No matter how old we get, being alone at home at night still elicits an underlying fear.
We know the doors are locked, we tell ourselves we're stupid for worrying. Yet still we do a quicker-than-usual walk up the stairs as we turn the lights off for bedtime.
One man who has a good reason to fear the home is New Yorker Grady Hendrix, who shared a terrifying childhood story with his Twitter followers.
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His thread, which has since gone viral, plays on all of our biggest childhood fears: not being alone in your home.
Grady's story begins when he was nine-years-old. First discovering the joys of snaking downstairs after dark to help himself from the fridge, he began making it his nightly routine.
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"I could make a peanut butter, Cheez Whiz, & mayo sandwich, eat leftover pizza, scrape off the icing from birthday cakes - as long as I was careful I could do anything!," he tweeted.
One night in May 1981, his family had ordered from a Fish and Shrimp house, so Grady waiting until everyone was asleep to creep downstairs to eat the sweet'n'sour pork leftovers.
This is where things get creepy.
After creeping down the stairs silently, he tweets: "I finally stepped into the totally dark den & let down my guard. All of a sudden I heard a fork click on the counter. I froze. The microwave clock light showed the outline of a man sitting at our kitchen counter."
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Grady describes the man as a "a skinny guy, eating our leftovers, and drinking our milk from the carton."
Like all of us would, he slowly backed away and the ran upstairs to wake up his mum and dad. But before they'd got back downstairs, the man was gone.
Grady's put his sighting down to a wild fantasy brought on from reading too many comics, but convinced of what he'd seen, the boy decided to keep notes of things in the kitchen.
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And sure enough, he soon noticed inconsistencies.
"I started tracking the position of everything in the kitchen. One day the paper napkin holder was on the wrong side of the counter. Another day a mug was in the sink that was NOT there the night before," he tweets.
Terrified, Grady spent the next few months sleeping with a steak knife under his pillow.
Months later in August, he awoke in the middle of the night to see a pair eyes watching him through the air vent in his bedroom.
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(At this point we'd like to interject with a big fat NOPE.)
Freaking out, Grady woke up his parents who checked the vents and the attic, but found nothing. "I wasn't very popular for a few weeks," he said.
In the last week of August, what looked like rice fell from Grady's air vent. It was actually maggots, and the air conditioner company said something had crawled into the air vent and died.
"Turns out what had crawled into our vents & died was the guy. We lived in an old house with lots of space between the walls & big ducts. He'd been living in them since May. At least," said Gary.
"He'd put a foam pad beside my bedroom vent so he'd be comfortable while he watched me. The police said he'd made lots of 'drawings' but when I asked they pretended they hadn't said anything.
"No one ever identified him. He was buried as a John Doe. To this day I can't look inside the vents in houses.
"But sometimes when I'm at someone's house I'll smell a little BO coming from their central air conditioning, and I'll wonder who's living back there in their ducts. Who's living in the dark?"
RIGHT WE ARE NEVER BEING HOME ALONE AGAIN. Block all the air vents, cement up all the walls, barricade the attic, we're done.
Scary eh? And we weren't alone.
Hundreds of people on Twitter took to Twitter to share their fear and burning questions.
"Now that we've read this, does anyone want to join me on a one-way trip to the center of the sun?," someone wrote.
"RADY. What the heck?! I won't be able to sleep tonight!!!!," said another.
"I want the follow-up on how much leverage this gave you with your parents for the rest of your childhood," penned another.
"This. Is. Unsettling," said another.
We'll put a disclaimer here that Grady is horror story author - though he insists this actually happened to him, it's worth considering he might just be telling another of his spooky tales.
Point remains, we're never staying home alone again.
Featured Image Credit: Photo by Mitja Juraja from PexelsTopics: Life News, Real, Life, halloween
