#Sounds/Banging #Person/Intruder #Parasite #Location/DominicanRepublic

The noises from the bedroom back door

This happened to me when I was around 7 years old.

When I was younger I used to live in the Dominican Republic my grandparents on my father's side and his brother. My dad lived in the United States at the time. My uncle and I shared a bedroom (to clarify, I was a 7 year old girl and my uncle was 9), and to get to it you had to go through my grandma and grandpa's room. My room also had another door which lead to the backyard.

As a lot of you might know, the Dominican Republic can be really dangerous, specially at night when the lights go out. Because the country can't afford to always keep the electricity running, we have blackouts multiple times a day and mostly during the nighttime when most people are asleep. So nights are very, very dark.

The door in my bedroom that opened to the backyard always scared me because I could hear everything from outside and it felt like someone could burst through the door and abduct me. The door was made of long planks of wood laid vertically next to each other. It was the type of wood that always looks like it's rotting. I think it actually was rotting.

I faced my bed towards the door so that I could see easily if anyone tries to come through. Every night I would fall asleep from the boredom of staring at that door. My grandpa sympathized with me and eventually he put a huge vintage wooden dresser in front of the door that he bought off the back of some guys truck. The dresser was so thick and heavy that I instantly felt safer.

It started the very first night.

As a habit of looking in that direction as I fall asleep, I was staring at the dresser. It was weird to look in that direction now because it was pitch black. I could no longer see the little beams of moonlight between the cracks on the door, or hear the sounds of the wild animals in the yard or the late night traffic on the street.

I remember it was nearing the season for tropical hurricanes so some nights I could hear faint sounds of the trees swooshing and the door creaking. Some nights the door was louder, like it's finally breaking down from the pressure of the winds. My grandparents didn't see anything wrong with the door in the morning when I told them I was scared it might be falling apart.

We never thought anything of it after that.

A few weeks later we had a huge storm. While I was trying to sleep I could hear banging and crackling and creaking and really loud 'woosh' and 'splash' and 'thumps'.

Naturally, I thought it was just the storm and so did my uncle. Every night after the storm we kept hearing similar sounds late at night. It would wake us up. We knew it wasn't the storm anymore, but we would try to be logical and realistic; it was probably the old dresser. It was probably the door because it got lose off it's hinges. It was probably a stray cat scratching it's paws on our door because the wood is soft; cats have weird habits. It was my uncle trying to scare me. It was me trying to scare my uncle.

We kept coming up with new excuses every night and blaming each other. All that was kept inside the dresser was blankets, towels, curtains and various linen for storage, so we never had a reason to look ourselves. The dresser was tall, and it had a divider in the middle. The left half had shelves, where my grandma would fold the towels, and the right half had a hanging rack, where she would hang curtains and sheets. Sometimes my grandma would complain that the blankets had dirt on them. She would blame my uncle and me, thinking we were wiping our hands on everything because we were too lazy to wash them.

One night there was a louder than usual "thump" coming from the direction of the dresser. I woke up in a sudden panic, but my uncle was already wide awake. I immediately thought he was playing games and started yelling at him. My grandpa woke up and came to see what's going on. I told him my uncle woke me up because he was trying to scare me, but my uncle denied it and said he was woken up by all the noise outside.

My grandpa didn't hear anything and told us to stop playing around and go back to sleep. As he started to walk back into his room we heard another loud "thump!". My grandpa heard it too. We all got freaked out because that time it sounded like it was coming from inside the dresser. He went to the bathroom and got the oil lamp we keep in there, turned it on and opened the dresser to look.

We saw the hanging blankets and curtains move slightly and right away we saw. My grandpa quickly stuck his hand in and moved the linen to the side. There was a woman in the dresser. She was a Haitian woman, really small and freakishly skinny.

There was a big hole on the right side of the cardboard backing of the dresser. It didn't lead to the outside that we could see; the door was still there, but we instantly knew how she got inside from the position she was in when my grandpa opened the dresser. She was standing up with her knees slightly bent, facing towards the hole. Her hand was up and behind the hole, reaching up towards where the frame of the door would be.

We could see her whole body and I still remember what she was wearing. She had a long, flowing sun-colored skirt, a dark-green (or dark-blue) shirt that was too small for her, so we could see her depraved belly. She had a rag on her head, but we could see her rough black hair sticking out through the gaps. I don't remember if she had any shoes, but I think she probably did. She also had a thin rope wrapped around her wrist all the way up to her elbow on her left hand. She was holding a plastic bag that had one or a few small things in it.

When my grandpa had moved the blankets out of the way, she panicked and we heard that she had dropped something. It was a couple of nails and screws. The ones that were holding the door planks together. The plank became loose and she started to push it with her hands. That was the creaking noise we heard. After a few seconds of struggling, she finally pushed the plank down and started to fit her body through the crack in the door.

Her head didn't fit right away, and my grandpa reached towards her and grabbed her arm. She bit him. She bit him so hard that she almost ripped off his skin. He was bleeding and she didn't let go until he let go of her first. She rammed her head through the door, and we could see how much it actually hurt her to force her head though it because it made a very distinct scrapping sound, and she yowled.

She tripped over her skirt when she reached the other side of the door, but started to run. We had an outdoor sink, and she got on top of it. She climbed the wall that separated our backyard from the backyard of the people on the other side of the street. The wall was made of cinder blocks, and it was so old and abused that it had a bunch of holes and deformities in it. She used these to climb.

While she was climbing my grandpa ran out of our room, past his bedroom, the living room and dinning room and opened the door to the backyard. We followed him, and as we ran by my grandma woke up. By the time he got the back door open the woman was more than half way up the wall.

He grabbed a machete he kept behind a broken washing machine we had in the yard, right next to the door, and ran towards her. He swung at her foot, but missed by a few inches. At that exact moment the electricity came back on, so all of the street lights flickered and turned on. We could see her now. She reached the top of the wall and jumped to the other side. My grandma had followed us to the yard, but didn't get to see what was happening. She asked and my grandpa just started swearing and yelling at the woman.

We don't have free emergency services in the Dominican Republic, so there wasn't much we could do because we didn't have any money. No one was hurt in the end. We went to examine the door and the dresser and tried to figure out how exactly she got in there almost every night.

The woman had removed the screws and nails on one of the planks on the door, cut a hole in the dresser and was staying in it. That woman was in our room, almost every night for about 2 months. Sleeping just a few feet away from us. We don't know if she ever stepped out of the dresser and walked into the rest of our home.

We didn't go back to sleep for the rest of the night. Before the sun was fully risen, my grandpa was nailing down the door from both sides. He bought a sack of cement and covered the door with it from the outside. He also replaced another door on the side of the house which lead to the outside. It was in the same condition as my bedroom door.

We didn't see that woman again. I'm glad we did not meet any closer than we had.

edit:typos.