The Heavy Steps

​​Back in the early 1980s, my husband got hired to be a handyman at an older bed and breakfast. We were both retired from our previous profession and were allowed to move into one of the bedrooms downstairs in exchange for his work around the property. It was a nice, old house far out in the country but close enough to still be able to make trips into town when needed. We moved in during the winter during the off season, so we were the only people out there most of the time besides when the owner was there. As well as being a handyman, my husband would sort of be a look-out for the place and just be sure nothing foolish was going on.
 
The first couple of months went by great as we had settled in and took pride in helping spruce the place up. It had been a number of years since anyone had really gave the house the care and attention that it needed, so the progress we were doing was paying off visually almost immediately. And the owner was very happy with what we were doing, even going so far as to sending us weekly fruit baskets for our troubles. We couldn’t have been happier, but that is where the trouble comes. Someone, or something, wasn’t happy with our presence or our hard work.
 
It all started one night just before we had settled down to go to sleep. We both heard a series of very heavy, large thuds coming from upstairs in the house. We weren’t sure if it was the second or third floor and it only happened two or three times in quick succession. My husband went looking around in all the different rooms, but nothing seemed disturbed and the rooms were empty like they were expected to be. Our only guess was that maybe the wind had blown hard enough to cause the house to shift, as old houses were known to do.
 
A couple of days went by before we heard anything else unusual, but the thuds returned around the same time at night. My husband went upstairs again to have a look, but turned up empty once again. I suggested that perhaps there was some kind of rodents in the walls that were causing the sound. My husband agreed with me and said that he’d have a look the next morning. But that turned up fruitless, as well, and we once again just kind of tried not to think about it and go about our business of beautifying the place during the day.
 
That is when things became too spooky for us just to brush off and ignore. My husband was outside working on something in the shed and I was inside scrubbing some old tin that I had found in one of the cabinets. I heard, clear as day, the sound of very heavy footsteps walking down the hallway directly above me. I knew that nobody else was in the house, but still didn’t think to go look. But I stood there and listened to the footsteps as they moved down the hall and eventually to the stairs just in the other room. It was unmistakable and I just knew that someone would be walking through the kitchen doorway at any moment as the sound got closer and closer. But nobody ever came and I was left standing there bewildered at what I had just heard. My husband came inside and I explained to him why I was looking so pale. He didn’t outright say it, but I think we both knew that there was something in the house with us. I am pretty sure he wanted to still rationalize things and wondered if there was some prowler hiding around upstairs playing games with us.
 
I tried not to think about it for the rest of the day and just wanted to get to sleep and back to work to take my mind off of it. But just as soon as we had turned out the lamp to get to bed, the same footsteps I had heard began stomping around from somewhere above our bedroom. My husband jumped up out of bed and quickly grabbed the old shotgun he always kept near the corner of the room and loaded a shell into it. The time it took for me to turn the light on and for him to get up and get the gun was long enough for the heavy steps to make their way down the hallway and the stairs. He told me to get behind him and aimed the shotgun at the door to our room. The steps were just as loud as they were upstairs as they made their way down the small corridor to our back bedroom.
 
With gun trained at the door and the steps nearly on the other side, my husband let out a loud warning to whoever it was coming; but the steps did not stop until they reached our door. We stood there in silence for what must have been two or three minutes before he let out another warning for whoever it was to announce their presence or be shot. He got no reaction, so he inched his way to the door and swung it open expecting to see someone there. But to both of our surprise, or perhaps not, there was nobody there at all. If there really was a person that walked down the hall to our room, there wouldn’t have been anywhere for them to hide and we both heard the footsteps come all the way to our door.
 
The owner stopped by the next day to do some preparation work for the spring season. I asked her if they had ever heard unusual sounds in the house and she said that there were rumors about it when they were renovating the rooms back in the ‘70s but nothing since then and they never experienced anything themselves. She did ask me if I heard “the heavy footsteps” though.

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