I grew up in a rural part of northern missouri we lived in a two story house with an unfinished basement.
The house had a strange floor plan tons of empty storage spaces and a bunch of tiny rooms and nooks that we no longer used there was even an old fireplace with a small wooden door leading to an underground firewood room with the dirt floor again this was one of the rooms that we no longer use. The house would always pop and creek.
That in and of itself isn’t too strange old houses tend to creek it’s nothing new my room was directly above a long narrow stairwell to the basement.
At one point I think when I was three or four my cousin came home drunk one night and crashed the car right into the wall of the house. And from that point onward the basement would always flood it would get gross and mill dewey so nobody would even want to be down there all that much.
I used to hear footsteps walking up and down the stairs the basement at night after everyone else had gone to sleep. Along with the rusling of plastic bags. I had my fair share of nightmares as a kid so I never really thought much of my experiences in that house as I grew older I used to have this one extremely vivid nightmare about seeing what I used to call the trash bag meant to be honest I’m not really sure if all of them were men.
But I would always be in bed when I saw them or hunched over figure or to would just appear covered in black plastic trash bags crinkling slowly as they approached no matter where I hit the house it would find me and just when it got close I would wake up in my. Bed. I also remember seeing with regularity a face that would pop out of the vent in the ceiling near the corner of my room.
This one I don’t think was a dream and old bands face with bt wide eyes would show up at night. Just about every night once the lights were out he never spoke just watched he would turn his head to follow me around the room especially the first few times when I ran to my parents’ bedroom sometimes I’d hide under the blankets for protection like that would have done any good.
At one point I started talking to him. Regularly skirting topics I thought might anger him so that he wouldn’t hurt me. Still he never spoke his lips never moved he only watched.
We moved to a new house several towns over around the time I was six or seven and just like that all the strange occurrences stopped. I recently brought up some of these old memories during a trip to visit my mother she gave me a concerned look and said she always hated that house.
She refused to go into too much detail about her own experiences but apparently our household wasn’t the only one that had been witnessing strange occurrences in our neighborhood.
My mother said that several other children on our block had specifically mentioned seeing an old man’s face pop out of their household ventilation systems.
Parents joked about it at first thinking that the children in town must be sharing all they’re crazy nightmares at school but when my mother asked me who I had told about these nightmares I said I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone but her.
She also mentioned that she used to hear strange noises in the basement at night. Including what she described as the crinkling of plastic bags at the time she chalked it up to being an old house with the basement that occasionally flooded but now that I’ve told her my experiences she’s not so sure.
In short there was a reason we moved out of that house when I was still young. My mother did tell me that are old house was built in the early nineteen hundreds near the site where there once stood and even older psychiatric hospital. The place had a bad reputation for practicing all sorts of pseudo science apparently the place had a long list of it’s own set of horror stories.
A construction company in town recently did some digging in our old neighborhood to put in foundations for some new houses while digging they found a number of discarded trash bags several feet underground that were filled with improperly handled human remains.