Uncle under the bed

Olka and I had been friends since school. Then we went to university and got married. Olya's parents were wealthy—when she got pregnant, they gave her a three-room apartment, so to speak, to give her a boost into the future. They had a wonderful little boy, named Vitaly after Olga's grandfather; we affectionately called him Vitka. When the baby turned one, Olya and her husband moved into a renovated new apartment to start a happy life as a young family. But the baby immediately began getting sick often, being capricious, and crying. Later, his tantrums reached such a level that he would somehow climb over his crib and run to his parents in the bedroom. Olya complained that their son was giving them no peace. He absolutely refused to stay in his room. At his grandparents', Vitka was a completely normal child, but at home, it was as if he had been replaced.

 One day, his mother gave her little boy some markers and paper while she was making dinner. When she came to look, she was horrified: her son had clearly drawn a person sitting under the bed, the entire sheet covered in black lines, mixed with yellow and red. Vitka couldn't really explain what he'd drawn, saying the word "uncle" and pointing under the bed.

A year passed. The boy remained restless. At night, he would regularly run to his parents and lie down between them. He had begun to speak quite well and constantly complained about some man in the dark corners. Psychologists and psychiatrists unanimously claimed that the boy was seeing negativity on television and projecting it into reality. Naturally, neither the specialists nor the parents wanted to believe in such mysticism. The mother was ordered to wean her child away from his parents' bed by any means necessary.

And so Olga took the extreme step. She read somewhere online that the child had been put to bed and covered, cried, then tired and fell asleep. After telling him that there was no man there, that he was just making it all up, she went out the door, leaving the nightlight on, and locked the boy in.

It was quiet for about 20 minutes, but then the boy started crying. Olga was in agony, but she had to wean him off somehow. With tears in her eyes, Olga sat and waited for him to calm down and fall asleep. But Vitka started screaming. Thinking the neighbors would come running to argue, the mother opened the door. Her son was sitting on the windowsill, pressed against the glass, his eyes wet, sobbing nervously. There were fresh bruises on his arms and legs. Stuttering, the child continued to say that a scary man was crawling out from under the bed, wanting to bite him and drag him away. The mother, tormented by her son's phobias, rushed the boy to the doctors again the next morning. Vitka had seen nothing but the cartoons his parents had taken away from him. He hadn't even looked at the scary pictures. Where had this terrible fear come from? The doctors were at a loss. Some suspected his parents were beating him, but he claimed his parents had never hit him, and neighbors described the family as a positive one—in short, there was no evidence other than the bruises. The mother and child went to a sanatorium for a week's rest. There, the boy was calm and slept on his own without screaming or arguing.

Upon their return, everything started again. And then Olga couldn't take it anymore. On the advice of an elderly neighbor, she decided to have the apartment blessed. The priest who arrived immediately declared that they lived in an unclean place and that the boy needed to be protected.

 After his departure, the evening was quiet, and nothing foreshadowed trouble. Olga was getting ready to meet her husband back from a business trip, putting her son to bed in her bedroom while she cooked. It was late when she realized she was short of flour. She went out to her neighbors. While they were talking, a sudden, inhuman, terrifying scream erupted, followed by immediate silence. Olga and her neighbors quickly returned to her apartment. What she saw left a profound impact on her life. Her little son was lying on the bed, arms outstretched, his body covered in bites, his eyes rolled back in terror. Running to her child, the mother discovered he wasn't breathing.

An autopsy revealed multiple human bites on the boy's body. The investigation concluded that the parents were innocent of his death, and the woman had an alibi—after all, the boy had been screaming precisely when she was talking to the neighbors upstairs.

 Then Olya and her husband confided in me what they later learned about the apartment. A man accused of pedophilia had shot himself in it about ten years ago. To avoid trial and shame, and then prison, he decided to shoot himself when they came to arrest him. Olya now believes in mysticism; she couldn't find any other explanation for her child's death. The police couldn't find any either.

My friend says she still cries often about the baby. They sold the ominous apartment, and they sold it to people who didn't have children.