When I was 10 years old, I had a best friend who lived a few minutes walk from my house. One day, after school, I went over to his house as usual to play.
When I got to his home, I found I knocked on the front door. The whole house was deathly silent.
I called out my friend’s name, but there was no answer.
His mother’s car was still in the driveway, so I knew they hadn’t gone anywhere.
“Come out to play!” I shouted.
There was no reply.
“Come on, I know you’re in there,” I called.
The silence was eerie.
I went up to the window and peered inside.
Just then, I heard my friend’s voice shout, “Just go away! Get out of here!”
Suddenly, there was a loud scream and a crashing sound.
Frightened, I ran home crying, not knowing what was going on.
The next day, at school, I heard a shocking story from the older boys. They said that a gang of thieves had broken into my friend’s house the day before.
My friend and his mother had been murdered.
If I had gone into the house, I would have been killed as well.
It turned out that my friend and his mother had been hiding from the thieves when I showed up. By shouting at me, he had saved my life, but he had also given away his hiding place.When I was a junior high school student, there was an old, abandoned house in our neighborhood that was falling into ruin.
There was ivy growing thick on the walls and the roof had caved in at some point.
One day, some of my classmates and I decided to sneak into it and explore. It was around 8 PM and the sun was setting. The door was locked, so we had to climb in through one of the back windows.
We went from room to room, finding our way with a flashlight. For some strange reason, there were hundreds of dolls lined up along the walls. Although we were all excited, the atmosphere became tense.
None of us spoke to each other and there was an uneasy silence.
Most of my friends were scared and wanted to go home, but I convinced them to stay and explore a little longer. We came to one small room at the front of the house that was empty except for a little table in the middle. As we entered, we could hear the floorboards creaking and groaning under our feet.
I noticed something lying on the table. As I got closer, I saw that it was a letter and there was an old cassette tape beside it. The letter read:
“Thank you Dad”
When I saw the writing, I felt a chill run down my spine and I decided it was time to go.
When we got out of the house, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. On the way home, one of my friends and I started talking about the letter and the cassette tape lying beside it.
“What was that?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, “but I brought it with me when we left…”
Curious about what the tape contained, we brought it back to my house, put it in my tape recorder and pressed “Play”.
There was nothing but silence.
We sat there and listened for 10 minutes or more, but there was just silence.
After a while, we figured there was nothing on it, so we just left it playing and started reading comic books. Eventually we forgot about the tape.
Then, all of a sudden, we heard a woman’s voice coming from the tape recorder.
It said, “Thank you dad for killing me…”There was a teenage girl who was hired to babysit two young children. After the parents left, she put the children to bed and then went downstairs to watch TV.
Suddenly, she heard a noise coming from the basement. It was the washing machine starting up. She was about to go and turn it off, but when she opened the basement door, the noise stopped. Shrugging her shoulders, she returned to the living room and resumed watching TV.
Five minutes later, she heard the washing machine starting up again. She got up, opened the basement door and started walking down the steps. She had only gone down a few steps when the noise stopped again. She went back to watch TV.
Five minutes later, she heard the washing machine yet again. Worried, she went upstairs, gathered the children and ran over to the neighbors’ house to call the police. They arrived a few minutes later and went down to search the basement.
They found a man armed with an axe, hiding behind the washing machine. He had been trying to lure the babysitter down to the basement in order to kill her.