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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/nocturn-e on 2026-08-09 00:20:15+00:00.

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I don't really know where else to put this. I don't have anyone to call. My mom passed when I was a kid, and I'm an only child. The one person who might have understood this is the reason I'm sitting where I am right now.

I'm typing this out while it's fresh because I need a record in case I need it later. Cell signal out here is garbage. It's one bar that keeps flickering out. Bear with me if this posts in pieces or in duplicate.

My dad and I hadn't spoken in about ten years. I want to be upfront about that because I know how these posts usually go with the movie-style reconciliations and deathbed clarity. Not us. We were actually estranged. We didn't have each other's phone numbers.

A cousin I barely talk to messaged me on Facebook two days ago. Dad died. Heart attack. He was found alone in a rental house outside a little town called Corliss, about seven hours east of Seattle. He was sixty-one with no history of heart issues.

I got a call from a local lawyer the next morning since I'm the next of kin. Dad rented the house, but there was a detached workshop on the property that he owned outright due to some weird deed quirk. The bank wanted the workshop cleared out by this weekend so they could process the whole lot together. If I didn't claim the stuff inside, it was going straight to the landfill.

So I drove down yesterday. I checked into a local motel, and this morning I went out to the property with the keys the lawyer mailed me.

I need to explain my dad first, or none of this will make sense.

He was always a strange guy. He wasn't dangerous, just off in ways I didn't understand as a kid and hated as a teenager. He moved us three times before I was twelve. Always to different small towns. He never told my mom or me why.

He had rules that felt totally arbitrary. I wasn't allowed to let anyone take pictures inside our house. Not even a birthday party photo if the wall behind me was in frame. He walked the perimeter of the house every single night before bed, checking the same windows in the exact same order. If you asked him what he was doing, he'd just say he was making sure everything was where it was supposed to be.

If I moved my dresser or rearranged my room without telling him first, he got scared. I want to be specific about that because it took me until today to understand the difference. He didn't look like an annoyed parent. He looked like I had just put myself in immediate danger.

There was another thing I hadn't thought about in years. Every couple of months, he would wake me up in the middle of the night. He'd walk me through the house in the pitch black and make me point out where every piece of furniture was without turning on a light.

He called it a game when I was little. I thought it was fun. By the time I was ten, I understood it wasn't a game. He never smiled during it. He always checked his watch afterward like he was timing something. I never asked him what he was testing.

The last real blowup happened when I was fourteen. A friend from school came over and took a photo of my bedroom for a group project. Just my desk and my bed. They posted it in a shared class folder online. My dad found out somehow.

His face just dropped. He went totally pale. He made me stand in the kitchen while he called the school to get the photo taken down. When I asked him why it mattered so much, he grabbed my shoulders and looked me dead in the eyes. He said, "You don't understand what you just did."

He wouldn't explain it. I remember being more scared of him right then than I had ever been of anything.

For weeks afterward he barely slept. I'd hear him downstairs at two or three in the morning, walking the house over and over. Stopping in doorways like he was listening for something.

About a year later he told my mom he had to leave for our own good. He moved out to a wooded plot of land in rural Idaho and basically vanished off the grid. No internet. No smartphone. Just a P.O. box. I was fifteen. I didn't get an explanation.

The last time I actually heard his voice, I was twenty-one. He called from a number I didn't recognize. I almost didn't pick up. I'm glad I did, and I've hated myself for what I did next for seven years.

He said my name. He sounded so old. He said, "I need to tell you something about our family, about why I had to leave."

I cut him off. I said something cruel about how he didn't get to disappear for six years and then call to unload some excuse on me. I hung up on him.

He never called again. I never gave him my new address after I moved to Seattle. I told myself for years that was just how things go. I don't think that's true anymore.

I'm twenty-eight now. I live in a cheap one-bedroom apartment. I hadn't thought about him in a long time until the lawyer called.

The drive took six hours. Gas stations got further and further apart. Around hour five, I stopped being angry at him for disappearing and just felt sad about it. I told myself I was driving out to do a chore, sign some papers, throw junk in a dumpster, and go home.

I stopped for gas in the last town before the property. The old man behind the counter asked where I was headed. When I told him I was going to the place near the end of Corliss Creek Road, he gave me a weird look.

He said, "That's the guy who built the big steel barn out there, isn't it?"

I said yes. He just nodded and told me to be careful driving after dark out that way. He said the roads weren't lit and the deer came out heavy. I don't think he meant deer.

The dirt road to the property was rutted so badly I had to take it under ten miles an hour. Pine trees pressed in close on both sides. No other houses.

The house itself is a rotting single-wide trailer. I went inside first. I expected to find mail or dishes in the sink. It was completely empty. No furniture except a sleeping bag on the floor and a camp stove. No decorations. No mirrors.

The only weird thing was the door. The cheap metal door of the trailer had three heavy deadbolts installed on the inside. The outside of the door was covered in deep parallel scratches. The paint was entirely stripped off the bottom half of the metal like a large dog had been trying to dig its way in for years.

Behind the trailer in a dirt clearing is the workshop. It's a massive corrugated steel pole barn. It looks almost brand new compared to the trailer. No windows. Just a set of heavy sliding double doors at the front secured with three huge padlocks.

I brought bolt cutters from my trunk. It took me twenty minutes to snap all three locks off. I slid the heavy steel doors open on their tracks.

I thought I'd find old farm equipment or prepper supplies.

I walked in and turned on my phone flashlight. I'm not making this up.

Built inside the center of that empty steel warehouse is my apartment.

It's a freestanding structure built out of drywall and two-by-fours. There is no roof, just exposed wooden beams overhead. But the walls match the exact layout of my apartment in Seattle.

I found an industrial light switch mounted on the steel wall and flipped it. A row of harsh warehouse lights buzzed on. I walked through the front door of the drywall structure. I felt sick.

It's a perfect one-to-one replica of my living space. It actually has all my furniture in it too.

I'm sitting on a cheap dark grey sectional couch right now as I type this. It's the exact couch I have back home. The coffee table in front of me is the same scratched laminate table I bought off Craigslist three years ago.

I walked into the fake kitchen. The cabinets are painted the exact same ugly shade of mustard yellow mine are. The fridge is the same model. I opened the fridge door. It was unplugged and warm inside, but the shelves were stocked with empty cardboard boxes painted to look like the exact brand of milk and eggs I buy. There are three magnets on the door arranged in the exact triangle pattern I keep mine in.

There is an ugly orange coffee mug sitting on the fake kitchen counter. A coworker gave it to me as a joke gift five weeks ago. I never posted a picture of it anywhere. It's sitting on that counter right now. It has the exact same small chip on the handle I put there when I dropped it in my sink last month.

I went into the fake bedroom. My exact bed frame. The same grey comforter. The cheap wooden nightstand. He even hand-painted a yellow water stain on the ceiling right above the bed. It perfectly matches the leak damage from my upstairs neighbor that my landlord refuses to fix.

There are fake windows built into the drywall. Look through them, and you just see the corrugated steel wall of the barn. But he mounted LED panels behind the frames to match the exact amber color of the streetlamps outside my real apartment. He even ran a small fan behind the wall angled to blow a draft along the floor. It mimics the draft in my real living room perfectly.

I opened the hallway closet. There were actual clothes hanging inside. My sizes. They were secondhand versions he must have bought to match what I own. The tags were cut off. They were worn in at the elbows and knees to look lived in.

I stood in that fake living room and thought about the perimeter walks. The photo rule. Walking the dark house to name furniture. All of it started making a horrible kind of sense. Whatever this was, it started before I was born.

My dad had to break into my real apartment more than once to get this. He had to measure every w...

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