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| Free Story Friday: The Woman Who Knocks |
A new original tale every week—twisted, terrifying, and inspired by the darkest legends you thought you knew.
The knocking came at 3:03 a.m.
Three slow, deliberate raps that echoed through Aiko “Lena” Sato’s cramped studio apartment. She woke with a start, heart hammering against her ribs, the sound still reverberating in the darkness. For a moment, she lay frozen beneath her thin blanket, listening to the rain drum against the windows and the old building’s pipes groan like arthritic joints.
Maybe she’d imagined it. Maybe it was just the wind, or a neighbor stumbling home drunk, or—
Knock. Knock. Knock.
There it was again. Measured. Patient. Horribly human.
Lena slid out of bed, her bare feet hitting the cold hardwood floor. She crept toward the door, each step careful and quiet, though she didn’t know why she bothered being silent. The apartment building was old, its walls paper-thin. Everyone could hear everything—arguments, television shows, the elderly woman upstairs who shuffled back and forth at all hours.
She pressed an eye to the peephole.
The hallway was empty. Just flickering fluorescent lights casting sickly yellow pools on stained carpet, and the faded wallpaper with its pattern of roses that had long ago turned brown.
“Who’s there?” Lena whispered, her voice barely audible even to herself.
For a long moment, nothing. Then—breathing. Soft and steady, like someone standing just on the other side of the door, listening as intently as she was.
Her mother’s voice echoed in her memory, sharp with warning: If something knocks and calls your name, Aiko, you never answer. Some spirits are polite… until you invite them in.
Lena backed away from the door, pulse racing. The breathing stopped. The knocking didn’t return. After twenty minutes of standing in the darkness, muscles tensed and ready to run, she finally convinced herself she’d imagined it.
The rain continued its percussion on the windows. She climbed back into bed and told herself she was being ridiculous.
But she didn’t sleep again that night.
Lena had moved into the Bellview Apartments two weeks earlier, after her relationship with Marcus imploded in a spectacular fashion involving his ex-girlfriend, a lot of shouting, and Lena realizing she’d wasted three years on someone who’d never really seen her. The apartment was all she could afford—a studio in a half-empty building on the wrong side of town, where the heat worked sporadically and the elevator hadn’t functioned since the Clinton administration.
She was trying to start over. New city, new job as a medical transcriptionist she could do from home, new name. Her Japanese mother still called her Aiko, but everyone else knew her as Lena. It was easier that way. Fewer questions about her heritage, fewer assumptions about where she was really from.
Her only neighbor on the third floor was Mrs. Nakayama, an elderly woman who burned incense that smelled of sandalwood and left small bowls of rice near her door.
“Offerings,” Mrs. Nakayama had explained when Lena asked, her English heavily accented but precise. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, with hair like silver thread pulled into a neat bun. “For the ones who wander. You keep your door shut at night, ne?”
Lena had smiled politely, assuming the old woman was just eccentric. But now, standing in her kitchen that morning making coffee with shaking hands, she remembered the serious look in Mrs. Nakayama’s dark eyes.
That evening, as Lena sat cross-legged on her futon scrolling through job applications, she heard it again. Faint knocking somewhere down the hall. Three taps. A pause. Then silence that seemed to swallow all sound.
She turned off her laptop and listened, but the building had gone quiet except for the ever-present rain.
The maintenance guy, Tommy, showed up the next morning to fix a radiator leak. He was in his fifties, with kind eyes and hands scarred from decades of repair work.
“You settling in okay?” he asked as he tightened a valve. “I know this place ain’t the Ritz, but it’s safe enough.”
“It’s fine,” Lena said, then hesitated. “Though someone was doing midnight door-to-door evangelism last night. Three in the morning.”
Tommy’s hands went still. The wrench slipped, clattering against the radiator. When he looked up at her, his face had gone pale.
“You… heard it?”
Something in his tone made Lena’s stomach tighten. “Heard what?”
He set down his tools carefully, like a man buying time to think. “There’s a rumor about this building. Tenants have been reporting knocking at 3:03 a.m. ever since—” He stopped, reconsidering. “Ever since a woman in 3B vanished two years ago.”
Lena felt her coffee turn to ice in her stomach. “Vanished how?”
“Just gone. Door locked from the inside, windows closed. Police said she must’ve left somehow, but…” He shook his head. “People call her the Woman Who Knocks. If you open the door—or even talk to her—supposedly you take her place.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lena said, but her voice came out thin and unconvincing.
Tommy gathered his tools. “Yeah. Probably.” But he wouldn’t meet her eyes as he left.
That afternoon, Lena found something taped to her door: a small paper charm covered in neat brushstrokes of Japanese kanji—an ofuda, she realized. Her grandmother had kept similar ones at her house in Osaka.
Mrs. Nakayama appeared in her doorway as if summoned. “It keeps out the restless,” she explained softly. “But don’t speak if she calls your name. Especially your true name.”
“My true name?” Lena asked.
The old woman’s expression was grave. “Names have power, Aiko-chan. They always have.”
Lena’s breath caught. She hadn’t told Mrs. Nakayama her Japanese name.
That night, she dreamed of knocking—endless, patient, waiting. She woke at dawn to find the ofuda on the floor, its edges damp, the ink feathered like bruised reeds running down the paper.
The next night, the knocks returned.
Three deliberate raps at 3:03 a.m., so loud they seemed to shake the door in its frame. Lena bolted upright, her heart a drum in her chest. She grabbed her phone, the screen’s blue light harsh in the darkness, and crept toward the door.
Through the peephole, the hallway appeared empty. But the floor outside glistened—wet, as if someone had been standing there dripping rainwater. As Lena watched, she saw faint bare footprints leading away down the corridor. They stopped abruptly in the middle of the hallway. Just… stopped.
In the morning, exhausted and jittery from too much coffee, Lena scrolled through local Reddit threads and found what she was looking for:
“Anyone else hear knocking in the Bellview Apartments?”
“Three knocks. 3:03 a.m. every night. Don’t answer.”
“Sometimes she says your name first. That’s when you know she’s found you.”
Her hands trembled on her phone. Her mother used to warn her that spirits learned names from careless mouths, from old papers, from the whispers of the living. She’d always dismissed it as superstition—stories from the old country that had no place in modern America.
She called her mother that evening.
“Mom, remember that story you used to tell me—about ghosts that knock?”
The line went silent. Then her mother’s voice came through, tight with fear. “Aiko. You didn’t answer, did you?”
Lena hesitated a moment too long. “No. Of course not.”
“Aiko.” Her mother’s voice broke. “Promise me. Promise me you didn’t.”
“I promise,” Lena whispered, and prayed it wasn’t a lie.
The next morning, Lena woke to the sound of sirens.
She stumbled to her door and opened it to find police in the hallway, their radios crackling with static. Mrs. Nakayama’s door stood wide open, and paramedics wheeled a stretcher past—a white sheet covering a small, still form.
“What happened?” Lena asked Tommy, who stood in the hallway looking gray and shaken.
“Mrs. Nakayama. Heart attack, they think.” His voice was hollow. “But the inside of her door… it was covered in handprints. Like something had been trying to get in. Or out.”
Lena’s legs nearly gave out. She noticed the ofuda Mrs. Nakayama had given her lying torn and trampled on the hallway floor, its protective kanji rendered meaningless.
That afternoon, as storm clouds gathered and rain began its familiar percussion, Lena received a voicemail from an unknown number. She almost deleted it. But something made her press play.
Three knocks echoed from her phone speaker. Then silence. Then the call ended.
3:03 a.m. arrived like a sentence being carried out.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Lena sat on her futon in the darkness, phone clutched in one hand, the other pressed against her mouth to keep from screaming. The knocking was louder now, more insistent, as if whatever stood outside was growing impatient.
She forced herself to stand and crept toward the door. Through the peephole, she finally saw her.
A woman stood in the hallway, long black hair hanging limp and dripping, a white dress clinging to her thin frame. Her head was tilted at an unnatural angle, as if her neck were broken. She faced the door, and though Lena couldn’t see her face, she knew the woman was listening.
Then the woman spoke, her voice soft as rain. “Aiko… you dropped this.”
Lena looked down. The ofuda lay neatly folded on her doormat, bone-dry despite the water pooling beneath the woman outside.
“It’s lonely out here,” the woman continued, almost tenderly. “Won’t you let me in?”
Lena’s phone buzzed in her hand—a voicemail notification. With trembling fingers, she played it.
Her own voice whispered back at her: Who’s there?
The realization hit like a physical blow. She’d answered. That first night, standing at the door in the darkness, she’d whispered the question. She’d spoken.
“No,” Lena breathed. “No, no, no—”
She called her mother, fingers fumbling with the phone. “Mom, please. You have to help me. I think I—”
“Don’t open the door,” her mother said urgently. “I’m calling someone. A priest, someone who knows—”
The clock on Lena’s phone blinked to 3:02.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Then her mother’s voice came from the hallway, warm and familiar: “Aiko? Sweetheart, open up. It’s me. I came to help you.”
Lena froze. Her phone was still connected. Her mother’s real voice screamed through the speaker: “Don’t open it! That’s not me! Aiko, don’t open the door!”
Outside, the imitation softened, becoming sweet and coaxing. “You used to listen to your mother, didn’t you? You were always such a good girl.”
The door handle began to turn slowly, though Lena stood ten feet away, her body pressed against the far wall. The lock clicked. The chain rattled.
“You can’t hide from yourself, Aiko,” the voice said. “You already let me in when you answered.”
The door swung open.
The smell of rain and earth flooded the apartment, thick and cloying. The woman stepped inside, water pooling beneath her bare feet. Her face remained hidden behind her hair, but Lena could see her mouth—lips too pale, stretched in a smile too wide.
Lena’s voice broke as she whispered the only prayer she remembered from childhood, words her grandmother had taught her in Japanese. The syllables felt clumsy on her tongue, but she forced them out, again and again.
The woman stopped. Her head tilted further, impossibly far. Then she began to laugh—a sound like water gurgling down a drain.
“You think old words can save you?” she whispered. “You already gave me what I needed. Your answer. Your name.”
The lights fluttered—and died. In the darkness, Lena heard wet footsteps approaching.
Then silence.
Tommy arrived for work the next morning, whistling despite the persistent rain. He climbed the stairs to the third floor, coffee in hand, and noticed Lena’s door standing slightly ajar. A fresh ofuda had been taped neatly to the frame, its kanji still dark and precise.
He frowned. “Miss Sato? You in there?”
Silence.
He knocked twice. Then, from inside the apartment, three slow knocks answered him back.
Tommy’s coffee slipped from his hand, splashing across the carpet. He backed away, nearly tripping over his own feet as he hurried toward the stairs. Behind him, the door creaked wider, and wet footprints began to appear on the hallway floor—one after another, as if someone were walking very slowly behind him.
The building management rented out 3B again three weeks later. The new tenant never spoke her name to anyone. She kept her door locked at all times and taped protective charms to every entrance. At night, neighbors reported hearing footsteps pacing in her apartment—back and forth, back and forth—like someone waiting.
And sometimes, if you walked the hallway at 3:03 a.m., you could hear it: polite, steady knocking, like someone waiting patiently to be let back in.
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved.
This original story was written exclusively for Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth.
Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission.
This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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