The Woman in the Wall: Answering the Knock in the Middle of the Night

A woman living alone has heard every story about the woman living alone. We constantly negotiate the knowledge of our vulnerability, both real and amplified by stories we’re told.

The second time I lived alone, I slept in a large room with five doors. Horizontal in bed, I counted them, opening onto rooms, halls, other doors. Beyond the doorways, the rest of the hundred-year-old house unfolded: living room, kitchen, parlor, center hall stacked like a spine. Behind my pillow were two big windows that didn’t open but rattled pleasantly with the wind and the night trains.

One night, I woke up to the knocking. Rap-rap-rap-rap- Echoing all around me. Insistent. I snapped to. The noise was coming from the front door. Rap-rap-rap. Just two doors away. I froze, flat under the quilt. 2:20 a.m. Then it stopped.

Maybe I didn’t hear what I heard. Maybe I was still dreaming. I’d fallen asleep around midnight. The last thing I saw through the window behind my head was the moon, upside-down and strobing through the blinds. I’d closed my eyes, counted the house’s doors and bricked-up fireplaces. I took stock of its paintings, including the portrait over the dining-room table of Eudora Welty with a pursed mouth, de facto patron saint of the writing residency that brought me to this Southern town. I pictured what lay beyond the walls: a field, the identical bungalow next door whose occupant I never met, rows of white trucks behind the post office. From there, the town spread, inching away from itself like a universe.

The knocking came again—round and pounding, not a knuckle rap but the side of the fist: Boom-boom-boom-boom! Then silence. I’d left a light on, which would now illuminate my every move. The front door was framed with floor-to-ceiling glass. I stayed still, scrolling through scenarios. No voice sounded. No footfall. If the knocker needs help, will they cry out? Are they high, drunk, sick? Are they circling the house, its abundant windows? Are they looking for home? Cold air pushed through the window seam.

A woman living alone has heard every story about the woman living alone, every knock in the dark. We know the knock is for us.

Should I call someone—or go back to sleep? I could engage with the knock, the door, investigate like a responsible citizen or a rational being with a general response to stimuli. Then again, aren’t those the ones who die first in horror movies?

I must’ve learned this strategy—just close your eyes—from Mama, from being a daughter. To help me fall asleep when I was little, sometimes she would leave NYPD Blue playing on the tiny TV in my room, soft and staticky. Sometimes she’d trace patterns with her fingers over my cheeks and forehead, down my nose, until everything dissolved. This was the power of relinquishing: Nothing bad can happen while you sleep; the innocence of unconsciousness protects you.

*

As a child, one story troubled my dreams the most. A counselor had told the tale to us latchkey kids on a snow day at the YMCA. I remembered the setting of the telling: how totally un-scary it was, huddled in a multi-purpose room with laminate flooring and wall-to-wall mirrors for aerobics classes, everything the color of the fluorescent lights overhead.

The classic version of the story goes like this: A man marries a woman who has an arm made of solid gold. They live contentedly together for many years, but more than his wife, the man loves her golden arm. Finally, the woman dies. Her husband buries her in the swamp outside town, and makes a great show of his grief in front of the neighbors. He decks himself out in black; he cries into his beard. That night, however, he returns to the grave and digs into the wet soil. He brings up his wife’s body and saws off her golden arm. He bundles the arm in a sack, replaces the corpse in the ground, and goes home. He places the arm under the pillow beside him and falls asleep. At midnight, he wakes to the wind. The wind is blowing, moaning, almost like a voice: Whoooo hasss my goooolden arrrrm . . .

The wind blows harder, rattling the windows, pushing inside. Now he’s sure he hears a voice: Whooo hasss my gooolden arm? The man shivers in his bed, listening. There’s a thud-thud-thud up the cabin steps, thud-thud on the door. Whooo has my golden arm? The man stays still, hears the latch. Then he knows: Whatever it is, it’s in the room. Whooo has my golden arm? He’s shivering, there’s something very cold next to the bed, standing over him. Then—he can hardly breathe—the voice is right in his ear: Who . . . has . . . my . . . golden . . . arm?

People have been telling versions of this folktale for centuries. In the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Folktale Index, it’s Type 366, a narrative called “A Corpse Claims Its Property.” Sometimes the corpse has been robbed of a prized dress, silver dollars holding down closed eyes, a human liver passed off as beef, a bone boiled for soup. The body seeks what belongs to it. It doesn’t stop.

The story of the Golden Arm is included in Mark Twain’s How To Tell a Story & Other Essays, with notes on how to keep an audience in thrall. How to set the mood, make sound effects: “(set your teeth together and imitate the wailing and wheezing singsong of the wind).” He tells you how to stick the landing. The voice is right in his ear: Who’s got my golden arm? The teller should wail this part “plaintively, accusingly”; the corpse has reached the moment of its reckoning. Then, Twain instructs, “You stare steadily and impressively into the face of the farthest-gone auditor—a girl, preferably—and let that awe-inspiring pause begin to build itself in the deep hush. Then—”

YOU’VE GOT IT!

The young woman at the YMCA paused perfectly. Masterfully. Then she shouted and lunged across the circle of little girls. We jumped out of our brown-bag lunches.

By the time this story translated to my nightmares, the details were distorted. The corpse had transformed into a swamp monster. The vengeful wife-ghost never scared me, maybe since I felt she was justified in her pursuit, so I filled in the shadow with an un-feminine, more random danger: the silhouette of a ghoulish Barney the Dinosaur sludging up the stairs to my room. In my dreams’ retelling, whatever it was that the man had stolen from the creature, he then chopped, cooked, and ate. He went to bed greedy, but no longer hungry.

When I moved into the house with all the doors, I had taken precautions to feel safe. I smudged with sage, double-checked the locks, paid my respects to Eudora. The previous resident had a certain painting removed from the house because she was sure it was haunted; I emailed to thank her. I kept finding pennies placed on window sills and thresholds, offerings or protection left by somebody else who’d rattled through these rooms. Maybe we both sensed that by taking up this temporary space as transitory writers—unplaceable women—we possessed a liberty that would, at some point, be recalled.

*

The first time I lived alone, I slept in a studio apartment overlooking a Grateful Dead bar. The old brick building sat on a corner in Denver’s Capitol Hill. I had moved across the country and could walk to my job as a music critic, passing the Unsinkable Molly Brown’s house on the way. The neighborhood’s derelict Victorian mansions had once been havens for punks and artists, but now were filling up with “young professionals.”

That evening, a weeknight, I’d seen a clutch of young women tramping down the back stairwell. Based on their outfits’ ratio of crochet, I guessed they were going next door to Quixote’s, the Deadhead spot. I settled in for a night with my laptop. Deadlines and late shows and the adrenaline of a new life made me keep strange hours, all hours. I was familiar with the sunrise flush out my window. I knew the dumpsters directly below were among the most popular in the city for digging and puking. I woke every day to a ten-foot mural of Jerry Garcia’s face glowering up at me, but I still only knew one song by the Grateful Dead.

The knocking came at two a.m. Insistent and loud, banging. But it wasn’t knocking at my door. The sound continued: rhythmic, forceful, pausing occasionally, echoing. My mind filled in the space: was someone beating a large rug in the stairwell? Thwap! Thwap! I waited. When it didn’t stop, I opened the door to the hall and listened. I heard another thud and then, whimpers. I figured it was a neighbor returning home on a bender, and they’d cry it out soon enough. I closed the door. But then the banging began again. Louder, more desperate. The knocker was probably locked out, and I figured the sooner I helped them, the sooner they would shut the hell up.

I moved toward the knocking. I pushed open the door to the back stairwell and called up, softly so as not to frighten, Hey, are you okay?—Muffled whimpers. I climbed a stair, two, three, and turned on the landing.

That’s when I saw them: the legs. There, above me, two tan legs stuck straight out of the plaster wall. Flailing. One leg bent backwards and kicked the door to the second floor: Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!

I ran up the steps and stood looking down at the legs. The legs were wearing tiny white denim shorts. Nothing else. A shoe and a mop leaned in a corner. Wooden splinters scattered on the carpet like eggshells. Then I saw the torso. The naked torso was in the wall, wedged into an opening the size of a doggie door, the hole jagged as though it had been kicked through. Every time the torso moved, splintered wood dug and scraped at the skin. Then I heard the voice—

Do you have a saw?

“What? Are you in there?” I shouted at the voice, coming from what I presumed was a head, hidden inside the wall. “Are you okay?”

Do you have a hammer?

“What?”

The woman in the wall told me, wailing, that she got locked out. Lost her keys. Phone dead. Her friends had gone home. This was a passage into her own apartment—some kind of antique air vent she’d kicked through, leading to a closet or crawlspace—and she had to get in. Her puppy was in there, she said. She’s been alone for HOURS. She’s scared.

I told her she was really stuck. Her body wouldn’t fit through the hole. Wriggling made it worse. I recommended a strategy of passivity: Lie still and it will be over soon. I put my hands on either side of the torso’s back and pulled. The wood tore at her, and the woman in the wall yelped and cried. I stopped pulling.

The voice came again, garbled through the wood and plaster: Do you have a saw? I did not. Do you have a hammer? I did, but I refused to give it to her. I called the cops because she was in pain—maybe it was all those nights falling asleep to NYPD Blue—but when the operator began asking if the woman in the wall was drunk and whether they should send an ambulance, I hung up. I figured this night was going to cost her enough.

I talked to the woman in the wall, though she wasn’t making much sense. Finally, I flagged down her neighbors—a young couple coming home from the bars. With three people and a pair of legs in the stairwell, I immediately felt safer and stronger. Together we managed to wriggle the woman out of the wall. Then we looked away. Her little white shorts had slipped from her hips, and she wasn’t wearing underwear. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, and her bra had somehow been lost mid-tunnel. Her long sleek hair hung in her glazed eyes, but she was quiet. Somebody lent her a T-shirt.

I called the building manager, who said to call a locksmith, and I called three locksmiths, none of whom could get there until morning. When the woman from the wall asked again about a saw, I slipped back downstairs into my one-room apartment. I pressed both hands against my door in thanks.

*

I don’t fetishize the vulnerable body. I’ve spent my life denying its existence—to friends, boyfriends, strangers on the street. To every shadow that quickens my step, every creak in an old house that sets my stupid heart spinning.

We must constantly negotiate the knowledge of our vulnerability—both real and amplified by the stories we’re told. We tamp it down while gripping it tight, keys clutched like blades between knuckles. How many risks have I taken, how many brain cells have I obliterated in order to assert my ability to move through the world on my own terms? I’ll be fine. I can have another. I’m walking. It was the wind.

I started telling this story right away—on the phone, on Instagram, at an all-staff editorial meeting. I get stuck on the woman’s peculiar repetition, her choices, her fixation on the rough tools that would hurt her as they set her free. If the Woman in the Wall were cataloged in the folktale index, and if we followed Twain’s rules for storytelling, it should end where the Golden Arm does: with the jump-scare, with the LEGS! These are half-stories, the unknown given half a form.

On this other night, in the Southern town, the knocking didn’t return. I called my boss, the person who’d phoned me months earlier to offer me this residency. She lived around the corner. She stayed on the phone while I coast-is-clear’ed, tiptoeing through doorways and peering out windows. Then she invited me, firmly, to spend the night at her house, and sent her husband to fetch me.

When I called my partner to tell him about the knocking, he asked, But you didn’t look to see who it was? It’s true I could have: knock-knock—who’s there?—danger assessed or dispelled in an instant. When I told my boss that I felt a little silly, she said, Better silly than stupid. She understood—when asked to get rid of that haunted painting, she threw it over the back fence of the post office. She understood that to live alone is to hear the echoes resound more loudly.

We reject windows and too many doors and good light and evening air because it means we can be reached, taken, invaded, dismantled. Mama taught me to trust sleep, but she also told me that if I wandered off in public, strangers could snatch me up. It was a trick, but it stuck. There I was, wandering off on my own again, rattling around in a space too big for me. Danger doesn’t need a reason: You and your body are often more than enough.

*

If someone else told the story of the knock at two a.m., they, too, might start with the house—or houses. On a quiet street behind the post office, two identical bungalows sit side-by-side. They share a driveway. One night, both houses leave their porch lights on. In one house lives a bookish bachelor who’s expecting a late-night visitor. When the visitor arrives, he goes to the wrong porch. Knocks on the wrong door. In one house, a man waits. In the other house, a woman scares herself to death.

In these middle-of-the-night stories, we tend to forget the neighbors. The neighbors who watched the man to see that he grieved his wife and her arm. Neighbors who pull you out of a wall. Whose lives sometimes collide, overlap, and run parallel. If I’d confronted the knock, perhaps this neighbor would be part of this story. Some blushing confusion on the front porch. Some lesson about the world being both closer than I think, and also having very little to do with me.

But I stayed silent, hidden, so I’m left with only the unknown, the five doors in and out, the half-formed dread that is all mine.

I keep telling the story about the woman in the wall because it nags at me. I want to know why once I moved toward the noise in the night, and later I was frozen. I leave out the story’s mundane aftermath, half because it’s better for telling, half because I don’t know what happened next. I ran into the neighbor couple who helped me pull her—she never told me her name—out of the wall. Turns out, the cops showed up. A cop picked the woman’s lock with an unfolded paper clip. The next day, the borrowed T-shirt was left crumpled in a plastic bag hung from the couple’s doorknob. “So I guess she’s fine,” the neighbor said. I figure this is not a story that the woman in the wall tells about herself, and that silence belongs to her.

Soon after that night in the stairwell, the Grateful Dead bar was shuttered. I woke up one day, and instead of Jerry Garcia out my window, I saw a black wall. The building turned into a dubstep club, and the woofer shook my windows like an underground explosion. Womp womp womp. A frame fell off the sill. I knew it was time to go. Like a good neighbor, I called in a noise complaint.

These days, I feel deeply for the woman in the wall. I identify with the corpse reclaiming its property. She’s the one with a mission, the one reversing her vulnerability. The woman in the wall struggled to return to the place that belonged to her, where she could protect what she loved. To close the door for herself, she broke through the wall. Offered up her body and didn’t give a fuck about splinters in her skin. I too feel like I’m tunneling—halfway into a book, between homes in pursuit of this life, often stuck; can’t go forward, can’t go back. I keep kicking my feet. Neighbor, I’m on my way. But do you have a hammer? Do you have a saw?