This Guy’s Twitter Thread About A Man Living In His Roof Went Stupidly Viral Because, Well, Fuck

Twitter Ceiling

It’s that spoooooooky time of year, people, which means everyone’s shares scary stories online like we’re all sitting around some virtual campfire. Halloween: it brings people together, and it also scares the living shit out of us. Case in point this Twitter thread by author Grady Hendrix, which is unsurprisingly going viral as all hell.

[jwplayer J0nX1Qrd]

The entire thread is right HERE if you want to dive in for yourself, but let me walk you through it at a leisurely pace. He begins by saying that he is going to share this story even though it was deeply traumatic for him. Grady, we thank you.

Everyone’s telling scary stories for Halloween so I’ll talk about something that happened to me when I was a kid because hey, trauma never gets old.

(Honestly I didn’t imagine it would be the levels of trauma that it goes to, but here we are.)

It all starts in a cute, innocent, relatable, wholesome way.

When I turned 9 I realized I could sneak downstairs after everyone was asleep and eat anything I wanted in the fridge. No one ever noticed!

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!

Creeping down was the hardest part. I had to navigate the pitch dark house all the way downstairs in total darkness like a tiny ninja.

Then it takes… a slightly unnerving turn.

One night in May, ’81 we ordered from Fish & Shrimp House. I waited until everyone was asleep & crept downstairs to eat the leftover sweet n’sour pork.

It took forever. 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.

Okay, this is a fucking nightmare already but guys believe me when I say, Grady’s story gets so much worse.

He couldn’t see me, but I saw him: a skinny guy, eating our leftovers, and drinking our milk from the carton.

I can’t explain how terrifying it is for someone to BE IN YOUR HOUSE. I slooooowly backed away, crept upstairs, and woke up my mom & dad.

They made way too much noise & took way too long & by the time they got downstairs the kitchen was empty.

Everyone said I read too many horror comics so they blew off what I said. But no way was I pouring milk on my cereal.

As I was reading this, I thought maybe, just MAYBE, Grady had a vivid imagination and everything was fine! Guys, I was wrong.

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.

My bedroom door didn’t lock so I kept a steak knife under my pillow. I must’ve stabbed myself in the hand 1000 times checking to make sure it was there.

Then in August, I was in my room reading when I looked up. There’s an A/C vent over my bed. Behind the vent a pair of eyes were watching me.

NOOOOOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE. Also: no. Another important thing to note: NO.

As if it couldn’t get more horrifying, IT DOES.

I freaked & raised hell until my parents searched our attic and the crawl space under our house. Nothing. I wasn’t very popular for a few weeks.

The last week of August our house started to smell. One night, rice fell out of the vent over my bed. Maggots. The A/C people said something had probably crawled into our vents & 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.

I just… cannot. This is like if you took a nightmare, added some hell to it and mixed in some horror for good measure. And somehow it gets even creepier.

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?

Thanks, Grady. Now I have the exact same fear. And so does everyone reading the thread. Here’s a wonderful selection:

https://twitter.com/LMOberleas/status/1189346091248095233

And the more succinct, but also, same:

Look, Grady Hendrix IS a writer, seeming to specialise in horror, so I think I might take this with a giant grain of salt and pray to the universe it isn’t true? However there are plenty of real, fucked up “living in the attic” stories out there like this one to keep me up at night so brb, going to live an attic, basement and window-free house forever.

Love scary shit and unsolved mysteries? Then you will probably love Pedestrian’s mystery/true crime/supernatural podcast All Aussie Mystery Hour. Subscribe on iTunes HERE, or on Spotify HERE. Or, you can just listen / download below.

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