Every Toy Was Back on the Floor

I had just married my first husband, and my daughter, Cierra, was about a year old. We moved into a trailer in a trailer park called Hill and Dale in Macon.

From the moment I walked into that trailer, I had a bad feeling about it.

There were children’s clothes scattered underneath the trailer and throughout the yard. One of the bedrooms had a lock on the outside of the door, which immediately struck me as strange and unsettling. I put Cierra’s clothes and toys in that room because it was closest to the living room, while our bedroom was on the opposite side of the trailer.

I had taken one of the side rails off Cierra’s crib and pushed the crib up against my side of the bed. She could sleep in her crib but still feel like she was right beside me, and I could reach over to her if she cried during the night.

Cierra seemed extremely unhappy in that trailer. She stayed with my Mama quite often because she didn’t seem comfortable there.

I also couldn’t sleep.

Almost every night, I experienced an overwhelming feeling of dread and fear that I couldn’t explain. It wasn’t simply being nervous in a new house. I would lie awake feeling like something was wrong.

Some nights, I would hear what sounded like little bare feet running back and forth between the kitchen and the living room.

What made that especially strange was that Cierra was never the one making the noise. When I heard it, she was either not at home or was asleep right beside me.

Then something happened during the day that I still can’t explain.

One day, I had been cleaning while Cierra was playing in her room. Eventually, I took her to my Mama’s house for the night.

Before leaving her room, I picked up all of Cierra’s toys and put them neatly into the clothes basket I kept them in. I walked out of the room and into the bathroom next door. I opened the cabinet to get something and realized the cleaner I needed was in the kitchen.

So I walked back down the hallway, past Cierra’s room, toward the kitchen.

I stopped just after passing her bedroom and looked back inside.

Every single toy was scattered across the floor.

The basket was upside down.

I immediately looked out the front window. I didn’t see anyone. I looked out the back window and saw my husband in the backyard, where he had been burning brush.

I opened the back door and yelled at him, “Why did you dump out all these toys?”

He looked completely confused.

He told me he hadn’t been inside the trailer for hours and hadn’t touched the toys.

And I knew he was probably telling the truth.

I hadn’t heard either door open. I hadn’t heard the toys being dumped out. I had only been in the bathroom for a very short time, and there wasn’t enough time for someone to come into the house, dump the basket, and leave without me seeing or hearing them.

I still don’t know what happened.

Another incident happened one night when my husband and I were asleep.

I woke up to him knocking on the wall.

I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he was trying to scare a raccoon.

He knocked on the wall in a particular pattern.

Something knocked back.

It wasn’t just a random noise. Whatever it was seemed to mimic the same pattern he had made.

My husband immediately bolted out of bed and went outside through the front door. I got up and looked out the window facing the backyard.

We didn’t see a person.

We didn’t see an animal.

There was only darkness and silence.

We were so uncomfortable in that trailer that eventually we even had a pastor come to the home and anoint it.

Not long after that, we moved out.

The trailer itself is no longer there. At some point after we moved out, it was removed, and the property looks completely different now. Unfortunately, there isn’t even a trailer there anymore that I could return to or revisit.

I’ve sometimes wondered what happened there before we lived there, especially because of the children’s clothes I found scattered around the property and that strange lock on the outside of the bedroom door. I never learned the history of the trailer, so I have no idea whether there was ever anything significant about it or whether those things were completely unrelated.