Scary House
TarPuppy is the name of a popular Redditere. His name will remain undisclosed for the purpose of this story. His story begins when he returned home after an ocean cruise holiday with his family. He was getting seasick so he came home early. Strange things started happening in his house and it was freaking his dog Murphy out too.
In a space of two weeks, he lost his mind. His own home was playing tricks on him. What was going on in his house that the authorities had to get involved?
First Night
On his first night back, things were normal as usual. TarPuppy had a history of anxiety disorders and it was making him feel uneasy being at home alone. He decided to pass some time by watching some of his favorite series on Netflix. His mood was slightly better, but he still couldn't fall asleep. He got up to go to the kitchen to make a nice hot cup of cocoa. Holding the hot cup tightly in his hands, he walked outside for a breath of fresh air before going to bed.
As he focused on his deep breathing, he tried to relax. He always had health issues and felt best at home. The soft glow of the porch light illuminated the area. He had no clue that something was busy just outside his house.
Relax Your Mind
It was getting chilly when TarPuppy realized he forgot his phone inside. He left his mug carefully on the outside ledge and returned to the house. He was desperate for an outside connection as he scrolled through his phone for any missed messages.
TarPuppy locked the door immediately when he got inside, it was his instinct to keep safe. His careful behavior gave him a sense of relief, although he was alone and scared. He still had an uneasy feeling that he was being watched.
I Am Being Watched
Tarpuppy commented on his original post that when he unlocked the front door and went outside again for his mug of cocoa, and when he realized in hindsight what could have happened if he hadn’t locked the door, it scares him down to the marrow in his bones. He looked for his cocoa, but it had been moved and was no longer resting on the ledge by the door. After checking his phone, TarPuppy realized that he had forgotten his delicious drink outside. He unlocked the front door and look over at his mug. To his shock, it had disappeared.
He looked around the vicinity and couldn't find it. As he walked out onto the porch he kicked something with his foot. It was his mug. How did it end up on the floor near his front door? He was sure where he had left it. Our Redditer started to cower in fear of someone watching him.
Demands
TarPuppy quickly ran inside and shut the door and locked it with a loud thud. It was as though his sixth sense had been activated and he was now in survival mode. All of a sudden, he heard loud male footsteps thumping on the porch. He froze in terror. "What should I do now?" he thought frantically. He could hear talking. He had to save his life. He ran upstairs to fetch his father's Remington but when he checked through the peephole again, the dark figure had gone.
Our Redditer had an uneasy sleep but the new morning gave him a bit more courage. He walked downstairs and checked through the window before going outside. All seemed clear. What he found outside gave him a serious fright. His mug was still there, empty with a small piece of paper inside. He hesitatingly picked up the note and slowly opened it, dreading to read it. On it was the scribbled words: "Let Us In".
Only The Start
TarPuppys fans didn't forget about him. Over the next few days, they followed his posts and gave him the motivation to stay strong. Things were getting stranger in his home and he was getting agitated to find out who was trying to scare him.
On one of his low days, he wrote a social media post: "I am physically and mentally exhausted. I refuse to be the victim of this haunted bullying anymore. Stop your sick games!" Who was this creepy stalker and would he ever find out? Time would soon tell.
The Next Threat
The next incident was worse than the first. It had been a few days since his last scare, which gave him enough peace of mind to want to order takeout pizza and relax in the comfort of his home. But his plans were interrupted. As he walked into his kitchen, he noticed that his refrigerator door was open. There is no way he would have been that forgetful. How on earth was it open? There were too many unanswered questions.
At the same time, Murphy his trusted four-legged friend started barking profusely. It wasn't his usual bark. He was trying to warn his owner of danger.
Is Someone There
Out of the corner of his eye, TarPuppy noticed something that didn't belong there. He gasped as he realized that he may not be alone in his house. His mind was going out of control. He looked towards his kitchen counter and there it was- another note for him.
He became giddy with fear and almost fell to the floor. This was not the time to be afraid though, he thought. He grabbed the piece of paper and opened it. It said: "I told you". These words ripped his brain open as he tried to figure out who was threatening him. Was the intruder still in the house?
Stuck
TarPuppy ran upstairs as fast as he could and bolted his room door shut. Nobody can get in here, he thought. He punched the emergency number on his cellphone and beckoned the police to come to his house. He was still shaking with fear and couldn't even remember his correct address for the operator.
The police arrived in about 15 minutes and banged on the door. TarPuppy responded and confirmed that he was still in the house. He begged the policemen to thoroughly search every nook and cranny of the house including the porch and basement.
Hidden Beneath
Through his bedroom window, he watched several policemen walk around his property. He felt braver and unlocked his room to go talk to them. The policemen searched but didn't find anything untoward. Although they were concerned, TarPuppy could tell that some of the policemen felt that he was playing a prank on them. It was almost Ten PM and they wanted to head back to the station.
Deciding to take matters into his own hands, he brought Murphy inside and locked the doggie door securely. Then the two held vigil for the entire night. But there was something TarPuppy could never have imagined. Just a few feet away from where he rested his head at night, there was something lurking within the very walls. Although the police confirmed that there was nobody on the property, Tarpuppy decided to take some extra precautions. He brought Murphy inside and locked all the doors and windows. He double-checked that everything was locked again, got some refreshments from the kitchen, and planned to stay up being a watch guard. He sat in the lounge so he could see and hear everything.
A Maddening Sound
When he could take the sound no longer and he could feel it pulsing inside his brainpan, he leaped up and fetched a hammer. Then, he started to pound at the wall. He scraped and banged at it furiously… he had to do something, anything to make the infernal noise stop. Now exhausted, he fell against the wall, defeated. But his anxiety only grew and grew as he sat there, listening to the din coming from the wall. Tomorrow he would have to find the proper equipment to investigate. What was the mysterious noise? And what would he find within the wall?
Deterioration
What was going on in TarPuppy’s home? Everything seemed wrong. He had been experiencing crushing headaches for the last week and felt like he had been living in a dream. He was starting to feel more and more paranoid. He became reluctant to leave the house, and this feeling grew until one day, he didn’t show up for work. The home and the mystery of whatever was going on inside the walls had completely consumed him.
Occasionally, he would see dark shapes in his peripheral vision and think that there was someone in the house, but as soon as he moved his head, they would be gone. He wrote that he felt like his mind and body were being poisoned slowly — but he didn’t realize that he had hit the nail on the head. Soon he would have the authorities storm in and confirm a nightmare he could never have imagined.
A Disturbing Find
When he rose the next morning, he was exhausted. He had been kept up all night by the noise that seemed to grow louder and louder. He stumbled through the hallway to the kitchen to brew some coffee in hopes that it might give him the strength he needed for the task at hand. He took his coffee to the living room and sat down. The noise was louder in here, too. The whole room smelled sickeningly sweet and familiar…but he couldn’t quite place the scent. As he sipped his coffee, he noticed something. Something had pooled on the carpet in a thick stain against the far wall, and this was where the scent was coming from.
He rose to inspect the dark puddle on the carpet. And then he saw that there was something oozing down the wall in thick dark trails. It looked like very dark tree sap, but how could that be possible? The entire surface of the wall was slick with it. He felt his mind trying to process this new information… but it was like his brain was shrouded in a thick fog. He felt an urge to just leave. Leave all this madness behind him and never come back. It was all becoming too much and there was a real possibility that his mind, under so much strain, would finally snap.
Blind Rage
Needing to escape the new madness he had just discovered, TarPuppy went outside with Murphy. He methodically walked around the house’s walls, tapping and listening. He had to put an end to this, and he had to do it now. After circling the house several times, he thought he had pinpointed the point in the wall where the sound grew louder. There was a crack in the bricks just large enough for him to slide his index finger inside. It was damp but surprisingly warm within the wall. He moved his finger around, trying to feel how deep the crevasse went. Then he touched something and an overwhelming pain shot through his finger and traveled up his right arm.
Now enraged, he pulled his throbbing finger out of the crack and cursed. He ran to the shed and found the sledgehammer and got to work on the wall in a fit of rage. He’d tear it all down, he thought angrily. He’d tear it to the ground.
To The Source
TarPuppy loosened a brick in the wall and slid it out triumphantly. He scraped his knuckles raw on the rough surface, but he didn’t care. He laughed wildly like a madman as he tossed it aside and stepped back to see what was within. He couldn’t quite comprehend what he was seeing, it was so bizarre, so unexpected, that he thought he surely must be hallucinating.
He blinked and shook his head, but there it was. He had finally found the cause for the incessant droning noise that had been driving him mad. He took one more look and pulled his phone from his pocket. With his shaky and swollen fingers, he started dialing frantically.
The First Wall
They came within the hour in a big white van. They donned their safety suits and got to work on the wall. When TarPuppy had seen the honeycomb when he removed the first brick, he knew he had a massive infestation on his hands. There were hundreds of thousands of bees, all humming and buzzing within the space in the wall. There were so many that their honey had started to seep from the molding and cornices in the house. He felt a sense of calm now that he knew that the sound he had been fixating on had a logical cause. But there was one other niggling worry – the bees didn’t explain the intruders, or the cryptic notes, or the growing sense of unease he had been feeling.
He had an inexplicable sense that things were about to reach some sort of tipping point. Little did he know that he was about to discover something much more sinister hidden in the walls than insects.
The Beehive
Jordy of Jordy’s Bee Removal Service was aghast when they removed the remaining bricks and revealed the inside wall of the old home. There were at least 35,000 bees residing within. They had never seen anything like it. It was a massive beehive, and it had taken over 5 hours to carefully smoke and relocate the bees that dwelled there. They then began to remove the hive, piece by painstaking piece.
One slab of honeycomb that was removed was an enormous 3 feet wide and 5 feet tall. It was no wonder that the kid who had called them to come urgently sounded dazed and had appeared absolutely shell-shocked on their arrival. He was waiting in the drive with his head in his hands when they rolled up, but something about his eyes when he showed them the gap in the wall had unsettled Jordy to his core.
Downward Spiral
TarPuppy paced in the house, waiting for the beehive to be removed. He was feeling feverish and had gibbered to the servicemen unintelligibly when they had asked him to show them where he had found the hive. He was shaking and was having difficulty organizing his thoughts. He wanted to pour himself a glass of water – a simple task — but would always find his hand empty as he came to, standing motionless over the sink.
There was something deeply wrong with him, but he could not articulate his feelings in a way that his own brain would understand. Then, he saw something on the tiles that pushed him right over the edge.
Nowhere To Hide
There, lying on the tiles, was the very same mug that he had found moved from the porch on that first terrible night, smashed into pieces. He was the only soul in the house. His fear gripped him like a vice and his hands started to tremble. He could feel his whole world spinning uncontrollably and he reeled, trying to remain conscious. His stalker had been inside the house again… But were they still inside? He ran upstairs to his parents’ bedroom and frantically tried to open the safe, but it was locked and the key had been moved from its usual place under the carpet. He searched for a weapon… anything he could use to defend himself from this unseen enemy who had been watching his every move for two weeks. He knew it now in his bones that something awful was about to happen.
The tension had built and built, and now something had to give. He heard heavy footsteps approaching, coming up the stairs, and when they reached the bedroom door, they stopped. Had they finally found him?
Final Stand
He had his back to the wall, and his eyes fixed on the bedroom door. The terror swelled inside him, filling him with fear. This was it – the final confrontation. Everything in the last two weeks had been leading up to this. He felt a slight sense of relief that soon it would all be over.
Whatever happened, this was the end. He watched the doorknob turn and winced as the door swung open and the figure came into view. He heard it breathing heavily, and he barely registered the shiny white biohazard suit as he lost consciousness and fell to the floor.
Silent Sickness
When Jordy’s Bee Removal Service had delved deeper into the cavity behind the colossal beehive, they were perturbed to discover that there was a black mass running along the entire inside of the home. They quickly called the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and they had dispatched a unit and swarmed the building.
What had been lurking in the walls behind the beehive was Stachybotrys, or black mold, that had been slowly poisoning TarPuppy over an extended period of time. When Greg B.Cole had swept the house for quarantine, he had found TarPuppy unconscious in the master bedroom and had carried him to safety. They also explained that the toxic black mold could cause hallucinations, memory loss, and even paranoia.
Coming Home To Chaos
TarPuppy’s parents had to cut their ocean cruise short and get off at the soonest stop when they received the call from the CDCP. The entire house was cordoned off and deemed completely unlivable due to the dangerous black mold, and they had to return urgently as their son had been found unconscious.
When they arrived on the scene, they couldn’t believe their eyes. Their exterior walls had been stripped bare, revealing gaping black gaps in the structure out of which a few straggler bees were still buzzing. The house had been blocked off with neon police tape, and there was a van parked outside with a biohazard symbol emblazoned on its side.
A Living Nightmare
As for our Redditer’s nightmarish game of cat-and-mouse with an unseen intruder, he was no longer sure if he had fabricated the entire and prolonged incident while he was under the influence of the toxic black mold.
His mind had taken him on a ride to the very depths of his own soul, but could he really have imagined the entire thing?
Proof
As soon as he could get away, he needed to get back to the house – or what was left of it now. He still had the notes. He had proof that there really had been someone stalking him. If he could only hold the notes one more time, it would validate his entire story.
He needed this, and he needed to know that what had happened had not been an elaborate mixture of delusion and paranoia that his mind had spun into a twisted narrative of its own making. He needed to go back.
House Of Dreams
Days went by, but they still had no word that they could return to the house. All their belongings – contaminated. Their entire lives had been in that old house. TarPuppy had been born and raised there, and it was the only place he called “home”. Where was home now?
It was within the sterile four walls of this hotel room that they had been put up in. He itched to go back. He had started to tell his parents about the threatening notes, but they had fobbed him off and wouldn’t hear another word about it.
Resolute
On the 6th day, TarPuppy had made his mind up to steal away to the house to find the notes. If he could just do that, he would be vindicated. Not just in his parent’s eyes, but also in his own. He would no longer have to doubt his own sanity. And that was growing increasingly important.
He could remember the incidences so vividly, and the fear that came with them, that his heart would pound and his hands would shake as he relived being hunted like an animal in his own home. He had to know.
Morning Breaks
TarPuppy awoke early, made sure his parents were asleep, and quietly exited the hotel. He called for a cab, with his fingers shaking while he punched the numbers. The wait was excruciating, and he was filled with nervous energy. He paced nervously up and down the pavement, with his hands in his pockets.
It was 5:00 AM and the light of the sky was just fading into the grey of early morning. He was filled with fear to be going back to the house alone. What would he find there?
Going Home
When he saw the cab roll around the corner, he knew it was time. He stepped in and gave the cab driver the address, and he was on his way. He was going home, maybe for the last time. The drive was only about 30 minutes, and TarPuppy counted everyone. Soon he recognized his street, and then the old house came up into view on the rise, stark in the morning light. He immediately saw the police tape around its perimeter, barring anyone from entering.
The cab driver was confused and asked if he had the right address, but TarPuppy reassured him that this was where he needed to be. He stepped out and started to walk briskly up the drive.
Ruins
TarPuppy fumbled under the slats of the front porch until he found the spare key that he had hidden there. He snapped the police tape over the door and slid the key inside the lock. He took a deep breath and swung the front door open on its old hinges. What he saw inside left him breathless. The interior of the house had been torn apart and was barely recognizable.
The scent of honey and fumigation hung thick in the air, and the floors and walls had been draped in a white tarp. A mist of fungicide hung over everything like a shroud.
The Notes
Covering his face with his sleeve to avoid breathing in the toxic fumes, TarPuppy ran up the stairs and into his room. When he entered, he was surprised to see that his belongings were as he had left them. There were shirts strewn on the floor, and his TV was still on. The Netflix binge message of concern quietly flickered on the screen: “Are you still watching “House Of Cards”?” Frantically turning to his desk, he rifled through the clutter of his drawers, looking for the notes. He knew he had left them there, secreted away and safe – just in case he had to present them as evidence. He started to panic now. Where were they? Had they been taken? Then, he pulled out an old notebook that had been placed conspicuously at the top of the pile of papers. He opened it, and what he saw made his shaky reality crumble around him in an instant. There were two pages torn out from the notebook — he could see the jagged lines where they had been. But this was his notebook… had someone written the threatening notes on his own notepaper? What was the alternative? That he was, indeed, delusional? He let the reality sink in for a moment, before sliding to the floor and hugging his knees.
And that’s how they found TarPuppy, clutching himself in the fetal position and rocking slowly, the notebook still in his hand, in the house that crumbled around him as his reality had. Do you know what dangers lurk in your own home? In the walls, floors, and recesses? There are dangers that lurk in the human mind, too. One silent spore can wreak havoc on the human body and send the mind reeling into a living nightmare. Do you know what toxic molds lurk in your home?
In order to protect the privacy of those depicted, some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed and are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.