Something Keeps Playing With My Light Switch

So, as a kid, I sometimes heard the sound of someone playing with a light switch. The light would remain the same. It wasn’t like everything went dark and came back; it was just the sound. I would be lying in bed, and then two quick taps on the light switch would be heard, then nothing. You might think since I was a kid, it was probably just my imagination. However, I remembered being worried enough to bring this up with my dad. He excused it with, “We have mice in the attic, nothing to worry about.”

However, the sounds continued well into my teens. I could have had headphones on, playing video games, listening to music, or whatever, and I would still hear that quick one-two tap on the light switch. It didn’t occur frequently, but just enough time would pass between the sounds for me to forget about it and quickly be reminded of it. I didn’t have any siblings, and my parents didn’t find pranks very funny, so I didn’t believe it could be anyone messing with me. Plus, if my parents—who could barely work a TV remote—figured out a way for me to hear that one-two-tap sound through headphones, props to them.

Moving on, when I was about 15, I started imagining all types of explanations. Maybe it was mice, like my dad said, or maybe it was something with the electricity, or after I started watching horror movies, demons messing with me.

A month after my birthday, I bought a pair of knockoff AirPods. The sound quality was pretty good for such a cheap price. Either way, they came in this hard plastic case. I swear to God this thing would have been just as effective as a brick in a fight. I kept it at my desk so I could fiddle with it.

As any kid around that age, I was super into video games. Mostly competitive first-person shooters. I mostly kept quiet, but when my parents weren’t home, I would be screaming like a banshee, swearing, screaming insults—the entire ordeal.

One day, I was home alone. My dad was working an afternoon shift, and my mom was out of town at some marketing conference. Quick side note for people who had never been around anyone who knew anything about marketing: all they did was sit around and complain about how this ad sucked and that other ad could be better.

Back to the story: I was home alone, playing video games. I heard the one-two-tap sound of the light switch but didn’t think much of it—I was used to it at this point. At a certain point in the game, I got angry and started swearing at my teammates for not going A with me. I ended up dying that round. This made me so angry that I picked up the knockoff AirPods case and threw it at the wall behind me. The case bounced off the wall, causing a lot more damage than I had anticipated.

“Fuck,” I said, then tilted my head back and sighed.

When I tilted my head back down and looked at the golf ball-sized hole that was now in my wall, I saw a flicker of something blue. I didn’t think anything of it. In retrospect, I really wished I had.

I exited the game (I would have lost anyway) and went to inspect the damage further.

“Dad is going to be so pissed,” I whispered.

I put my finger into the hole—not sure why, but I think that was a pretty normal reaction when having damaged something. Anyway, as I put my finger into the hole, I could feel that the wall was pretty thick with a lot of space. I had long skeleton fingers, and I could easily put my entire finger in without being close to touching the other side.

As I wiggled my finger around for a second, I felt hot air blowing in intervals on my finger. Then something warm and slimy wrapped all around it—like sticking your finger in a warm piece of raw chicken. I recoiled and threw myself back, landing on my ass. Panting, quick scurrying could be heard coming from the wall.

“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck,” I whispered in a panic. I grabbed my phone and ran down the stairs, terrified. I picked up my phone, called my dad, and tried to explain the best I could what had happened.

Needless to say, my dad left his work as he heard how scared I was. He then took one look at the wall, said that I was full of shit, and scolded me for putting a hole in the wall.

That night, I pleaded with him that I could sleep on the couch in the living room because I was too terrified to sleep in my room. My dad was still pissed about the wall, and the couch had become his new bed when my mom was away. He was not ready to give that up.

My dad took my PC’s power cable and forced me to go to bed early that day. I could see the hole in the wall from my bed, and I was mortified. I was waiting for something to walk by or a tongue to poke through the hole.

After about an hour of being unable to sleep and just staring at the hole in the wall, I remembered an old Hunger Games poster I had that I had never put up. I searched my closet, found it, and quickly taped it up. I fell asleep within the next hour.

I woke up the next day, feeling extremely bad due to the lack of sleep and nightmares. I turned around and looked at the wall. Something had poked through the fucking poster.

There was a hole in my fucking poster. It was watching me.

I was wide awake in a second and rushed out of my room and down the stairs, adrenaline pumping through my veins. I tried to tell my dad again. He didn’t believe me again. When I tried showing him the poster, all he said was, “Why would you ruin a poster of Jennifer Lawrence? I thought all teenage boys liked pretty women,” then went back to ignoring my pleas for help.

At this point, I knew my dad would not help me, and my mother was gone for another week. I tried to come up with some sort of plan to get my dad to believe me. I can already hear some of you saying, “Film it,” and I would have if I could. I had dropped my phone a couple of weeks before this, and it had cracked the lens of the camera, making it unusable.

I’m sure you all could have devised a better plan than I did. I planned to get a hammer from the garage and simply wait. I was going to wait for the one-two-tap sound and throw the hammer as hard as I could at the wall, hopefully hitting something.

Anytime I was in my room, I made sure I had the hammer close by. I slept with it and had it in my lap or my hands at all times. I let my now-ruined poster remain on the wall. Each day, as I tried to sleep, I stared at the hole in the wall, scared as ever, and each night, I saw that blue flicker.

After three days, my dad gave me back my PC’s power cable. I started playing video games immediately, wanting to distract myself. I had the hammer in my lap, and then I heard it—the one-two-tap of the light switch.

I grabbed the hammer, swung myself around, and threw it as hard as I possibly could at the wall. I could never in a million years have replicated that throw. The hammer spun in the air, and the head of the hammer hit the wall perfectly, crashing through it.

I’m going to describe the following events as clearly as I can. Whatever was behind the wall screamed. The scream was hard to describe—it sounded like a prehistoric beast with a throat infection. It started clawing at the walls, and limbs soon after came erupting out of the walls.

I froze in shock. This thing came bursting out of the wall. It was tall and pale, with limbs reaching down to its inverted knees. Its ribcage was easily visible, and it was unnaturally thin. Its face had rat-like features, with small blue eyes and an elongated jaw.

My dad, hearing this bombardment of sound, came running up the stairs and threw my door open. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree—he also froze in shock.

The thing from the walls pounced at my dad, sending him crashing down to the floor. It wasn’t attacking, it was trying to flee. I could hear it stumbling, almost falling down the stairs, trying to get out.

At this point, I unfroze. I jumped over my dad, who was lying on the floor on the brink of passing out, and ran after the creature. It had busted the front door wide open.

I managed to get a glimpse of it as it was galloping away from the house, at a certain point looking over its shoulder.

We moved not soon after that. My mom didn’t get much of an explanation. She tried to scold me for the destruction of an entire wall. My dad actually stood up for me and told her that it had collapsed on its own.

Me and my dad never talked about it. I think he feels ashamed that he didn’t believe me and I don’t think I could have a conversation with him that would make sense of the situation. Since then both me and my dad only move into places with paper-thin walls. A bit of a weird requirement, but I think you understand after reading this.

I have no idea what happened to the thing in the wall, how long it had lived there, how long it had watched me, what it wanted. There was nothing on the news, and I scoured the internet trying to find anyone with a similar experience, but I found nothing. I hope whatever it is, that it leaves me alone, leaves everyone alone. Or at least doesn’t make itself known again.