yet somehow uneven. She knelt and knocked. Hollow.

She tried to forget about it. She told herself she was being dramatic—too many horror books, too little sleep. But the whispers returned that night. Louder. More desperate.

“Why did she leave us here?”

Clara bolted upright.

This was no dream.

She grabbed her flashlight and tiptoed down to the living room. The floorboards were warm, unnaturally so. Her fingers trembled as she ran them along the edge of the nearest plank. It was loose. Just slightly.

Something told her not to pull it up. But curiosity is a stronger force than fear.

She pried up one board, then another, until a dark cavity yawned open beneath her. The old basement—smaller than she expected, almost like a crawl space—was barely three feet deep. She shone her flashlight into the darkness.

There, nestled in the dirt and shadows, were toys.

Old wooden dolls. A broken tricycle. A child's shoe.

And then, a pair of eyes stared back at her.

Clara screamed and tumbled backward, the flashlight clattering across the floor. By the time she scrambled to her feet and peered back into the hole, the eyes were gone.

The next morning, she went into town and found an old man sitting at the café, sipping coffee slowly. His name was Harold, and he’d lived in the neighborhood all his life.

“Your grandmother,” he said, “was a good woman. But strange.”

“How so?”

“She took in children, back in the 1950s. Orphans. Said she couldn’t bear to see them sent off to homes. But one day… they just stopped coming. And she stopped speaking of them. We assumed they’d grown up or left.”

Clara’s skin prickled.

“There was a boy,” Harold continued, “James. Red hair. Sweet kid. Disappeared one winter. The police asked questions. Your grandmother said he ran away. But she looked… haunted after that. Like she was hiding something she couldn’t stand to say out loud.”

Clara returned to the house that night, mind heavy. The whispers were louder now—no longer begging, but crying. Wailing. Children’s voices, calling names. Pleading for someone to listen.

She couldn’t bear it anymore.

The next day, she called a local contractor and had the floorboards removed completely. Beneath them, the earth was disturbed, loose in places. And buried beneath, just a few feet deep, were bones.

Small bones.

The coroner’s report confirmed it—at least three children, their remains decades old.

The police reopened the case, and newspapers had a field day. “Murder House on Windmere Lane!” the headlines screamed. Clara watched her family’s name spiral into infamy, her heart sinking under the weight of ancestral guilt.

She left the house, moved back into the city. Tried to forget.

But the whispers followed.

They came not from beneath the floorboards anymore—but from her dreams. From the rustle of paper. From the silence between breaths.

“Thank you,” they said sometimes.
“She couldn't hear us. But you did.”
And sometimes, “Don’t let her hurt us again.”

Clara doesn’t sleep much these days. She writes, mostly. Stories about haunted houses, broken families, and secrets buried in silence.

And sometimes—on the edge of sleep—she still hears the whispers.