I found a door in the woods that goes everywhere and I…
0 reactions
I found a door in the woods that goes everywhere and I can’t stop using it to watch you.
Not you, specifically, I guess, although you might be one of the two hundred or so people I’ve been lurking behind over the last seven months. But that isn’t what has me spooked.
I think someone else is using it to watch *me*.
I’ve lived in the Midwest my whole life. Total nowheresville. The place I’m renting backs onto the woods that border the east end of town and since I grew up not too far from here, I’m pretty familiar with them. Used to trek all over when I was a kid, walked the trails with my dog as a teenager, and still go out there pretty often as an adult. Easily twice a week. Maybe like the back of my hand, is a stretch, but I can definitely get from A to B without a map is what I’m saying. So imagine my surprise when I found a roughly square concrete bunker wedged against the side of a hill back in December.
It was just before Christmas, snow on the ground from an overnight flurry, and I had been walking for a while. Maybe an hour since leaving my back yard. I know the area well, it’s all undeveloped public forest, and there’s almost no structures in it that I’m aware of. Maybe a fire lookout. This, though, was weird. Solid concrete, with one of those gray-green metal doors like the entrance to a power substation or something. Big “Danger. No Entry” sign on there. Some graffiti too, just tags and the like, and almost swallowed by snow and dead weeds and spindly overgrowth. I figure that’s why I never seen it before; in the spring it’s probably mostly covered by bushes and the concrete just kinda blends into the foliage.
So of course my brain yells “World War 2 Bunker” and I’m running up the incline towards half-buried treasure.
Turns out, though, not a bunker at all. I got the door open with a little effort and a lot of creaking metal and behind it is just a hallway. Maybe ten feet long, and only a few inches wider than the door. Walls are concrete, like the outside. In fact it kinda looks like a solid block of cement that someone dug a corridor through. Scratches everywhere, too, all over the floor and walls and ceiling. Then, at the far end, another door.
The first time I stepped inside I was struck by how quiet it was. I’m used to it now. Pretty sure it’s just the shape of the hill around the building keeping the wind out. The only light is whatever comes through the open door behind you, which being winter was that bright almost bluish white of the snow reflecting the sky. I ran my gloved fingers over the scratches. They’re dug pretty deep. Purposeful like. I figured out later they were symbols, but I won’t get ahead of myself. At this point I still thought it was just the vestibule for some bigger bunker complex under the forest. Expected a staircase down when I opened the far door. So I gripped the door handle and turned.
Immediately: light behind me.
This is when I figured out the scratches all over the walls and ceiling were symbols, because when I looked back to find the light source I realised it was coming from the walls, and the ceiling, and the floor. One symbol on each was glowing like there was an LED behind it and I’d just completed the circuit. Green. The colour of the sky before a tornado.
Then I opened the door.
Like I said before, I expected this to lead into some kind of bunker. Stairs. Hallways. Rooms full of rusty bunk beds. Fallout symbols on the walls. What I got, was so much fucking weirder. You have to understand when I tell this story that I never meant for this to go so goddamn badly. I never meant to become some weirdo stalking strangers for kicks. I’m a normal dude. I have a normal job. I have friends. I am single, admittedly, but not in the incel kinda way. But when I stepped through that door, in the woods, behind my house, and emerged from someone’s bedroom closet on the other side of the country, I nearly shit myself.
That’s where it started. I high-tailed it out of that bedroom when I heard someone on the stairs, shut the door behind me, spent a few minutes catching my breath. I convinced myself it couldn’t be real. I’d open the door again and pay closer attention to the room and realise it was fake. I couldn’t have been on the second floor of a house. I couldn’t have been looking out the damn open window, curtains fluttering in a light breeze, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. So I took a few deep breaths and tried the door again.
Same glow. Different symbols. I didn’t actually realise they were different symbols at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight I am erring on the side of they were different symbols because I did not return to the bedroom.
Nope.
An Italian restaurant kitchen. Not even kidding. Fluorescent lights. Tile floor. Stainless steel everything else. A bunch of line cooks shouting at one another in strong Brooklyn accents. I stepped in through the rear service door and the smell of marinara sauce and fresh seafood hit me like a wall. So I’m losing my mind, right? Back in the hallway. Close the door.
Confused, and needing some air, I checked around the outside and there’s nothing remarkable about the building. It’s concrete on all sides, as far as I can tell, with the, (and I really hate to use this word but), “Magic Doorway” end buried a little under the hillside. Could have been here for decades, judging by how pitted and pockmarked and derelict it all looks. The sign is recent-ish; it’s all scuffed and dirty like it’s been there for years, but it’s a modern sign. Twenty years old, tops.
No answers outside, so: Back inside. Open the door. Walk into a room.
This is how it’s been for months. That day I tried five or six more times and since then I’ve been going up there every day. Before work, after work, days off, weekends and every single time that door led me to a new, completely random place. It only seems to open into doors of roughly the same size and dimensions as the one I step through. I can’t step into it and out of a barn door or an airplane door although I have stepped through the door and onto a cruise ship once. Seems as long as it swings on hinges and has the dimensions of an average house door, it’s fair game. So, that’s the first caveat on the “everywhere” bit.
But you’re wondering how all this has led to me becoming 2026’s preeminent stalker? Well that’s the second caveat.
When I’m through that door, *nobody can see me*.
I’m not, like, invisible (I don’t think) because I can see my reflection in things, and I’m not a ghost because I can’t walk through walls and I can interact with stuff just like I would normally. It’s just that nobody notices me. Like I’m not supposed to be there, so I’m not. But I am. Honestly I could stand two feet in front of you and you wouldn’t see a thing. I’ve spoken to people, even moved things right in front of them and they just go about their day like nothing happened. At most they seem a little confused. Like they’re sure they heard…something… but it goes away before they register it, or they’re sure that they put their mug over on the end table, not the coffee table, but shrug it off as bad recollection.
Except they did put it on the end table because I’m the one that moved it to the coffee table. I did it right in front of them. They should have seen me.
But they didn’t.
They never do.
And this lets me watch them as much as I want to.
Watch you as much as I want to.
I’ve watched people have dinner, sitting at their dining table right beside them. I’ve been in board room meetings and heard colleagues gossip by photocopiers. I’ve watched folks shower, and screw, and jerk off in the living room. Seen people stealing from the company till or their parent’s wallet or their wife's purse. I’ve stood in the corner of bedrooms and watched people sleep. Sat behind couples watching TV on the couch. I got on stage at a Bring Me The Horizon concert. I’ve been in more than a few drug labs and easily a dozen brothels.
I’m pretty sure I stumbled across a serial killer one time.
So, you see why it’s intoxicating right? This whole being an unseen observer in people’s lives? Sure, I don’t always understand everything. I’ve ended up in countries where I didn’t speak the language and that kinda limits me to relying on context clues. I think the symbols are like a code that correspond to points in space. Like a telephone number.
Once it was warm enough for the gloves to come off I discovered I can touch the symbols in advance. Turning the doorhandle alone just picks a random set. I tried finding a system, but hell if I could make heads or tails of what specific chicken scratch means what part of an address. The same combo always leads to the same place though, so I can make repeat visits. There’s one place I go back to a fair bit. This tool shed in the mountains somewhere. Europe, I think. It’s one of the few places I’ve never seen any other people and I just sit in the grass to watch the goats climb the rocks. Sometimes I just stare at the clouds.
Mostly, though, I watch people. People eating, people sleeping, people working. People in private moments and public ones. Men, women, young, and old.
But lately, I think *I’m* the one being watched.
At first it was just paranoia, I guess. I’d been standing in the corner of so many darkened rooms that I began to get the heebie-jeebies any time I was alone for five minutes. I’d look across at the corner of a room at work and be convinced there was someone standing there, even though I couldn’t see them. Watching TV at home alone I’d get the idea in my head that there was someone at the other end of the couch and have to kick my leg out to be sure. One of the empty chairs at my parents’ dinner table would be pushed out just a little further than was necessary and I’d become convinced someone was sitting in it. Watching me. Unseen.
Then things started to get misplaced. The mug that’s a little further left than I remember it. Milk on the counter instead of in the fridge. My keys missing from the hook I know I hung them on. Just like I do every day. An open door I distinctly remember closing. Maybe I just got confused? I wasn’t sleeping very well. Every time I closed my eyes I’d hear breathing. Which makes no sense because I know people can’t see or hear you when you walk through that door, but maybe they… feel… it? I’ve seen more than a few people look at me, right at me, puzzled, knowing something was off but chalking it up to their imagination. That feeling you get when you think you’re being watched. We’ve all had it before. I think, maybe, in those moments there is someone watching you.
Now they’re watching me.
What clinched it for me was the door to the bunker. You see I always close it. Every time. It’s pretty hidden now that the bushes have all grown back and with the door closed you’d hardly know anything was there at all. Definitely can’t see it from the path. Still, I close it, every time, to keep it all to myself, but one day I made my trek up the hill and found it open. Just a little. A crack.
So, to be safe I bought a real hefty padlock and sealed the door up tight. Made sure no animals could get in. That the wind wasn’t going to blow the door open. It should have held. Would have. Then I came back and the padlock was cut clean through and just left there on the ground. And beside it the door was open. Not a little this time. Open. All the way. A message.
Like you wanted me to know. Cause I know you’re reading this and okay, I get it. I’ve learned my lesson. The door doesn’t belong to me. I get it and I can’t take it anymore. I need you to stop! Please! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Whoever you are. No more pulling my bedsheets off at night. No more leaving the front door open for me to find in the morning. No more smiley faces drawn in the glass while I’m in the shower. Message received. Loud and clear.
I promise I won’t go back.
Just please.
I’m begging.
Leave me alone.
#entertainment
source
Not you, specifically, I guess, although you might be one of the two hundred or so people I’ve been lurking behind over the last seven months. But that isn’t what has me spooked.
I think someone else is using it to watch *me*.
I’ve lived in the Midwest my whole life. Total nowheresville. The place I’m renting backs onto the woods that border the east end of town and since I grew up not too far from here, I’m pretty familiar with them. Used to trek all over when I was a kid, walked the trails with my dog as a teenager, and still go out there pretty often as an adult. Easily twice a week. Maybe like the back of my hand, is a stretch, but I can definitely get from A to B without a map is what I’m saying. So imagine my surprise when I found a roughly square concrete bunker wedged against the side of a hill back in December.
It was just before Christmas, snow on the ground from an overnight flurry, and I had been walking for a while. Maybe an hour since leaving my back yard. I know the area well, it’s all undeveloped public forest, and there’s almost no structures in it that I’m aware of. Maybe a fire lookout. This, though, was weird. Solid concrete, with one of those gray-green metal doors like the entrance to a power substation or something. Big “Danger. No Entry” sign on there. Some graffiti too, just tags and the like, and almost swallowed by snow and dead weeds and spindly overgrowth. I figure that’s why I never seen it before; in the spring it’s probably mostly covered by bushes and the concrete just kinda blends into the foliage.
So of course my brain yells “World War 2 Bunker” and I’m running up the incline towards half-buried treasure.
Turns out, though, not a bunker at all. I got the door open with a little effort and a lot of creaking metal and behind it is just a hallway. Maybe ten feet long, and only a few inches wider than the door. Walls are concrete, like the outside. In fact it kinda looks like a solid block of cement that someone dug a corridor through. Scratches everywhere, too, all over the floor and walls and ceiling. Then, at the far end, another door.
The first time I stepped inside I was struck by how quiet it was. I’m used to it now. Pretty sure it’s just the shape of the hill around the building keeping the wind out. The only light is whatever comes through the open door behind you, which being winter was that bright almost bluish white of the snow reflecting the sky. I ran my gloved fingers over the scratches. They’re dug pretty deep. Purposeful like. I figured out later they were symbols, but I won’t get ahead of myself. At this point I still thought it was just the vestibule for some bigger bunker complex under the forest. Expected a staircase down when I opened the far door. So I gripped the door handle and turned.
Immediately: light behind me.
This is when I figured out the scratches all over the walls and ceiling were symbols, because when I looked back to find the light source I realised it was coming from the walls, and the ceiling, and the floor. One symbol on each was glowing like there was an LED behind it and I’d just completed the circuit. Green. The colour of the sky before a tornado.
Then I opened the door.
Like I said before, I expected this to lead into some kind of bunker. Stairs. Hallways. Rooms full of rusty bunk beds. Fallout symbols on the walls. What I got, was so much fucking weirder. You have to understand when I tell this story that I never meant for this to go so goddamn badly. I never meant to become some weirdo stalking strangers for kicks. I’m a normal dude. I have a normal job. I have friends. I am single, admittedly, but not in the incel kinda way. But when I stepped through that door, in the woods, behind my house, and emerged from someone’s bedroom closet on the other side of the country, I nearly shit myself.
That’s where it started. I high-tailed it out of that bedroom when I heard someone on the stairs, shut the door behind me, spent a few minutes catching my breath. I convinced myself it couldn’t be real. I’d open the door again and pay closer attention to the room and realise it was fake. I couldn’t have been on the second floor of a house. I couldn’t have been looking out the damn open window, curtains fluttering in a light breeze, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. So I took a few deep breaths and tried the door again.
Same glow. Different symbols. I didn’t actually realise they were different symbols at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight I am erring on the side of they were different symbols because I did not return to the bedroom.
Nope.
An Italian restaurant kitchen. Not even kidding. Fluorescent lights. Tile floor. Stainless steel everything else. A bunch of line cooks shouting at one another in strong Brooklyn accents. I stepped in through the rear service door and the smell of marinara sauce and fresh seafood hit me like a wall. So I’m losing my mind, right? Back in the hallway. Close the door.
Confused, and needing some air, I checked around the outside and there’s nothing remarkable about the building. It’s concrete on all sides, as far as I can tell, with the, (and I really hate to use this word but), “Magic Doorway” end buried a little under the hillside. Could have been here for decades, judging by how pitted and pockmarked and derelict it all looks. The sign is recent-ish; it’s all scuffed and dirty like it’s been there for years, but it’s a modern sign. Twenty years old, tops.
No answers outside, so: Back inside. Open the door. Walk into a room.
This is how it’s been for months. That day I tried five or six more times and since then I’ve been going up there every day. Before work, after work, days off, weekends and every single time that door led me to a new, completely random place. It only seems to open into doors of roughly the same size and dimensions as the one I step through. I can’t step into it and out of a barn door or an airplane door although I have stepped through the door and onto a cruise ship once. Seems as long as it swings on hinges and has the dimensions of an average house door, it’s fair game. So, that’s the first caveat on the “everywhere” bit.
But you’re wondering how all this has led to me becoming 2026’s preeminent stalker? Well that’s the second caveat.
When I’m through that door, *nobody can see me*.
I’m not, like, invisible (I don’t think) because I can see my reflection in things, and I’m not a ghost because I can’t walk through walls and I can interact with stuff just like I would normally. It’s just that nobody notices me. Like I’m not supposed to be there, so I’m not. But I am. Honestly I could stand two feet in front of you and you wouldn’t see a thing. I’ve spoken to people, even moved things right in front of them and they just go about their day like nothing happened. At most they seem a little confused. Like they’re sure they heard…something… but it goes away before they register it, or they’re sure that they put their mug over on the end table, not the coffee table, but shrug it off as bad recollection.
Except they did put it on the end table because I’m the one that moved it to the coffee table. I did it right in front of them. They should have seen me.
But they didn’t.
They never do.
And this lets me watch them as much as I want to.
Watch you as much as I want to.
I’ve watched people have dinner, sitting at their dining table right beside them. I’ve been in board room meetings and heard colleagues gossip by photocopiers. I’ve watched folks shower, and screw, and jerk off in the living room. Seen people stealing from the company till or their parent’s wallet or their wife's purse. I’ve stood in the corner of bedrooms and watched people sleep. Sat behind couples watching TV on the couch. I got on stage at a Bring Me The Horizon concert. I’ve been in more than a few drug labs and easily a dozen brothels.
I’m pretty sure I stumbled across a serial killer one time.
So, you see why it’s intoxicating right? This whole being an unseen observer in people’s lives? Sure, I don’t always understand everything. I’ve ended up in countries where I didn’t speak the language and that kinda limits me to relying on context clues. I think the symbols are like a code that correspond to points in space. Like a telephone number.
Once it was warm enough for the gloves to come off I discovered I can touch the symbols in advance. Turning the doorhandle alone just picks a random set. I tried finding a system, but hell if I could make heads or tails of what specific chicken scratch means what part of an address. The same combo always leads to the same place though, so I can make repeat visits. There’s one place I go back to a fair bit. This tool shed in the mountains somewhere. Europe, I think. It’s one of the few places I’ve never seen any other people and I just sit in the grass to watch the goats climb the rocks. Sometimes I just stare at the clouds.
Mostly, though, I watch people. People eating, people sleeping, people working. People in private moments and public ones. Men, women, young, and old.
But lately, I think *I’m* the one being watched.
At first it was just paranoia, I guess. I’d been standing in the corner of so many darkened rooms that I began to get the heebie-jeebies any time I was alone for five minutes. I’d look across at the corner of a room at work and be convinced there was someone standing there, even though I couldn’t see them. Watching TV at home alone I’d get the idea in my head that there was someone at the other end of the couch and have to kick my leg out to be sure. One of the empty chairs at my parents’ dinner table would be pushed out just a little further than was necessary and I’d become convinced someone was sitting in it. Watching me. Unseen.
Then things started to get misplaced. The mug that’s a little further left than I remember it. Milk on the counter instead of in the fridge. My keys missing from the hook I know I hung them on. Just like I do every day. An open door I distinctly remember closing. Maybe I just got confused? I wasn’t sleeping very well. Every time I closed my eyes I’d hear breathing. Which makes no sense because I know people can’t see or hear you when you walk through that door, but maybe they… feel… it? I’ve seen more than a few people look at me, right at me, puzzled, knowing something was off but chalking it up to their imagination. That feeling you get when you think you’re being watched. We’ve all had it before. I think, maybe, in those moments there is someone watching you.
Now they’re watching me.
What clinched it for me was the door to the bunker. You see I always close it. Every time. It’s pretty hidden now that the bushes have all grown back and with the door closed you’d hardly know anything was there at all. Definitely can’t see it from the path. Still, I close it, every time, to keep it all to myself, but one day I made my trek up the hill and found it open. Just a little. A crack.
So, to be safe I bought a real hefty padlock and sealed the door up tight. Made sure no animals could get in. That the wind wasn’t going to blow the door open. It should have held. Would have. Then I came back and the padlock was cut clean through and just left there on the ground. And beside it the door was open. Not a little this time. Open. All the way. A message.
Like you wanted me to know. Cause I know you’re reading this and okay, I get it. I’ve learned my lesson. The door doesn’t belong to me. I get it and I can’t take it anymore. I need you to stop! Please! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Whoever you are. No more pulling my bedsheets off at night. No more leaving the front door open for me to find in the morning. No more smiley faces drawn in the glass while I’m in the shower. Message received. Loud and clear.
I promise I won’t go back.
Just please.
I’m begging.
Leave me alone.
#entertainment
source
| 3,000 mlx | |
| 4 | |
| 0 |