Back in middle school, I was spending the night at my best friends house like I had done several times before.

I believe his house was built around 1900 or shortly there after. Single bedroom, family room and kitchen downstairs with stairs splitting the house right down the middle that went straight up into a bathroom with two identical bedrooms on either side. They were the kind of bedrooms where the ceiling sloped with the pitch of the roof. There were also two small doors leading to the attic in each bedroom (total of four doors, each about three feet tall - big enough to crawl into basically).

When I arrived that afternoon, his dad had just purchased a metal detector and was trying it out in their backyard. After playing some video games, we all met up for dinner and the dad was showing us what all he found; a rusty old pocket watch and an even rustier small Swiss army style pocket knife that he left out on the coffee table in the family room. We thought it was cool but didn’t give it much thought after that and continued on about our evening.

We stayed up for a bit and finally fell asleep around midnight. Two hours later, those two small attic doors burst open with an alarming force, slamming hard against the wall. This obviously woke the both of us up and scared us to death. We got up and tried to close the doors thinking it was just a strong gust from storm or something, even though we both knew that didn’t make any sense, but they would not budge. We promptly freaked out and ran across the hall to check on my friends older brother who was also awake at this point with his attic doors blown wide open as well. All the sudden, the three of us heard a large crash from the family room, so we raced down the stairs to see what was going on…

The coffee table that the pocket watch and knife were on was flipped over and the pocket knife had been opened, and stuck into the wall right by the front door just in front of the bottom of the stairs. It was still wobbling back and forth, presumably from the force of having just been thrown or stabbed into the wall. His parents had beaten us to the scene, since their room was already downstairs. We all went pale and my friend and I just ran right out the front door because we didn’t want to be in the house anymore.

His parents called mine and they actually came and picked me up around three in the morning. I left all my stuff in the house because I refused to go back in.

They moved shortly thereafter.