I don’t really believe in the paranormal. Call me a doubting Thomas, I guess. I mean, I could be convinced, but I suppose that in this particular incident, I was dumb enough to try and entice whatever it was that my girlfriend was consistently hinting at and warning me about, at the time.

Anyways, she claimed something evil lived in her attic. We had a nickname for it, but I don’t recall what it is now. This was in 2022.

She was 18 at the time, and I was 19. Living in Minnesota, me having just recently moved there from my childhood home in Texas, I was curious and excited about the big, wide world. The paranormal always caught my attention as if I were a spectator of a mere sports event, as in, it all seemed fun to me, and that’s all it ever seemed to be, innocent fun…

I chalked up the idea that we should go up there and check it out. She immediately, strongly, opposed the idea, and demanded I promise simply not talk about whatever it was, while inside the house, which was about 100 years old. Even when we’d talk about it outside of the house, she’d get uneasy. Hence, the nickname.

Anyways, one night, we had some reason to go up there. I forget what that reason was, maybe some tie-dye equipment since that was what we were getting into at the time, but point being we just needed some supplies from the attic. She wanted to be super quick about it. To go up, find what we were looking for, and come back down… that’s it.

I felt very enticed to see for myself if something actually lived up there. I was bored, existentially speaking. I just wanted to have something unexplainable shake me to my core for the sport of it.

When we were up there, I admit, something felt off. Something felt very off. It was cluttered, boxes everywhere, one of those opened up doll houses, dust-galore… but something felt sad, dark, angry, hurt… it’s hard to fit the array of emotions in that attic into human emotions, as human emotions feel more categorized, and the emotion in that atmosphere felt much more fluid and abstract.

Anyways, once we were done, we were walking down the stairs from the attic. They were steep, like, a 70° decline. And, instead of a ladder that would open up onto the floor of the house, the attic was entered and exited through a door that one could easily assume to be a closet door if it were closed.

I let her head down first, and as we were walking down the stairs, I got this huge rush of an emotion to lunge at my girlfriend from behind/above her, and hurt her. Now, this was a very strange intrusive thought. I’d never act on it, but the intensity of the emotion felt extremely abnormal, and with vivid imagery. It was like something was already inside of me trying to force me to act on it.

As we arrived at the doorway, I turned around to close the door, and we both look at each with wide eyes. Both of us, at the same time, heard it.

Just feet away, at the top of the stairs (which curved, so we couldn’t see it), something started running… no… SPRINTING, hard, loud, aggressive, down from the top of the stairs.

“What the f—“ I acted quick, and slammed the door as fast as I could.

The sound of sprinting, getting louder, continued over the next second or two, up to just abruptly stopping at the other side of the door. There was nothing after that. We looked at each other with disbelief. I started smiling because I couldn’t believe what just happened. My mind began racing around all the logical possibilities, and almost immediately I wanted to ask if she maybe had a problem with raccoons or something about that size, but she looked genuinely distressed. That, and I don’t know why raccoons would chase humans down the stairs unless they were trying to get out.

She wanted to leave, so we left to get food.

In any case, from then on, I understood why she wanted me to always be sleeping over.

She’s since moved out and lives undisturbed now.

But from this experience, I have learned not to entice whatever else could share this plane of existence with us.