Be Careful Who You Buy Furniture From - Original Short Story by Josh
I know how this is going to sound, and honestly, if somebody had told me this story a few years ago, I probably would have laughed it off. I was never the kind of person who believed every creepy noise was a ghost, or every old piece of furniture came with some tragic history attached to it. I just liked saving money.
When my girlfriend and I first moved in together, we were trying to be smart financially. We had both been renting separate apartments, but once we started dating seriously, one of those places was basically sitting empty most of the time. It felt pointless to keep paying for both, so we found a two-bedroom place on the quieter side of town. It was more expensive than we wanted, but it felt safe. The kind of place where we thought we could settle down, maybe start a family one day, and not have to worry quite as much about the world outside.
We brought most of our furniture from our old apartments, but we were still missing a few things. The spare bedroom was basically a storage room at first. Friends and family kept asking when they could visit, and we kept saying, “Soon. We just need to get a bed in there.” I wish we had waited until we could afford something new.
There was a secondhand furniture place near the edge of town that sold lightly used bedroom sets, tables, couches, that kind of thing. The owner seemed nice enough. Helpful, talkative, not pushy. We found a bed frame that looked perfect for the spare room, and the price was way lower than anything we had seen online. There were a few dark, odd-looking spots on the wood, but we assumed it was normal wear. The guy said he couldn’t remember who had dropped it off, but with how much stuff he had coming in and out, that didn’t seem strange at the time.
We bought it, brought it home, cleaned it up the best we could, and set it up in the spare bedroom. Not long after that, a friend stayed over. He was supposed to hang around the next morning, maybe grab breakfast with us, but he left early without really saying goodbye. He mumbled something about forgetting an appointment and practically rushed out the door. That wasn’t like him. He was the kind of guy who would tell you every detail of his day whether you asked or not. After that, he barely talked to us.
A little while later, I switched to a midnight shift because the pay was better. Since I had to sleep during the day, I started using the spare bedroom so I wouldn’t wake my girlfriend up coming in and out. That was when things started.
At first, it was just knocking. Nor the normal settling sounds a place makes, either. I mean sharp knocks from inside the room, like someone tapping on the wall beside the bed. Then came the bangs. Loud enough that I thought my girlfriend was dropping things or moving around without thinking. One afternoon I finally got irritated and opened the door to ask her to keep it down.
She wasn’t home. Her car wasn’t even in the parking lot.
I tried to ignore it. I told myself I was tired, that working nights were messing with my head. But then the room started to smell. Not all the time, just randomly. I would wake up and smell something sour and rotten, like damp wood and decay. I checked the closet, the vents, under the bed, everywhere. Nothing.
This went on for months before I finally asked my girlfriend if she had noticed anything weird. The second I said it, her face changed. She looked like she wanted to tell me something but was afraid of what it would mean if she said it out loud. When I pushed her, she shut down and said, “Nothing.”
That night, I decided to call out of work. I thought maybe she was mad at me, and I had missed something obvious. When I told her I was staying home, she just shrugged and said, “You can go to work. It’s fine.”
I finally asked her what I had done wrong. That was when she told me.
She said I had been coming to her bedroom door at night and just standing there. Not saying anything. Not moving. Just standing in the doorway. She said when she told me to stop messing around and come to bed, I laughed and walked back toward the spare room.
I told her I had no memory of that. I don’t sleepwalk. I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t taking anything. She didn’t believe me. She thought I was playing some stupid prank, and the more I denied it, the angrier she got.
A few nights later, I went out with friends. When I got back, I heard her yelling before I even opened the apartment door.
“Stop standing there. I’m not joking anymore.”
I thought someone had broken in. I ran up the stairs, unlocked the door, and went straight to the bedroom. She was standing there furious, asking why I kept doing it. I showed her the text I had just sent my friends saying I made it home, something we always did when we were out late. She looked at the message, looked at the time, and still said I was messing with her.
I asked her if she had actually seen my face. She said no. Just a shadow. A shape about my height. But she said the outline was mine. The shoulders, the way it stood, even the way it tilted its head. She said it looked enough like me that every time it happened, she assumed it was me refusing to answer.
I promised her I would stay in our room that night so she could see I wasn’t doing anything. She didn’t want to at first, but eventually she agreed.
We were lying in bed with the lights off, both of us wide awake, when the door slowly opened.
There was someone standing in the doorway.
Not just someone. Me.
I know that sounds impossible. I was in the bed. She was beside me. But whatever stood in that doorway had my build, my posture, my face, or at least enough of my face that my brain recognized it before I could make sense of what I was seeing.
My girlfriend screamed. I yelled something at it, and it turned and walked toward the spare bedroom. I chased it because at that point my brain still wanted it to be an intruder. I wanted it to be anything normal.
The spare room was empty.
Then I felt something behind me. I turned around, and it was standing in the hallway, exactly where I had just come from.
It looked at me and said, in my voice, “It’s time. You’re dead.”
I swung at it. My hand went through nothing. Then it was gone.
The next day, we went to a church and asked if someone could come bless the apartment. We burned sage. We prayed. We did everything people tell you to do when they don’t know what else to say. Nothing helped. If anything, it got worse. Doors opened by themselves. The smell came back stronger. My girlfriend stopped sleeping through the night, and I started seeing movement in reflections where there shouldn’t have been anything moving.
We tried to find another place, but we were locked into the lease and couldn’t afford to break it. I was still skeptical enough, or maybe just desperate enough, that I didn’t want to spend money we didn’t have unless I had something solid to point to. Eventually, we called a medium. I know how that sounds. I would have rolled my eyes at it before all this happened.
She walked through the apartment quietly, then stopped in the spare bedroom. She pointed at the bed frame and said, “It’s that.”
She asked where we got it. Then she crouched down near the dark marks on the wood and went pale. She said those weren’t stains from age or water damage.
She said they were blood.
According to her, someone had died on or near that bed. Not naturally. She said it felt like someone had been killed by a person they trusted, maybe someone they loved, and whoever did it tried to clean the frame but couldn’t get everything out. She also said the person connected to it felt close to my size, close enough that whatever was in our apartment could use me as a shape. After that, she refused to say anything else and left.
We got rid of the bed that same day. I don’t mean we donated it or sold it. I mean we made sure it was gone and would never end up in someone else’s spare room. After that, the apartment went quiet.
We never really talked about it again. But I still think about that furniture store sometimes, and about how many people buy things without knowing where they came from. So if you ever find a secondhand bed frame with dark stains that don’t quite look right, do yourself a favor.
Leave it there.
