The Smiling Boy in the Walls
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The Smiling Boy in the Walls
The smell was the first thing I noticed when I moved into Apartment 3B, a sweet, cloying scent like rotting sugar and mildew-stained toys. The kind of smell that lingers in thrift shops and forgotten nurseries.
I ignored it at first.
The landlord, a pale man with a cough like torn paper, had been eager to rent the unit. No background checks. First month free. “Don’t worry about the noises,” he muttered as he handed over the keys, eyes darting toward the peeling wallpaper in the hall. “Old pipes. Building shifts sometimes.”
But it wasn’t the building that shifted.
It was the laughter.
It started on the second night. A soft, raspy giggle that came from inside the walls, right behind the cabinets, just behind my bed. At first, I thought it was the neighbors. But the units on either side were empty. I checked. Deadbolted. Dark.
The giggling never stayed in one place. Sometimes it moved from the floor to the ceiling in seconds, like something was crawling through the drywall. Other times, it would stop abruptly, only to be replaced by the slow, unmistakable sound of nails scratching. Not like mice. Not random.
Rhythmic.
Intentional.
By the end of the week, I’d started sleeping with the lights on. My dog refused to go near the walls, she’d growl at them, hackles up, tail stiff as a wire. One night, she simply started whining at the air and then peed herself. She never did that before. The vet found nothing wrong.
That same night, I found writing scratched into the back of a kitchen cabinet. It looked like it had been carved from inside the wall. Each letter shallow and jagged:
“Smile back or he gets in.”
I stared at the message until my eyes ached. My reflection in the oven door was grinning. I wasn’t.
I tried asking the other tenants about it. Most wouldn’t talk to me. One old woman down the hall told me there used to be a boy in my apartment. “Weird little thing,” she said, voice trembling. “Kept to himself. Always talking about Jeff. Jeff the Killer, he called him. Said Jeff spoke to him in his sleep. Taught him how to make people smile the right way.”
“What happened to him?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Just made the sign of the cross and shuffled back into her unit.
After that, things escalated.
I began waking up with scratches on my arms. My fingernails were clean. Sometimes, there were trails of dirt on the floor, as if someone had crawled in from a vent. But all the vents were sealed. The building didn’t even have a basement.
Then the faces started appearing.
Reflections in the dark glass of the TV when it was off—always grinning, always too wide. Teeth like shattered porcelain. Eyes pinprick small, floating in pools of shadow.
The worst night came two weeks in.
I woke up to the sound of breathing.
Not mine.
It came from behind the wall, just inches from my head. Slow, wet inhalations, like someone gasping between sobs and laughter. I sat up, and the wall bulged outward—just slightly, as if something was pressing from the other side.
That’s when I saw it: two eyes. Tiny. Black. Watching me through a crack in the plaster.
And then… a smile.
A slow, spreading grin carved too wide into a face that shouldn’t have fit in the wall at all.
“Found you,” he whispered.
I screamed. Called the police.
They came. They checked everything. No signs of forced entry. No prints. But when they peeled back the wallpaper in my bedroom, they found something.
Dozens of photographs.
All of them grainy and stained. Most were of people sleeping in the very bed I now used. But one photo made the officer drop it with a hiss.
It was me.
Taken from the ceiling.
Smiling in my sleep.
My lips torn and stretched. A grin that didn’t belong to me.
I moved out that night. Slept in my car for days. But sometimes, when I close my eyes, I hear the laughter again. High and wheezing. Crawling across the back of my mind.
I saw a post online recently—an urban legend spreading again. About a boy obsessed with Jeff the Killer. They say he tried to become like him. Cut his own face into a grin. Disappeared into the walls of his apartment, waiting for someone else to move in. Waiting for someone to smile back.
He doesn’t kill you.
Not at first.
He waits.
He watches.
Until you smile.
Then you belong to the wall too.
So if you ever hear laughter from behind your cupboards, don’t ignore it. Don’t talk to it. And for the love of all that’s holy...
Never. Smile. Back.
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I was smiling reading it. That doesn’t count, right?
Creepy, indeed.