I found a room in my house that I've never seen before (I've been living there for months) Part 1 of 2

1            

Life has been pretty good for me lately I’d say. I’d worked for a couple of years back in Montgomery which was almost a couple of hours away from my hometown of Burton, Alabama. I didn’t mind it up in Montgomery, but it wasn’t home. I missed living in a small town where there’s barely any traffic and there’s places and space to just go for a walk in a field if you want to, like where I grew up.

When I got my new job I knew exactly what I wanted to do about a place to live. I moved back in with my parents of course for the time being but I wanted to build a place of my own and I had dreamed of getting to do this for years. I wanted to build myself a little bardominium style house, one with a high ceiling and a huge living room, I knew whatever I was building was going to be for just me unless I got married or something someday so I could make it exactly how I wanted to.

It didn’t take long to find exactly where I wanted to build it either, I built it right on some land on my grandparents’ property right next to their house. First, we got a metal building guy to do the outside shell of the house which was about a one thousand square foot rectangle that was about 15 feet high at its tallest point and after about 3 months, the help of my parents, and a couple of contractors; it was finished.

Me and my dad built all the walls and ceilings and we got some outside help from an electrician and plumbers. We worked on the place nearly every day for those 3 months or so except a couple of weeks where either my parents were on a vacation or I was out of town on a work trip but the house came out exactly how I wanted it to be.

The house was a rectangle with one half of it being one large living room with the kitchen on the other end of it, the other half was a small hallway where there were two bedrooms and a bathroom off it. I had argued for a while with my parents at the beginning of the building process about what to do with the ceiling as I just wanted everything to be open at the top and maybe just a ceiling over the side of the house with the bedrooms. This would leave basically the living room to be open to a nearly 15-foot ceiling which might be a waste of space, but I loved the high ceilings. My parents convinced me that it would be more practical to close in the top of the living room which left me with a lower ceiling in the living room, but I feel like I still got what I wanted for the most part.

“What you want to do tonight, Aaron?” asked my younger brother Eric. Eric would usually come home to visit about every other weekend. He left home a couple of years ago since he started school at UAB in Birmingham.

“What you want to do? Not much going on sports wise,” I replied as Eric stood up from his chair as we were watching some old episode of Family Guy that I had seen about a thousand times. This was our usual routine to go out to eat somewhere on whatever day Eric was back in town and then would come back here and find something to do before the weekend started where we’d mostly hang out at my parents’ house.

“Got a great idea though, you’re probably not going to like it I’d imagine,” said Eric as I already had a good idea at what he was about to mention.

“Paperball?” I replied begrudgingly.

“Of Course,” replied Eric as he went for an open notebook that I had laying on my desk in my bedroom. Paperball was basically wadding up a couple of pieces of paper together and taping them and playing baseball except the ball is paper and your hand is the bat. An inning was 2 outs since it was hard to get an out with just one person trying to field anything that is hit. It was one of those things that I actually did like playing but throughout childhood and even now Eric loved playing it so much that it was almost a drag, but I’d happily play tonight though.

“Alright then, let me get the furniture moved then,” I replied. Since I’ve been living here, the home plate would be in the kitchen while first base would be the wall that divided the hallway and the living room. Second base was the wall next to the front door, and third base was the TV.

“We’ll do first to 50 then, sound good?” asked Eric to which I nodded.

The game followed as usual, Eric would jump out to something like a 10-run lead on me before I got him out by tagging him with the ball and me suddenly scoring a little bit and playing better defense. Before you knew it, it was 47 to 48 with me having 48 in the bottom of the inning and I had a ghost runner on first base (ghost runners to keep up with who was on base since it was of course just us 2).

Games at my house would tend to take a little longer since my ceilings were lower than at my parents’ house and any ball hit into the ceiling counted as a foul ball but any ball that hit the far side wall above where the door was, that was a home run and all I needed to win. I then destroyed one, a line drive going right towards the wall. After a couple of seconds of anticipation, it landed just a couple of inches under the ceiling resulting in a home run and a win for me.

“Yes! What a comeback, right Eric?” I said mockingly as I rounded the bases even though it wasn’t necessary for paper ball of course.

“Man, I’ve been sucking lately for sure,” said Eric as he picked up the paperball that I had just hit a home run with and smacked it from under the hallway doorway up into the ceiling. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first but I did want to keep that paper ball just in case we played again tomorrow night.

“Where’d you hit it?” I asked Eric as he had walked into the hallway to get it.

“Wow, come see where this thing ended up,” said Eric as he walked out of sight further into the hallway.

I followed him into the hallway and looked up to see the paper ball lodged into the door in the hallway ceiling that led into a little loft area that was above the ceiling of my hallway, bedroom, and bathroom.

“Jeez how’d you do that?” I asked Eric as we both looked up at the rectangular wooden door that was in the hallway ceiling near the bathroom. There was a wooden ladder that we installed back when we built the house that ran up the wall separating the hallway and the living room that went up to this door that really looked like any typical attic door. Eric was already halfway up it; the paper ball quickly came falling to the ground as Eric simply just took off the door’s latch and pushed the door upward.

“Cool, what stuff you got up here?” asked Eric as he peeked his head through the door.

“Basically any crap that I can’t put in the closet,” I replied. I haven’t been living in my house for too long, but I had made a couple of trips up there so far, it was mostly old toys up there and holiday decorations that my parents made me move out of their house.

“Nice, I remember playing with that way back in the day,” said Eric as he was now out of sight and in the attic.

“What you looking at?” I asked as I had a hard time remembering exactly what stuff was still up there.

“LEGOs, there’s also hot wheels stuff too, pretty neat,” said Eric, I could now see the door opening and Eric climbing down the ladder.

“You didn’t stay too long, thought you were always up for adventure,” I said as Eric was now back on the ground of the hallway.

“Way too hot up there, dark too. You should invest in some light up there cause it looks like a nice space up there, probably could have an entire new room up there if you wanted,” said Eric.

We went back to rotting away watching TV in the living room for the rest of the night and slept in for a while the next morning which was certainly far from out of the ordinary for us. Eric probably not as much but I was always starving for a day like today when I could wake up whenever I wanted given that I had a regular 9 to 5 job.

Both me and Eric woke up to the sound of knocking on the front door. I looked through my bedroom window to see that it was our grandmother.

“Good morning y’all, sorry if I came to early,” said my grandmother as I opened the front door for her. As she said that I glanced up at the clock on the wall and saw that it was already 10 AM.

“No grandma that’s fine, we needed to get up anyway,” I said as I let her in the house, being my next-door neighbor my grandmother of course had a key to my house but she never just walked into the house on her own.

“Hey grandma, great to see you,” said Eric sleepily as he had sat up from the inflatable bed that he would sleep on when he spent the night at my house.

“Hello boys, your mom said that Eric would be here this weekend so I wanted to bring over some French toast for y’all,” said grandma as she walked over to my kitchen table and placed the couple of plates of French toast and a bottle of syrup and placed them down.

“Awesome, thanks grandma, can’t ever get enough of that stuff,” said Eric as he gave grandma a hug. She was a typically warm and caring type of grandmother that always would bring stuff over to us whenever Eric was over and on top of that she was a great neighbor too. Always there when you needed them and not there when you wanted to be left alone. It had been of course hard on her whenever my grandfather died about five years ago but over time she had managed and had even started working part-time again.

Grandma hung around for about 10 minutes or so asking mostly questions to Eric since she didn’t get to see him as often, all the while both me and Eric were already wiping syrup off of our chins from devouring the French toast. She left and me and Eric mostly crapped away the rest of the day between throwing the football around before going over to my parents’ house to spend the rest of the day with them.

2         

I went back to my house at around 9:30 PM or so while Eric stayed at mom and dad’s house like he normally did when coming over for the weekend. I of course had a couple things I wanted to do when I got home which was mostly playing video games and doing some Saturday night laundry which was just about as good as it gets for a bachelor like me.

I did however start getting curious about what Eric had found last night. I had of course been in my attic before, but it had been a solid six months since I had moved in and there were a lot of things that my parents had helped with involving either building my house or moving into my house while I wasn’t really there. I of course assumed that anything up there was just toys from my childhood like all my LEGOs that I used to play with nearly religiously, but I felt like that might actually be a good thing to explore my childhood a bit.

After about an hour or so of being back home I decided to climb up the hallway ladder and open the latched door into the little loft/attic area that was above my bedroom and bathroom.

Once I got up to my attic I had my lantern style flashlight ready since the light source for the attic was a single window that we had determined would be enough light to suffice for the little attic space. We figured that it would have been a huge hassle for us having to run wiring upstairs given that we had a window there already for the day and if I left the attic door open from the floor it provided enough light at least to walk around.

It looked the same as I remembered it being, it was probably about a 50 square foot rectangle that had a small three foot raised wall around it where the middle wall separated the hallway and the living room. Just like I figured it would be, most of what was up here was about 10 large Rubbermaid boxes that contained a lot of random things like books, kids clothes, and toys. There wasn’t much to note other than before, the only thing now was trying to figure out what I wanted to do when it came to getting one of these boxes successfully down by myself. I went straight to the Rubbermaid box that bordered directly above the living room and hallway wall that was labeled “SpongeBob LEGOs,” all while scrunched down due to the low diagonal ceiling.

I opened up the box and found nothing in the box, something didn’t make sense, but it didn’t immediately cause too much worry for me since I figured that surely there was a good explanation for it. My parents likely did something with them when helping to move stuff in, or so I thought before I looked over the ledge of the loft space wall to see something that I had never seen before.

It was nearly pitch-black dark, so I raised my flashlight and pointed it forward and I saw neat grey carpeting. It looked as if there was a whole other room that was above my living room space. I couldn’t believe my eyes mostly because how could I have missed that? It was always so dark up here the times that I had been in this attic space over my bathroom that I had never even paid attention to what was beyond it. Judging from how high the ceiling was in the living room I just assumed it was just a low hanging crawl space but now standing in front of it that was far from the case.

I walked over to the three-foot wall that separated the attic space above the hallway and the living room and climbed over it to the feel of that grey and flat carpet. The spot that I first got on I could tell wasn’t very high as I could feel the cold metal ceiling on my back. I raised my flashlight and saw in the opposite corner something that I hadn’t seen in a long time; it was my entire mini hot wheels city set that I used to play with as a kid, set up perfectly against the wall. It looked exactly like it did back then and perfectly set up the way I used to. I walked to that side of the room and leaned down to see the whole set including the fire station, bank, police station, and city towers with little roads that connected throughout the whole city when the individual pieces were put together. I was amazed and overjoyed to see these perfectly set up in a part of my house that I felt stupid for not realizing before had existed.

I looked at the overarching wall right above where I was, which was a light switch which I had desperately needed while I was up here stumbling around in the dark. I flipped the switch and saw the entire room suddenly light up as I was even more surprised to see how well lit the room was, even better than the rest of my house below. The room had perfect carpet but also perfectly done white drywall lined the room, the ceiling was still insulation and steel girders just like it was when the building was first built but I was amazed at how well my parents had built this part of the house, almost like a surprise. The most surprising was what I began to notice all around the room.

I looked to my left and saw a yellow bookshelf just the way it was when I was younger, in fact it even looked like it had the exact same books too, it was filled with basically the entire goosebumps books collection.

On another wall I saw my entire imaginexs collection just sitting near where the bookshelf was in the corner. They weren’t very complicated things, but it certainly would have taken a person a solid four or five hours to have completed all of them. What I saw next was something that I expected to see but still wasn’t quite ready for the scale of it.

Maybe an entire decade ago I spent the entire summer before 8^(th) grade making a whole LEGO city, I had got together several sets that I had accumulated over the years including airports, a hospital, fire station, police station, and I had even built a little college complete with a football and baseball stadium. I bent down and got a closer look and could see that the streets of the city were even made of that exact same poster board with black streets made to look like asphalt from the dry erase board markers that I had at the time. It was exactly how it had been the last time I had built it from the movie theater all the way to the beach, it was all there.

Through all this excitement of seeing things like this perfectly plucked right out of my childhood I hadn’t yet stopped to think what all of this could have meant. Who did all of this? Sure wasn’t me, I wasn’t even aware that most of this stuff was still around, I figured most of this stuff was packed deep in some closet somewhere and I thought we had gotten rid of at least some of those imaginex a while ago. It seemed at the very least that my parents had installed this part of the house without me being involved with it which didn’t necessarily seem that strange since they worked on the house a lot when I was gone but had they also been the ones that set up all of these toys?

If not them then who else could have had any motivation or access to do all this. My birthday is in a couple of weeks; the thought crossed my mind that maybe my parents had been setting this up to surprise me but that seemed like a strange birthday present for a 24 year old for sure. Even if I really enjoyed seeing all this nostalgia it was a little creepy to think that my parents would secretly set up all my childhood toys for me to play with.

I turned the light off and climbed down from the attic all the while still pondering this whole situation. I decided that tomorrow I wouldn’t ask my parents about this, at least not yet. I would test this all out on Eric while he was still in town and see what he thought like maybe they had told him about it as a surprise to me.

3         

Church was at 10 in the morning per usual and I walked into church to see my parents and Eric were already seated in the usual pew that the family sat in. I sat down and attended the service for the next hour and I even managed to get the bizarreness of what had occurred just the night before out of my head or at least until the service was over.

“Hey Eric, can you come over to my house real quick before the games start?” I asked Eric as we were standing outside of the church at the front entrance while mom was still talking to someone inside.

“I guess so, we were going to watch the Saints game at 12 though you know,” said Eric which I knew would be cutting it close since it was already 11:15 but Eric was probably going to leave to go back home to Birmingham not long after the game and I figured that it would make even less sense for him to come over to my house then then now.

“Oh yeah I know, it won’t take long though don’t worry,” I replied to Eric as we both gave a look over to dad who was halfway paying attention to us and the other half taping his foot waiting for mom to get done talking inside.

“Alright then, I’ll be over as soon as I get back to mom and dad’s and get changed. See you then,” said Eric.

About 20 minutes later I could hear Eric’s blue Camry pulling into the driveway. I had just gotten back and changed out of my church clothes just a couple of minutes before and I was excited and a little worried about what I was about to show Eric. He had played with a lot of those toys that were up there so I figured that he would be excited to see them placed so invitingly up in the attic, but I was a little worried that maybe he knew something about this if it was a surprise that I was about to spoil from my parents.

“Hey, so what’s the deal with the coming back over here?” Eric said as he entered my house.

“So, this is kinda weird, but you know how you went up the ladder to my little attic the other night?” I asked as a starter since I felt like Eric would most certainly protest my next request.

“Yeah, what’re you leading towards here? You brough me back here to talk about you’re boring attic?” asked Eric smiling.

“Don’t worry we won’t miss a second of our beloved 2 and 10 New Orleans Saints today I just want you to go back up to the attic and tell me what you see up there,” I told Eric as it seemed like he was a little aggravated with what was a strange detour from our usual Sunday routine.

“No way, you’ve probably got some creepy clown costume set up to scare me up there or something, I know a set up when I see one,” replied Eric.

“No that’s not true I swear, I just noticed something strange about the part of the attic that goes over the living room from up there and I’m just wondering if you notice the same thing up there when there’s some light. I can go up there with you if you like,” I replied to Eric hoping that he’d go up there just to help pique my curiosity to see how he’d react to all those old toys up there.

“Alright then, give me the flashlight,” said Eric as he walked towards the hallway ladder.

“Thank you, all you got to do is just go up there and tell me what you see,” I said as Eric was now on the ladder climbing up.

“Sure, I will say though if this is some set up to jump scare me or something I think I might just strangle you,” said Eric sarcastically.

Eric didn’t say anything until I could see him open the hatched door and climb up into the attic.

“What do you see up there?” I asked up towards Eric.

“Same exact stuff that I saw Friday night, there’s literally nothing different up here,” replied Eric.

“Go look over the ledge in the direction going back towards the living room,” I said trying to get Eric to notice the same thing that I had last night.

“It’s like a crawl space, past this ledge off the attic space that’s over the bathroom it’s literally no more than two or three feet of space all around the entire house,” replied Eric. What was he doing up there then? He must have been lying or joking with me for some reason because how on earth could he not see an entire room over the living room with carpet, toys, and bookshelves. It wasn’t no crawl space up there; there was at least 8 feet of space from the floor to the ceiling up there.

“What? I’m coming up there,” I said as I took the reins of the wobbly wooden ladder and went up to the attic.

“Sure, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at with all of this,” said Eric.

I got to the attic to see Eric standing off to the right just like where I told him to go looking over the ledge of the attic space with a flashlight to see exactly what he had described. Beyond the spot where the four-foot wall that surrounded the small attic area that was over the hallway and the bathroom there was nothing but a short crawl space. In the exact spot that I had first seen flat grey carpet just last night there now was just 2X4 boards that had drywall under them which was the living room ceiling, probably not even a space you’d want to crawl through even if you could. From what I could see it would have been nearly impossible to get to the other side of the living room ceiling from up here without crawling on your stomach.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said puzzled as I looked out over the crawl space that I had just been so sure earlier was a room with all my favorite toys from my childhood all perfectly lined up for me to play with.

“What’re you talking about, it’s just the top part of your house man, hadn’t you been up here before?” asked Eric as he was still standing in the same spot over to the left holding up the flashlight to point across the crawl space leading to the other side of the living room ceiling.

“Nothing, nothing; I’m sorry about all of this, let’s get back over to mom and dad’s house and see the game,” I said as Eric continued to give me a disturbed look, I’m sure probably thinking that maybe I had played some hard to understand joke on him.

The rest of the day played out just as it should have as both Eric and I hustled back over to my parents’ house, which was about five minutes away, and ate lunch and watched the Saints get destroyed by the Panthers. We waved goodbye to Eric as he made his way back up to Birmingham and I stayed at mom and dads to hangout for a little while after. The entire time I continued to think about what I had seen in my attic just last night, I mean how could I not? I guessed that it was later at night, it could have easily just been some wild dream the more that I thought about it. I briefly thought about asking my parents about it, but after what I had just seen while up there with Eric I felt like I would have looked like just as much of an idiot as I felt after showing Eric up there earlier in the day.

4         

I went back home right before nighttime and continued to watch football throughout the night divided by some bouts of video games and pacing back in forth across the house and doing some cleaning. It was an early night to bed between the fact that I was back to work tomorrow early and the usual boredom that Sunday nights normally brought.

I got done with my usual nightly rituals and routines before lying in bed. I usually watched an episode of some old sitcom or something that I had on DVD before actually drifting off to sleep so I did the same as I was watching an episode in the third season of Frazier, I was about to close my eyes for the night when I spotted a different source of light. It wasn’t very strong, but it presented enough light for me to look over and see that the light was coming from the hallway.

Thinking that I must have simply just left a light on somewhere maybe in the bathroom or spare bedroom, I shuffled out of bed. I got through the edge of my bedroom doorway and to my surprise I found that the light was coming from above me, from the hallway ceiling door. This was starting to get really stupid in my opinion, 30 minutes ago I had finally convinced myself that I had hallucinated the entire thing with the new room full of toys up above the living room. What I was about to do I figured would be to finally prove me right or wrong one way or another as I went back into my bedroom and got my phone before going back to the hallway ladder.

I climbed to the top and opened the attic door and was met with light. I’d never before seen it so bright in the spot of the attic that was right next to the ladder, I peeked my head above and could see exactly what I had seen the night before with that same familiar flat grey carpet. The room was fully illuminated as the lights were on and I could see all my toys sitting in their exact same spots as they were yesterday, almost as if all they were just right where I had left them.

A smile ran across my face as there was joy in me that I was right about seeing all this last night and I ran right over towards the yellow bookshelf that was straight from my childhood. I went to where I left off at and pulled the book Mummies in the Morning from the Magic Tree House collection, I loved reading those books as a kid, and they were clearly under my reading level now but I couldn’t help myself.

I went from that to playing with my LEGO city, I noticed that my little LEGO football players were on the football stadium field in my little LEGO college campus. I began to even move the figures around on the field as if they were actually playing a real game.

I had been doing exactly what I had been doing last night as I was swept away with playing with the toys that I enjoyed the most from my childhood. During all of this, I felt almost like I was in some type of dream like state like I was in a trance. I suppose that maybe had been the case because I really was having this same dream again, I figured that I might as well enjoy it while I was here. I was playing with all these toys in the same way that an eight-year-old might would, I’m 24 and it felt almost as if I had reverted straight back to my child like mind set of that kid I once was sitting in my bedroom floor back at my parents’ house putting together LEGOs.

Not that I would refuse to have anything to do with these toys as a 24-year-old, but I feel like I should have been more embarrassed about all this even though there isn’t anyone else around. I suddenly came to a moment of clarity as I was right in the middle of moving a LEGO police car down the LEGO street to answer a burglary claim pushing the car across the LEGO bridge I had set up.

What the hell was all of this? Why was I suddenly playing with toys like a kid? Before I had just been fascinated with seeing all my old toys together like this but this was starting to just be creepy. My mind was starting to understand that there was something wrong here, my brother couldn’t see all this stuff up here, why am I then? Was it really a hallucination or is there some trick here that I’m missing?

I decided that the best thing to do would be to just get up and go down the ladder and maybe just try not to even think about what’s up here for a while. I stood up and dropped my LEGO car down on the floor which sent it shattering LEGO pieces coming apart all over the town streets in between the bank and the fire station. As I turned back towards the back wall of the room, I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed yet.

In the center of the back wall there was a sheet on the wall, like there was a small eight-foot-wide opening in the wall that was a separate room that was separated from this one by a white sheet that was hung up on a pole with hangers like what would hang a shower curtain.

At first I just stood there and wondered how could I have not noticed that curtain there? It was the same color as the matte white color of the walls but I suppose I just didn’t notice it because I hadn’t really even looked at that side of the room as much given that all of the toys were lined up on the side and the opposite side of the room from this back wall.

Without much thought or speculation, I walked towards the white curtain thinking that what was behind it must be another closet that likely held some more tubber ware boxes of stuff that my parents must have installed to store more of my stuff in my house. I was completely unprepared for what really was behind the curtain

I pushed open the curtain and saw none other than my grandmother sitting down in a chair in the middle of the room. This room contained all sorts of other grandmotherly things with a table with a sewing machine, on the wall to the right was yarn and cabinets on the back wall that were filled with craft supplies. There was even a whole bookshelf on the wall to the left that was filled with old detective novels that I knew that she tended to read most of the time.

“Grandma?” I asked feebly since I was shocked enough by this that it felt like a word hadn’t been invented yet to describe how off put I was by this situation.