I've been going back and forth on whether to call about this. But I think it's time someone knew. This was 1986. Late spring, early summer, I remember because the lilacs were blooming and the smell was everywhere. I was living in Millerton, which is barely a town. Maybe 800 people. The kind of place where everyone knows everyone, or at least knows of everyone. My house was on Maple Street, which sounds nicer than it was. Just a row of old houses, most of them rentals. Mine was a two-story with a basement. Nothing special. I'd been renting it for about three years at that point. I was working at the grain elevator during the day, and I'd usually spend my evenings reading or watching TV. My sister kept telling me I should get out more, meet people. I wasn't interested.
The house next door had been empty for almost a year. The previous tenant had moved out suddenly, something about a job opportunity. Then in March of '86, someone new moved in. A man, probably in his fifties. Thin, graying hair, always wore the same brown jacket. I never caught his name. He didn't introduce himself, and that's what got me, in a town that small, people introduce themselves. He kept to himself completely. No visitors that I ever saw. Didn't have a car, I'd see him walking to the grocery store, carrying his bags back on foot. The houses on our street were spaced pretty far apart, maybe 100, 120 feet between them. Old properties with big yards. So it wasn't like we were right on top of each other. But here's the thing though, I started noticing his schedule. He'd leave every morning around 8, come back around 5. Regular as clockwork. Except he didn't seem to have a job. I asked around. Nobody knew what he did.
The first time I noticed something really odd was maybe two months after he'd moved in. It was a Saturday night, late. I was in my basement doing laundry. I had this old washer and dryer down there, and the dryer was acting up, making this rattling sound. I was bent down trying to figure out what was wrong with it. That's when I heard it. A sound coming through the basement wall. A kind of high-pitched keening. Not quite human, not quite animal. It lasted maybe ten seconds, then stopped. dryers are so frustrating to fix - Connor' I stood there in the dark, I'd turned off the overhead light to see if that would stop the dryer noise, and waited. Nothing else. I told myself it was probably a cat. Maybe he had a cat. But it didn't sound like a cat. It sounded wrong.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]