It’s 3:04 AM. No one is home. You just got into bed. You turn over in your sheets and are about to drift to sleep—WHEN SUDDENLY—you hear a rapid knock at the window—right next to your ear. Your eyes pop open, the hairs on your arms stand up, your heart races, it feels like someone just slid an ice cube down the back of your shirt. Was it a burglar? No that’s ridiculous. Was it your roommate trying to scare the living hell out of you? Most likely. Or was it the dead, lingering spirit of an ill-tempered axe murderer? Maybe—no, definitely the latter.

Too often does the average ghost story start this way: a mysterious noise that prompts our mind to leap to the irrational and unlikely, to the world of the supernatural. In fact, this is how our story started. After hearing a series of inexplicable knocks in our house, our minds jumped from the rational to the irrational, from the comfortable to the unbearable, from “Oh, it’s just the pipes,” to, “That’s 100% a malevolent demon.” Though we are still unable to attribute these occurrences to a reasonable source, we are able to live with the unknown by accepting the equally unsubstantiated theory that the noises we hear are typical. To maintain our sanity, we tell ourselves that houses creak and settle—that it’s nothing to fear. “It’s just the pipes.”