Submitted by thrwawayghostplshelp t3_zjcve7 in nosleep
So, this just happened. And I know no one will believe me. But I have to get this off of my chest. I feel like I’m going insane here.
Three months ago, my wife and I moved into a new home. We had been saving up for years, and finally could afford the place of our dreams. It was a little underpriced, but we figured it was because the roof needed to be replaced. I don’t think that was the reason anymore.
The first time I noticed anything, it was when we were moving in boxes, on the first day we took ownership. I had placed a super heavy box in the living room (I was lifting all the heavier boxes as my wife had just had surgery, and was limited to lifting things that were 10 lbs). I went out to the car to get a new box, and when I came back, the heavy box in the living room was nowhere to be seen. This box was full of books that were supposed to go into the third bedroom on the second floor that would soon become my wife’s office/library. I found my wife in the kitchen and told her that she shouldn’t have moved the box because it was waaaay too heavy for her, and also where did she put it?
She was really confused. She told me she had been unpacking glassware into cabinets the entire time, and hadn’t been lifting anything heavy.
I was really confused. I went back into the living room. Still, no box. I looked around and eventually went upstairs. And then, yes, in the third bedroom, there was the box, right in the middle of the room. I called down to my wife that she should NOT have carried this heavy box up the stairs to play a prank on me. She didn’t reply, and I thought she was being a little childish. I was about to leave when I noticed that the floor had a fine layer of dust on it. And there were no footsteps leading up to the box that I could see. And like I said, the box was in the MIDDLE of the room. It was incredibly strange, but I was more upset that my wife had maybe injured herself by carrying this extremely heavy box of books upstairs for god know’s what reason, so I went back downstairs and kinda berated her.
She was insistent that she had been in the kitchen. Then she started to worry about ME, wondering if I had forgotten carrying the box upstairs from being overtired/dehydrated/etc. I was pretty tired (moving is a lot), and the conversation ended with both of us taking a break from unpacking and having a meal. Still, I couldn’t shake this feeling that something really weird had just happened.
A week went by. Nothing happened. We found out that the flooring upstairs is EXTREMELY creaky and can be heard very loudly from downstairs. Not surprising, this house is almost 200 years old, and it kinda made me feel better because I never heard any creepy, unexplained floor creaking during that week. I guess I kinda figured if we were being haunted by something, it would make sounds with the floor like in horror movies? I was optimistic.
But then, something else weird happened. It was pretty small. My wife got a mild infection in her surgical site, and she was on bedrest (don’t worry, she’s fine now). I woke up early one day and let her sleep in as I went into town to get some groceries. When I came back home, she was awake. She said, “Thank you so much for leaving me a glass of water with my antibiotics. That was really kind of you.”
I didn’t leave her a glass of water. I mean, I probably should have looking back (she was very sore in the morning during this infection, so getting up for water for morning meds would have been a pain, literally), but I didn’t. I told her this. She laughed and said, “What do you mean? I woke up to a full glass of water and my dose ready to go next to me. You’re so funny.”
I felt a chill run down my spine. I told her I didn’t do that and she was scaring me. She laughed it off. I immediately got a thermometer and checked to see if she had a bad fever from the infection, but no. I asked her if this was another prank like what she did with carrying the box upstairs, and that was when she got annoyed with me. She basically told me to stop gaslighting her, and we got into a small argument. A very small argument, but still, there was no resolution because we were both convinced the other was lying.
More time passed. Wife healed from infection (thank god). Month two of living in house. No weird occurrences. I felt myself start to relax again. I should not have relaxed.
My wife was experiencing some post-surgery depression (it was a very tough operation to get at her age, the doctor’s said it was completely understandable). One day, I found her sobbing alone at the kitchen table. I asked her what was wrong. She said in a dream, there was a woman who lived in this house who told her, “Cry. Cry. Cry.” Just over and over and over. She said that she had woken up and had gone to the kitchen to get some water, and when she looked up into the window reflection above the sink, for a split second, her face resembled the woman’s face from her dream, and she suddenly started to cry. She was hysterical, just holding herself and rocking and talking about how sad she’s been since the surgery. I was trying to calm her down in any way, and I said the words, “You need to stop crying and pull yourself together. Don’t listen to that stupid woman in your dreams. You need to be strong.”
Right after I said that, I heard a creak from the floorboards upstairs. No big deal, just the house settling, right?
But in that exact second, I realised I had never heard this house settle before. Ever. At all. The only time I had ever heard the floors upstairs creak was when I or my wife were walking on them. The house was perfectly quiet. That is not normal for a very, very old house.
I didn’t have a lot of time to think about this, though, as my wife started sobbing harder and saying she “didn’t want to be strong”. I told her that she needed to be, and she cried harder. At this point, I left the room to grab my phone (I was going to book a telehealth appointment on her behalf). When I came back into the room, her back was facing me. She was holding her shoulder and was crying less. I asked her from across the room if her shoulder hurt. She whipped around and looked at me in total fear.
“How are you over there?” she asked.
“I was getting my phone.”
“You were holding my shoulder.”
“No, I was getting my phone to book you a doctor’s appointment.”
“No, I literally just felt your hand on my shoulder. I *touched* it.”
She was starting to cry more now, and I thought in that moment, “Oh my god, my wife is losing it.” I immediately went over and consoled her, and while holding her, I booked an appointment online with a doctor. I figured she needed some antidepressants or something. I got an appointment later that week, she got put on some green and white pills, and I thought everything that was going on was because of stress from the surgery.
No. It wasn’t. Oh my god, it WAS NOT HER.
Flash forward to this morning. My wife and I got into a fight. Pretty much first thing this morning, she rolled over and said, “I want to stop taking these pills.”
I was not very receptive, admittedly. I told her, “No, you need to stay on these pills. Remember what happened with the box, the glass of water, and then your weird dreams? That stuff will happen again if you stop taking the pills.”
“The box moving and the water glass were both you. And the dream keeps happening, but it’s a little different now.”
I ignored her saying the box and water glass were me. “How is the dream different?” I asked. I kinda wish I didn’t.
She said the following.
“The woman still lives in this house. And she still tells me I need to cry. But she also tells me other things. She whispers a lot now. She doesn’t want me to tell you about her, so I don’t. But she wants you to know that there is a brick that has broken off of the chimney, and in a few days we will have a windstorm, and I will be walking back into the home from the car, and she’s worried the brick is going to fall off of the roof and hit me, so she’d like you to please go remove it.”
I laughed at this. I’m not proud. I said to her, “If she’s so worried, can’t she move the brick? Or does she only exist in your head?”
My wife, fully serious, said, “She can’t leave the house right now. But she doesn’t want the brick to hurt me, so I was allowed to tell you about her. Please go to the roof.”
We went back and forth for awhile. I’ll spare you the argument that ensued. But it ended with me going up onto the roof. Guess what I found?
In the eaves, away from view. Broken off of the chimney. A brick.
I didn’t move it. As soon as I saw it, I got back down off the roof and walked around the house from all angles. No matter how hard I tried, I COULD NOT SEE THE BRICK FROM THE GROUND. I then decided to go back inside and try something. I went back to the bedroom, where my wife was still in bed, and told her I removed the brick.
“Thank you,” she said, with a smile. “That’ll make her much less worried about me.”
Okay, I thought. If there really was some supernatural being inside my wife’s head, they would know I was lying. I relaxed and went to take a shower, and thought about talking to my wife’s doctor about upping her meds.
After the shower, I went back into the bedroom. My wife was still in bed, but she had tears streaming down her face.
“Do you want me to die? She said you want me to die!” she said. She was furious.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You left the brick up there! You lied to us. You went up and saw it and then LEFT IT! Why would you go up there and not take it down?”
My blood, once again, went cold. I ran out of the room without another word. I went downstairs. I was thinking maybe in the time I had my shower my wife had went downstairs and had seen the brick in the gutter somehow and then had slipped back into bed without me hearing floor creaks.
Still, I could not see that brick from the ground. I went and checked to see if the ladder was in the place it was that I put it (in the shed, at the back, where I had just put it after I checked the brick the first time). It was.
I ran back inside. Up the stairs. To our bedroom. There she was, crying still.
“How did you know?”
“She told me.”
“She’s not real.”
“She tells me everything!”
“You need help!”
“Please take the brick down!”
I slammed the bedroom door. I’m in the living room now. I have not talked to my wife since. I don’t know what to do. I think our house is haunted. I don’t know. What do I do, besides booking another doctor’s appointment for her? I’m genuinely freaked out. I am willing to answer any questions and clear up any confusion. Please, help. I don’t have anyone else I could really ask about this, for fear of judgement. The anonymity here makes it easy to say that I actually think there may be a ghost haunting my house. I am a grown man and I think there is a ghost in my house - that’s how freaky this situation is. I don’t believe in anything supernatural, religious, etc, usually, but oh my GOD. Someone, please. Answers??? I looked on reddit for similar stories and all I could find was a story about carbon monoxide poisoning. We have a detector on each floor of our house. Is there something else this could be? Do I get radon detectors? Lead? What other chemical thing could cause this? Do I need to sage my house or hire a company to decontaminate or get my wife put in an asylum or WHAT??? I’m a logical man but I feel like logic is escaping me. Please, someone, help me.