The baby monitor picked up my daughter talking to someone in her room.
I was in the kitchen. My husband was at work.
The voice that answered her was a MAN’S.
I’ve been raising Poppy alone most of the week since Derek took the shift job in Fresno. He’s gone Monday through Friday, back on weekends, and it’s just me and my four-year-old in a house at the end of a cul-de-sac.
The monitor sits on the counter next to the coffee maker. I keep it on while she naps so I can hear if she wakes up scared.
That afternoon I heard her laughing.
Then a man said, “Not so loud, okay? It’s our secret.”
I dropped the mug I was drying.
I ran up the stairs so fast I skinned my shin on the gate. When I threw her door open, Poppy was sitting on her rug alone, arranging her plastic horses.
Nobody else. The window was locked. The closet was empty.
“Who were you talking to, baby?” I said.
She looked at me like it was obvious. “The man in the wall.”
I told myself she’d been dreaming. Kids that age make up friends.
But that night I couldn’t sleep, so I pulled up the monitor’s app and scrolled back through the saved audio.
The man’s voice was there. Clear.
Then I noticed the little device number under the recording. It wasn’t my monitor’s ID.
My monitor was a Hatch. This recording came from a unit labeled NURSERY-2.
We only had one camera. I bought it myself.
I called the company the next morning and gave them our address. The rep went quiet for a second.
“Ma’am, we show two devices registered to your account,” she said. “The second was added three years ago.”
Three years ago. Before Poppy was even born.
“Who registered it?” I asked.
She read me the name on the account.
It wasn’t Derek. It wasn’t me.
I sat down on the floor without deciding to.
That afternoon I went into the nursery and started running my hand along the wall behind the crib, pressing every panel, until my fingers caught on a seam near the outlet that didn’t sit flush.
I pried it back.
Poppy walked in behind me, holding her horse.
“He told me you’d find it,” she said.
The Space Behind the Outlet
The panel came loose with a soft crack.
Behind it was a black plastic box, about the size of a paperback, screwed into a wooden brace between the studs. A wire ran from its side and disappeared down toward the floor. There was a tiny green light blinking near the top.
I didn’t touch it.
Poppy moved closer.
“Is that him?”
I grabbed her around the middle and pulled her against my leg. Her plastic horse fell onto the carpet.
“No. We have to go downstairs.”
“But he said – “
“Downstairs, Poppy.”
That voice came out wrong. Too sharp. Her mouth pinched, and she looked at the box instead of me.
I called Derek.
He answered on the fourth ring. Behind him I could hear metal clanging and somebody shouting about a pallet.
“What happened?” he asked.
“There’s a device in the nursery wall.”
The clanging stopped.
“What kind of device?”
“I don’t know. A camera, maybe. A microphone. It has NURSERY-2 on it.”
He said nothing.
I pressed the phone harder to my ear. “Derek?”
“I thought that thing was gone.”
The words landed so cleanly I almost missed them.
“What thing?”
“I mean, what are you talking about?”
“You said you thought it was gone.”
He started talking fast then. About old wiring. About the previous owners. About how the house had a security system before we bought it in 2019 and some of the equipment might have been left behind.
I looked at the black box.
“Why would the company say it’s registered to an account from three years ago?”
“Because old systems don’t disappear just because you change owners.”
“Derek.”
“What?”
“Who is Paul Haskins?”
He breathed into the phone.
That was when I knew the company hadn’t made a mistake.
“Where did you get that name?” he asked.
“The account.”
“I don’t know him.”
“You do.”
“I don’t.”
Poppy reached for my hand. Her fingers were cold, though the house was warm.
From inside the wall, the little green light blinked again.
Derek said, “Don’t turn it on.”
I stared at the box.
“You just told me you didn’t know what it was.”
“I said I didn’t know if it still worked.”
“You knew it was there.”
“No. I knew there used to be something there.”
“Why?”
He cursed under his breath.
Then the call ended.
I stood in the nursery with Poppy pressed against my thigh and Derek’s dead voice in my ear.
The house made its regular sounds around us: the refrigerator kicking on downstairs, a truck rolling over the storm drain at the end of the street, the heater ticking behind the wall.
I took Poppy to my sister’s house.
Before I left, I covered the box with a towel.
Not because that would stop anything.
I just needed it not to look at us.
Paul Haskins
My sister Marlene lives eleven minutes away, in a yellow duplex beside a laundromat. She opened the door wearing one slipper and holding a wooden spoon.
I told her there was a camera in the wall.
She looked past me at Poppy.
“Is she hurt?”
“No.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Then come in before I burn the sauce.”
That was Marlene. She could be standing in front of a dead body and still worry about dinner.
Poppy sat at the kitchen table and colored a horse purple. I took my laptop into the laundry room because the washing machine was running and I didn’t want her to hear the recording.
I opened the Hatch app. The old audio file was still there.
The time stamp read 2:14 p.m.
Poppy’s voice came first.
“Do you hear me?”
A man’s voice answered, low and close to the microphone.
“I hear you.”
“Mommy said I can’t talk to you.”
“Mommy doesn’t know everything.”
I stopped the recording.
My hand was on the edge of the dryer. The machine rocked under it.
I played it again.
Poppy giggled. “What are you doing?”
“I’m waiting for you to tell me the new secret.”
“I have a purple horse.”
“That’s not a secret.”
She whispered something too soft to catch.
The man said, “Good girl.”
I shut the laptop.
Marlene knocked on the open door. “You want coffee?”
“Did Derek ever mention Paul Haskins?”
She looked at the ceiling.
“That name rings a bell.”
“Where?”
“Don’t know. Maybe from the house papers.”
“How would you know a guy who lived here before us?”
Marlene wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Because I was with you when you met the realtor. You were crying in the driveway because Derek wanted the place and you hated the stairs.”
“I didn’t hate the stairs.”
“You said, ‘Those stairs are a lawsuit waiting to happen.'”
That was true.
She sat on the washing machine. “Why Paul Haskins?”
“The device is registered to him.”
Marlene’s face changed.
“What device?”
I told her about the wall. I told her what Derek had said.
She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t make the face people make when they are trying to decide if you’re overreacting.
When I finished, she said, “Call the police.”
“I don’t know if it’s a camera.”
“Call the police.”
“I need to know what I’m looking at first.”
“You need to stop touching things.”
“I didn’t touch it.”
“You pried it out of the wall.”
“I didn’t take it out.”
“That counts as touching.”
I called the non-emergency line. An officer named Greg Pruitt came to Marlene’s house at 3:06 p.m. He was a wide man with a bent wedding ring and a paper cup from a gas station.
He listened to the recording twice.
On the second time, his eyes moved to Poppy.
“Does your husband know the child is talking to somebody through that device?”
“I think he does.”
“Think?”
“He said he thought it was gone.”
“That wasn’t in the recording.”
“No. That was on the phone.”
He wrote it down.
Then he asked me for the address.
What Derek Had Left Out
The house had been owned by Paul and Janet Haskins from 2008 until 2019. I knew that much because the realtor had left a photocopy of the old listing in a folder under the sink.
Three bedrooms. Two bathrooms. Quiet street. New roof.
The listing didn’t say that Paul Haskins had installed cameras.
Officer Pruitt stayed in the driveway while I unlocked the front door. Marlene kept Poppy in her car with the doors locked. She had put a cartoon on her phone, but Poppy wasn’t watching it.
The nursery looked exactly as we had left it.
The towel was on the wall.
I stood at the doorway.
A small red light had appeared beneath the towel.
It hadn’t been there before.
Pruitt stopped behind me.
“Don’t go in,” he said.
“I have to get my daughter’s blanket.”
“We’ll get it.”
He spoke into his radio and asked for another unit. His voice stayed flat, but he moved his hand away from his holster and rested it near his belt.
The light blinked twice.
Then a man’s voice came from the wall.
“Claire?”
My name.
Poppy screamed from the car.
Marlene shouted, “What the hell was that?”
Pruitt stepped into the room.
“Police department. Identify yourself.”
The voice said, “You shouldn’t have brought them here.”
Pruitt yanked the towel down.
The black box had a speaker grille on one side. A narrow lens sat behind a dusty strip of glass. The lens turned toward him with a faint mechanical click.
The device was live.
Pruitt grabbed my arm and pulled me back.
“Everybody outside.”
The voice followed us through the room.
“Claire, you need to listen.”
I went cold in the fingers first. Then my knees started shaking so badly I caught the doorframe.
It was Derek’s voice.
Not similar. Not close.
Derek.
Pruitt got me into the hallway while the second officer, a young woman named Sandra Doyle, checked the closets and bathroom. She found no one.
The voice continued through the box.
“Claire, answer me.”
I yelled, “Where are you?”
A pause.
Then, “At work.”
Pruitt looked at me.
I pulled out my phone and called Derek.
His number rang once.
The device in the wall rang with it.
Nobody spoke.
Pruitt took my phone from my hand and put it on speaker.
Derek answered.
“Claire?”
The voice in the wall spoke at the same time.
“Claire?”
Two Dereks.
One from my phone. One from behind the wall.
Pruitt motioned for me to end the call.
I couldn’t move.
The phone voice said, “Honey, don’t panic.”
The wall voice said, “You weren’t supposed to open that.”
Doyle drew her weapon.
For a few seconds, both lines stayed open. The phone hissed. Somewhere near the box, a chair scraped across a floor.
Then I heard a cough.
Derek’s cough.
The one he made after drinking coffee too fast.
Pruitt took the phone and said, “Derek Miller, this is Officer Pruitt. Stay where you are.”
Derek hung up.
The wall went silent.
The Room Under the Stairs
The officers searched the house for another entrance.
They found one behind the shelves under the stairs.
I had never moved those shelves. They were built into the wall, painted white, holding old board games, wrapping paper, and a broken fan. Doyle ran her flashlight along the baseboard and found a fresh screw where the wood didn’t quite meet.
The panel pulled away.
Behind it was a narrow door.
The lock was on the outside.
Pruitt stared at it.
“Who has a key?”
“Derek,” I said.
The lock was already open.
The room beyond smelled like dust and hot plastic. A folding chair sat in the middle. There was a small desk, a monitor, two empty coffee cups, and a pile of extension cords. A narrow vent had been cut into the ceiling, aimed toward the nursery wall.
On the monitor was a live view of Poppy’s bedroom.
Her purple horse sat on the rug.
The camera angle showed the crib, the closet, and the strip of wall where I had found the device.
There were no windows.
Doyle opened a file drawer beneath the desk. Inside were printed photographs.
Poppy asleep.
Poppy eating cereal.
Poppy in the backyard.
Poppy sitting on the front steps with a red balloon.
The photos had dates written on the backs.
Some were from this month.
Some were from before Poppy was born.
I grabbed the top one.
It showed me standing in the nursery, eight months pregnant, holding a paint roller. Derek stood behind me with his hand on my stomach.
On the back, in blue ink, someone had written:
She still doesn’t know about the other room.
I dropped it.
Pruitt picked it up with a tissue.
“Do you know this room exists?” he asked.
“No.”
“Does your husband?”
I looked at the desk.
The coffee cups were from that morning. One had a brown ring along the inside. Derek drank his coffee black.
The other had three sugar packets beside it.
A photo sat beneath the monitor.
It showed Poppy at two months old, asleep in the bassinet beside our bed.
On the back:
He says she hears me when she sleeps.
I couldn’t understand it.
Not because the words were hard.
Because Derek had been there. He had taken that photograph. He had complained when I left the bassinet too close to the heater.
Pruitt found a receipt in the drawer.
Fresno Trucking and Cold Storage.
The date was Monday.
The time was 5:48 a.m.
A security badge number was printed beneath Derek’s name.
“He’s really at work?” I asked.
Pruitt looked at the receipt. “Maybe.”
“Then who is in the room?”
The monitor flickered.
A new image came up.
Derek was standing in front of the camera.
He wore his work shirt. Gray. Company patch over the pocket.
His face filled the screen.
“Claire,” he said.
Pruitt reached for the power cord.
Derek smiled.
“Don’t unplug it. You’ll lose the audio.”
The Name on the Account
The police took the equipment, the photographs, and the hard drive from the desk.
Derek didn’t come home that night.
He was arrested at the truck yard in Fresno just after midnight. Pruitt told me they found him sitting in his pickup with a second phone, three charging cables, and a key ring with one brass key marked NURSERY.
He had not been in the hidden room that day.
He had been controlling the camera from Fresno.
The man who had spoken through it was someone else.
Paul Haskins.
The company had the account under his name because Paul had installed the first system in 2018. Paul and Janet had used the hidden room to monitor their daughter, Ruth, who was six years old.
Ruth disappeared in October of that year.
The police never found her.
Paul told everyone she had been taken from the front yard. Janet said Paul had been repairing the furnace when it happened. Their marriage broke apart six months later.
The house went up for sale.
Paul died in a motel outside Bakersfield two years after that.
He had left behind several accounts, including NURSERY-2. Derek found the login information when we bought the house. He told me the old security system had been removed.
He lied.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
The hidden system had not been speaking through the internet alone. A second unit was still active in the crawlspace under the nursery. It had a microphone, a speaker, and an old battery pack. The police found it beneath a loose floorboard.
Paul had kept the system running after Ruth vanished.
He had been listening for her.
On the hard drive, there were hours of recordings from the house. Empty rooms. Pipes knocking. Mice moving behind the drywall.
Then, three years ago, a new recording.
Derek’s voice.
He was in the nursery before Poppy was born.
“Say hello to your sister,” he told me in the recording.
I was laughing. I said, “We don’t have a sister.”
Derek answered, “Not yours.”
The police played more.
His voice changed when he spoke into the hidden microphone. He made it softer. Lower.
“Ruth, if you’re still here, tap once.”
The audio held the sound of my pregnant stomach shifting against the chair.
Then a tap came from inside the wall.
I stopped the recording.
Nobody in the room spoke.
Pruitt told me the sound could have been plumbing. A pipe contraction. A mouse. A loose wire.
But Derek had kept recording.
After Poppy was born, he began speaking to her through the system. He told her the man in the wall was her secret friend. He told her not to tell me because I would take him away.
He taught her to answer questions.
He taught her to say when I was asleep.
He taught her to describe where I kept my purse.
I had one question left.
“Who was Paul talking to?”
Pruitt looked at the evidence technician.
The technician slid a printed transcript across the table.
It was from a recording dated October 17, 2018, two days after Ruth disappeared.
Paul was in the nursery.
A child was whispering from inside the wall.
Not Poppy. Not Ruth, unless Ruth had been alive.
The child said, “He put me under the stairs.”
Then Paul answered, “I know.”
Another voice came through the speaker.
A man’s voice.
Derek’s voice.
“Don’t let her out.”
I stared at the page until the words blurred.
Derek hadn’t discovered Paul’s system after we moved in.
He had known about it before we bought the house.
He had been using it because Paul had taught him how.
Poppy’s Purple Horse
The case took nine months.
Derek admitted to hiding the equipment, recording us, and talking to Poppy. He denied knowing what happened to Ruth. He said Paul had shown him the room when Derek was nineteen, back when Derek worked for a repair company that serviced the house.
Paul was dead, so there was nobody to ask why Derek’s voice appeared on the old recording.
The police found Ruth’s coat in the crawlspace.
They found a child’s tooth inside a coffee tin.
They found nothing else.
Poppy stayed with Marlene while I moved into an apartment across town. She stopped talking about the man in the wall after three weeks.
Then, in December, she asked me for her purple horse.
I hadn’t seen it since the day we left the house.
I told her I would look.
The police had returned most of our things in sealed boxes. Clothes. Books. Kitchen stuff. The nursery toys were still being held because the case wasn’t closed.
I called Pruitt.
He said the horse hadn’t been logged as evidence.
Marlene found it in a grocery bag behind her hall closet.
The paint was scratched along one side. A tiny line of black had been drawn across its mouth.
I carried it to Poppy.
She took it without smiling.
“Did he come with it?” I asked.
She looked at the horse’s face.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Poppy nodded.
Then she turned it over.
Something had been taped beneath one hoof.
A strip of paper, folded twice.
I peeled it off.
The writing was small and cramped. Blue ink.
Poppy, if your mother asks, tell her I went away.
My hands stopped working.
Poppy looked up at me.
“Mommy?”
I couldn’t answer.
The paper had been sealed inside the horse. Not placed there recently. The tape was yellow and brittle, the same kind used on the old photographs from the hidden room.
On the back was a second line.
He said you would open the wall.
Poppy leaned toward me.
“Who?”
The baby monitor on Marlene’s kitchen counter clicked on.
We had unplugged it.
A man’s voice came through the speaker.
Not Derek.
Not Paul.
A child.
“Mommy,” the voice said. “The man in the wall is awake.”
Poppy dropped the horse.
From inside the plastic body came one hard tap.
Then another.
Would you have opened the wall? Tell me.
For more chilling tales that blur the line between reality and the supernatural, you might find yourself drawn into the story of The Girl at the Market Had My Dead Daughter’s Face or perhaps the unsettling mystery behind My Missing Husband Carried Two Years of Unsent Letters. And if you’re in the mood for another story where home isn’t quite the sanctuary it seems, check out The Gate Closed Behind Me Before I Reached the House.
