𝐒𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞. | ʜᴏʀʀᴏʀ ᴏɴᴇsʜᴏᴛs

𝐏𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩.

Please Help

I bought my first house recently after living in apartments for years. Finally, I'd saved up enough for a down payment and searched for months and months until I found a place that I thought was perfect. It sits on a little bit of land, the neighborhood is nice, and there's no HOA...I thought I'd found my dream home. One story, two bedrooms, one bath, great for a starter.

When I closed on the place, I met the previous owner. He was an older man and explained with glee that he'd built it himself, literally. Eccentric was my first impression of him, as he explained how he'd gotten fed up with paying for city water and decided he'd just dig his own well in the crawl space one year. "I spent a lot of time in that crawl space," he told me with a forlorn expression. Through the whole process, I got the distinct feeling that he didn't really want to sell the house, but rather felt that he had to.

The inspection hadn't turned up any issues, so I assumed that even though this man had built the house himself, he must have known what he was doing. Everything looked to be in order (to my extremely untrained eye) when I moved in and functioned as expected. I had hot water, the furnace was working...what more could a young, single guy ask for.

It wasn't until I was setting up the living room that I noticed something...odd.

The previous owner had clearly been a movie buff as there were hooks in the ceiling where he'd hung a projection screen, and mounting left over from where the projector itself had been installed. An HDMI cable and speaker wiring were routed through the wall and all around the room to set up what must have been a very nice home theater system. Being I'm a big gamer, I was actually excited he'd left it all behind, as I'd likely be able to make good use of it all for LAN parties. Using a multimeter, I began the tedious process of checking where each wire and cable was routed, labeling them in turn.

It took a couple of hours, but eventually I was able to track everything from origin to terminus except for one cable.

An HDMI cable was routed straight up through the laminate flooring behind where he must have had his entertainment center and I couldn't find the other end of it anywhere inside. When he'd installed the flooring, he'd managed to cut a perfect circle for the cable diameter, so the head couldn't just fall through. And, unlike any of the other wiring, it looked like before he moved out, he'd attempted to remove it.

Scratches indicated he'd taken tools to the floor in an effort to cut it out, but for some reason had given up with little progress. There were marks on the cable itself as well, but he'd clearly had no success perforating it. 'Must have some kind of aircraft grade shrouding.' I thought. 'Guess he either thought it just wasn't worth the effort or didn't want to leave me with a big hole in the floor.'

Unfortunately, given I couldn't find the other end in the house, I knew I'd likely need to go down into the crawl space to figure out where it was routed. Wondering if maybe he'd built a secret compartment somewhere in the walls to house his media players, I decided I'd plug it in and see if there was still anything connected on the other end.

I regretted that decision immediately.

When the screen came to life...I saw grainy footage, like from a CCTV camera. In it, a woman was chained by her wrists and ankles to a wall in a dark, cramped space. She was kneeling in pea gravel and there was almost no light, the ceiling above too shallow for her to stand. Her hair was long and matted, clothes soiled and tattered, and she was so emaciated that I scarcely believed she could be alive. When she looked up, I saw the sorrow etched on her face as she wept. "Please help." She mouthed.

My heart stopped as our gazes met... 'Can she see me?' I knew that to be impossible, but her eyes bored straight into mine, begging me to save her. Appalled, I leapt back and powered off the TV...a sickening sensation growing within.