The following is my personal experience and the inspiration for this series – the house my father grew up in and the family collectively calls “1018.”
My grandparents bought and renovated this Victorian-era house, run-down and stuffy, with close neighbors in a small neighborhood before my birth. You could tell that the place used to be nice, or at least it was supposed to be. But with the years racking onto its foundation, it slowly deteriorated into something unrecognizable. For reference, it gave the same aura as the Pink Palace from Coraline or the house from Monster House. Not just because of its appearance, but because of the tales that come from that place.
My dad’s stories were always retellings from my mom. Why? Well, whenever I asked him, he’d always avoid talking to me. Here’s the latest of our conversations –
“Can you tell me about 1018?”
“Are you writing something on this? I don’t have stories that I want you to write about.”
So yeah, he isn’t much help to get the truth out. However, my mom has always been more than ready to tell me the bizarre happenings of that place, so I got this story summed up.
It was when my mom and dad were still dating. They were lying in bed in his bedroom, or as the family likes to call “the yellow room,” watching a movie. It had been a good hour or two since they initially fell asleep, lying on their sides and away from each other. But for some reason, my dad had an unnerving feeling and woke up.
He wasn’t able to move any part of his body other than his eyes, which were locked onto a demonic-like figure hovering over him, easing close to his face and degrading him, telling him that he had no future, that it would ensure he didn’t, and that his life was ultimately meaningless.
When my dad finally mustered enough strength to get up, he rose in a sweat, alarming my mom enough to wake up. He retold the whole story to her, beginning to end.
Years later, I was born. My grandma still lived in that house, and we’d go over there to visit all the time. My sister and I had our nursery decorated with ladybug designs and plenty of toys for us to play with, and spent most of our time there while we were over, running around and watching out the windows that felt so high up back then. But there was one thing we didn’t like about our little play area, and that was the closet.
The closet was small, too small to fit any hangers in or for an adult to stand inside. I remember vividly that it was always cold and dark and how much I hated it. I would always stay to the furthest corner of the room to avoid it, though I never had an actual reason as to why. I didn’t need to. Because after a while, it proved itself to be a cause for concern.
It would call for me. Not as a distant attempt, but on a personal basis.
“Sarah,” it would say in an airy whisper. It sounded almost like the vent blowing. “Sarah.”
The back of that closet was right up against my father’s old room – the yellow room.
My grandmother doted on my sister and me. That’s why we would always have to get baths before going back home, as we were covered in chocolate and sticky sweets all over. She’d fill it to the brim with bubbles as she took calls on the phone in the other room, leaving us to play for an hour or so. There was an incline in the bathtub for the adults to sit, but as toddlers, we would take turns using it as a slide. Madeline, then me, then Madeline, then me again, over and over, without ever getting bored.
When it was my turn again, I sat up on the very top and allowed myself to slide down with a giggle, sinking into the foamy water. Unlike the previous times, however, my head slipped under the surface. I instinctively worked to pull myself back up, grabbing onto the side of the tub and pulling, but a weight on my chest kept me under. I squirmed and writhed against this mysterious weight for what felt like forever as my lungs began to burn. But as fate would have it, my grandmother came to pull me out just in time after Madeline screamed for her.
That weight sticks with me just as it stuck with my father.
But it doesn’t end there. Stories from this house don’t ever really fade.
After my grandmother moved out of the house years later, she called my mom up to help her with some renovations. My dad told her not to go, begged her really, saying that he didn’t feel safe with her being alone in the house. My mom ignored his warnings and went anyway in order to get the bathroom fixed up sooner rather than later, as they wanted to put the place up for sale. She recalls the incident as follows –
“Upstairs, there were six doors that opened into the main hallway – four bedrooms, one bathroom, and an attic. So, I had my tools in the hallway for easy access. And then I opened all the doors, checked all the rooms, and left all the doors open because I felt eerie in the house by myself. So, I’m sitting there looking for a tape measure, and then I hear a door slam even though I could clearly see all six doors. So this means one of the outside doors slammed. I had to unlock the back door to run out of the house, and the front door was completely sealed shut. So, what door slammed?”
My aunt moved in shortly after. And although we didn’t visit often, there were still times when we’d stop by. The one time we did stay for an extended period of time again, however, there was another incident.
There weren’t enough beds for my sister and me, so we dealt with sleeping on the floor in the yellow room. I didn’t experience anything that night, but my sister, on the other hand, had the misfortune of finding an experience of her own. As we lay on the floor near the bed frame, my sister looked under the bed while trying to go to sleep. The only problem was that she saw two glowing, red eyes looking right back at her. Rather than alarming anyone, however, she turned around and tried to ignore it.
“I was scared, but then I was like, it’s probably just an evil rat or something.”
We returned home the next night. That should’ve been the end. We didn’t go back after that incident, so we thought that there would be no way that place would haunt our thoughts again. At least, not until it was time to sleep again.
My sister claims to have been woken up unable to move anything other than her eyes. At the foot of her bed were two large windows, in which she watched a dark figure slowly open and crawl inside before jumping on her chest and screaming in her face,
“I hate you.”
“It lowkey sounded like Chucky or really evil Eric Cartman,” she reports.
But even though she may act like she wasn’t affected now, this incident was the sole reason why we had to switch rooms in the first place.
There are more stories of bad luck and odd happenings associated with 1018. Needless to say, there’s an established lore, perhaps a story for another time.
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