Please note: this story was provided by the author and published as is.
I’ve always been a bit of a loner. Not a complete social pariah, but at my high school I’m far from popular, most clubs bore me to death, and a thriving sports career is not in my future. I’m not completely hopeless though, about a year ago I found this forum “Ghost Watch” where people would post stories about places near them that were supposedly haunted. I’ve also always been a bit of a skeptic on the supernatural but I loved reading the scary stories posters were sharing. I spent hours and hours reading and commenting about ghosts, ghouls, or whatever “bump in the night” creature. To say the least I was completely immersed, I would eat, drink, sleep “Ghost Watch” if I could. There was something endlessly entertaining about imagining myself in some creepy underpass or old dirty hospital looking for something unexplainable, even if I didn’t believe it was real. In a short time “Ghost Watch” became a community for me, I even had friends who would message me as soon as a post went live just so we could read it together.
It seems silly in retrospect, but I would get a little jealous when a new post would pick up traction. We’re a small community so there’s times when the forum seems almost dead and every story being posted is recycling the same old haunted houses everyone had read about a million times. Then someone would post something new and fresh.
On those days the forum would pick up activity, everyone chatting with each other, and the original poster would look like a hero. For a day they were a tiny celebrity giving a couple hundred lonely internet users a reason to indulge in their fascination for the strange. That’s when the jealousy would hit. I wanted to be the center of that community, to be the person who was motivating people to come and read even if it was just for a day. The trouble was I hadn’t really paid attention to my own town’s “spooky locale” scene. To me when I looked at an abandoned house I just saw an abandoned house but a few weeks ago a golden opportunity fell into my lap.
My Dad works construction, specifically he’s the guy you call when you need to get your roof fixed. I overheard him talking to my mom about a job he got, the details aren’t that important: some old lady with a leaky roof; however, something he said piqued my interest. The old lady had asked him if he knew anybody who did window tinting because some kids had broken one on the empty house across the street. According to Dad she droned on and on about how much of an eye sore the window was compared to the rest of the otherwise normal houses on the street. Dad wasn’t really surprised, something about boys being boys, I remember him distinctly saying the house looked like it hadn’t had anyone in it for years.
I did some digging online as fast as possible. My research said it was foreclosed and abandoned like 10 years ago. There were even some posts on local news facebooks from people saying that they heard someone inside or complaining that when they walked by it smelt like rot. Any time someone brought up the police or going inside someone would claim they did, but didn’t find anything or say it was too dangerous to even try. I was ecstatic. A real urban legend, hell even the possibility of a full blown haunted house hiding just down the road!
That Friday I got a good look at the place. The house itself is a typical two story midwest brown house if it wasn’t for the boarded up front door and overgrown yard you might not even think it was abandoned.
I came back real early in the morning, 2 am. It was a cold October, the kind where the wind felt like it was biting at you, standing there shivering with my phone recording. I thought I was going to be the person who found something in that house nobody else had or prove my skepticism right. Either way I was determined to get a good story for “Ghost Watch” out of the place.
The city had nailed a plank of wood across the front door to stop people from doing exactly what I was planning. So, night after night, I waited from a nearby alley until someone else tried breaking into the place. I knew it’d make a lot of noise to remove, and I was proven right when a couple of other boys from town came on up the road with a hammer. Maybe they were drunk or just playing around — daring each other — but they were determined to get inside. I saw the light turn on in one of the neighbors’ houses just a few minutes after they got the wood plank off, then a couple minutes later a police cruiser rolled up and made sure the boys got out and on their way home.
That was until I saw them start talking on their radio and relaxing against their cruiser. The cops were really going to wait around for someone to bring a new slab of wood to staple to the front door. I was deflated, after about ten minutes I decided that the moment wasn’t going to come, that those cops were going to stay put and I’d have to figure out some other plan. I took a step back into the alley when the light trill of the cruiser’s radio chirped. I guess the dispatcher must have said something urgent was happening because both the cops were hustling to get in their car. They peeled out onto the street and into the night, leaving me feeling like the luckiest person alive. The door was wide open for me, I only had until the cops came back, but I was going to get my story.
Created by: Danny Ingrassia
Standing in front of the house, with splintered wood surrounding the simple red door, it honestly didn’t seem that scary. The front room was covered in dust and graffiti. The rest of the house was laid out in a series of rooms in a straight line following the length of the building. A living room with an open arch revealing a kitchen was dead still. I remembered the musty smell and how much dust there was, you could see the footprints of the boys who’d been here earlier. The footprints wandered around the house stopping at the very back where an old rotten wood door led into what I assumed was the basement. There was a staircase to an upstairs room as well, the bannister was painted white at some point but now most of the color had been chipped away leaving only the cheap brown wood behind. I could see the boys had started climbing the stairs but their footsteps only disturbed the dust halfway up before turning around. I really didn’t want to go into a dingy basement so I decided upstairs was a good place to start.
The room itself was covered in even more dust than everything else in the house and smelled bad, like dirty socks. I was surprised that the room looked like someone had lived there. I had assumed that the room would be empty, but there was a bed with a plain white spread and a table with an old scrap book open on it like someone meant to come back for it later. On the walls were multiple picture frames, most of them had old yellowed pictures inside depicting various outdoor landscapes. The kind someone would take on a vacation. One in particular showed a woman accepting an award on stage, it looked like there were a lot of people in the crowd so it seemed important. Near the table three frames were hung neatly in a row each containing different diplomas: Masters in Chemical Engineering, Masters in Plant Biology and a PhD in Microbiology all given to a Janet Dottore.
Everything in the room had a thick layer of dust on it, scattered around the scrap book was some cut up paper and loose scissors. I was so lost in my fascination that I wasn’t even thinking about the cops anymore, I had to know more about who was living in this room. Curious about the book on the table I stepped forward, leaving footprints in the dust like it was fresh snow. I dusted off the scrapbook and started to flip through. I expected more pictures but what I found was just clippings of what I assumed were academic articles.
Most of them were clips from the middle of the articles, paragraphs of jargon that just didn’t make any sense to me. In the sparse amount of pictures that were there I saw the same woman from the picture on the wall who I assumed was Dr. Dottore from the diplomas. I looked around the room, it struck me that a woman had been living here and for some reason just disappeared. Her house was abandoned by anybody who might have cared, she seemed so smart and people certainly knew who she was. How did this place end up abandoned like this? What made her leave the scrapbook? It gave me some chills to think about. At the same time I was thinking: Oh. My. God. This room was a gold mine. The pictures, the articles, the scrapbook, all of this was juicy details for my Ghost Watch post. A written out post can do well, but one with pictures and evidence was sure to be at the top of the front page for weeks.
The initial surprise of finding such a strange room had begun to wear off and the thought of the cops coming back began to lurk in the back of my mind. Making sure to record as much as possible for my post later, I picked up the scrapbook to take home with me. I stood in the center of the room and took a long sweeping shot. I thought I would be playing up how spooky it was with everything inching slowly into frame: the door, the bed, the nightstand, the table with its papers and the old yellowed pictures on the wall. All from a different time preserved by a mostly undisturbed layer of brown dust.
Honestly I thought the night had already been a huge success.
The sound of a far off siren started to blare outside and I scrambled to the window above the bed to look outside. I held my breath for a few seconds before I realized whatever siren calling out was heading away from me. I chuckled to myself, I was on edge because with this scrapbook I couldn’t afford to get caught anymore. I figured I was trying my luck, I could always come back if I really needed to, so I decided to get out of the house.
Walking down the steps, humming a happy tune, I could feel the cool breeze coming for the night outside the front door. I made the fatal mistake any young explorer might make. I looked back. Through the footprints left behind in the living room, over the undisturbed sea of dust in the kitchen, the basement door stood dark in its frame. Closed and silent but I could almost hear it whispering to me about some other secret the house was still hiding. I looked outside at the still night, the houses on the other side of the street lightless like nobody was home. I set the scrapbook down leaning against the front door frame. Surely I had a few minutes before anyone arrived. How bad could a peek downstairs be?
I knew this was my chance to leave, but how could I? There was something here in the house I could feel it. An answer to all the questions, the thing that’s always missing from a Ghost Watch post is the “why”. Sure there’s scary stories and ghosts or things going bump in the night, but why are those things there is the answer you never ever get. In that moment looking through the rest of the house at that basement door I convinced myself the “why” was down there. It no longer was about getting a good Ghost Watch post, I was sure this house was my key to the greatest post the forum had ever read.
Stepping through the kitchen and towards the basement, I remember the smell hitting me first: sweet and rancid, like when fruit has gone bad in the fridge. The dust was so thick I could feel the souls of my shoes meeting a little resistance before touching the floor. Nobody had walked in this part of the house in a long time. The wood of the basement door was cheap and clearly rotten all the way through, a small silver handle sat slightly sunk into the frame like everything else, dust was caked into every crevice. I tried to turn the handle but it was stuck in place. I turned back towards the front door, the night inviting me to leave. Cops be damned, I thought and shouldered into the basement door. It groaned under the impact becoming concave, but didn’t open. My resolve solidified, I had to know what Dr. Dottore was hiding from me. Another shove and the rotten door unceremoniously split apart, soft wet thuddings chasing the crumbled pieces down the staircase behind to the basement.
The smell hit hard, intensely wet, acrid, and overwhelmingly sweet, I had to cover my face with my shirt to not get sick right on the spot. The staircase was barely visible under all the dust. Now that the door was out of the way I started to hear a low distant rumbling deep in the house. It reminded me of an AC kicking on starting from the basement and then diffusing easily into a softer purr throughout the house. Down a small set of stairs was a landing with the back door to the house directly in front, another flight of stairs was just around the corner making it impossible to see the basement without descending. I stood still for a moment, I hadn’t expected to hear anything in this house. A thread of fear began to creep in my body, I seriously considered cutting my losses and getting out of there. Then the sound came again, rumble then purr, my phone buzzed in my hand and I instinctively took a look. Someone had replied to me on a Ghost Watch post, suddenly all the excitement I felt before upstairs came rushing back. This was my moment. I cleared the little debris left in the doorway and descended to the basement landing.
If it smelled like dirty socks before the smell now was an unkept locker room. Carefully climbing down the rest of the stairs I could tell the basement was unfinished, but the dust obscured everything, all obfuscated from what seemed like decades of solitude. The noise again, now that I’m in the same room it comes across a little different. It’s less of a rumble and purr but a hiss then a thud. Like a really old and loud hospital ventilator. I swing my flashlight around to find the sound to find the source of the sound and behind the staircase I catch a small glint of something silver. I make my way over to it, the dust on the floor is so thick at this point that I can feel it tickling my ankles as I walk. On an old sturdy wooden table I found a small refrigerator and microscope. Next to them a box of cigarettes and a lighter, whatever Dr. Dottre was working on, she must have been taking a lot of smoke breaks.
Piled with dust the microscope didn’t have any slides in it, instead they were scattered around, each with a pile of dust like a knuckle protruding in their center. The refrigerator was dark and it looked like dust was pouring out of the opening creating a particularly large pile underneath it. I cleared some out of the way and peeked inside. Neatly arranged in vial racks on three shelves were test tubes many of which were still empty; although, there were a number of vials whose seals were broken, dust oozing from their caps. Every vial had an unknown brown liquid inside and outside a sticker with what I assumed was a date. There were two slots on the bottom most tray that were empty, looking on the table I didn’t see any tubes so I cleared out the pile just below the fridge with my foot. Just there on the stone basement floor there were two broken vials, the liquid inside had pooled around the broken glass dust sticking to it and making a nasty fuzzy mess.
A chill ran up my spine and I suddenly got that feeling that someone was watching me. I turned on a heel and flashed my camera through the basement. But it was impossible to see through either thick layer of mold. I waited for a moment, even called out to see if someone was there. The sound answered back a quiet hissing and then a thud. No movement, no other voice, again just me and the mold. The fear started to creep back in and my mind started to think about the cops showing up again or maybe my parents realizing I wasn’t home or really anything, the fear trying as hard as it could to get me to go home. Almost to confirm that fear the room was suddenly plunged into darkness as my phone’s flashlight went dark. It was dead and with it any light I could see by, I stumbled backwards tripping backwards, falling to the floor. For a moment I sat still, adrenaline pumping through my body. The ventilator sound made me jump again. I scrambled up against the refrigerator table grabbing the lighter and flicking it open.
The glow from the fire was weak but at least I could see. I took a deep breath patting myself down to make sure I wasn’t hurt. I looked at my hand and realized the tip of my fingers had landed in the sticky floor mess, rubbing it off on my pants. I tried to turn my phone on again but it had absolutely no power. I started to get worried, I was still in the middle of recording when it died and the idea of losing my footage made me start to panic. I was going to miss my moment, I was going to lose my story.
My head snapped up again as the ventilator sound went off. Now that I had taken a second to myself, the distracting fun of the basement was gone, I could tell where the sound was coming from.
Towards the other side of the basement I crept lit only by the lighter. The fear of someone finding me starting to rear its head and the panic of the potentially lost footage was impossible to ignore. But almost like my body wasn’t in my control I moved forward, the need to know was greater than any other emotion in my body, I had come this far. I had found the lab of Dr. Dottre. Even if I never got to tell anyone else I had to know what this last mystery was.
In the corner was a massive pile of dust, at first I thought it just collected there but then the ventilator sounded again. It was loud here and the pile began to shake, disheveling some of the dust. It was hard to see by the fire light so I got a little closer. I
reached my arm forward to get a look and let out a scream when I realized there was a human silhouette sitting in what seemed like an office chair. It was covered top to bottom in brown wet dust, each mixing together in a way that it was almost impossible to tell where the chair ended and the body began. I caught a glimpse of something blue on the right breast underneath the dust. In retrospect this was insane of me but I reached out to clear the dust, it fell in a large sheath revealing the body below the muck.
The very first thing that hit me was the smell. I have never smelled wet rot like this before, sulphuric and sour with a hint of sweet. It was like opening a sun warmed box filled with rotten meat. The top of the head was soft and decayed black and dark green all over. Its mouth was hung open and a wave of dust was hanging out barely hooked on to the bottom jawbone like a wet malformed tongue. The rest of the face was barely recognizable, some parts rotted down to the bone, the rest those awful colors of decay. The sockets of the eyes were completely filled with dust trailing out as a thin line down the dead cheek skin. It was wearing a lab coat that I imagined used to be white but over time had decayed into a soft wet brown. On the breast pocket there was embroidery, the muted blue I’d seen earlier, on it: Dr. Dottre. The torso was mostly exposed, the top skin long gone. I would have expected a pile of wet organ meat but instead the center mass was a giant pile of the same wet brown substance I saw earlier in the fridge. I could make out the structure of ribs etched on the outside of the mound but everything else was eaten and covered in dull brown barely bouncing light back from the fire.
It was disgusting but I forced myself to look, I had to remember as much of it as I could for my Ghost Watch post. I kept leaning closer and closer to the body. Then the hiss began, I watched as the body shuddered and the lungs began to expand. Then when it seemed like they were going to burst they quickly deflated pushing all the air up into the skull. The force was so great that the upper jaw lifted a bit and then snapped back down in the sickening thud I’d been hearing. It was terrifying and incredible like the corpse was breathing from taking air in the lungs. The smell that came out of the throat became more than I could handle and I lowered my shirt to heave.
At that moment the head of Dr. Dottre sprayed dust in all directions. A stream of dust poured down its chest, out of the back of the head, somehow climbing up the wall to the ventilation above, and straight forward from the eyes directly into my face. I staggered back wiping at my face wildly and coughing. The dust had gotten in my mouth and this time I did retch but it still left behind a sweet earthy rotten flavor that I would taste for days afterwards. This was the straw that let the fear and the panic take back control. I had dropped the lighter so I stumbled in the dark coughing hard and feeling my way back up the stairs. No matter how much I rubbed and scratched I felt like there was more dust obscuring my vision and crawling down my throat. I struggled to see even after I got up to the kitchen, the mood giving at least a little light to see by. Everywhere I looked there was dust, every surface, I was coughing so much I had to steady myself putting my hand on a counter covered in dust. It was all too much, I felt like I couldn’t get away from all the brown, that I was trapped in the house like Dr. Dottre.
Just like when I came down from outstairs I felt the cool breeze coming in from the front door. Swallowing the next cough and letting in burn in my lungs I rushed as fast as I could outside onto the front porch. The cool night felt good and I fell to my hands and knees coughing with my full body for what felt like ten minutes. A few times I was really worried that I needed some real help, but my phone was dead. Who was going to call 911? All the houses up and down the street were still dark. Eventually it passed and I felt like I could breathe again. After I was done with my fit I rolled onto my back and was finally able to get the dust off my face. I took a deep, relieved breath. When I looked back out into the street I saw the familiar black and white of a police car pulling up to the curb of the house.
It’s been about two weeks since then and I’ve been slowly drafting my story so I can post it on the forum. My parents were more mad then I’ve ever seen them. They grounded me for the next three months. Total complete lockdown, sometimes I feel like I can’t even go to the bathroom without one of my parents getting suspicious I’m going to “try and escape”. The only reason I even have my computer to type this out is because I had to be sent home from school for the time being. Since that night every couple of hours I have had a severe coughing fit and the doctor said I needed bed rest at home until I get better or they find a medicine that helps. At first they were scary, coughing to the point my voice was gone but I’ve gotten used to them. It’s some kind of bronchial infection from what I’ve been told. I feel bad because I think I’m contagious, during the day I can hear my mom coughing in the house.
Speaking of, I can’t even make the post yet because they have my internet on a strict block, no fun until I’ve balanced out the karma I guess. I can pretty much just look at my school work. The only other thing I can do is read a book or write this post on a notepad. No one has given me an update about the house, none of the kids at school care and my parents wouldn’t indulge me even if I begged. I tried to get the officer to let me grab the scrapbook before I left but he was all business.
That’s my story. It was incredible. It was so so so scary. And I have no proof of it, to my horror my video wasn’t saved, I didn’t bother to grab one of those viles, and I wasn’t able to get my hands on that scrapbook. I never could have imagined what I was going to see that night. I really thought I was going to see some empty house and have to come up with some reason why it was empty. Instead I fell into a world so different from myself it didn’t even feel real in the moment. So it’s up to you if you believe me, at the end of the day I’m just telling you another in a long line of spooky stories with now “why” or “how” to prove it to you. But I don’t think I care anymore. Regardless of everything I now have a moment that’s mine. I was there. I saw Dr. Dottre’s room. I broke down that door and I walked through that basement. Thank you for reading. Thank you for doing whatever you were researching in that basement Dr. Dottre. You gave me a night that I won’t forget for the rest of my life and that, I think, is more than any viral forum post could give me. I hope someone finds you and gives you the rest you deserve.
P.S. Does anyone have any good solutions for dirt stains? I’m scared to tell my mom in case she blows up at me again, there’s a brown stain on my pillows that just won’t go away. I don’t even know where it came from! It’s beginning to really annoy me and make all my pillows smell weird. I tried soap and water but every day I wake up and there it is. A couple of dark brown dots right next to where I lay my head.
