The Beating Heart in the Closet: Stories From My Grandmother's House

I turn around and I see the mattress sinking in, but there's nobody nothing there. I get up, I run through, and I run outside to the front door. My name is James from Corpus Christi, and these are stories of events that have happened in my life, mostly in my grandma's house. When I was young, I lived with my mother and my father. They went their separate ways. I was about five years old and I moved with my father into his parents' house, so I was with my grandma and grandpa from his side. The way their house was set up is when you go through the gate, you have the porch. You enter through the front door, and you are in the living room. When you go past the living room, you are in the kitchen and dining room area. Directly taking a left from there, you can see a hallway that goes through the length of the house. When you look straight across of that hallway, there was a bedroom there and that was the bedroom that I stayed. And looking left down the hallway you can see directly into the door of my grandparents room they slept in there. To the left of my bedroom was a bathroom, and then to the right that was where my father's room was, but he never slept there. He always slept on a mattress in the living room. Looking down that hall, it was always darker than the rest of the hallway. I was being a five year old child. I was throwing a tantrum about something. I don't remember what. I received a spanking and I was told to go to my room, and I went to my room crying. I remember throwing myself on the floor and just throwing a tantrum. When you enter the bedroom. You have about two paces before you pass the closet that's on the right hand side, and I was on the floor close to it, and I heard something coming from the closet. The closet was opening very slowly at first, and I just kept looking into it, like I stopped crying. I was looking into there. All of a sudden, the closet just it swung open, and I started feeling the since of being sucked in. I'm on the floor, I'm trying to kind of crawl out of the bedroom, and I'm starting to cry and scream louder and louder, and I feel this pulling sensation into the closet and I'm grabbing onto the corner of the walls. My grandfather he barges in, kicks the door open, and he sees me hanging on and crying. And when I see him, when I'm making eye contact with him, I see you. At first, he's angry, and then he goes to kind. Of like they shocked look. He reaches down and he grabs me by my armpits and he starts tugging, and I remember him using his shoulder against the wall to pull me up. When he pulls me, he throws me outside of the bedroom. I land in the kitchen and my grandma and my aunt are there and they're asking me what's happening. And I'm trying to process everything. And I explained to them that I was being sucked into the closet. They didn't believe me, and they just kept telling me that I was crying too much. And my grandfather he comes out and he starts talking to my grandma and he's validating my story, telling them like what was happening. You know, they're not listening to him, They're not listening to me. He decides to go outside grab some tools. He comes in and he removes the door from the hinges and he says that there's not going to be a door on that room anymore. When I was able to go back into the bedroom because I was scared, I would look at the corner where I was grabbing, and sheet rock had been missing, pain had been missing. And the creepiest part is where my grandfather's shoulder was. It was like indented. You can see the kind of like the frame there was pushed in there. So I mean, I feel like that had really happened to me. I to this day. Cannot sleep with the closet door open. I always have to keep it closed. And you know, I tell my wife now that you know, it's just something that I guess I grew up with being afraid of. Following that event, Like I said, to the right of the hallway was my father's room. That area was just so much creepier than the rest of the house. It was just all shadow like, it was all dark. You cannot see. As a matter of fact, me and I had a younger brother with me. Me and my brother, we had a pace count. If we try to go down. And just we're curious children. We try to go down and you know, touch the wall and come back just because of how dark it was. We actually had a pace count to the wall, and I remember my pace count was between eleven and twelve, and there were times where we'd get like to five or six, and we still cannot see light from the other side of the hallway. And there's even the light like a light switch in the hallway. It's the craziest thing. But nobody ever went in there, and nobody ever told us anything that had happened in that bedroom. But everybody knew and there I think our parents and grandparents were just keeping a story from us or something, because even my father would sleep in the living room, he would not go there. And maybe six seven years old, one of the times, I'm passing through the hallway to go to my bedroom. I'm following my brother, and I see something out of the corner of my eye. And the craziest thing is it's always a shadow, so you can't really see anything. But I see something out of corner of my eye from the right side, and I look up. I see like ahead coming from an attict that I didn't even know we had there. I hear and see kind of like a board moving, and I run to my grandpa and I'm telling them and I'm telling my ground my grandpa, and at first they kind of don't believe me. But my grandma starts kind of freaking out because, you know, she understands that there's no way that we can see that there's access. To an attic up there. So my grandpa gets a ladder and he goes up and he checks it out. He comes back like maybe five minutes, it felt like a long time, and he said he didn't see nothing. When I turned eight, my grandfather died. He died in nineteen ninety one. My grandma got really sad and she started getting sick. She started her he started declining. She was crying every night. My aunt would come over and, you know, try to take care of her, give her some support. Periodically, she started accumulating these religious statues. My grandmother had a caregiver. She had to go to dialysis twice a week. She asked me and my brother why the statues were facing the corner of the wall, and me and my brother looked at each other, like, we have no idea. You know, we don't really go in there other than just to give her water or she calls for help or anything. So we kind of took it upon ourselves to take turns sleeping with my grandmother to see who was turning these statues, you know, facing. The wall before we go to bed. Both of us would check and we'd see the statues are facing the entrance. Upon waking up, the statue sure enough would be facing a corner, you know, the corner that. They were closest too. We just were so determined to catch what was going on. My brother one day said he heard the doorknob rattle, like the closet doorknob to my grandmother's room. So he jumps out of her bed. He comes, he wakes me up. He's like, you got to see the closet. You got to see the closet. I run to my grandmother's room. I open up the closet. All of a sudden, my grandma says, what are y'all doing? And I turned around and she's sitting up in bed. Mind you, Like I said, she goes to dialysis twice a week, so she did not really have the strength to just quietly move up, especially like that quickly. It was almost instant, and she told us to close the door and to go to bed. My brother was so creeped out, he did not finish sleeping the night there. We never did figure out how those statues were rotating. Maybe a year later, I was in the fourth grade. I'm not exactly sure what had happened, but I could not move my neck. I could not move to the left. I had trouble moving my shoulder, my left shoulder and just turning to the left, and it felt like something was swollen in there. Me to pediatrician and they took X ray. They said everything was fine, and they kind of chalked it up to, you know, being something with muscles. I don't really remember what they said exactly. I was a kid, about ten years old. I had spent an entire summer in bed, and some religious person who was coming by in Corpus CHRISTI and people were going by to see this person and receive blessings and cures. And my aunt was all into it, and she was like, you have to come, you have to come. So she takes me out of bed and we go and we kind of start waiting. Unfortunately, the line was long. I didn't get to see anybody, but somebody walked up to us. There was this. Tall gentleman walked up to us and he was just talking to me and my aunt and the stuff that he was talking about. You know, he knew names of people in our family. It seemed to me like my aunt and this guy was they were familiar with each other. Well, he hands me a rosary and he says, to keep it safe and it'll keep me safe. And he puts it in my hand. You know, I give him my hand, palm up. He puts it in my hand and I look down. Now as I look down, I see out of the corner of my eye he's kind of doing like this, this motion from my right side to my left side of the back. Of my head. And as I see his hand moving away from my body, I instantly feel that I can move my shoulder up and down. My neck is still tight, but I can make a movement to the left without it hurting. And him and my aunt they finished a conversation and he tells me, you know, take care, be safe, and he walks away. And as me and my aunt were walking to her cart, she asked me if my dad knew that guy, and I was like, no, I've never seen him before. In my life. I thought you knew him, And she told me she had no idea who he was. My aunt kind of looked it up to him being an angel coming down to helping me out, because the next couple of days I was able to move, and after about two three days I had full range of motion and my shoulder and my neck and you know, that weight wasn't there. And it was a crazy incident. Shortly after that, my dad had been seeing this girl. I was about eleven years old. She had three kids as well, so to include my brother, there was three additional siblings. There was another brother and two younger sisters. Their house was very weird, but I was kind of used to the sensation of the way their house was all dark and stuff. It was kind of like the dark corner of my father's bedroom. They had an uncle that lived there and he one day he came out yelling about who was touching his Uiji board. Me and my brothers were just kind of looking at each other, like, we don't even know what a WITCHI board is. He who were calling it a Witchi board? He explained to us, and he pointed to it and said, don't ever go there, don't touch it, And of course we're curious about it. One of the other brothers. He decides to grab it and we noticed markings on it. I was nervous and I didn't want to touch it. I didn't want to mess with this. I'm just told me just stay away from it, and my younger brother he agreed with me, so he put it back. But then one day we see the uncle pull it out and he's just like mad and angry and saying, you know, he told us not to be touching it. So he threw it in the trash and put it out to the curb and waited there until the garbage man came to pick it up. We were just there watching. He was like, you're gonna watch me, you know, put it away, and it went away. The very next day he pulls it out again and asks us. How we had pulled it out. And the crazy thing about it is that there were initials on one of the corners of the Wigi board. They were like in issues on one corner, and there were markings on another corner, and these were like scratched in. We felt like this was the same Wiji board that we all saw get dumped into the trash and taken out, and we just we didn't we didn't have an answer, but we were in trouble because he thought we pulled it out somehow. He rips up the Wigi board like, rips it up, tears it apart, puts it in the trash again, keeps a bag in his room. When the trash comes around. The next week, he opens a bag and he says that this is going in the trash, puts it into another trash bag, puts it into the trash can, and makes us stand out there and wait for the garbage man to come and pick it up. Sure enough, they pick it up, they take it out, and it happened again. But when it came back it wasn't ripped. We're not understanding what is going on because we've seen him throw it away once. We've seen him rip it up once and it came back whole both times. So this time I grabbed the Luigi board and I put it in a grill and I burned it. I'm burning it, and I'm like, this is crazy. You know, I have to take care of this myself, because there is no way that this is happening. Somebody's playing a prank on us. But we're getting in trouble, you know. The three brothers are getting in trouble for it. I make sure this thing's burned. I put the ashes in a bucket where they were collecting dog poo, and at dog poo went out into a trash can and put in there for the garbage man. They come, they take it, and next thing you know, he's got the Uji board with the same markings. And I'm just like, I'm telling my dad like, hey, this is what's happening. I don't like this, and he's kind of like it's nothing. You know, nothing's really going on. They're just paying a brain like stuff would happen in that house like some crazy things. They brought a priest over to I guess try to bless the house. He walked into the door and he said, I'm sorry that there's nothing I can do. The kids were told to, you know, go away, go across the street, come back later, So we came back later. We tried to ask for updates on the story what was happening, and nobody really. Would tell us anything about what was going on. Later on, they brought some lady I'm not sure what her involvement is with this mystical stuff, and she comes in and as soon as she enters the property, like passes the gate. She gives an explanation as to what's going on. She enters the house and she's like, you have black spots at this corner of the room. I had no idea about these black spots. But she walks. Directly to one of the back rooms and sees these black spots and it kind of looks like molde. At this point, they tell us to leave, and my father actually walks me and my brother to my grandmother's house. And I'm not sure what happened with that or after that, but we never I never went back to there. I stayed with my grandmother with my brother. When I turned about twelve thirteen, my dad and his girlfriend decided to move in together, so we moved in together into some apartments. There's two story apartment. When you entered the apartment, you have the living room. Past that there's a dining room with the back door. The living room had theirs that would go directly right, and then turned the left to go upstairs, and you had a small hallway that had a bedroom. The bedroom door on the left which was where me and my brother slept, a bedroom door on the right, which is where the sister slept, and the bedroom door upfront is where the parents slept. We had lived there for two weeks and nobody really said anything to each other. But one day my sister brings up a shadow man with a hat. We all kind of start bringing up whether or not we had seen this, and it turned out being that most of us, everyone except for my dad, had seen something similar out of the corner of their eyes. You can never like make contact with it. You try to turn the. Look and it's gone or it moves away. But we all had been seeing this shadow with kind of like a round a round hat. Later on, my baby, she was maybe like two years old. She was just crying and crying and crying, and it was bedtime and we couldn't figure out what was happening. So I mean, I step out of the bedroom and I go to Luk and my dad and step mom A and they're trying to comfort her, and she's describing like this shadow figure from the closet and what she sees. She describes a palm up and she describes a human heart beating. The beating was like the rhythm of a heart. And she was two years old. I couldn't figure out where she understood what this looked like. She didn't know it was a heart. She just kept describing the beating and the bleeding, and she would describe a finger, the pointer finger of the same hand that the heart was in curling, egging her to come to the closet. But she was two years old in a crib. It was kind of weird. It kept me up for some of that night. But that same night, later on that night, we you know, we all go back to bed. We start hearing music and my brothers are like, hey, you need to go and you know, tell mom and dad that they're being too loud and we can't sleep. You know, we got school tomorrow. And I was like, nah, they'll turn it down a little bit, and they're like, no, no, get up and go tell them. You know, we've had a rough night. I decide to get up and I opened the door. And as soon as I opened the door and my dad opens the door to his room, he looks at me. He's like, what are y'all doing? And I'm telling them nothing. We were trying to sleep, but you'll have the radio and he's like, it's not me. I'm down I'm up here. We opened the bedroom door to my sisters, and both of my sisters are awake, but they're in bed. So me and my dad look at each other and he's like, come on, follow me. We go down the stairs, and when I go down the stairs, my dad says, hey, this radio is off. Why is it playing? He leans over poo's a plug out from the wall and it shuts off and he starts playing with the switch. He leaves it on off and he was like, that's weird. Let's go back to bed. I go up the stairs first and he's falling behind me and the radio comes back on again. I look at him and he just looks there. He looks at me, and we don't say anything to each other. We just walk back to the kitchen. We go to the kitchen and he looks at the radio, picks it up and he's like, must be the battery, opens up the battery compartment, takes out the D batteries that were in there, puts him on the table and he holds it and he's like, but the switch is off. This is weird. It must be broken. All of a sudden, the dial for the FMAM dial, the little needle starts moving left and right. The knobs aren't moving, but the dial is moving, and there's sound coming out of the radio. He drops it. He was by the back door. I opened up the back door, grabbed the radio, threw it out, and as soon as it left the apartment, it just. Completely shut off. Like then it stopped playing, and my dad immediately like pushes me out of the way, closes the door, locks it, and he was like, this is just a bad dream. Let's go to bed the next day. And when we get out of school, me and my brother, we end up moving back to my grandma's house. And then everybody else came along afterwards, like a day after so we ended up moving out of that apartment. When we moved into my grandma's house, everything was fine. There was still you know, the dark side of the hallway, and it was it was kind of funny because like me and my younger brother would kind of introduce it to our other siblings and we tell him about our pace count and kind of dare each other, you know, go go touch wall and come back. One of my younger sisters apparently she kind of got stuck in that hallway, so she said she was running straight but ended up touching my dad's door. And so what my dad ended up doing is putting like a shelf and kind of like a like a drawer addresser along the side of the hallway to narrow the hallway so that way we could touch either the wall on the side or one of the dressers on the other side, so that way. That wouldn't happen. But even when everybody moved in, nobody slept in that room, and my dad and his girlfriend they even slept on the living room mattress. I guess I grew up as a child there, so I didn't really question it, and maybe seeing how everyone else had accepted it, maybe none of the younger sisters had had a reason to question it either. This was nineteen ninety nine. I remember this because upside down at six sixty six, I was sixteen years old. This was like the craziest event of my life. In that house, my grandma had told me to do something, and I don't remember what it was, but I told her no, I cussed at her. I'd never cussed at my grandma before, and for some reason I decided to cuss at her, and I was volger. I threw the middle finger at her. And I don't know why I did it, but I was mad, and I went to go lay down. All five of the siblings slept in one room. We had a bunk bed. The brothers slept on the top bunk, the sister slept to the bottom bunk, and I slept on a mattress on the floor. And so I went to the room and I laid down on the mattress. The best way to described this. Bedroom is it went past the bathroom, so like the bathroom is on the left, but the bathroom was shorter than my bedroom. My bedroom. Protruded, so it wasn't like an even squared house. To the very end, I had two windows, one to the left. If I looked out that window on the left, I can see the bathroom window, and I can see out into the street to the yard. The window that was straight ahead had some shutters that were rusted shut. These shutters would not open for anything. We used to w D forty. Me and my friends used to like do kind of like a strength test to see, you know, who could open them. They would never open. The one on the left that one could open, and my friends used to come by and they used to knock on that window, and that's how I would know they were here, and. I would go outside, you know, or talk to them out there. So I go and I lay down, and I'm laying on the mattress and I'm just like upset and I'm kind of kind of crying about it. And I hear knocking on the window to the left, so I'm like, oh, cool, one of my buddies is here. Let me just see who it did. I open up the window and nobody's there, and I'm just like, oh, you know, someone's playing a prank or something. And then I hear running in the hallway coming from my father's room. And at first I was just running back and forth, back and forth, and I'm like, oh, it's probably one of my sisters, you know, because of the steps sounded like they were a lot quicker. And then I hear giggling of a girl as well. I'm like, hey, you need to stop, you know, I'm trying to be left alone go play outside or something. And it stops. It stops for a little bit. And I start hearing knocking again at the window, and I'm like, great, everybody's messing with me. You know, they found a time to you know. Really make me mad. The more that I ignored it, the stronger it actually got. I started hearing the running down the hallway. It started going past my bedroom door, towards my grandma's room and back. So I decided to flip over and lay on my back and just kind of like. Set up, leaned up against the wall to see, you know, who it is. And the running stops going past the door, and then knocking starts along that hallway, that dark hallway. I'm just looking, I'm waiting, and I hear the footsteps get deeper, they sound heavier, and then they stop, and then I hear the bathroom. It seemed like something went past my door. I don't have a door on the hinge anymore. Sounds like something went past my door into the bathroom and started knocking there. And then from like it kind of reset back to my father's room. And there was going along the walls as well, but not from inside my room, from outside my room, and I hear the scratching going along. It skips the door and it goes to the bathroom, and it goes along as if it's inside the bathroom. The scratching continues through the bathroom wall onto my window with the shutters, and I can hear the nails or the scratching on the shutters, and this is happening outside the house now. And it turns the corner and it's scratching again through the shutters that rusted shut, back to the wall that's on my father's side of the room, and the scratching makes about two three revolutions. I'm really getting kind of scared here. I started hearing. Footsteps again, louder and louder, and I hear my dad's bedroom door opening, and I'm. Not thinking that somebody is inside the house anymore. So I turn around in my stomach, you know, because I was I was calling out to people and nobody was answering. So I turn around all my stomach and I'm like, I'm just gonna go to sleep. I'm gonna go away this, you know, this stuff's gonna go away. Let's see what happens. And I hear the footsteps. Come boom, boom boom. They stop at the door, and you can hear what sounds like feet kind of turn and I hear the feed like the heavy footsteps go into the bedroom that I'm in and the footsteps stop, the noises stop, and I feel the impression of my mattress where my where my feet is kind of go down. I feel I feel an impression. I turn around and I see the mattress sinking in but there's nobody, nothing there. I get up, I run through, and I run outside to the front door, and I ran across the street. Across the street from my grandmother's house was just an empty lot. There used to. Be an elementary school there, and to the right of that was an actual elementary school. But I stayed across the street and I fell asleep, like on the sidewalk. And one of my neighbors he's seen me, and he. Goes up and he's like, hey, what are you doing. Are you okay? It's getting cold, it's getting dark. I explained to him what happened. He was like, no, nobody's been there. Everybody left. It turned out being that everybody was looking for me to go see the fireworks. It was like Fourth of July and they wanted to go see fireworks at the Bayfront. Apparently they were looking for me, and I was nowhere to be found. But from when I had cussed out my grandmother. I had been in that bedroom until. I ran out. I did not go anywhere else. Them hearing that I was across the street, you know, they pulled up and my neighbor tells them, and they're thinking that I had left. You know, they don't believe me that I was in the house time. So nobody had believed me on that story. But that was one of the creepiest things that had ever happened to me. I turned eighteen two thousand and one and joined the army right away. Everything was fine, you know, nothing, nothing bad had been happening. He had a deployment, came back in two thousand and six from Iraq. When I returned from Iraq, there was. A cash of bayonets. That was found. They put our unit name on there, OHIF three, and they kind of handed them out to many of the people that were in the unit. The one that I kept, I kept it stowed away, never opened. It stayed in a box and stayed in the garage. And when I got out in twenty thirteen, I moved back to Corpus Christie. I would go through my stuff and I would tell, you know, my kids. I have two kids of my own, at this time, and I would tell them about how I got this. And what the unit man and stuff like that. And I happen to pull the bayonet out of the sheath and it looked like there was blood inside one of the grooves there. So I close it up and I was like, let's go to the other side of the house. Where I lived. I lived in an apartment. The room that I kept that bayonet and was completely empty. Nobody lived there. Windows always stayed shut. One day, there were like these pinkish brownish footsteps. They looked they looked like boots. There was two footsteps, like shoeprints or bootprints, just in the middle, in the middle of the of the room. You know. My daughter, she was right behind me. She looks at it and she's like, what is that? And I look at her shoes. Her shoes doesn't match. My shoes don't match, you know, the different sizes. We couldn't figure it out. I would have a lot of dreams. I would have sleep paralysis ever since I returned from deployment. I would fight it. I would I would fight to move, I would fight to open my eyes, I would fight to open my mouth say something. And the more. That I fought, the better at it that I got to where I was actually able to make movements. There was this one. Time where this mist like it it was the shadow figure. You know, at first I would see the old Hag and a shadow figure, but then the old Hag kind of went away and it was just a shadow figure. And there was this mist on the face of this shadow figure, and it looked like it lifted away, and it was its eyes that it was showing me like it its eyes, and the mist kind of looked I guess it had the motion of like a static TV. And it just stared, didn't say anything. And when I was able to move, it went away, and I was able to move. My arm shot up from just all the all the strength I was trying. To use to be able to move and break free, it just shot up. I can't really tell if I transition from one stay to another whether I'm actually asleep or awake, but I feel like I had been awake the entire time. But when I got rid of that bay and Net, those sleep paralysis episodes had lessened a lot. I got rid of it by taking it to a pawn shop. Nobody wanted to take nobody wanted to buy it. I went to a pawn shop and I was like, hey, can can I get a. Couple bucks for this? And they told me yeah. They called me not even a month later. I think it was like a couple of weeks later, and they asked me if I can go back to pick it up. And I was like, no, I don't. I don't think I want to, but let me ask ask you has anything been going on? And the dude wasn't really being straightforward about what had been happening. He just kept saying he didn't want me to lose the item, you know, because it had a lot of sentimental value. And I was like, no, I've been sleeping a lot better. I still actually do get these sleep paralysis episodes. And my wife now. She knows when they come, and a lot of times I think she stays awake trying to break me out of them. She's been doing this for several years. They don't come as often as before, but they still come. Around, and she knows that I'm able. To mutter words like speak a little bit, and she'll push me or shove me, or you know, something will wake me up. It's crazy how that stuff sticks with you that started in about two thousand and six. To this day. Actually, I sleep on my stomach. You know. I have all these back pains, but to less on the episode, TYE, sleep on my stomach because they don't seem to come around when I'm on my stomach, only when I'm on my back. I still sleep with the closet doors closed. You know. My wife sometimes will accident leave it open, and I'll tell her something because I can't do. It, and she'll go and she'll she'll close it. People tend to not not believe it or write it often, and it becomes kind of strange unless you find someone who's gone through the same stuff.