A Saskatoon CreepypastaI have lived in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, for most of my life, and until last winter, I never believed in ghosts. I believed in bad weather, strange noises in old houses, and people who told stories to frighten others. Then, one night in January, something underneath my house called me by name.
It began at 2:17 a.m.
I remember the time because I had just checked my phone. Outside, the temperature was minus thirty degrees, and the wind was rattling the windows hard enough to make the glass vibrate. I was lying in bed when I heard three knocks coming from the basement ceiling.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
I lived alone.
At first, I assumed the sound was the furnace. The house was old, and its pipes regularly complained whenever the temperature dropped. I rolled over, pulled the blankets over my head, and closed my eyes.
Then I heard my mother's voice.
"Daniel? Can you come downstairs, sweetheart?"
My mother had been dead for eleven years.
I sat up so quickly that I nearly fell out of bed.
Her voice had been perfect. Not something vaguely similar, not a recording distorted by static. It was exactly how I remembered her: gentle, slightly tired, with that little upward inflection she used whenever she asked me for something.
I stared at the bedroom door.
"Daniel?" she called again. "It's cold down here."
I didn't answer.
My mother had died in a hospital in Regina. She had never lived in this house, and she had never visited Saskatoon during the last year of her life.
I reached for my phone and called my brother.
He answered after several rings.
"What?" he mumbled.
"Do you hear anything strange when you're alone?"
There was a pause.
"What kind of question is that?"
"Never mind."
I was about to hang up when he said something that made my stomach tighten.
"Is this about the basement?"
I stopped breathing.
"What do you mean?"
He was silent for several seconds.
Then he whispered, "Don't answer it."
The call disconnected.
I tried calling him back, but he didn't answer.
I sat in bed until sunrise, listening to the house settle around me.
Nothing else happened that night.
By morning, I had convinced myself that grief, exhaustion, and the strange acoustics of an old house had played tricks on me. I went to work, drank too much coffee, and deliberately avoided thinking about the basement.
That evening, I called my brother again.
He finally answered.
"Where did you hear that?" I demanded.
"Hear what?"
"You said something about the basement."
He sighed.
"Daniel, when Mom was alive, did she ever tell you about Grandpa's house?"
I remembered a little about it. Our grandfather had owned a house on the outskirts of Saskatoon, an old wooden place that had been demolished before I was born.
"No," I said.
"Grandpa used to say that sometimes people heard voices coming from underneath the house. He thought it was a gas pipe or something. Then one night, Grandma heard Grandpa calling her from the basement."
My brother stopped talking.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Grandpa was upstairs with her."
A cold sensation crept across my shoulders.
"What did Grandma do?"
"She opened the basement door."
"And?"
My brother exhaled shakily.
"She heard herself screaming from the bottom of the stairs."
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to tell him this was ridiculous.
Instead, I asked the question that had been bothering me since the previous night.
"Did Grandma go down?"
"No. Grandpa dragged her away from the door."
"What happened afterward?"
"She never spoke about it again. But Grandpa eventually boarded up the basement stairs."
I looked towards my kitchen.
The basement door stood at the end of the hallway.
It had been there when I bought the house, painted white with an old brass handle. I had never given it much thought.
"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked.
"Because Mom told me something before she died."
My brother's voice became quieter.
"She said that whatever was in Grandpa's basement had followed the family. She said it sometimes called people using the voices of those they loved."
I heard a faint noise behind him.
A knock.
Then another.
My brother stopped speaking.
"Where are you?" I asked.
"At home."
"Are you alone?"
He didn't answer.
Instead, I heard a woman's voice in the background.
"Michael? Come downstairs, sweetheart."
My brother began to cry.
"That's Mom," he whispered.
Then he screamed.
The phone went dead.
I called the police.
They went to my brother's house and found him sitting in his kitchen, unharmed, staring at a closed basement door. He refused to explain what had happened. When they asked about the screaming, he said he couldn't remember making any noise.
He called me the next morning.
He sounded exhausted.
"Daniel, I'm leaving Saskatoon," he said. "I'm going somewhere without a basement."
"You're not making any sense."
"Listen to me. Whatever you heard last night, don't go downstairs."
He hung up.
I haven't seen him since.
Three days passed without incident.
Then, on Friday night, I came home from work and found my basement door standing open.
I was certain I had closed it that morning.
The darkness beyond the doorway seemed unusually deep. I could see the first few steps descending into the basement, but the light from the hallway appeared to stop at the threshold.
I approached slowly.
A smell drifted up from below.
Damp earth.
Rotting wood.
And something strangely sweet, like flowers left too long in a vase.
I reached for the light switch.
It didn't work.
Then I heard footsteps.
Someone was climbing the stairs.
I backed away.
One step.
Two.
Three.
A pale hand appeared around the edge of the doorway.
Then another.
Something was pulling itself upwards, slowly, as though it had forgotten how to walk.
I ran for the front door.
Behind me, my mother's voice called out.
"Daniel, please."
I stopped.
It was the word please that did it.
My mother had always said it exactly that way when she wanted me to stay with her a little longer.
I turned around.
At the top of the basement stairs stood a woman in a faded blue nightgown.
Her face was hidden by long, wet hair.
She was holding something in her hands.
A photograph.
I recognized it immediately.
It was a picture of me as a child, sitting on my mother's lap.
The photograph had been in a box in my bedroom closet for years.
The woman slowly raised her head.
"Daniel," she said.
I could see her face now.
It was my mother's face, but the proportions were wrong. Her eyes were too far apart, and her mouth stretched almost to her ears.
Behind her, something moved in the basement darkness.
A second face appeared.
Then a third.
All of them belonged to people I recognized.
My grandfather.
My grandmother.
My father.
People who had been dead for years.
They stood shoulder to shoulder on the stairs, staring at me with expressions of terrible patience.
My mother took one step forward.
"We've been waiting for you," she said.
I ran.
I didn't stop until I reached a neighbour's house. I spent the night there, and the following morning I called a contractor to inspect the basement.
He found nothing unusual.
No hidden rooms.
No crawlspaces large enough for a person.
No evidence that anyone had entered the house.
I sold the property two weeks later.
I moved to an apartment on the other side of Saskatoon, on the fourth floor of a building with no basement access for tenants.
For a while, things were normal.
Then, last night, I woke at 2:17 a.m.
Three knocks came from beneath my bed.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
I froze.
A moment later, I heard my mother's voice.
"Daniel? Can you come downstairs, sweetheart?"
I live on the fourth floor.
There is no basement beneath my apartment.
I reached for my phone and turned on the flashlight.
The floorboards beside my bed were lifting.
Something underneath them was pushing upwards, slowly, patiently, as though it had all the time in the world.
Then my phone rang.
It was my brother.
I answered, unable to speak.
His voice came through in a frantic whisper.
"Daniel, listen carefully. I finally figured out what it wants."
The floorboards creaked.
My brother began to sob.
"It doesn't want to kill us."
A long, pale finger pushed through the gap between the boards.
"It wants us to come down."
Then my brother said the last thing I ever heard him say.
"And Daniel?"
"Yes?" I whispered.
"Whatever you do, don't look underneath the bed."
Naturally, I looked.
There was a face beneath me.
My face.
It was lying on its back in the darkness, smiling up at me.
Its lips moved.
And in my own voice, it whispered:
"You're taking too long. Everyone else is already here."
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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