Creepy - The House with Painted Doors

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

A home is supposed to be a place of solace, a refuge. You can shut the windows and lock the doors and be safe. But what if there were doors you couldn't lock? ***Credited to user straydog1980 HERE with guest narration by Nichole Goodnight***Please consider supporting the podcast at Patreon.com/Creepypod or creepypod.com/support***Produced by Steve Blizin***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Creepy is made possible things to patrons like Daniel White, Andy Soto, Neil Mason, Richard Burgess, Randalli, Keith Milholland, Dustin E, Eric Bellenbaum, Jen Sky, and Luke McAllam. Thank you so much for your continuing support of this podcast. If you'd like to see how you can support the podcast, please check out the rewards tiers at patreon.com slash creepy pod. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous, chilling and disturbing creepy pastas and urban

legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents. The house with painted doors. Written by user Stray Dog 1980 on Reddit No Sleep, with guest narration by Nicole Goodnight.

The doctor told me it was a figment of my imagination. A hallucination. A phantom limb. Cut off. But the ghost of a feeling remains. The doctor taught it and prescribed me a different pill. I've lost kind of how many pills I've tried. There was the yellow one, and the red and white capsule, and the green one.

They succeeded in me incontinence, nausea, and hair loss. But they haven't taken my girl away. My doctor told me to talk about it. Tell people, who the hell am I supposed to tell someone? Something like this. My last friends abandoned me when Sylvia left. It's late here. It's just me and no sleep.

Where to start? When there's so much to tell, at the beginning, I suppose. It's always a good place. We thought we had it made when we moved into the suburbs. We had well-paying jobs. Fluke or competence had saved us when the waves of cuts hit around 2,000. For once in our lives, money wasn't a problem. Eight years earlier, we had Annabelle.

Bell for short. She was our little angel. Parents out there will know. Child shifts the center of gravity of your life. The move was good for her. Good for us. Away from the hustle and danger of the city. Busy streets, missing children.

A sticky hands and staring eyes of sexual predators. It wasn't the host of our dreams, but it was close enough. A lawn for the balmy summer months. Fireplace for the chill of winter. Space for us to grow into. Especially for a young girl. It came fully furnished, and it was a steel. At distressed sale, our agent called it.

At least a tenth off what a similar property would set us back. The euphoria and novelty lasted me till the first night. Sylvia was asleep next to me. The moonlight sparkling off the fine hairs on her bare shoulder. We shared a celebratory drink after dinner. Then another after that. I was lying in bed, basking in the warm glow of alcohol when I first heard it.

My first thought was rats. That was exactly what it sounded like. A little tap dance of tiny claws on hardwood coming from the walls. The delicate snoring from next to me told me that Sylvia was undisturbed by the scratching noise coming from the walls. I flinched as my bare feet touched the cold floor. The floorboards groaned in protest as I patted across the room like an old. Overweight Ninja, the tapping paused at the first creek of the floorboards, then resumed. The rough weave of the wallpaper under my palm as I leaned in to track the pitter-patter behind the walls.

The scampering sounds eluded me. Every time I attempted to track the rats, the sounds seemed to come from another part of the room. My knees blew sore from pressure. I wasn't some young child at a place. playground. I was a grown man, and my weight pressed down on the bony points of my kneecaps. Out of desperation, I put my ear to the wall, hoping that the source of the little noises would reveal itself to me. I was only met with a stubborn silence, or almost a stubborn silence. On the edge of my hearing, so quiet that I had to strain my ears to pick it up,

A child's laughter from inside the walls. I did not speak of the incident. I spent more time trying to convince myself that there hadn't been a childish giggle. When perhaps. The rattle of a toy. Not a rattle. Maybe one of those newfangled dolls with those soulless eyes and microchip voice. There was a change in her.

Like the heavy air you can see. smell before a thunderstorm. She was a little quieter than usual. A strange environment will do that to a kid. A little withdrawn. Sylvia didn't really notice. I suppose I'd always been more observant than her. Bell started looking tired, dark crescents appearing under her light hazel eyes.

She wasn't getting much sleep. My first instinct was to blame the rest. and the walls. A wooden. They got louder and louder as the days went by. The damn things were keeping me up at night. It seemed that the sounds progressed from simple scratching to thumps, almost as though the cursed rodents were hurling themselves bodily against my walls.

The thumping started sounding nearly like footsteps. I was not about to be defeated by a group of jumped-up rats in the world. my own house. Fueled, testosterone-induced rage, I waged war. I tried glue traps. I try poison. I tried cages. Nothing worked.

I asked Sylvia about it, but she seemed oblivious to the late-night disturbances and could sleep through a hurricane. I asked Belle if the noise was keeping her up at night. Sylvia was over in the living room watching TV while Belle and I did the dishes. She just looked out with those big eyes of hers. The other children want to play, but they can't open the door. The girl always had an overactive imagination. But this one had a little too close to home for me.

I felt the unfamiliar prickle of boost flesh on my arms. You mean the door to the house? I asked, keeping my tone deliberately playful. It was a game. Just another of her little games. I had imaginary friends at that age. Why should my own child have been any different? No, Daddy.

The door behind the cupboard. We were up in her room. The opening theme from desperate housewives floated up through the floorboards, a world away. I thought I'd humor my little girl. There was something deadly serious in her tone that I could not shake.

I reached back around the standalone wardrobe. It felt nothing more than the smooth paint on the wall. There's no door here, honey. Look closer. I held up my cell phone for light, still playing along. There was something strange in that poem width of space between the cupboard and the wall. A discoloration of the wall, perhaps. Something darker in the shade of the wardrobe.

The hard edges of the wardrobe bit into the soft flesh of my fingers. I put my back into it, and the piece of furniture gave ground gradually. It was a door behind the wardrobe, just as pellets at. Not any door, though. I ran my fingers over the smooth surface of the wall. Just a painted one. So convincing were the brushstrokes on the door that I had to touch the wall. all again to tell myself that it wasn't real.

How'd you know this was here, baby bear? The other children told me. From school? As far as I knew, she hadn't brought friends home before. No, Daddy. The children from behind the door. I looked into her tawny eyes, hoping to spot some twinkle of mischief there. There was nothing there but an innocent earnestness.

I lay in bed that night, studying the cracks on the ceiling. My heart pounding heart in my chest. A heavy baseline above the distant rumble of the heating. My daughter's words had unsettled me in a strange way I could not pinpoint. It felt off somehow. Like a surrealist painting. One tiny detail throwing my carefully ordered world into disarray. I took deep breaths, trying to drive away that strange, tight fear in my chest.

The odd painted door. A mural of some sort? Why was it still there when a room had so clearly been repainted? The thumping of the rats in the walls, sounding so much like little footsteps, the children from behind the door, she said. I rubbed my forearms, vigorously. trying to press the goosebumps back down into my skin. That's when the thumping started again.

Not rats, I realized. Not rats at all. Footsteps. The light bounce of a child. I crept up to my wall again, pressing my ear against the wallpaper. There was laughter there, soft and faint. not the laughter of a single child children

their happy footfalls beating a rough drum beat on the wooden floor there was someone else in there with my daughter my heart jumped I felt to chill in my veins as I rushed out in my room and tore down the corridor the silvery light of the moon shone through the window it gave everything an odd flat look without contrast.

Bell's room was only a few feet from the door to our bedroom, but my chest heaved with deep body shaking breaths. I could still hear them faintly through the door. The thud of feet on the floor. I steeled myself. There was nothing. Sound traveled strangely through these old houses. Echoes maybe.

She was just talking to herself in her sleep. Just a moving. Perhaps door knobs slowly. There was a conspiratorial shush from the other side of the door and silenced the scent like a shroud. I gave the door a gentle push. The room was dark and quiet. The moonlight crept into the room. My daughter was standing there just behind the door, a still figure against a dark background.

The shock took the strong. strength from my legs. I backed away a little quicker than I meant to. She just stood there, swaying slightly. Thin white crescents showed from under her hooded eyelids.

Her lips were moving, almost soundlessly. I leaned forward, straining to make out what she was saying. It slowly became clear. One sentence, over and over. All the doors are open now.

All the doors are open. All the doors are open now. All the doors are open. And from behind her, in the shadowed room, click. Bell didn't recall a thing the next morning. She could sense my frustration and fear as I quizzed her about the night before. Dark circles framed puzzled eyes in her pale face. in her pale face. She hadn't slept well last night either. Sylvia took her to school. I hadn't

broached the topic with Sylvia yet. There was still some time before I had to leave for the office. I crept back to my daughter's room feeling like a thief in my own empty house. I stood in front of that strange painted door for the second time in as many days. I ran my fingers around its edges, remembering the strange sound of the door shutting from the night before. Its edges were wholly contiguous with the wall. I pulled the wardrobe out further, putting my entire frame between the wardrobe and the door and leaning into it. There was no gift, no yielding of the door.

It was just painted over a wall as solid as any other. I was about to go when I heard an unfamiliar rasp under my foot. The floor was gritty with some kind of dust. I knelt down and pinched some of the dust up between two fingers. All the doors are open now. My daughter's dreamy voice in my ear, my memory of it so sharp that it seems like she was right there whispering it. How odd it was.

For the dust to be pink, of course it would be. It wasn't dust at all. It was paint. Paint from the wall. Things didn't get better. The gambling footsteps continued at night, unabated. That in the whispers and the giggles at night. Whatever was in my daughter's room toured with me.

It never let Sylvia hear it. I would stay up, waiting to wake my wife up just in time to hear. it, only to be met with a stubborn silence. Trickery wouldn't work either. We stayed up late to catch a DVD long into the small hours of the night, but the house remained quiet. The laughter from the next room was always tantalizingly distant. The happy sounds of children at play is still from a great distance,

too great a distance to be in the room next to mine. Bell was in high spirits, but she was wasting away. Sylvia hadn't noticed it yet, but I felt it in the sharp bones of her shoulders, pressing into my arms when I hooked her, or her skinny arms that I could almost encircle with my thumb and forefinger. I received an email from her teacher, mentioning that Bell still wasn't integrating well at school. He said that Bell was perpetually tightly.

tired in class and she had plamed the late-night games of tag and hide-in-seat with her friends for her tiredness. You need to exercise more control over your girl. He said, what was going on? Sylvia was already asleep. The nightly visits hadn't started yet. I slid into Bell's room silently, an open packet of flour in my hand. I scattered it all around the floor, taking care not to step into the flower myself.

I lay back in my bed with a sigh, waiting for the sounds to start. Sleep took me unexpectedly, but what little I had was fitful and restless. I woke with the snort at first light. It was a Saturday, and it would be some time yet before the rest of the world woke. I stretched under the covers, my back popping satisfyingly. I blinked the sleep from my eyes. The flower. I had to check the flower. I swung my feet off the bed and planted them on the floor.

Right next to a pair of white, speckled footprints. Just where they would be if someone was standing over my bed. Staring at me, the damnable chill stole the warmth of the morning sun from my skin. My hands clenched and unclenched spastically like dying spiders. I stared at the trail of flower-marked footprints from my open door. How long had she stood there, in the dark, watching me sleep, I wondered. I set up on shaky legs, a hand on the wall to support myself down the corridor. Bell's door was ajar.

It swung open silently. The sound of deep breathing told me that Bell was still asleep. There was but a single set of footprints. just starting from her bed where her feet would have landed if she got off no multiple footprints just a single set from my daughter

typical some nambulism perhaps the stress of the move the new school could have brought it on she'd never slept walk before but who knew what dark things lurked in her psyche I heaved a sigh of relief chastising myself for a week's worth of irrationality.

How reassuring the illusion of normalcy in our lives. And how quickly it shatters. Not with a roar or a flash. With something simple. Something simple like my daughter's shoe, bouncing off my toes I tried to leave the room. Flipping once, twice, and coming to rest next to a hollow in the fly.

on the floor. The size. The shoe. The prince. It didn't fit. It didn't match. Whatever had gotten off the bed had stood next to me the night before.

It wasn't Bell. After that cruel prank, the noises at night returned unabated. The strangeness started to leak. The night was no longer its sole province. I was waiting for. bell outside the upstairs toilet another Saturday morning when I heard a familiar taunting voice start off over the sound of the shower. A chorus of children's voices, saying something with a strange cadence, a chant almost. Stay, they seemed to say. Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay. They were in there.

There was no way for them to escape. I found the door unlocked. I turned. I turned. Her in the knob, braced my legs, and threw the door open, and found nothing. Hot water still gushed from the showerhead. Steam billowed out into the cooler air of the corridor. No one was there. I'd seen her go in. I would have wagered my life on it, and yet she was gone. The giggling started again, coming down the corridor, mocking.

her room. I bolted down the corridor. I found her there. A towel wrapped around her bare body. Staring at me with cold mirth from her bed. Her dripping hair had left a trail of water on the wooden floor. A trail which led to the wall with the painted door. I felt her eyes trailing me as I left the room.

I shut the shower off, looked for how my daughter and the voices had escaped. the tiny toilet. It took a minute, like the picture with a young lady that turned into an old crone. The answer was right there in front of me, sketched out between the tiles in front of me in bold strokes of dark mildew, was the vague outline of a door. It was another sleepless night. I thought long and hard about trying to explain everything to Sylvia. It sounded crazy.

there were doors in the walls, doors that our daughter had walked through. Doors led in something strange into our house, something that wanted her to stay. The thought lingered in the back of my head like the superlative scab, itchy and red and raw. Sleep would not come easy. I was contemplating a little chemical assistance to aid me along my way when I grew aware of, a soft sliding sound. Movement caught my eye. I saw a slim figure slowly shuffled by the door to our bedroom.

Bell? I called out to her softly. She didn't break step. And what a step it was. A stiff-armed and stiff-legged march down the corridor. Her feet scraping over the wooden floor. Bell! I called out, a little louder.

There was no response. I got out of bed and tiptoed to the door. The door of the toilet clicked shut softly. I followed. The lights revealed an empty corridor. The toilet door yielded with a squeak of complaint. The silence was thick and cloying. It seemed that no sound would carry through the air.

The light clicked to light. in the toilet. Shadows left and danced with its first few flickers. The shower curtain swayed. The draft I had left in when I opened the door, I told myself. It did not help. I chided myself from my childish fears, but the flutter in my gut remained. I yanked the curtain aside, roughly. My either hand bawled into a fist to protect myself. From what? My daughter? Nothing. awaited me on the other side of the curtain. Nothing but that strange outline of a door. Etched out in the lines of the tiles.

I heaved a sigh of relief. Perhaps the lack of sleep was getting to me. My fear is spilling over in awaking dreams. The calm was short-lived. I heard another door slam shut. Downstairs. A series of childish titters carried up through the floorboards. I bolted downstairs.

Again, the lights revealed nothing, almost nothing. A huge throw rug that had come with the furnished house had been tossed aside. There, hidden under it, was another door, scratched into the parquet flooring. I felt sick to my stomach, thinking the days we'd spent on the couch with our feet on that hideous thing. I ran my fingers around the grooves. With the scratch marks, the door felt cool to the touch, cooler than the surrounding wood. The same feel of a front door, guarding against the winter chill. Whatever it was that the door guarded against, it was cold.

Very, the laughter started again. Taunting, mocking. I heard the creek of my daughter's footsteps on the stairs to the basement. The light of the living room seemed to shy away from the depths of the basement. I could make out Bell's outline, just with a light of the living room at the darkness of the basement. The light switch was at the foot of the stairs. The steps sang under my weight. Bell didn't turn around.

I reached out to grab her shoulder. Her bony's shoulder was icy cold. I pulled her towards me. I could just nearly see her face. Something blotted out the light. I blinked at the silhouette at the top of the staircase. The lights on? Bell's voice.

Bell was at the top of the stairs. Corressive fingers on my hand. The girl in front of me. Her fingers on mine. Her voice was a hoarse whisper as though forced from a throat long turned to dust. She giggled and twisted away from my grasp, vanishing into the dark. The dark space under the house suddenly filled with a pair on the feet down the dusty floor, two pairs, three pairs, until it seemed like an entire legion of light fever dancing across the floor.

The sound was deafening in that confined space. I reached forward and thumbed the light switch, only to be greeted by silence and the slowly settling dust. Something was wrong with the wall again to expect. With a sweep of my hand I clear the dust from the wall, just as I expected. Another door. This one a huge set of double doors painted on the wall with garish colors. Just before I left the basement, I saw the clean circles on the floor where the opening door had swept the dust away.

I had to go. There was something dark in the house. something wholly unnatural about those strange painted doors. I sprinted up the stairs. Grab some clothes. I told Belle as I passed her. I did not stop to see if there was a shred of understanding in her blank eyes. She turned and followed me silently upstairs.

I shook Sylvia awake roughly. Four weeks to the day we moved in and we were fleeing our own home. She plinked the sleep from her eyes. In hushed tones, I tried to explain the situation to her. The pained doors, the sound of the children, the danger we were all in. Her expression solely changed from sleepy bewilderment to one of disbelief and annoyance. She told me I was overreacting, that the stress of the move and our job was taking its toll on me. We would talk about it in the morning, she said.

Get help from a doctor if we need to. I grew increasingly agitated at her apathy. I begged her to humor me for just one night, for our family to shift to a motel for a single evening. Our conversation grew heated. This was all cut short when Belle reappeared at our doorway. Her hair was wild. Her eyes burning with some inner fire.

You should go now. All the doors are closing soon. I must be with them. Her voice was toneless, the flat delivery of an atheist reciting a litany. Sylvia gaped, having her daughter acting strangely as her husband tipped her over the edge. Weeping, she rushed forward and held bell closer to him.

You're not going anywhere. This isn't real. Daddy's sick. He made you sick, too. You and I will get away from here, get away from Daddy, those words. Felt like physical blows. I felt sick. My wife started pulling at Bell's hand, trying to move her.

Bell stood fast and there was nothing my wife, with her advantages and strength and weight, could do to shift her an inch. Sensing the prey was about to evade them, the things in the house grew restless. Our room filled with the room filled with the room. the sound of feet down the floor, the sound of little feet running up and down the corridors. With a squeak, Sylvia pulled the door shut and leaned against it.

The door shuddered on its hinges as unseen things flung themselves against it. And successful, the house grew silent. Sylvia stared at the doorknop. I shook my head, stepping off the bed. I had just gotten onto my feet when a new horror showed itself, or a wall. was stretching, distending like a boil, bulging obscenely towards us. There was a door under the wallpaper. It had been here all along. Sylvia began to sob, big hiccuping sobs of fear. We heard the tearing sound of the glue

ripping off the wall. The blister on the wall took shape. I saw the hard edge of the door pressing, straining against the wallpaper. Behind that, the sharp points of fingers pressing against outwards, many pairs of hands. A pale finger burst through the thick wallpaper. It hooked down where it began to tear at the fabric. Sylvia now were transfixed by the sight, paralyzed by fear. Sylvia screamed as Belle tore herself free from her mother's grasp. Bell took a step forward and placed her hand on the light switch.

I saw my daughter again. For the last time, her eyes sparkled with tears. Don't look. You don't want to see them. I love you. With a flick of her wrist, she plunged the room into total darkness. The sound of wallpaper ripping was very loud. The temperature in the room fell. It felt larger.

somehow that we weren't in the bedroom of our home anymore in some vast and empty space. A chill wind blew and it smelt of dry dust. When the wind died down, we were alone in our room. Our girl was gone. What is there left to say after that? We did what we could. We moved into a hotel. The police came.

They looked for prints. They asked questions. they took pictures, they broke down the walls behind the doors with their hammers, nothing. The detectives came, they asked more questions, hard questions sometimes. They took me away for a while. The doctors came. They cajoled and counseled. They asked me about my parents, about our family, if I had ever hurt my daughter.

The doctors found nothing wrong with me. The cops found nothing in my house. The detectives found nothing false in our story. They let me go. Sylvia and I stayed with her parents for a month. Bell's disappearance ripped a hole in our lives. We tried. Some things just don't heal right.

Others don't heal at all. Things weren't the same. The split was amicable, and we just drifted. No arguments, no fights. Just the slow death of the love that had once bound us. And what then came back here? There was nowhere else I could go. The first night was the hardest.

The bedroom was out of the question. I spent the first night on the couch, hugging a bottle of Jack. It was midnight. when the laughter woke me. They were still there in the house. Through the tinkling of the laughter, I could pick out just a single voice. The father never forgets the voice of his child.

The doors were gone, but they were still there. She was still there. I'll stop here for the night. Her again. She sounds happy. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast,

or to suggest stories for future episodes, please visit us. At Creepypod on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, or email us. All stories told on this podcast can be found at creepypasta wiki.com and are protected by a creative. Commons license. Some rights reserved unless otherwise stated.