17 Aug The Thing on Crutches

I was ten years old the night I started to fear the dark.

Our house was big—too big, if I’m honest. My parents had bought it only a year earlier, a strange hybrid of old and new construction. The original farmhouse was more than a hundred years old, with creaking wooden floors, narrow staircases, and walls that seemed to sigh when the wind blew. A newer wing had been added sometime in the eighties, bright and modern, with carpeted bedrooms, wide windows, and softer angles. My parents and little sister slept over there.

I was the unlucky one. My bedroom was in the old part of the house, tucked at the top of a short staircase across a drafty hallway. At first, I liked it. I had privacy. I could stay up late reading comics with a flashlight. But when night fell and the house settled into its groans, that privacy became isolation. Every noise in the night felt magnified.

That night—I still remember it was early autumn—I woke to a sound that didn’t belong.

At first, I thought it was just the house stretching, the wood adjusting to the cool air outside. But then I sat up, holding my breath. No. This was rhythmic and sharp.

Clack. Thunk. Clack. Thunk.

I froze. The sound was faint at first, coming from the main level below. But the more I listened, the clearer it became. Someone—or something—was moving in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs.

It wasn’t footsteps. I knew footsteps. This was the sound of crutches.

The crutches my grandfather had used after his surgery a few years before made the same noise on hardwood. The clack of rubber tips striking the boards. The awkward, hollow thunk as the weight shifted. That uneven rhythm of someone struggling forward.

But my grandfather lived three states away, and there was no reason anyone else would be in the house.

I wanted to call for my parents, but I knew they wouldn’t hear me. Their rooms were too far off in the new wing, behind carpet and drywall. I was the only one awake in the old section, the only one who could hear it.

The sound grew louder, as though whoever was on those crutches was pacing. The hallway creaked under their weight. Clack. Thunk. Clack. Thunk. Closer. Pausing. Then resuming again.

I kept staring at the thin wooden door to my room, half-expecting the knob to rattle.

Then the impossible happened.

The sound didn’t just stay downstairs—it shot upward.

I heard the crutches slam onto the bottom step. And then, in the span of two seconds, they flew up the staircase. One, two, three—each tread slammed as though someone were bounding, impossibly fast, straight toward me. The noise didn’t pause or hesitate. It was like whatever it was wanted me to hear it.

I gasped and dove under my blanket, curling into a ball. I held the fabric over my head as if it were armor.

The steps reached the top of the stairs. There was a split-second of silence. And then—

Clack. Thunk. Clack. Thunk.

The crutches weren’t in the hallway anymore. They were in my room.

I know what you’re thinking: the door was closed. I remember twisting the knob and pulling it shut before going to bed. But I never heard it open. No squeal of hinges. No rattle of the knob. The sound just… passed through.

The crutches circled my bed, causing the wooden floorboards to creak. It moved to the far side, the side against the wall where there was no space for a person to stand. Yet the sound was there, clicking and scraping, impossibly close.

I buried my face in my pillow, trying not to breathe. Every muscle ached from holding still. I don’t know how long it lasted. Seconds? Minutes?

The silence stretched until it hurt.

Then, just as suddenly, the sound sprang to life again. The crutches clicked back around my bed, toward the door—no, through the door—and pounded down the stairs, as fast and violent as before.

And then it was gone.

The house fell silent again.

I stayed under the blanket until dawn bled through my curtains, shivering and damp with sweat.

I never told my parents the whole story. How could I? They would’ve chalked it up to a dream, an overactive imagination. But it wasn’t a dream. I was awake, so awake that my ears strained for every detail.

I tried to make sense of it later. Maybe someone had broken in, but why on crutches, and how did they move that fast? Perhaps it was an animal, but nothing about the sound seemed animal-like. Or maybe… maybe the old part of the house had kept a memory. A person who had lived, limped, and suffered here.

But even that doesn’t explain the speed. Or the way it entered my closed room.

I never heard the crutches again. Not once in the years I lived there. But even now, decades later, every time I wake to a strange sound in the night, I think about that hallway. About how I was the only one who could hear it.

And I wonder if it’s still there, pacing, waiting for another child who sleeps too close to the old bones of the house.

---

True Scary Stories

🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

Written by Craig Groshek (retold from a true scary story)
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

🔔 More stories from author: Craig Groshek (retold from a true scary story)

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