A couple years ago, my friends and I did something irresponsible and reckless. We decided to rent a mansion for a weekend in Southern Florida, outside of Miami. We wanted to find a place to kick it for spring break and the hotel thing seemed overrated. So, one of my friends found that for a few hundred dollars more, we could afford a mansion in a nice part of town. We checked it out online and it seemed legit enough, so we booked it.
We drove the five hours south for spring break and found the mansion looking just like the website's description. It was inside a gated community and had views of the water. Oddly, the community was pretty empty. There didn’t seem to be any other cars around or signs of people for that matter. We didn’t pay too much attention to it, though, and headed towards the house. It was massive, easily the biggest house I’d ever seen. There was a five car garage, a large fountain in the front yard, and pillars that seemed to stretch to the sky.
My friend said it had twelve bedrooms and ten bathrooms. Why you needed that many bathrooms, I don’t know, but we were excited to go and check it out. We parked out car in the driveway and opened the front door. We were inside a cathedral size house. The ceilings looked to be a mile away. A massive chandelier hung in the lobby, illuminating the foyer. The house was ornate in every way possible. It felt like we were inside Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
Massive paintings hung on the walls as well as various pictures of ocean sketches. My friend, who was an art history major in college, started pointing out various paintings—"that’s Monet, and that’s Michelangelo," he said as he walked around the room. He kept marveling at how real they looked. He’d seen some of the originals and he swore these looked exactly the same. We told him that was the point, of course. He seemed weirded out by it though.
We explored the rest of the house together. The kitchen was as beautiful as it was large. It had three refrigerators (three!) as well as a massive sink that a person could certainly fit inside. My friend said they must be washing large babies in here. I got this weird feeling of a some kind of fat baby getting his wrinkly back scrubbed in the sink. It made me wheezy.
Next, we started to explore the bedrooms. There were twelve of them after all. Each room was nicer than the last, fitted with a bed, a massive dresser, and more ludicrously nice artwork. Several of the bedrooms had bathrooms, each with a claw foot tub and a stand up shower. Then there were the closets. Several of the rooms had walk-in closets that were as big as a college dorm room. Strangely, the closets were all filled with clothes—everything fromm formal dresses and shoes, to suits and winter coats.
“Why?"
We wondered if part of it was by design, so anyone who stayed here could sift through the clothes and pick what they’d like. My friends objected, of course, arguing that no one needed a winter coat in Florida. I couldn’t dispute that point—it was certainly valid.
Our exploration continued, finding more rooms and more closets and then their were the hallways. We wandered down a few hallways, only to find they didn’t go anywhere. You’d walk through a door and enter into a hallway and then you’d walk to another door that was just an empty space. This happened several times. Honestly, it started to get kind of creepy. Someone joked that this was like the Winchester Mansion with all it’s doors leading to nowhere.
Wandering through doors and hallways started to feel disorienting, like we’d lost sight of where we were supposed to be. I couldn’t even remember the way back downstairs after thirty minutes of this. Finally, by some luck of the draw, we found a stair case that went downstairs and we ended up back in the kitchen.
“How many hallways and staircases are there?” my friend asked.
Someone suggested we find them all, which just creeped me out again if I’m being honest. Then my friend said he remembered something about a pool in the house. We all thought that was hogwash—a pool in the house? We went outside even though it was dark and turned the lights on. Sure enough, there was a pool there. It was pretty warm too, but no one felt like swimming. That’s when my friend saw something kind of strange. The pool narrowed to a small stream and seemed to go under the house.
We followed the tiny stream and it seemed to be emptying into the house.
“We have to explore it?” he said.
We went back inside and started looking all over the first floor for another stair case or a way to go downstairs. We had explored every possible option and had given up our pursuit when someone yelled from the other side of the house. One of our friends had found a small door, barely big enough for a person to fit through. We opened the door and there was another door on the floor. We opened the door and there was a flight of stairs.
I stood back. “No thanks” I said.
Everyone else kept saying we should go, so, begrudgingly, I went with them. Step by step I descended down the ladder until we were in another part of the house. It was dark, but we found a light. I couldn’t believe what we’d discovered. it was an entirely new floor. The walls were covered in white marble, like a turkish bath. We walked from the first corridor and saw the pool. Sure enough, there was another pool down here. It was huge. It stretched from one side of the room to the other, and looked to be at least twenty feet deep. In fact, we couldn’t even see the bottom of the pool. I touched it with my hand. It was ice-cold, a gelid water that would give anyone frost bite if they stayed in for too long. It didn’t make any sense, though, because it was warm down here. I didn’t understand how the pool could be so deep.
We walked into other rooms that were just as dark and cold and the creepy factor was growing more and more. There were small rooms that had nothing but a chair inside them. A single plastic chair and walls made of stone.
We kept exploring the cavernous additional floor and and then we heard a sound. A loud bang came from upstairs.
“Is anyone up there?” I asked.
But we were all here. Then the sound of footprints was heard. But it was’t a single pair. It sounded like a stampede, like a hundred people were now upstairs, running wildly. We knew we needed to get out of here, but we hadn’t found another stair case. We ran to the walls. They were ice cold. How deep were we in this house?
Maybe we could swim out of the pool someone suggested. It did lead outside. But no one could bear to touch the freezing waters. The sounds grew louder, more and more footsteps crashing above us. And then came the grunting. It was a low guttural sound, but it kept growing and growing. Then we heard a voice that kept saying, “Where are they? Where are they? Where are they? Where are they?"
We ran to the end of the house and found another door. It was a set of stairs. We ran up them as fast as we could and came to yet another hallway. There were two doors at the end, side by side. We all chose the door on the right and found ourselves outside, on the left side of the house. That was good enough for us. We didn’t even care about our luggage at this point, so we just ran to the front. Our car was nowhere in sight. Then we looked into the house and saw that it was indeed filled with guests. There were hundreds of people crowded inside, but we couldn’t make out any faces. They were just black sillouhtees.
We slowly walked across the front lawn and then it went silent. We looked back and hundreds of tiny beedy eyes were staring at us from inside the house. They weren’t human eyes, they were dark, black circles that sat on dark hairy faces. We didn’t stay to see what would happen, we just ran as fast as we could towards the front gate.
No one looked back as we ran, except for me. I turned back when we were down the street. The front lawn was covered with the creatures, whatever they were. They stood there, hundreds of them, watching us flee into the night.
Eventually we made our way to a police station where we relayed our story and the missing car. Strangely, the police said they had seen the car. In fact, they had it at the station. We went out back and there was our car as well as our bags. We didn’t say anything after that. We just got in our car and drove home.
Submitted September 20, 2016 at 06:08AM by worldofleo http://ift.tt/2d3GY7v nosleep
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