The Apartment Upstairs

Start writing...I heard the footsteps again.

Every night, around 11:23 PM, without fail, the floorboards creaked above me. Just three slow steps. Then silence. Not the scurry of mice. Not the groan of old pipes. Just steps.

The thing is, the apartment upstairs has been empty for months.

My friends roll their eyes when I bring it up. They say I’m being dramatic. “Old buildings do weird things,” Ella told me. “You live alone too long, your mind plays tricks.”

Maybe.

But I started recording the sounds. I played them back, night after night. Same time, same rhythm. Three steps. Nothing more. Like someone stepping forward—and stopping.

The landlord insists no one has a key. He even showed me the lease log. The last tenant was a woman named June. Lived there three years. Quiet. Kept to herself. Died in her sleep. The unit’s been untouched ever since.

“Untouched,” he said. I checked the mail slot once. Dust coated the inside.

But something about those steps made me curious, obsessed even. So one night, I did what any lonely fool in a half-empty building would do.

I climbed the stairs.

I told myself it was just curiosity, just to see if the door was still locked. My fingers shook as I reached for the doorknob.

It turned.

I should have left then. But I stepped inside.

The air smelled faintly like lavender and old books. The apartment was… still. Not cold. Not warm. Like it had been waiting. Sunlight from a streetlamp outside filtered through gauzy curtains. Furniture covered in white sheets gave the place the look of a forgotten museum.

And then I saw her.

A painting on the wall. A woman in her sixties. Soft eyes. Gray curls tucked behind one ear. The bottom read: June, 1986.

She looked familiar in that strange way where you can’t tell if it’s memory or imagination. I walked further in, drawn like a moth. In the corner of the living room stood a writing desk. Neat. Tidy. Like someone had just stepped away.

Three dusty journals lay stacked beside a ceramic mug.

I picked up the top one. The first page read:
“If anyone finds this, I hope you understand. Loneliness doesn’t always look the way you expect.”

The entries were quiet, intimate. She wrote about growing old alone. About how people stopped calling after her retirement. How silence stopped feeling peaceful and started feeling personal.

She talked about the footsteps too.

“I sometimes hear someone moving downstairs,” she wrote in her final entry. “Just after 11. Maybe a neighbor. Maybe a ghost. Maybe it’s me, slipping out of myself for a moment, imagining I still belong to the world.”

I closed the journal and backed away. Suddenly, the apartment felt different. Not haunted—but hollow. Like it carried someone’s unfinished breath.

I left the apartment that night and locked the door behind me.

But I didn’t stop hearing the steps.

Now, every night, 11:23 PM. Three slow steps. Then silence.

I don’t record it anymore.

Instead, I sit quietly and whisper, “Goodnight, June.”

Sometimes I imagine she whispers back.


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💬 Author’s Note:

If you’ve ever lived alone in an old building, you probably know what it means to hear a memory in the walls. This story is fiction, but the loneliness it speaks of? That’s very real. Check on the quiet ones. Leave the light on. And maybe listen a little closer to the floorboards.