In the mornings, I often discovered a mysteriously damp sock on my ex’s side of the bed, and sometimes, in my sleep, I heard him make peculiar noises. One night, I jolted awake and was horrified to uncover the chilling connection between the two strange occurrences: he had been sleepwalking into the backyard, standing barefoot in the wet grass, and talking to someone who wasn’t there.
I stayed frozen in bed that night, barely breathing, just watching through the curtain as he stood motionless under the moonlight, his damp sock clinging to the edge of the garden. He mumbled things I couldn’t make out. It wasn’t just gibberish—it sounded like a conversation, as if someone was talking back to him.
The next morning, I asked him if he remembered anything. He rubbed his eyes, smiled, and shrugged like I’d just told him he left the lights on. “Must’ve been dreaming,” he said, brushing past me to get coffee. But it kept happening—every few nights, he’d wander outside, sock half-on, sometimes both feet bare, murmuring to the air like it whispered back.
At first, I thought maybe it was just stress. His work was hectic. He had this intense job at a logistics firm, always glued to his laptop. But the way he moved outside—it didn’t feel like stress. It felt like something else. Like he was following a command.
Then came the drawings.
I found them in his work bag, crumpled at the bottom like old receipts. Pages and pages of odd sketches—circles inside squares, eyes with no pupils, twisted trees with symbols carved into their trunks. I recognized the tree from our backyard in two of them. Same bent branch. Same three stones around the base.
When I showed him the drawings, he looked… off. Not scared, not confused—almost annoyed. “Why are you going through my stuff?” he snapped, grabbing the papers and shoving them in the bin.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Every creak of the floorboards made me jump. Around 2 a.m., I heard him again. This time, I followed.
He was standing in front of the tree from the drawings, barefoot. No sock this time. His eyes were closed, lips moving. He whispered a name. “Caro…line.” He kept saying it. Over and over. “Caroline, Caroline, Caroline… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t know.”
My heart dropped.
That wasn’t my name.
The next morning, I didn’t say anything. I googled “sleepwalking talking to people” and “saying names in sleep backyard.” I didn’t get much. Mostly forums full of people joking about sleep-eating cake. This wasn’t that.
The next day, I found something behind the shed while watering the plants. A tiny wooden box. Old, maybe antique. Inside were two things: a lock of hair tied with a blue ribbon, and a note that read, in faded ink, “Forgive him.”
I confronted him again, holding the box.
“Where did you get that?” he said, pale as chalk.
“Behind the shed. Who’s Caroline?”
He stared at the box, not me. “You weren’t supposed to find that.”
He didn’t answer any more questions that day. Instead, he left. Took his laptop and keys and left the house without a word. He didn’t come back that night. Or the next.
I called his mom. She was a kind woman, always sending me birthday cards. When I asked her about Caroline, the phone went quiet.
Finally, she whispered, “Oh, honey… he never told you?”
She told me about his childhood. How, when he was ten, his cousin Caroline came to live with them after her parents died. They were close, inseparable. Until the day she drowned in the pond behind their old house. He was there, but no one knew what happened. He couldn’t speak for days. When he finally did, all he said was, “She told me not to tell.”
I sat on the couch, the box in my lap, piecing things together.
The damp sock. The drawings. The name. The box. The backyard.
I started digging. Not literally, but into records. Old articles. His childhood town had one local newspaper, which still had digital archives. I found the report: “Tragic Accident: 12-Year-Old Girl Drowns Behind Family Home.” No foul play. No questions asked.
But there was a small paragraph at the end. “The boy, a cousin and close friend of the deceased, was found sitting on the edge of the pond with a cut on his hand, repeating the words ‘circle, circle, she knows the way.’”
I remembered the drawings. Circles. Circles inside circles. He’d been drawing them again.
When he returned two days later, he looked like he hadn’t slept. “I went to see her,” he said quietly.
“Her who?” I asked, but I already knew.
“The place where she died. I needed to go back. I think… I think I’ve been walking in my sleep because she’s trying to tell me something.”
I didn’t know what to believe anymore. But I still loved him, in that way you love someone who’s haunted—not just by a ghost, but by themselves.
He asked me to come with him. Back to his childhood town. Back to the pond.
I said yes.
The town hadn’t changed much. A gas station, a bakery, a quiet park. His old house was now empty, for sale. We found our way to the pond out back. The water was still. It looked peaceful.
He stood at the edge, barefoot again. Closed his eyes.
“She used to play here,” he said. “Said she could hear the trees talking. That they knew things.”
“Did she really drown?” I asked, heart pounding.
He looked at me then, with tears in his eyes. “I don’t know. I remember us playing, then… the water. Her hand slipping. I tried to grab her, but I couldn’t. Then… nothing.”
I stepped into the muddy grass. The ground was soft. Spongy.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he said. “I thought if I ignored it long enough, it would go away. But she keeps calling.”
We stayed in that town for a few days. He saw a therapist—an old family friend. They talked for hours. He cried a lot. I think something cracked open in him that had been sealed tight for years.
When we came home, things were quieter. No more sleepwalking. No more socks. Just… healing.
We didn’t get back together in the way most people would expect. We grew apart, in a good way. He moved closer to his family. Took a job that didn’t eat him alive. Adopted a dog named Molly. Said he needed something warm beside him that wouldn’t disappear in the night.
As for me, I started writing again. That whole experience taught me that some stories find you. Even in the form of a wet sock.
I wrote an article about it—not the spooky version, but the human one. About grief, guilt, sleepwalking through pain. It went viral.
People messaged me saying they saw themselves in it. That they too had loved someone haunted. That they’d tried to help, and sometimes failed, but now felt seen.
And that was the reward I didn’t expect.
Helping others heal by telling a story I lived.
So, here’s the lesson:
Sometimes, we carry guilt like a damp sock we don’t even realize is clinging to us. We ignore it, pretend it’s nothing. But if we don’t stop to look, to ask why it’s there, it grows heavier. Until someone else helps us peel it off, look at it, and say, “It’s okay. You don’t have to carry this anymore.”
Not every relationship is meant to last forever. Some come to reveal old wounds. To bring closure. To shine light on what’s hidden in the dark corners of our hearts.
And if you’re lucky, those endings aren’t tragic—they’re transformations.
If this story touched you, share it. Maybe someone you love has been walking in the dark too.
And maybe, just maybe, they’re ready to come home.
