Creepypasta (Collections)

When You Go A-Knocking

Growing up in small town in the middle of Kansas in the 1970s meant that not only was there not much to do as a slightly mischievous teenager, but if you did want to do something, anything, you had to come up with it yourself. This usually meant anything from the fairly innocuous, like cramming as many friends as I could fit into my trunk to sneak them into the drive-in, to the slightly more unlawful, like trying to break into the five-and-dime in the dead of night (relax – we didn't actually succeed on that one).

One of my buddies, Donnie, had slightly macabre tastes. He managed to get ahold of an anatomy class skeleton that he liked to pose around his house and his dream was to one day get a real casket to put the skeleton in; that's the kind of guy Donnie was. Whenever we left it up to Donnie to decide where the night would take us, it was usually in that macabre vein. He liked to explore old cemeteries, abandoned hospitals, things of that nature. On one particular Saturday night, he said we should explore an old abandoned farmhouse he had spotted along the side of a country road. I didn't hear any better ideas, so Donnie, Pat, Hoodie and I all piled into my Rambler and headed out. Donnie only vaguely remembered where the place was; it took us an eternity of winding down pitch black country roads before Donnie finally excitedly exclaimed, "That's it!"

The place was creepy looking. The house itself was fairly typical of the area. It was a stark, two-story affair, which was probably painted a dull grey at some point, but almost all of the paint had since peeled away, leaving behind exposed wooden planks drying and cracking in the Kansas heat. Illuminated in the moonlight, the planks looked like a ribcage. Most of the house's windows had long since been broken; only a couple of windows on the second story remained intact. No one had bothered boarding up the broken windows, suggesting no one had looked after this property for a long time. A porch circled the house, but the porch was sagging and leaning with age. As I pulled my car into the driveway in front of the house, my headlights shot into the house though the broken front windows. When I cut the car off, it suddenly hit me just how dark it was out here in the middle of nowhere. We waited in the car for a few moments as our eyes adjusted to the dark. Once we stepped out of the car, we starting taking inventory of our surroundings.

The moonlight only gave us the slightest of clues about what lay on the property. About fifty yards behind the house stood a large garage of some sort. There was a third building beyond that may have been a small barn. On our left was an expansive field. What probably used to be a field of wheat or corn was now an overgrown mess of weeds and sunflowers, most of which was well over six feet tall. I suddenly became unnerved looking at the field, gently swaying in the evening summer breeze. Anything could be out there in that field, I thought to myself as a soft shiver went up my spine. The moment of creepiness was broken up by my buddies piling out of the car. We all stood there for a moment soaking it all in, the only noise was the nonstop thrum of the locusts in the trees. It was Donnie who eventually broke the silence. "I've driven by this place a dozen times and never seen anyone anywhere near it. It's definitely abandoned." It didn't really need to be said; the sorry state of the place confirmed a human hasn't been living here in years. Decades, probably.

Pat made the first move. He bounded up the steps on the porch towards the front door. One of the ancient steps partially gave way under his weight. The rest of us were careful to hop over that step. The front door was as dry and warped as the rest of the house. Pat gave it only a slight shove with his shoulder and the door swung violently inwards with a faint squeak. I clicked on my flashlight and scanned the inside of the place. Directly in front of us was a staircase leading up to the second floor. Off to the right was a mostly empty room and a narrow hallway ran along the bottom of the staircase, advancing into the pitch black house beyond. I took in the details of the room to our right. Only a few random pieces of furniture remained; an end table sat in one corner, covered in a thick layer of dust. The wooden floor was now covered in leaves and other debris blown in through the broken windows.