27 Jan The Doorless Room in My Old House

Posted at 21:46h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on January 27, 2026

“The Doorless Room in My Old House”

Written by Ian Dean
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 24 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 1 vote.

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In the summer of 2025, a large house just outside of a small town in northern New Hampshire went on the market. I’d been watching and waiting for years, because it was where I grew up. I was even born there, after my mother suddenly went into labor a month before I was due.

We sold it and it left the family in 2004, twenty-four years after I took my first breaths there. The new owners then took good care of it for twenty years, maintaining it but not really updating it or trying to improve anything. As far as I know, they had no complaints. Nothing bad happened at the address; at least nothing that had been reported. As far as anyone is concerned, it’s a perfectly normal, lovely, and secluded home, surrounded by a dense cluster of trees. I’m sure that the couple who lived and raised three children at my old coming-of-age residence were content and lived normal lives, but now that their job of tending to little ones was complete and the kids had moved out, they no longer had a reason to stay at such a large place.

It so happens that one of my old school buddies never left the area, and works at the real estate agency that is now trying to sell it. I wasn’t sure if I’d buy it, and if I did, if I would try to flip it, rent it out, or just stay for a year until the warm glow of nostalgia faded and I was ready to truly say goodbye to it and my formative years. My friend, though, was kind enough to let me pay it a visit so that I could see the two-story old manor… without giving into an impulse buy just so I might have a chance to spend a day there.

I wondered if I would have enough time to find that room. Or prove once and for all that it either existed, or did not.

By the time I pulled up to the wrought iron gate, the sun was already starting to lower in the sky. It was one of the longest days of the year, so sunset would last and last, making it feel like time had slowed and the land was caught between day and twilight. The extended golden hour was something I always associated with my summer days of running about the yard, or exploring the little quirks and eccentricities of the residence as long beams of orangish yellow light came in through the many large windows across both floors.

I got out of my car, pulled open the gate, and then drove through and closed it back up. Now surrounded by the outermost enclosure, it suddenly felt like I had entered a time capsule. There was a For Sale sign out front, the grass and weeds were higher than my parents would have ever permitted, and the tire swing and my mother’s garden were long-gone, but otherwise, it was just like I had remembered it. I coasted up to the garage, turned the engine off, and when I stepped out to admire the house, chipped white paint and other blemishes and all, I already felt like the past was beckoning me inside for one last look.

It’s hard to assign it a design style. It was built in 1932 and takes cues from Victorian architecture, but lacks a turret room or the flourishes that would typically be found over windows or on the roof. With three bathrooms and four bedrooms—we used one for guests and the other as a home office—it wasn’t quite big enough to be considered a mansion to anyone except myself, when I was a kid and everything in the world was a little bigger.

I went up to the porch, put in the combination for the lockbox hanging on the front door, used the key, and stepped inside for the first time in over two decades. I instantly felt home again, like I was ready to run upstairs to my room and toss my homework on the bed, where it’d be ignored until much later in the night in favor of hanging out with friends or playing video games.

Instead, I went left at the foyer and reached the living room, the largest space in the house. As floorboards creaked underfoot and the sun bathed the room with more than enough light to fill every corner, I steadily took in the sight of the large emptiness. I had never seen it this way, free of décor, furniture, and rugs, as it had been filled with family things before I was even born, and I last left it before the movers packed everything away. With no couch, lounge area with a love seat, two armchairs, and a coffee table, and no entertainment center holding a large TV or packed bookshelves… it was a remarkably bigger place. It was too empty, and the acoustics were nothing like I remembered.

Other than the floor, walls, ceiling, and windows, only a couple features remained: the support beams above, and the immovable fireplace, which always had some crackling wood in the winter months. All of it seemed free of dirt and dust. I mused on how many, if any, particles of dust in this house were still comprised of my dead skin cells, and in what corners they may have hidden for all those years. The previous owners seemed to have kept the place immaculate.

As I’m sure most of the members of this forum are aware, kenopsia is the feeling of almost oppressive emptiness felt in a vacant place where it seems like there should be people. I believe it comes in at least two varieties. On one hand, you can have a sports stadium, or concert hall, or a mall, where it’s as if you can almost hear the voices of the masses that were once there and need to be again for such a large space to have any meaning. But typically, so long as that place hasn’t been abandoned and life promises to return, then what you feel is simply the absence of it. You just happen to be seeing a location in a most unusual state, and likely past closing or under special circumstances.

And then there is the more personal version of the sensation. The spot is much more familiar, one of the few corners of the world that is truly important to you and your history, but that promise of life returning is gone.

This is when a house, or maybe a school or family-run business, has lost so much of its relevance to one’s own future, that it’s become a realm of ghosts and echoes. The air is saturated with a heaviness you can’t explain, and part of our mind yearns to simply see or hear a fragment of the past reemerge, if just for a moment. Linger too long, and you may even hallucinate. At the very least, you’ll get lost in memories, and perhaps others will sharpen in focus. Or ones you believed forgotten might suddenly feel new again.

The living room was only my first stop, and it already felt like my emotional center had been hit by a truck. How is it that this was once a place of music, food, and social gatherings? My parents must’ve hosted a party or a large dinner for their friends and family once a month on average. Dozens of guests, maybe sometimes fifty or more, would show up, chat, play games, and make new connections. Other children rarely showed, so I’d often stay up in my room and only gave the latest social event lasting into the late hours a peek, or at most, I’d make a food run during which getting trampled by all the adults felt like a real threat in my mind. How could it now be so empty here, and forgotten? A thousand people may have seen our house while we lived here, and now there was nothing but faint, distant whispers, like all those voices got lost in the walls and bounced around a few million times before just now finding freedom again, but they’ve become so weak that only the subconscious can hear them.

I went through the dining room, where all three of us had, at most, maybe thirty meals together a year. My dad kept so busy, that it was usually just me and my mom. We never had a maid or butler, but I do vaguely remember a cook that would come by three or four times a week, who would create a dinner with more love than my mother ever put into food. Off to one side, the hardwood floor showed some faint scratches and impressions where her piano used to be. She played often, and taught, but never tried to become one of the greats in the region. It was a passion, yet she didn’t want to burn herself out by making a career out of it. If only I still had the old piano, and could move it into the house for just the visit so I could hear its strings reverberate in the room. It’d be one of the few sounds I knew growing up here that I couldn’t otherwise replicate.

The kitchen looked the most familiar of all. The prior occupants had replaced the fridge and stove, but the sink and all the cupboard and counters, save for a fresh coat of paint, looked just like I remembered. This was a room I could navigate in the dark when I snuck a midnight snack, and a thin layer of cooking oil, dispersed while food was cooking, might have still existed on some surfaces if not for the refurbishment. And all the cleaning I’m sure the previous owners did, of course.

I wanted to see every room, but this was where I’d have to pause. With no tables in the home, the kitchen counters would have to do for a “base of operations” in regard to my search. I opened my folder of information and got myself situated for something I figured should only take a few hours, or less.

That room I mentioned has been a big mystery in my life, and it began way back and early on in my formative years. My parents are both gone, I’m an only child, and I doubt many of their friends are still around, on the off chance any of them would know or remember anything about this house. So, there’s probably no one out there who can provide me with answers, and it was up to me to piece things together using what little time I likely had in this place.

All I have to go off of is a fuzzy memory, and it’s one that at certain times in my life, I wrote off as a dream. Or a memory of a dream. It definitely blurred the lines between them. It’s haunted me, off and on, for nearly all of my life. I’m not sure how long I was in there, if it ever did truly exist, but there might have been a moment of my life in which I found myself trapped in a windowless, doorless room.

How I got in there, or back out, I have no idea. Its size and appearance have changed in my mind over the years as my waking self tries to rationalize it, and my sleeping self revisits it often. Countless times over the decades, I’ve had dreams of spaces with no apparent exit, and while I once considered them nightmares, eventually I grew numb to each new encounter with the rooms that were always shifting. Sometimes they’d be a classroom, or an abandoned office that looked like one of many in which I’ve worked. Many rooms could be in good condition; others were dimly-lit or had peeling, rotting wallpaper. Every now and then, I got the feeling that despite not seeing the outside of these rooms, they were either buried underground or somehow floating high up in the sky.

Wherever they were, and whatever they looked like, they always gave off a sense of being trapped or forgotten, with no hope of escape. I might as well have been surrounded by a mile of rock on all sides. And worse was what I’d be trapped with: corruptions of childhood toys. Characters with sinister intent, from brands and stores that never existed, having been warped by my own mind and turned into hellish little prison guards that made sure I’d never leave a place which already had no escape.

The warden was the one unchanging toy that appeared in every dream: a teddy bear of some kind, which had a frozen scowl. It all sounds crazy, but the dreams were so vivid, and recurred so much, that I’ve realized they must have been related to real-life trauma my mind has tried its best to shut out. But where would an experience like that come from? If a doorless room did somehow exist, why and how was I even in there?

As I covered the kitchen counters with everything I was given or could find out about the house—a collection that included, most importantly of all, a floor plan—I quickly felt like a detective with a corkboard trying to put all the pieces together, and see something beyond just the facts and evidence.

But I had nothing to go on but untrustworthy memories, faded further by time. I’d already studied the floor plan extensively, which matched the layout I had memorized as a kid, and I couldn’t see how the architect or one of the owners before us might have hidden away a secret room behind a wall, or just a well-concealed door somewhere. There was simply no available space within the dimensions of the building. At most, maybe there could have been a hidden closet. Perhaps something used to conceal liquor during the later years of Prohibition. Sure, rooms look much bigger to us when we’re young, but I didn’t dream of confining places that were taller than they were wide.

If there was a hidden room on the property, I’d have to think creatively. And, no, I never considered something really “out there” like pocket dimensions or foldable space; nothing sci-fi or cosmic horror like that. Though what I could do was a little high-tech on its own. I was going to go through the entire house, room by room, and use a distance-measuring laser to match the sizes of each area with the floor plan. It would be the best, most accurate way to see if a sealed room existed. At the most, I was open to some kind of optical trickery. Not that I expected a fairly ordinary house to utilize any such design techniques. I wasn’t going to entertain any ideas crazier than that.

My expedition began outside, while I still had light. During my family’s era at the house, my mom kept her garden in the side yard, and maintained a large fountain in the back. The previous owners had replaced the patio, which was a shame given that she always made sure its bricks were pristine, so she could be proud of the outdoor parties she hosted.

The few times I asked Mom about my strange memories of a room with no doors, she dismissed them as bad dreams. Maybe she was just good at hiding things, but I never sensed any reluctance to talk about it, like she was trying to keep a secret. So, I always assumed she knew nothing either way, or why I thought about such a room so much. She died only five years ago.

My time limited, I tried not to get lost in nostalgia as I circled the house twice and took redundant measurements that matched up with the floor plan. The sun had dropped below the trees, but it wasn’t dark yet.

Back inside, I measured the garage first. And then the kitchen, dining and living rooms, and the den where I stayed cozy in the winter with a movie or game. The bathrooms were done quickly, as was my childhood bedroom that was long-empty and felt too small. The guest room was where visiting family had shacked up, but it had a pall cast upon it after my maternal grandfather died in his sleep in its bed, in 1994. There was the smallest bedroom that had a single window, which was eventually filled with computer equipment and CDs. And then the master bedroom, where a king-sized bed and an antique vanity once resided. My young mind perceived its old cracked mirrors as dangerous portals to another reality that, in the middle of the night, could let “something”in.

I looked at each closet and measured every twisting hallway, full of 90-degree turns that helped me evade pursuing spirits during my ghost-hunting phase. Everything checked out on the first and then the second floors, and I even remembered to peek at the extra-small linen closet that was tucked away in the corner of the largest bathroom, which had helped me win many games of hide and seek with my friends and cousins, and that the prior owners might’ve ignored completely or never discovered.

The sun was setting by the time I made it up to the attic, and the dull amber glow coming from its tiny window barely gave me any light. It was free of cobwebs, and the insulation looked like it had been replaced within the last ten years. My thoughts drifted to Christmas decorations in boxes and stuff I grew too old to enjoy anymore, yet didn’t want to get rid of.

It was while I was up there that I was reminded of my strange propensity as a child to lose certain toys. One day they would be around, and I had memories of putting them away, and the next, they’d be gone, never to be seen again. We could always afford new ones, and I got plenty of random gifts from my parents, but it’s odd how easily I accepted that a Hot Wheels car, stuffed beast, or an action figure was suddenly no longer in my life, for no apparent reason. It was like I had stuffed them into pockets full of holes, meandered in a childhood haze for a week, and when I went to take them out again, some had been lost on the trail of adolescence—God knows just when or how.

After my final measurements came back as accurate, I returned to the kitchen, turned on its lights, and considered what I might have missed. There was nothing that suggested a lost room on the surface, and after two hours of hunting for any anomalies, I had found nothing other than some unburied memories and melancholy.

But, there was one last place to search. I had been holding off in hopes I’d find something by then, but I suppose I should’ve been braver and gone into the basement earlier, while the sun was out. Now I would have to go down there with just my small flashlight. And the crowbar I had stashed in my car but had yet to use. If there was nothing to pry, at least I’d have some protection against anything that could be lurking.

Nothing bigger than rats, hopefully. Maybe a raccoon if I was unlucky. I hated the basement as both a kid and a teenager, and refused to go down there if I could help it. It may have had narrow ground-level windows, but it still always felt dark and surreal, like a dungeon. I also never kept any of my old things down there, feeling like if it wasn’t mold that got to them, they could also slowly “absorb” a curse or be possessed by spirits. Yeah, I was a strange kid with irrational fears, yet there was just something about that place I hated. But the previous owners, who I had begun to see as an important buffer between my past and the present, had improved things down there, too.

With a torch and some heavy metal in hand, I descended into the large rectangular concrete hole, still equipped with my laser “gun” and the “map” displayed on my phone screen. The sooner I could get out of there the better, but I didn’t want to rush in my surveying and make mistakes.

The first thing to do was to get the lights on, assuming they still worked. I had so rarely been in the basement, that I’d forgotten where the switch was, and it took a few minutes just to find it. Thankfully, the bare bulbs did their job, and the place lost some of its creepiness.

As I worked, I tried to recall what all been kept down there. I didn’t think there had been much, as it did seem relatively ignored by my parents as well. A ping-pong table stood out the most. Old furniture. A small collection of storage containers. And… when I thought about it, there were several shelves full of toolboxes, and a workbench. Did my dad have more tools than normal? I probably hadn’t considered it before. There used to be some plastic barrels down here, too. For yard waste, I believe. Even though I couldn’t recall any memories where I saw them out. He enjoyed cleaning the yard himself instead of hiring crews, but… Huh. Didn’t he only ever use trash bags?

What exactly did my dad do, anyway? Whenever other kids asked, I was never sure what to say. He was gone a lot, and talked often about the government, so I must’ve assumed he had some important, maybe secretive role in serving the country.

I looked up repeatedly as I made my measurements, keeping an eye on the house floorboards and air ducts above and trying to spot anything out of the ordinary. The basement was simple, with four sides, a few pillars, and the stairs in the center. Its size matched the dimensions of the house, though it didn’t go under the kitchen or garage, which both extended out from the residence and kept it from being a perfect rectangle. I checked the walls beneath their thresholds more thoroughly than the others, thinking there was a small chance of there being a secret room beyond them, but they were solid.

So… it seemed like I was about done. I’d probably continue to be haunted by a room that didn’t logically exist for years, but at least I could definitively conclude that it wasn’t real. I was ready to leave, and had made up my mind to never return. Any magic that this house once had disappeared during my visit. I’d been given a unique chance to see a home I didn’t think I would again, and it got a second farewell from me. Good enough.

I headed to the light switch to return the basement to the darkness in which it belonged. I was already thinking about where I’d grab some fast food on the way back to my hotel room.

But at the last moment, I saw something in the corner of my eye. Of course I did. I mean, if I hadn’t, would I have bothered to post this story?

Just before I hit the lights, I noticed a segment of the western basement wall that was… different. A section of cinder blocks, about ten feet wide and maybe a little less than three feet tall, had an off color. It was painted in a dark gray like everything else, yet it didn’t quite match. It was subtle enough that I never would have noticed without all the lights on—the old couple must have added a few to help them see better down here.

And I kid you not, only a few seconds after I spotted the segment, the circuit flipped and I lost all of my illumination. If I was a believer in the paranormal, I may have taken that as a sign that the house was trying to hide something from me. I scrambled to get my flashlight back on and find the breaker box. I then turned off all but one of the four bulbs as to not overload what might have been a sensitive or poorly wired circuit.

In the more familiar dim light, I went over to the wall and ran my hand across it. I gave it a knock, but it sounded the same as the rest of the blocks. Nothing else looked out of place at first, and I was soon considering ignoring the anomaly. Until, once again, my eyes picked up on something just before I might have left. On closer examination, I noticed multiple scratch marks on the painted floor, all of them leading towards the wall. With my heart starting to beat faster again like it hadn’t since I first set foot inside the house, I got down on the floor, closed one eye, squinted, and looked for… anything. I wasn’t sure what.

The atmosphere began to feel oppressive again. The shadows seemed, if only in my head, darker and denser. It was like a force just beyond my perception no longer tolerated my presence in this time-worn place, and now I was fighting a primal urge to escape.

When I discovered the notch in the floor, only millimeters thin, I knew that I couldn’t run from my past or my family’s secrets. There was something hidden down here, as unbelievable as it sounded.

I stuck the edge of my crowbar into the narrow gap, and ended up having to hammer it with my shoe-covered foot to force it deep enough inside to get any use out of it. Once the metal was a few inches into the notch, I pried, hard. It took all my strength, but after several seconds, there was an audible click, and the entire segment of off-color wall just… popped open. As much as it could with so much weight pressed down on it.

I stood, reversed the crowbar, and used the hook end to pull up a large hidden hatch, which opened like an early garage door before they were motorized. The reason it was so heavy was due to its façade, made up of about an inch-thick layer of attached cinder block so that it would blend in with the wall. What the hell was something like this doing in my basement, I thought. And what was beyond it?

With my muscles getting weak, I got back on the floor and jammed the crowbar between the floor and right in the middle of the big hatch, which was heavy enough to pin it down and immobilize it. The tool was long enough to keep it open about two feet, more than enough to slide my way past it.

I didn’t want to risk having the bulky hatch slamming back down and trapping me inside whatever it was concealing, and I had no idea how its locking mechanism worked. Doing what I could with what I had on hand, I removed my jacket, wrapped it around the crowbar, and tried to immobilize it further by putting my shoes on either side of it.

After a final, shaky breath, I got on my stomach and began pushing and dragging myself through the hidden crawlspace and into the darkness beyond. I would never do anything like this, if it weren’t for the memories that had plagued me for decades. If the doorless room had ever been real, then certainly it must be just a little deeper inside.

A few feet into the crawlspace, I lost what little basement light I still had and turned on my flashlight again. Just ahead, a makeshift pushcart of sorts appeared in my beam. It was low to the ground and had no handles, being little more than four swiveling wheels screwed into some plywood. It must have been used to transport things into the room, if it did exist. There was only a foot of space or so left between the platform and the top of the crawlspace—still enough to get on your back and push yourself about on the “trolley.”

Or maybe another person?

After going in a little more than twenty feet, I reached the end of the crawlspace, and the feeling of claustrophobia was getting to me. I pushed at the back wall. I then pushed harder. It was solid, and didn’t budge. There must have been only dirt on the other side. I gave the other walls a shove with my legs, and they all equally had no give whatsoever.

But I had to be close to something. I had no memories whatsoever of this crawlspace, but if this was all it was, then it lacked purpose. Feeling trapped in its confines as desperation set in, I began to panic and I forced my eyes to scan the walls and the ceiling above me repeatedly, as if trying to will something into existence. I didn’t want to leave the crawlspace and come back in. I wanted to find a secret, prove to myself I didn’t grow up imagining a doorless room, and then leave this house for good. But here I was, in its depths, as I felt the ghosts of my parents and the past pressing on my shoulders, asking me why I had returned. Why I hadn’t left all this behind and moved on.

What I should have done was bring a sledgehammer. No, I should’ve rented out a jackhammer and gone to town. I’d pay for the damages, whatever they were. I hadn’t realized before that this had become an obsession, but now I could admit it. This had been subtly growing in the back of my mind for decades, and now it was an aching need to uncover a truth I’d…

Wait. Were my eyes playing tricks, or had I really just seen a square in the ceiling? I had become so frantic, that I’d swept the light over it too quickly, only processing what I might have stumbled upon after it left my vision. I calmed down and rechecked the solid steel slab above me. Why was it made of metal, anyway? I could’ve been under a bank vault for all I knew.

I soon found it again. The square was around three by three feet, and so perfectly fit with the rest of the metal that it left only a barely perceivable hairline crack between them. I rolled onto my back, scooted over, and pushed mightily with both arms. On my first attempt, it budged, if only barely. I took a deep breath, really put effort into it, and pushed up a metal panel that weighed at least fifty pounds. It was agony on my muscles, but I managed to get it high enough to dislodge from the square slot that it had been planted into for so many years. There was a faint, tenuous breeze, but I was unsure of its direction.

Little by little, I got the panel to slide across an unseen floor. I stopped when the opening was halfway uncovered, then sat up and stuck my head and arms up and through it so I could get a look around with my flashlight.

Holy shit, I thought. I was too stunned at first for anything more complex.

It was the room. I knew it immediately. Unless I was hallucinating down here, I had found my validation. It was covered on all sides by various easy-to-assemble hard plastic shells, like the kind you’d find in a shed or garage. And those shelves really were, for whatever reason, filled with toys.

My legs trembling, I carefully “climbed” up into the room, still in disbelief of what I had just rediscovered. It was pitch-black inside, so my first order of business was to find a light. Up above was a dangling chain for a naked old incandescent bulb, out of reach for any child. I pulled it, and somehow the relic came to life. It was almost painfully bright, at least a hundred watts; far too strong for a place this size.

Seeing the room in full light only added to my confusion about its existence. It did indeed have no doors or windows. The only way in was through the floor panel, which had no handles and must’ve required something handheld to open from this side. It seriously looked impossible to get fingernails under and pry open by hand, and as I no longer had my crowbar on me, if I accidentally kicked it back into place, I was probably doomed to starve to death down here. So, the next thing I did was drag it further away from the opening.

The room had two air vents, both closed. I doubt they’re connected to the house’s central heating ducts, but who knows for sure. Past shelves full of toys, I could see parts of the walls between the gaps. There were soundproofing panels, either hanging or screwed in. The walls and floor just added to the bizarreness of the room, since for another unexplainable reason, they were designed to look just like the rest of the house. Only the bathrooms, garage, and kitchen didn’t also have its floral wallpaper. There were even wooden baseboards painted in sky blue, just like in my bedroom. It was no wonder I grew up thinking this place had been hiding above, the way it matched other rooms.

The floor, however, was not made of wood. A vinyl wrap was glued to the metal and designed to mimic hardwood planks, but age and wear and tear had been unkind. The wrap had many bubbles, and spots where it was torn. Most of the damage surrounded the room’s single piece of furniture, a metal foldout chair that looked like it was from the 80s and sat slightly askew—positioned however it was left in, at the latest, 2004. The room had almost no dust, and the way the air smelled, it had seen no circulation.

Thinking back on it now, the room’s final feature probably should have disturbed me more. My measurements revealed that it was a few inches bigger than the crawlspace below on three of its sides, and from what little I could see of its corners where the baseboards met the floor, I sort of understood why.

The room was lined with small drains, like the kind you’d find along a swimming pool. At the time, I didn’t think that much about why they existed. I didn’t really give myself much time at all to ponder the room’s purpose, in fact, because I spent the bulk of my visit distracted by the toys.

I didn’t think they all once belonged to me, but my lost collection was certainly among them. Stuffed animals, cars, puzzles, games, action figures, spaceships, robots, army men, peg people, play sets, things that played sounds, a colorful tape deck, fake food and tools, random junk and gizmos, and entire assembled LEGO sets—they were all here. From old things out of the 70s I had gotten from extended family, all the way through stuff that was sold in stores in the 90s. Locked in time, forgotten, never touched by those who lived here after us. Left to decay in an isolated room that let in no outside sound or light.

How many of the toys really were mine at some point? Why were they taken from me? Had I lost some out of a punishment? Did my parents, or maybe just my dad, watch out for what I no longer played with and steal from me when I wasn’t looking? There were some things I had gotten rid of myself and thought I’d donated, sure, but most of it was either stuff I didn’t remember having at all, or had vanished without my consent. There was enough here to fill a toy store, or a museum. The purpose of the treasure horde, if it ever had one, was lost.

In the center of the middle shelf facing the metal chair, was the teddy bear—the “guard dog” in my dreams about this room. It was a ragged thing that leaked stuffing, and was maybe the only toy in the room that needed washing. But it didn’t have that malevolent look I always thought it did. It simply seemed sad, like teddy bears do, with big black eyes that had been staring at the room’s single seat for a generation. And then there was its particularly pudgy stomach.

That’s right. It came to me just then. He was my night companion. I had called him Mr. Tummy, because I was a dumb kid and his belly was big and round. He must’ve been one of the toys I lost when I was five. Perhaps around the time I remembered being in this room? Why would my dad take away a kid’s teddy bear? And did my mom let him?It was beyond any standard punishment.

Unless… Had I really been a troublesome child? Were many of these toys taken to discipline me? I suddenly realized that I couldn’t recall much about my behavior as a kid. Was I that bad, or was Dad just overly strict? Whatever the case, it wouldn’t account for all the toys here, many of which I never owned.

The hundreds of toys judging me in this forgotten tomb were getting to me. With no pictures left in the house, the only eyes inside it were down here, and I was all they had to stare at. Worse, it felt like my dad was breathing down my neck. It was time to leave, for real now, but I still wasn’t satisfied with my answers—not when I only had more questions after finding this place.

So, I searched for any lingering remnants, of anything other than a toy. The first thing that stood out was a large portable boombox from the 1980s, higher up on the shelves. I popped open the tape deck and found, for whatever bizarre reason, a cassette of 1950s polka music about halfway played.

I then got down on my knees and checked under each shelf for more. I soon found a glass vial that must have rolled away, now empty after either getting used up or drying out. It expired in 1997, so its contents wouldn’t have been injected into me, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t been stuck with something else the day, or night, that I found myself in here. It was a powerful tranquilizer. Perfect for knocking someone out so that they’d wake up in this room with no idea how they got here, or why there wasn’t a way out.

There was one last thing I found before I left for good: a single piece of notebook paper, the kind with the colored lines kids used in elementary school while learning to write. It was yellowed from time, and messy handwriting, already nearly illegible and faded to almost nothing, covered every line—meaning that it might have been just a middle page of something larger. My heart briefly seized up when I deciphered the words on the paper. They explained everything about why I had been here.

Done with the accursed place, I returned to the access panel and gave the entire room one last look, as if to say goodbye to my forgotten and lost toys. I’d keep them here, locked in their mausoleum. To take any with me would only strengthen my connection to this place. I did consider bringing just Mr. Tummy with me, one of my best friends as a kid, but those black eyes of his…

As ridiculous as this sounds, I felt like any time I’d look into those eyes, I’d wonder what things he witnessed with them. Because this room wasn’t made just for me. My dad, whatever it was he did, had it built for other people… and other reasons I never wanted to think about.

So, my teddy bear stayed. To keep watch, or so the other toys wouldn’t feel so lonely. I don’t know. My mind was frazzled, and I only wanted to leave. I closed up the room, left the crawlspace, got my shoes and crowbar, let the big cinder-hatch close, and then turned off all the lights and left the house forever. The paper was my proof that I had gone back, but otherwise, I’m not going to tell anyone about the secret room personally. I hope the next owners don’t find it, either, and live at this otherwise nice house oblivious to its existence. I won’t give out the address, and don’t go looking for it.

I’ll head out in the morning, and I don’t know when I’ll be back to my home town. That’s not out of newfound fear or hatred towards it; I still made a lot of good friends and memories here. I simply can’t predict the future.

As I wrap up this strange story in my hotel room, I’ve been skimming the torn paper I found. It has kept me grounded as I write, and helped me keep my focus and recall things I felt about that time and place, both when the world was always new to me and hours ago when I’d locked the front door one final time.

The words were misspelled and poorly scribed, but as they came from a five-year-old, it could’ve been worse. Written three times on each line, was the apology, “I sory I waz bad.”

I wondered how many other pieces of paper there once were. And how long I was trapped in the doorless room that I had woken up in, and never entered or left on my accord, being watched by all those lost toys.

And how many times I’d been in there.

I did say at the start that this was a story of ghosts and monsters.

I don’t really miss my parents anymore.