My Husband Won't Allow Me to go into our Basement

My husband doesn’t allow me to go into our basement of our house. Let’s call him John. We just moved into it about two months ago. The only time I ever saw it was when we were just viewing the house before we bought it. I’d never experienced my husband’s behavior like this before we moved. He said he wanted to make it into a man cave, which in his eyes meant no woman, or even wife, could ever be allowed down there. At first, I respected it, thinking he would let up on it sooner or later. But after two months, nothing changed. If anything, he got even more strict about it. The more strict he got, the more curious I became.

We were both lawyers at a small firm in upstate New York. We both worked the same hours, same days, Monday through Friday, nine to five. It was pretty rare if we stayed late, or went early. If we had a brief due, it came home with us. We had no kids; both of us were too busy to be able to raise one. We each had our own office in our house in the spare bedrooms. But John was downstairs more than he was in his office. I had custody of the main level, he got the basement. Sometimes, he’d be down there so long, he’d forget about his briefs and cases he was supposed to work on. For a man cave, I never saw him take any of his friends down there to hang out on the weekends, not even when it was football season.

I was convinced the house was haunted. No, not the typical doors closing by themselves, or things go missing just to reappear in a different spot. I would hear thudding noises, sometimes even a muffled wailing. All coming from the basement. When I brought it up to John, he dismissed it as a window being open down there and probably knocked things down and it was probably making the pipes howl. All I could do was agree instead of trying to argue with him.

There was a fair share of times that I tried to get downstairs. I tried to make up a lie that I was vacuuming and needed to go down to finish it off. “Now, honey buns, you know the rule. The basement is off limits to you,” he’d say.

“I’m just trying to clean the house,” I’d reply. He’d shake his head and that’s the end of it.

Once, I found a box buried deep in our closet with old New York Giants gear in it; a blanket, a signed football, a flag. I dug it out and brought to the basement door, about to take it down.

“What are you doing?” John appeared behind me so suddenly, I nearly dropped the box on my feet. “Were you about to go downstairs?”

“I found this box of football stuff and figured I’d just set it down there for you.” He took the box from me and set it before the closed door.

“I’ll take care of it.” He waited for me to leave the room, and eventually, I obeyed.

That night, I was woken up in the middle of the night to the wailing sound. I put my pillow over my head to try to block it out but I could still hear it. I reached over to nudge John to wake him up. “Do you hear that?” I whispered. “It’s happening again.” I felt a pillow but not my husband. I sat up and found that John wasn’t in bed. The first thing that came to mind was he was in the bathroom. Our bathroom was in our room and I didn’t see the glow of the light coming through the cracks of the door. I decided to investigate. I got out of bed and tiptoed towards the basement door. The wailing was louder than I’d ever heard it.

“Honey buns?” I let out a small shriek and found John standing behind me. He was in his plaid pajamas, his hair was still a bit messy from sleep. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t you hear the wailing?” I asked. He stared at me like I was crazy. “I know it’s coming from downstairs.” I reached for the doorknob but John already had his hand wrapped around my wrist.

“I’ll take care of it. Get back in bed.” I slowly walked to the edge of the room, back toward the kitchen when I spun around to him.

“Where were you at? You weren’t in bed when I tried to wake you up.”

“I was in my office working. I have a brief due in two days.” I nodded once, and I could still feel that crease in my forehead that I get when I think too hard about things. Defeated, I headed back to bed.

The suspicion got worse and worse as the days went on. More nights came up that John wasn’t in bed when I woke up. Some nights, the wailing would stop and I’d sleep through the night but like clockwork, it’d come back eventually. I could hear thudding during the day on the weekends. I could easily dismiss it as the wind knocking something off a shelf but in the back of my head, I knew it was something else. I knew he wasn’t getting a lot of sleep. At work, he’d be like a zombie. He was started to get dark red and purple bags under his eyes. When confronted about it by coworkers, he’d just say he either stays up way too late working or crash in bed way too early and wake up during the night, unable to go back to sleep.

At some point, John would take random days off. When I’d get home from my day at work, he’d be even more robotic than before. I figured he’d take days off to catch up on his sleep, but clearly, there was no sleeping involved. As the weather got colder and colder, I ended up with the flu. I took two days off work to just stay in bed and relax. On the second day, I was feeling well enough to be able to get up and make myself something to eat. I put a bowl of soup in the microwave and stood there to wait for it. Until I realized something. This was the first time I was alone in the house. John had gone to work for the day and I was alone. Completely alone.

I walked over to the basement door and stared at it for a moment. It was four-thirty, which meant John wouldn’t be getting home for another hour. I placed my hand on the doorknob and turned it, swinging the door open. I slowly made my way down the stairs and into the dark room. The curtains to the little windows were all closed. My bare feet touched the cold concrete floor. I pulled the string to the light above me and saw that it wasn’t a man cave at all. There was no football stuff set up, there was only a couch neither of us wanted upstairs, and the TV wasn’t even hooked up and plugged in. What could he have been doing down here all this time that made this so secret to him?

Then, just as I was gonna finally say it was just a boring basement, I heard a faint knock on the closet door at the other end of the room. I made my way over to it, feeling uneasy and scared. The wailing was back, and it was definitely coming from the other side of that door. I swung the door open and nearly fell over. I gasped loudly, cupping a hand over my mouth. A young girl sat taped and tied to a chair. She had duct tape over her mouth, around her wrists and ankles. A rope was around her chest, keeping her secure to the chair. Her hair was a mess with a few spots of sticky dried blood. Her face was bruised and swollen, almost to the point where she was unrecognizable. The rest of her body was beaten, and it looked like she’d been getting tortured for weeks. The wailing was her crying and trying to scream through the tape on her mouth. The thudding was her ramming herself into the door. The secret John had kept from me about the basement was because of her all along. I stood there, staring at her as she went in and out of consciousness, and trying to process this.

“Honey buns.” I froze where I stood at the sound of John’s voice. His victim began to cry at the sight of him and I never turned around. My heart dropped to my stomach and I knew I was in trouble. “What did I tell you about coming down to the basement?”

#creepypasta #murder #torture #suspicion #dezyshae