“The Thing Under My Apartment”

I’ve lived in this old Brooklyn apartment for almost five years. The building creaks like it’s alive, but rent is cheap and the neighborhood is decent. Nothing truly weird ever happened—until three weeks ago.

It started with a smell. Not like garbage or mold, but something rotting—wet, metallic, and wrong. It came from the floor near my bed. I told my landlord, but he just shrugged and said, “Old pipes. You’ll get used to it.”

Except, I didn’t.

Every night, around 2:30 a.m., I’d hear scratching. Soft at first, then louder. It wasn’t rats—I know what rats sound like. This was slower, deliberate. Like fingers dragging along the wood beneath the bed.

One night I had enough. I grabbed my phone, turned on the flashlight, and got down on the floor. There was a tiny gap between the floorboards, just wide enough to see movement—something shifting in the dark, glistening slightly when the light hit it. I froze. Then… something moved toward me.

I jumped back so hard I hit my head on the nightstand. When I looked again, it was gone.

The next morning, I told my neighbor, Mrs. Lewis. She’s lived here since the ‘70s. Her face went pale.
“You shouldn’t stay in that room,” she said. “That apartment… it used to belong to a man named Carter. He went missing in 1994. Police never found him. Some say he never left.”

I laughed it off—until last night.

Around 2:30 again, I woke up to the same smell—stronger this time. The scratching started immediately. I turned on my phone light, and before I could even look down, I heard whispering. Faint, wet-sounding whispers coming from the floorboards.

“Don’t… leave me…”

I froze. The floor beneath my bed began to bulge upward, like something was trying to push through. My heart nearly stopped. I ran out, barefoot, and spent the night in my car.

This morning, I went back to grab my things. My mattress was half sunken into a hole in the floor—black, wet, and reeking. When I shined my flashlight down, I saw what looked like a human hand, pale and bloated, reaching upward before slowly sliding back into the dark.

I called the cops. They came, checked, and told me the floor had collapsed due to “moisture damage.”

But last night, I checked the local news. They found human remains in the crawl space under the building.
The article said the man was estimated to have died around 1994.

His name was Daniel Carter.
My landlord just texted me: “Floor’s been fixed. You can move back in anytime.”

I blocked his number.