Dream #1 — PART 3 The Knocking Started After the Dream

The next night, my grandparents stayed in the room.

Grandpa still thought the whole thing had just been a bad dream.

He didn’t want to admit that there might actually be something wrong with the place.

Then, sometime in the middle of the night, they both heard it.

At first, it was coming from the window.

A light scratching sound against the glass.

Once.

Then again.

Then it stopped.

A little while later, it started up again.

Grandpa got out of bed and checked outside.

There was nobody there.

He went back to bed.

Not long after that, someone knocked on the door.

It wasn’t the wind.

It sounded like an actual person standing outside.

A few knocks.

Then silence.

My grandma was already scared and told him not to open it.

Grandpa kept saying it was probably nothing, but even he was starting to get uneasy.

Because the night before, in his dream, the old woman had been standing outside that same door.

And now someone was really knocking.

They barely slept that night.

But it didn’t stop there.

Over the next couple of nights, they kept hearing things outside the room.

Sometimes it sounded like fingernails dragging across the window.

Sometimes it sounded like someone walking around just outside the door.

The worst night was when they heard an old woman laughing.

It wasn’t loud.

That almost made it worse.

It was low and broken, like someone was crouched right outside the door, making sure they could hear her without letting them see her.

Both of my grandparents heard it.

After that, Grandpa stopped trying to explain it away.

The next morning, they packed up and moved out.

The room was locked again.

And from that point on, nobody in the family wanted anything to do with it.

Years passed.

Then I was born.

By the time I was around ten, that room was still sitting there empty.

The family was still short on space, but nobody touched it.

Until my uncle Ryan got engaged.

When he heard the stories, he laughed.

He said my grandparents were just superstitious.

He said if there really was something in that room, he’d go in and deal with it himself.

So he moved in.

And on his second night there, he saw an old woman standing outside the window.

To be continued.