Short horror stories

Under the floor boards...

In the summer of 2006, I subletted a house in the east end of Toronto. The houses in this area were about a century old, and many had since been turned into duplexes. I was in college at the time and most of my friends went home for the summer. I became close friends with my neighbor (we'll call her Donna to protect her identity) and we quickly started a daily ritual of coffee on my front porch in the morning. Donna rented the basement and first floor of the house across the street from mine.

One morning she came by and seemed extra tired. Donna owned two eerily identical tuxedo cats and that night they both woke up around 3am and started to meow. The meowing was so loud and constant that it woke her up. She looked around her first floor bedroom and found them both in the corner staring up at the ceiling while scratching the walls. She thought it was weird but assumed the cats probably heard a mouse in the walls, something not uncommon for these old houses.

Unfortunately the cats began doing this nightly. Every morning for the next few weeks she would tell me about her sleepless nights with her twin cats. At one point she locked them out of the bedroom, only to wake up and find them back in the same spot. Every night they managed to open the door and get in.

One morning she came by and seemed really shaken. I asked her what happened and she told me she had a really weird and realistic dream that night. In her dream she woke up and saw a woman standing at the end of the bed. The woman's clothes weren't modern, something from at least 60 years ago. The woman was trying to talk to Donna, but when she opened her mouth all that came out was white noise. Donna tells the woman that she doesn't understand. The woman then points to herself and rocks her arms back and forth. She licks her index finger and moves her finger from right to left. Donna still doesn't know what she means and asks her again, but then she wakes up.

She had that dream several times that summer, and each time the woman made the same hand movements right before Donna woke up. It became a major talking point for us for months. We were endlessly trying to figure out what the dream meant.

Flash forward to the summer of 2007 and Donna and I are now roommates in a different part of the city. One morning I'm having my coffee, reading the news online, and I come across an article: "Renovator Uncovers Mummified Infant." I click on the article and it says a man who was renovating a house in the east end of Toronto found a mummified infant wrapped in a newspaper from 1925. The child was hidden below the floor boards on the second story of this house. When I scroll down I see a picture of Donna's old house.

I yell down the hall at Donna to come see this. She looks at the article and her face goes white. We didn't have to say anything to each other, we both knew. This was Donna's house, the baby was found in the floor boards right above Donna's bedroom and the woman was telling her "my baby is wrapped in newspaper."

I love this!!!