This evening as I was taking my daughter upstairs to bed, she froze outside her open bedroom door.
“What’s wrong?”
Staring into her room, she said “I just saw a cat or a dog or something on my bed. It looked up at me and then slid under the covers.”
I turned the lights on and we went in. Of course there was nothing there.
“She says she saw something in the back stairwell,” my wife tells me.
Our daughter is eight years old and not prone to flights of fancy or making things up. Also, we have been very careful to not let her overhear any of our conversations about what is going on here at home.
When I talk to my daughter, this is what she tells me:
She saw something hanging from the wall in the back hallway, up near the ceiling. A big dark mass, something solid. About the size of a cat. It reminded her of a bat, curled up and hanging there. It was alive, “kind of like an animal.” She ran to get her mom, thinking it might be a bat (we get them sometimes in the house, especially during the summer) but when they got back it was gone.
If there was a bat that big in our house, I tell my daughter, we would know it.
“You did the right thing,” I tell her. “If you ever see anything like that again, just come and get me or mom right away. We’ll take care of it.”
As I came into the laundry room this morning, a shadow moved in the dim light from right to left — coming from the hallway and passing through the closed and locked door at the top of the back stairs.
The shadow was large, as wide as a refrigerator though not as tall. It has a solid mass to it, depth even.
I did not at any point feel afraid.
This is just another episode in a growing list of sightings here in The Last House — shadows mostly, sometimes dark and sometimes pale, moving up and down those back stairs.