A Collection of Spooky Stories from My Childhood

Keyhole

There was once a lowly insurance salesman who was down on his luck. Pitiful suitcase in hand, the downtrodden man slowly trudged down the darkened road towards the only motel in town. The sun had already set and the stars were appearing one by one in the dusky sky. Not a leaf stirred in the stillness of the smoggy summer night.

The man dragged the case up the creaky wooden steps of the porch and pushed open the door, stepping into a dingy room decorated only with an old desk and a dusty fake ficus. The fluorescent tube light flickered and the air conditioning droned in an ominous harmony. The woman behind the desk looked up from her sleazy magazine and snuffed her cigarette in an over-full ashtray. 

"How long?" She queried, absentmindedly thumbing through the various record books splayed before her.

"I don't know...." the man admitted. "At least a few nights."

"Room 106. Last door on the left. We accept cash or check." 

After paying the woman, the man gathered his belongings and exited to the courtyard, the rooms surrounding him in a square. All of the windows were dark, all of the doors locked. As the man crossed the courtyard, his eye was caught by one particular door. A fragment of police tape was stuck to the peeling gray paint and a couple of boards had been nailed across. The numbers on the doorframe read 107.

The man couldn't exactly say why, but the door was more than a little off-putting. A chill crept down his spine as he passed in front of it, but despite his fear, the man couldn't help the sudden urge to look inside. A strange curiosity seemed to have taken over him, his body moving towards the door almost against his will. He tried the handle, but it wouldn't budge.  He knelt by the door to the boarded up room and placed his ear against the worn wood. The faint sounds of someone crying quietly could be heard through the thin wooden panels.  Slowly, he looked up at the door and moved towards the doorknob, unable to quell the desire to look through the keyhole. He closed one eye and lined the other up with the hole and the room on the other side came into focus.

The room was sparse, with a double bed placed crookedly against the wall, blankets strewn across it, and a desk in the corner with it's chair fallen over on its side. Dust could be seen floating thickly through the air in the beams of moonlight streaming through the window opposite the door. On the floor in the center of the square of pale light sat a woman, her back facing the keyhole. Dark hair flowed down her back and her nightgown was pooled around her. She was the one who was crying, the man realized. He could see some kind of baby's clothes clutched in her hands as she continued to cry, sobs racking her body.

He couldn't recall how long he had sat there and watched her, but he seemed to come to when clouds rolled in and covered the moon, plunging the room and the woman inside into darkness. The crying stopped and everything went silent, as if the world was holding its breath. Something about the stillness was even more disconcerting than the woman and the man suddenly felt like he was doing something terribly wrong.

He quickly trotted over to his room, unlocked it, and shut the door behind him, breathing a quiet sigh of relief to have locked out whatever was behind that creepy door. But all that night, he couldn't stop thinking about it and wondering what had happened. Why was it boarded up? Why was there police tape? Had there been a crime there? Who was the woman and why was she crying? After a while, the man eventually tired and he his mind stopped racing long enough for him to fall asleep.

It was still dark when he awoke. Had something woken him up? He inexplicably began to feel frightened, as if there was something in the darkness with him. He rolled over and waited, trying to listen for any sound, any clue as to what was causing his hair to stand up. The silence in the room was so thick, he could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He swung his feet to the floor and sat up, staring for a moment into the blackness around him, waiting for some shadow to move in the corner of his eye. He stood up and slowly shuffled towards the door, only distinguishable by a faint light creeping through the gap at the bottom. He turned the knob and stepped out into the hallway, releasing the breath he didn't know he had been holding as his eyes adjusted to the yellow buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead. 

He turned and looked at the nearby gray door of room 107, once again drawn to it like a magnet. He did not understand his own morbid fascination with the room or what he had seen, but nonetheless, he could not escape its pull. He felt his skin prickle at the sight of the boarded up door, the metal numbers gleaming dully on the frame.

He found himself kneeling before it, his eye nearing the keyhole even as everything in him was screaming at him to run away. He closed one eye and trained the other on the keyhole, expecting to find the disheveled room he had seen before.

But he couldn't see anything. It was like the hole had been blocked by something. Something red. There was no sound other than his own ragged breaths and pounding heartbeat. It was as if blood was covering the keyhole, dark and rich in its crimson tones. Finally, he stood up, confused over this turn of events, and returned to his room. 

The night passed without any other oddities, but the morning light did nothing to dispel his curiosity. He tried once more to peek into the room, but this time it was dark and he couldn't make anything out. He made his way back to the front desk and found the lady from earlier still sitting there, cigarette in hand. 

"Can you tell me anything about room 107? Do you know why it's boarded up?" He asked.

"Oh. Yeah, that room's bad news." She began, tensing up slightly as she broached the subject. "Up til a couple months ago, there was a young family livin' there. They seemed nice enough, kept to themselves, mostly. But man, they was weird, that's for sure."

"Weird how?"

"Ah, just little things at first, you know. Like them never turning on the lights, always coming and going at strange hours. They were always fightin' too; got a lotta noise complaints 'bout them, especially about their baby that was always screaming to high heaven. And they would hardly ever say a word to you or look you in the eye, even if you tried to say somethin' to one of 'em. I never knew much about where they came from or what they did, and they seemed to want to keep it that way."

"What happened to them?" the man inquired. The woman became visibly uncomfortable, lighting up another cigarette with trembling hands.

"After a few months, I stopped seeing them at all. They just locked themselves in that room all the time and the only way I knew they were still there was from all the constant yelling and fighting. But then one day, it just stopped. Their room was always locked and they never spoke to me anyway, so I wasn't surprised when they didn't respond to my knocking. A whole week went by without so much a a breath stirring in that room, but then I started getting complaints about the smell, and man, did it reek.

"Eventually, I tried to open the door with my master key, but it was like the door itself was glued shut. I had the police come out here and force it open and they found..." She paused, taking several shakey puffs from her cigarette as she tried to gather her thoughts. The man watched her intently as he waited for her to finish her story. "... They found their bodies." 

The man's heart felt like it was pounding out of his chest as he remembered what he had seen the night before. Had it all been a dream? Was the crying woman a ghost? Or someone else entirely? His racing thoughts were stilled as the woman continued her story. "They said that the man had strangled the woman and smothered the baby before hanging himself in the closet. But they said that the room was all messed up too. All the furniture was broken and turned over, clothes everywhere, light bulbs all shattered, carpet torn up and burned. It was like an animal had been set loose in there... But that's not even the strangest part." She said, her brow furrowing as she recalled the memory. 

"What was it?" the man asked, his gaze trained on her face. 

"All of their eyes, pupils and everything, had turned completely red. Blood red."