The New Owners

Late at night, the Thompsons’ cozy suburban home hummed with the soft glow of a single lamp in the living room. Mark and Lisa had just settled into bed when a faint creak echoed from the back door—a sound too deliberate to be the house settling. Mark grabbed the baseball bat by his nightstand, whispering to Lisa to stay put, but as he crept downstairs, the air grew heavy, tinged with the metallic scent of wet soil. A shadow darted across the kitchen, too tall and jagged to be human, and then the lights flickered out, plunging the house into a suffocating dark.

Lisa’s scream shattered the silence as Mark bolted back upstairs, finding her staring at the bedroom window-outside, a figure pressed its warped face against the glass, its eyes hollow pits, its mouth stretched into a lipless grin. The bat slipped from Mark’s hands as the thing tapped the window with bony fingers, each knock syncing with the thud of something heavy moving through the walls. The front door slammed open downstairs, though they’d locked it tight, and footsteps—wet, uneven—climbed the stairs, pausing just outside their room as the tapping stopped and the grinning face vanished from the glass.

By morning, the neighbors found the Thompsons’ house eerily quiet, the back door hanging off its hinges, smeared with muddy handprints that trailed inside. The couple was gone, their bed unmade, the bat lying splintered on the floor. Scratched into the bedroom wall were the words

“We live here now,”

and though the police searched, they found no trace of the intruders—only a faint, rhythmic tapping from the attic that faded when they climbed up to check. The house sits empty now, but some swear they see shadows in the windows at night, grinning out at the world they’ve claimed as their own.