I've never told anyone about this, but I've had a few drinks and it's 4 AM, so what the hell? For the last 18 years, my mom and I have lived in the same house. I'm an only child and my dad died before I was born, so it's always just been the two of us. But we've never been the only ones here. I don't know what they are, but there's at least two of them, and they're not the same. I don't know how long they've been here, this house is supposedly over a hundred years old and has seen lots of people come and go as it used to be a boarding house that hosted passing-through settlers and individuals headed out west for a new life when this was the edge of the frontier. What I do know is they've been here as long as we have. It started pretty innocuously. When we first moved in, a Crucifix I made out of popsicle sticks and glue at summer camp wouldn't stay on the wall. I must've tried to put that thing back up a million times, but it wouldn't stay. I'd hang it up again and again and in inevitably (and always the middle of the night) it very loudly fall onto my hardwood floor with a clatter. Eventually I gave up trying to hang it back up and replaced it with a wooden carving of Odie from Garfield's head, which has never fallen once to this day. The bed I slept in for 13 years came with the house. It was an old antique bunk bed with knocks in the wooden footboards/ladder that my grandmother says was from the spurs of the cowboys who slept in it before me. I don't know why, but from the start I had a feeling that the top bunk was off limits, that I shouldn't ever find myself sleeping it. From my bed, I could see through my door and out into the hallway, where the light switch from my bathroom glows orange so it can be found at night. One night when I was maybe 10, I finally had to know what I was missing, so I sad to hell with it and moved on up to the top bunk. I barely slept at all. The whole night, I could feel something watching me, something angry, but I was sure it was my imagination. As I rolled over, I saw the glowing light switch of the bathroom disappear and reappear as if something passed in front of it. As the first hints of sunlight started to creep through my window, I decided I would try to read to distract myself until I fell asleep, so I reached down to my bedside to grab a book. As I reached down, I swear to this day, I very clearly saw a shiny, wet, pale white hand with thick, pruny fingers wrap around my wrist and pull me out of the bed. As I hit my floor, I heard a really gross wet smack, like someone chewing with their mouth open, and I felt a really thick, hot, wet draft across my face, like someone with the raunchiest morning breath you can imagine just yawning inches from my nose. As the sun rose, the room brightened up, birds started singing, and I felt alone again. But there was definitely a distinct wet patch around my wrist. I slept in the bottom bunk every night for the next several years after that, where I could no longer see out into the hallway, and felt more protected. But it wasn't over. At least one night a week, I would wake up to a completely silent room in the wee hours of the morning. No crickets, no owls, no AC, nothing. Then, suddenly, the silence would be broken by very loud and deliberate tapping from the wall right behind my pillow. It would go on rhythmically at first, tap tap tap. Then it would turn to more rapid, but still rhythmic, scratching. It was like some persistent reminder of my "lesson" about staying in my bunk. I started staying downstairs every night, reading with my mom in her room until I was ready to fall asleep. One night we were both in her room reading, when we heard the voices for the first time. Coming from the air vent in her baseboard was a flickering light, like a candle was lit just around the bend somewhere down in the vent. Also coming from the vent were a male and a female voice, sounding distant and distorted as if we were listening through a drainpipe. We both heard them, we couldn't make out what they were saying but they sounded like they were arguing, and as soon as I called her attention to the vent, the lights went out and voices stopped. We never saw the light again. A few weeks later, mom was home from work, doing something in the kitchen sink when she heard voices again. She looked up and out the kitchen window and saw two elderly ladies laughing and talking, coming through the gate on one side of the house and walking through her garden to the gate on the other side. She'd never seen these ladies before, she never saw them again, and when she tapped on the window to get their attention, they ignored her. What's more, we have dogs that we let roam the yard and have never left those gates unlocked for a single day since we moved in. When I was in high school, we did some renovations to the house. particularly the front porch, the basement, and both closets in my room. One thing was that I dismantled the old bunk bed and put it in the basement, and then put my new bed against a different wall-- the one where the crucifix used to hang. Doing so meant moving a bookcase, and behind this bookcase I found a very curious air vent. This vent only blows hot air. No matter what the A/C units in the house are set to, either the downstairs or upstairs unit, no matter the time of day or year, this vent is a steady jet of thick, hot air. In one of my closets, there was a small three-inch hole in the floor. A friend and I shone a light in it one day and saw a bunch of stuff down in it. When mom started the renovations on the house, one thing she was gonna do was put new flooring in that closet, so my friend came back over the day before that was to be done and we decided to fish some of the stuff out. With a pair of needle nose pliers, we poked around past baseball cards, crumpled papers with handwritten script on them, until we came across something shiny. We fished it out and found it to be a rusty knife, ruined and caked in splotches of... something. Took it to mom, she put it in the kitchen and said she'd take it to a jeweler to get it restored and appraised, but it disappeared overnight and neither of us has seen it since that day. In my other closet, there's a small hatch in the ceiling, about 2x2 feet wide. I can't reach it and I've never been in it, which means no one's been in there for at least 18 years, but there's always a hot draft coming from it too, and often I'll find my closet light on in the middle of the night. During these same renovations I mentioned, one of the guys who was doing work in the basement came to us and said they had found something very odd: accessed via the crawlspace under the house, almost directly under my moms room, on the other side of the basement wall was a single, small little room littered with antique glass liquor bottles. Mom took some of the nicer bottles, made them into candles, and then had them seal off the crawlspace and get back to making the basement flood-proof, which was the main thing: after a rainstorm, the basement would pool with water about 4-5 feet deep and ruin everything in it. We don't know what either of our mysterious rooms was used for, what those bottles or the knife were used for, or where the lights and light and heat in the vents come from. We don't talk about any of this, we don't acknowledge it, we just live around it. Neither of us believes in ghosts or anything like that, and every scary movie I've seen says engaging and encouraging the fictional things that antagonize you only empowers them. I've never told my mom about the hand or the tapping, not even though it followed me when I changed beds and moved to the other wall, not when I started sleeping with my door closed and my tv on to drown out the sounds in the night, and not when I can close my eyes and see the dark, humanoid shadow standing at the side of my bed or in my doorway. We don't go into rooms without turning on a light first, we don't respond to or investigate any strange sounds, if mom leaves town for a weekend, I keep my dog with me and have my girlfriend come over so I'm not alone. In six months we'll be moving out of the house for good. We don't know what we'll be leaving behind, but it won't be an empty house.