Old Abandoned House
Every author has a handful of moments in their youth that stick—half-memory, half-myth—etched into their bones like fingerprints on old glass. One of mine involves being the petrified kid on the staircase in an old abandoned house. It was the kind of fear that only teenagers with oversized egos can conjure.
Back then, we were just a group of restless youths with too much energy and not enough supervision. But that’s the way it was in those days. Our town had an old abandoned house made of weatherboard, with rusted tin gutters, and a front gate that creaked and squealed whenever someone opened or shut it. We had no idea who once owned it, but the place had been vacant for a long time; naturally, that made it the perfect place for us to poke around and play games.
I Was The Kid On The Staircase
We‘d been exploring the upper floor, throwing around ghost stories and daring each other to sit alone in the dusty lounge room as the sun went down. But it was on the ground floor where we found it. A little door—no higher than a child’s shoulder—wedged in an obscure dark corner. A latch. A hollow darkness behind it. And, just inside, a narrow stairwell leading to the depths below.
“Go on, Shane,” one of the guys said. “You’re the brave one.”
So, full of the bravado that only comes from being watched by your mates and trying to impress a girl who wasn’t even there, I crouched, opened the door, and started my descent down the stairwell. The wooden stairs creaked underfoot. The air was musty, still, and slightly damp, like a tomb that hadn’t been visited in years. Each step took me deeper into the unknown. To be the kid on the staircase in a dark stairwell when your mates are safely in a room above, didn't really seem that brave.
Then, halfway down, something changed. The air felt wrong. Heavy. Like it was pushing back. I heard a noise—probably just a rat, or my imagination doing backflips—but in that moment, it sounded like something dragging across concrete. Too loud for a rat. My heart was beating out of my chest, and I felt like my time was about to come to a grizzly end. I swear I levitated back up the staircase in an instant. I really didn't want to be the headline in the local paper: Old Abandoned House Claims The Kid On The Staircase.
I burst out of the little door like a termite on fire. My friends were nowhere to be seen. Cowards! They’d taken off when I disappeared down the stairwell, convinced I was about to be delivered into the clutches of something evil and to die alone in the depths of that old abandoned house. And that's what it felt like. Not to be too dramatic, but I felt like I was standing on the staircase to oblivion.
As I raced out of the old house and into the yard, I found myself in the path of an old man who looked like he had just risen from the dead. He was hunched over, but weirdly, his eyes were staring straight into mine. “Get out of here while you have the chance,” he shrieked.
Adrenaline coursing through my veins, I flew over the fence and ran like hell without looking back. I found my friends cowering around the corner.
I never got another chance to prove my courage. The next time we returned, the house was half-demolished. Bulldozers were tearing it apart. And that little door? Gone. Swallowed by rubble and time. And the staircase to oblivion? I don't think I would have had the courage to alight those stairs again, let alone descend to the bottom. To this day, I still wonder what was down there. A cellar? An old workshop? A forgotten room full of secrets? Or something much more sinister? But our old abandoned house was no more.
And this is the staircase that eventually found its way into my book, The Room Under The House. I can't say this whole experience damaged me in any way, but I never did venture into an old abandoned house again. Funny how stories root themselves in memories of the past.
I may have been the terrified kid on the staircase who didn't make it to the room below, but I guess, in some roundabout way, that room found me.
