My wife and I have lived in our house for around 5 years, and in that time we’ve probably been down into the cellar a handful of times. Our house is an old Victorian terrace house, and so the cellar is cold and damp. When we first moved in we kept wine and stuff down there (because my wife liked the idea of telling people we had a ‘wine cellar’) but it got annoying going down there every time so we stopped using it. There’s only the two of us living here so we never really needed to use it for storage space.
A few weeks ago we decided we were going to renovate it, maybe turn it into a mini gym or something. So at the weekend we went down and began cleaning it up. The cellar has a stone floor, but the walls were covered in this horrible, yellowed floral wallpaper. It looked old as hell, and I assumed it was put up decades ago. So we began to strip the wallpaper. And that’s when we found the door.
Covered up with wallpaper, the door was set into the wall. It was plain wood, and the door handle had been removed so that it was flat. We were pretty stumped at how we hadn’t noticed this before, how it had blended in so well with the rest of the wall. But at this point, I was pretty excited that we’d found a secret door, so I largely overlooked its oddness.
All the houses in our street have cellars, so I assumed it must be an old doorway leading through to next door’s cellar. We decided that we’d go round to our neighbours’ tomorrow morning and tell him about the doorway, and suggesting we brick it up or something (I didn’t really feel comfortable about having this access point into our house).
My wife tried to look through the small circle hole in the door where the handle had been removed, but it was pitch black in there, so because we’re nosy, we used the torch on her phone to peek through the hole. My wife looked first. She suddenly went still.
“This doesn’t go into next door’s cellar,” she said slowly, moving back from the door. I frowned and took her phone, looking for myself. Instead of the cellar, there were stone steps, leading downwards. I couldn’t see very far with the light from the phone, so I brought down my big torch and managed to get the door open.
We looked down the stairs with the torch. They weren’t very long, and at the end of the stairway was another door. This one looked really old, wooden panels kept together with metal columns. It even had one of those metal ring handles.
It didn’t make sense how this could be here. Even though it was going down, the beginning of the stair way would still cut into next door’s cellar. We’d been in his cellar for drinks a few times, which had been done up into a games room with a bar and pool table, and I had never noticed a big jut out from the wall that would cover a stairway, or that it was smaller than our cellar if there was a whole wall blocking it off.
My wife thought we should probably talk with him before going down and left, but I was too curious about the whole thing. So I took the torch and went down. I tried the handle, and it was a bit stiff, but I was completely took by surprise that it opened. I shone the torch inside. It was a concrete room, similar looking to our cellar but smaller, and this was the only entrance or exit that I could see.
I waved the torch around and nearly jumped out of my skin. There was a man stood at the back wall, facing the wall, his back to me. He was completely still, wearing a black suit and black rimmed hat. The man was so still that I began to think he might be a manikin, until he slowly lifted one foot.
I stood transfixed, my torch light trained on him. It was just bright enough to illuminate his body, but the rest of the room was in complete darkness. He held his foot still in the air, before slowly moving it a step backwards. His movements were unnatural and jerky, like someone who didn’t fully understand how to walk. He stayed like that for a moment, completely still, one foot placed back. Then he lifted his other foot in the same jerky movement. This time when he stepped back, his foot slammed on the floor.
The sound shook me out of my frozen state and I jumped back. As soon as I moved it was like I’d triggered something, and suddenly he moved so quick. He was running backwards towards me, his legs jerking around unnaturally. Writing this down it sounds kind of funny, but at the time it was utterly terrifying. I’ve never seen someone move that way before.
I instinctively threw the torch at him (maybe I thought I could knock him out or something, I honestly don’t know) and legged it back up the stairs, slamming the door shut behind me and running up the stairs leading out of the cellar, slamming that door shut too. I hesitated by the door, barricading it with my arm, trying to control my breathing and understand what I’d just witnessed.
I heard the sound of the door push open in the cellar, and then what sounded like a huge lump of flesh dragging along the floor. I thought I began to hear what sounded like a low hissing noise, at which point I ran out of the house yelling my wife’s name. She was stood on the front step of the neighbour’s, talking to him. I grabbed her and pulled her to the other side of the road, yelling for my neighbour to get away from the house.
Without waiting to explain to them what I saw I grabbed my phone and called the police. We all stood there in the dark, my neighbour in his robe and slippers, looking at the house. After a few moments, I saw the lights that we’d left on flicker through our kitchen window. And then they went out completely. All I remember was holding my wife’s hand so tightly, looking up into our dark windows, and waiting for the police to arrive.
They found no one in the house, but the cellar door was open and so was our back door. They checked our garden but found no one, and no footprints or signs of someone being there.
They brought a team over to check out the hidden room we found. My neighbour claimed no knowledge of the room, and that he too couldn’t understand how the stairs and room could possibly exist, could fit in between our two cellars. The police couldn’t explain it anymore than we could. I didn’t want to ever go back in there, so they showed us photos of the walls inside that room. The concrete was carved with symbols, and they found what looked like centuries old dried blood. They had the symbols sent to our local university’s history department, but no one knew what they meant.
They sealed off the room and we’ve never gone down into the cellar again. I think we made a huge mistake that day in opening that door, in going into that room. I think we set something free that day, something that someone had locked up for a reason, and I don’t think it’s good.