The Secret Room

I lived in the second oldest house in my area near Waco, Texas from when I was about eleven until I was sixteen. I don’t know the significance of this, really, but I feel it’s the only possible explanation for any supernatural presence. I’m not sure when the house was originally built, but the rest of the houses around mine were built in the 40s and 50s, so I supposed it’s older than that.

The house seemed normal when we first moved in. Only two families had lived there over the years, so it wasn’t like there was a high turnover rate. In fact, no one really noticed or mentioned anything supernatural about the house.

However, there was a “secret room.” This room was actually a selling point for my parents to help us deal with moving. Even though my dad was in the military, we had lived at our past house for quite a while and didn’t want to move. So, of course, when my parents said there was a secret passage connecting one of the possible bedrooms with a secret room, we became excited about the new house. My sister fought for it, but I won because the other bedroom already had flower wallpaper up. When I first saw my room, I went straight to the closet to see the “secret door.”

The secret door wasn’t really that secret; it was right in the back of the closet in plain sight. However, it was a lot smaller than any normal door. Even when I was only eleven or twelve, I had to squat down to get in. It looked like it was made for a child to use.

Another interesting thing was that the door handle was not really built into the door; it was just a handle added as an afterthought. This made me think it was originally just some sort of attic or crawl space door and was not meant for a room. The door was lockable by key from my side of the door; the other side had no handle or keyhole. When you open the door, there’s a very small hallway about the same height as the door and not really fit for an adult, but it’s just a few feet long and then you get into the room.

The room was just an empty room added above the garage of the house. There was no way out except for the “secret passageway” to my closet. There were no windows, one light with a string used to turn it on hanging from the ceiling, and the room was completely white with seemingly new wallpaper. There was no furniture or anything left in the room from the previous owners; in fact, I don’t think the previous owners used it at all. I believe it was sealed before or soon after they move din and wasn’t touched since then, since it was pretty dusty, but who knows. The lock did seem very old and had a hard time moving, as if it was rusted or the wood was warped or something.

Now, my parents though the room could be me and my sister’s own little toy room or whatever when they first saw it, but after moving in they had second thoughts. I’m not sure what it was, but they said it was because they wouldn’t be able to hear us if we got hurt in that room since it was so detached from the rest of the house. Of course, since we wanted our own secret room so badly they gave in, but said that we had to tell them when we were playing in there and we had to keep the door to my room, my closet, and the secret room open at all times when we were there. So, we went on and, like I said earlier, nothing much really supernatural happened in the rest of the house, and not even too much in the “secret room,” at least not to me.

My sister began having an imaginary friend. Whenever I wasn’t in there, I could hear her talking and whispering to someone. I noticed that, although at first she used to have fun in there, that as time went on she seemed sadder when she was in there. However, up until now, this could all be coincidence, so I didn’t give it much thought.

The only weird things that happened with me was that at night I thought I could hear some sort of scratching on the walls behind my room, except it wasn’t really with fingernails; it was softer sounding. It wasn’t on the door, but coming from inside the room.

Now, I believe that I only heard this at night was because it was quiet at night and the scratching/rubbing sound was so soft that you normally couldn’t hear it. I really had no idea was it was; I told my dad once and he looked for some animal but couldn’t find any so we just forgot about it and I lived with it. Like I said, it was so soft that it never really bothered me. It could be some far off tree rubbing against the house for all I knew. This rubbing happened consistently, but like I said, I never paid it much mind, at least until my sister went into the room one night.

She knew about the rubbing, too, and never really said anything about it. One night, though, probably a year or so after moving into the house, the rubbing was going on as usual. I was in that limbo before falling asleep when I thought that someone was in my room and unlocking the closet door. I thought it might have been a dream, but I looked around and saw my door and closet door open, so I got up to check it out. I was a little scared, but I realized it was probably Mom or Dad checking out the rubbing sound since I told them it still happened sometimes. 

I turned the light on in my closet and looked in. I saw a figure sitting in the room facing the wall. Now, even when I was a kid, I had been pretty brave. I was still scared since I was pretty young, but I knew that you just can’t run or you’ll never know. I said, “Hello,” and I heard, “She wanted me to see,” in what sounded like my sister’s voice. The light was in the middle of the room, and it was tough taking even those few steps to get to it in the middle of that dark room. But, like I said, I couldn’t just leave, so I just went there and turned it on. When I looked at the figure, it was indeed my sister, sitting and scratching at the wallpaper. I touched her and found that she was crying, so I pulled her up and took her out of the room. 

I’m really glad that I didn’t just lock the door and run or else she would have been stuck in there all night (this is one reason why I never run away from something abnormal). I locked the door, took her to her room, and watched her as she went to sleep. I really thought she could’ve been sleepwalking or something, although she never had before, and since it was over I didn’t want to wake up my parents. I went back to sleep.

The next day, I asked my sister if she remembered going into the room and she began to look freaked out. I told her she was probably just sleepwalking, but she said that “the girl” asked her to come look at her pictures. She didn’t start crying, but she was about to because she was so scared. I didn’t ask who “the girl” was. I told her it was just a dream and went to prove it. She didn’t want to enter the room again, so I went in and saw where she was scratching on the wall. Only a little bit was scratched away, so I started peeling some more wallpaper off. Under the wallpaper were different pictures drawn in what looked like crying. They were typical kid pictures of mainly cats and houses, but there was one picture that I thought was weird.

It was a little girl, a cat, a mom, and a dad. Now, everything looked like a normal kid-drawn family portrait, except the dad had no face. It was just a circle. Of course, my rational side said she just never finished it, but the dad still looked strangely out of place, like the lines were distorted because she had trouble drawing it. Anyway, I told my parents and they yelled at me for pulling back the wallpaper. I didn’t want my sister to get in trouble, so I didn’t say anything about her or what happened last night. 

My parents said we had to get it fixed now and were mad, and didn’t let us play in there again as punishment. The whole thing still seemed normal to me. Kid draws on wall, parents put wallpaper up to cover it. I didn’t realize until later that night, when the scratching/rubbing sound started up, that it sounded like a crayon. I really started thinking that it was “the girl” that my sister talked about was drawing on the wall.

Now, after this happened, I started believing that “the girl” was actually in there. Once I started acknowledging her presence, weirder things began to happen. It happened really slowly. I was about fourteen or fifteen after the episode with my sister, and the weird things were happening slowly over the course of the next years I lived in the house up until I was eighteen. The changes were so subtle that I didn’t really notice that they were happening until much later. 

The drawing sounds increased a little bit and soon were audible even during the day. I also started hearing little pattering of feet. The more I heard these, the more emotional I felt about them. I started feeling angry the more I heard the sounds, especially when I was trying to sleep. However, I always managed to control myself and try to think that this girl was obviously sad and just trying to have fun, and I calmed myself down. However, this was going on for so long that I finally asked my sister when I was about sixteen.

I asked her if she ever heard the sounds. She said that she did, although they were pretty quiet. Now, I didn’t think this was so weird since obviously I could hear them too, and I told her how annoying it was. She kind of looked at me as if she was hurt, and said that every time she heard the sounds she felt really sad. She had trouble talking about it, but I told her it was pretty important since it was going to affect the rest of my years left in the house. 

She told me that “the girl” was the girl she used to talk to when she played in the room. She didn’t know her name, but they used to play together. She said she looked like a little girl about her age, so they had fun together. However, as my sister got older, the little girl seemed to get older too, except very unnaturally. It was subtle at first, but soon she began hating seeing her. She said she looked as if she “shouldn’t have been alive anymore.” I didn’t really know what this meant.

My sister said she wore the same dress the whole time, even when the girl grew out of it. I asked her why she went into the room that one night to find the pictures, and she said she really didn’t want to but the girl made her feel so sad that she’d do anything to help her out. However, this still freaked her out and I didn’t ask any more questions.

Things got worse every night, and I hated that sound. I was so mad that she wouldn’t just shut up so I could sleep. The weird thing was that I was scared at the same time, since I knew that whatever it was in there wasn’t actually alive any more. What also freaked me out was that the sound didn’t annoy my sister, but I guess she had more tolerance than I did.

I asked my parents who used to live here, and they said a family with two sons. Of course, this didn’t have anything to do with the room, since they had it locked off the entire time they were there. So, I asked if they knew anything about the family before them. They said the original owners were the ones who had the house built and that they didn’t know much about them, except that they had a daughter who died when she was eleven. I asked if they knew how she died, but they said it was some sort of accident, so it wasn’t murder or child abuse or anything. I also asked if she died in the secret room, but they said they didn’t think so. I really think that this was the girl in the room, although I had no idea why she inhabited it still.

Once I knew this, I sort of had an idea with what I was dealing with. Last year was when things got the worst. I heard almost constant drawing and her jumping around inside the room. The footsteps sounded heavier and were louder. If I ever heard it, I’d pound on the door to the room and she’d stop immediately, but I’d hear soft whimpering or crying. She’d also start drawing again later on. Sometimes I’d scream at her to shut up. I really got mad every time it happened since it had been going on for six years. However, I knew that I had to do something about this. I was a lurker of /x/ by this time, so I’ve read a lot of ghost story threads, and I remembered how pussy most of the goons were regarding ghosts and never checked anything out. So, I knew that I had to at least understand what was going on exactly, and, if possible, end it. I didn’t really have a plan, but I knew I had to see the girl or talk to her or something.

Last year, shortly before I turned 18, my parents went away for the weekend, so I took the key to the secret room from their room (they kept it ever since locking that day when I took off the wallpaper). I was determined to see her, so I stayed up and expected to hear sounds. I couldn’t hear anything, so soon I fell asleep. It was about 1:00 AM when I woke up to a loud bang, like someone jumped or fell. I heard her footsteps afterwards, and, of course, the drawing. The first thing I felt before any fear was pure anger. I hated that she woke me up, even though this was what I wanted. I immediately grabbed the key and went to the door. I was pounding on it as I said, “That’s it!” and unlocking the door. The sounds stopped and I heard whimpering. I threw open the door and saw the room for the first time in years.

The light coming from my room illuminated a figure in the room, much like when I saw my sister there years earlier. This was when I began to feel a wave of different emotions; I was really angry, really scared, yet I also knew that I had to do this and remain calm. I went into the room and stood a few feet away from the figure, which was standing in the corner. I turned on the light. What I saw was probably the most horrific sight I could probably have ever thought of in my entire life. Any horror movie monster had nothing on how unnatural the girl looked.

I finally realized why my sister described her in such a weird way. Her body was taller than she could have been. Her limbs were so lanky, bony, and stretched like she kept growing past how tall she should have been. She was wearing a really small dress, and it was really tight on her body. Her face looked as if her head had continued to grow but her face had not. The skin was stretched and the eyes were sunk back into her head – yet wide open – and her small, childlike teeth were exposed since her lips were stretched back with the rest of her face. Her hair was down to her waist and her face had tears streaming down. I took all of this in in just a moment, and as soon as we met eyes she let out a wail as if she was crying and moaning at the same time. It wasn’t a loud wail like most people describe ghosts; it was pretty soft and it was as if she was in terrible pain, but I couldn’t tell her expression since her face was so unnatural and stretched.

As soon as I heard the wail, all of the anger in my body was overcome by fear and I ran. I wish I could say I ran for a video camera, but I just ran. I know I’ve been talking about how much I hate when people don’t investigate things, but I was so terrified that I ran. Once I got out of my room, I ran to my car and drive away and spent the night at a friend’s house. Once I realized what happened, I was in a cold shiver and scared out of my mind for the entire night. I was too scared to go back home until my parents came home.

I waited until they came back on Sunday, and then I came over. They asked me why I took the key and left the closet door open and I just told them I wanted to see if I could sell any of my old toys on eBay. I took one last look in the room and locked the door. Ever since then, nothing happened. I don’t know why things stopped, but I’m always hoping it’s not because I “let her out” like in the Ring or something and that she’s really evil. Since nothing has happened since then, I do really hope that I helped her out in some way, but in all honesty I don’t care. 

My parents moved after I went to college, and I have no intention of ever going back. I came up with a theory that the male family member in her life was really mean to her and hated her playing in there, and possibly beat her, while the female family member always felt sad (hence my sister, and the girl’s willingness to open up to her first). Anyway, like I said, that’s just all theory but it kind of makes sense. This all happened last year, and the more I think about it the harder it is to remember.

(Sorry, I hadn't realized I forgot to finish this story up before posting it! It's fixed now.)