I Rented a Haunted Airbnb for the Discount

I thought I was just saving $48 a night. Instead, I spent three nights sharing a house with something that never came upstairs—but definitely knew my name.

The first thing I noticed was the smell.

Not the usual old-house smell, not mold, not dust.

Sweet, like someone had sprayed cheap floral perfume years ago and shut all the windows. Faded, but still clinging to the hallway.

I stood in the entryway of the Airbnb, backpack still on, keys in my hand, reading the little chalkboard sign propped on the console table:

“Welcome, Emily!”

Cute. Except my name isn’t Emily.

I laughed it off, took a picture, sent it to my friend with the caption: “Weird start, but hey—$48 off a night for ‘minor paranormal activity’ was worth it.”

Two hours later, I found the basement door.

The listing had forgotten to mention there even was one.

And the discount suddenly didn't feel like a bargain anymore.

The $48 Discount and the “LOL Probably Haunted” Listing

This whole thing started because I was cheap and tired.

I’d been scrolling Airbnb for hours, trying to find a place near the small town where my cousin was getting married. Everything was either booked, wildly expensive, or so aggressively “rustic” I could practically hear the mosquitoes humming in the photos.

Then I saw it.

A big old Victorian house, white wraparound porch, climbing roses, hardwood floors, tall windows, clawfoot tub. Suspiciously underpriced compared to everything nearby.

Right at the top of the description:

“Old house with lots of character—creaks, drafts, friendly spirits (no, really). Discounted rate due to guests occasionally reporting ‘unexplained activity.’ If you’re easily spooked, this might not be for you! 😊”

That little smiling emoji felt so disarming.

I clicked through the reviews, expecting horror stories and one-star rants. But most people seemed… amused.

“Definitely felt like I was being watched, but in a chill way. Great water pressure.”

“My girlfriend heard footsteps at night when I was in bed next to her. We laughed about it. Great location.”

“Something banged on the pipes at 3am for five minutes straight. Would stay again!”

Everyone sounded almost proud of themselves for surviving a “haunted” house and saving some money.

I told myself: It’s just old pipes. I grew up in creaky houses. I sleep with a fan app and ignore everything anyway.

Besides, I was only going to be in the room to sleep, shower, and change. How bad could “friendly spirits” really be?

You know that sharp little edge in your brain that goes, This is stupid, right before you do the stupid thing anyway?

Yeah. I ignored it and clicked “Book.”

First Night: The House Introduces Itself

When I drove up, the house looked exactly like the photos, except quieter.

No neighbor kids. No cars passing. Just that late afternoon, pre-storm stillness where the air feels heavier than usual.

The lockbox worked. The key turned. The door opened with a groan that was so on-brand I almost rolled my eyes.

Inside, it looked like the perfect “cozy haunted house” aesthetic you see on Pinterest. Mismatched vintage furniture, old books stacked on end tables, floral wallpaper that had surrendered to time along the seams.

I set my stuff down, noticed the “Welcome, Emily!” sign, and texted the host.

“Hi! I checked in. Just fyi, my name isn’t Emily, but the sign is cute lol.”

He replied almost immediately.

“Oh wow, I’m so sorry! Emily is a previous guest. Must’ve forgotten to erase. Hope the house treats you better than it did her 😂

Let me know if you need anything!”

I stared at that line for a second.

Better than it did her.

I typed: “What happened to Emily?”

Then I deleted it. Because it felt too dramatic, and I could already hear his answer in my head: “Oh, she was just really scared of every noise.”

Instead, I wrote: “No worries! All good.”

I wandered through the house: living room, dining room, kitchen. It was old but thoughtfully kept.

In the hallway off the kitchen, I noticed a door that wasn’t in any of the listing photos.

Not the front door. Not the back door. Not a pantry.

Just a narrow white door with an antique knob and no sign on it.

I turned it gently.

Locked.

I jiggled it a little harder.

Still locked.

I shrugged and told myself it was probably the owner’s supply closet or a private storage room. Still, there was something about it that snagged in my mind.

The first thing every horror movie teaches you is: there’s always a locked door, and it’s never just a closet.

I dropped my bag in the upstairs bedroom, opened the windows, and tried to shake off the unease.

That night, I went to the rehearsal dinner, told my cousin I’d found a “haunted discount mansion,” and wore the story like a party trick.

“You would do that,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’ll either come back with a ghost story or a lawsuit.”

When I returned around midnight, the house felt different.

Not colder. Just more… aware.

You know when you walk into a room where people have just stopped talking about you? That thick, buzzing quiet?

It felt like that.

I brushed my teeth with the bathroom door propped open, watching my reflection like something might move behind me. It didn’t. Of course it didn’t.

I turned on my fan app, crawled into bed, and told myself I was too old to be scared of the dark.

At 3:17am, I woke up because someone said my name.

Soft. Right next to my ear.

Not a dream. Not the app. Not a noise. A voice.

Clear as anything: “Hey. Wake up.”

I sat bolt upright, heart beating so hard it made my vision pulse.

The house was silent.

No footsteps. No pipes. No cars outside.

Just my fan app and my own breathing, fast and shallow.

I got up, turned on the bedside lamp, flipped the light in the hall, checked the bathroom, checked the stairs. No one.

I checked the closet. Empty except for an extra blanket and a fan.

I checked under the bed because I’m not above that. Nothing.

Back in bed, I stared at the ceiling and laughed at myself, but it was that thin, shaky laugh that doesn’t convince anyone.

Maybe I’d dreamed it. Maybe someone had yelled outside. Maybe I’d heard a voice through the walls from a neighboring house.

My brain lined up its rational explanations like soldiers and marched them past me until I finally fell back asleep.

In the morning, the chalkboard on the console table downstairs said:

“Welcome, Emily!”

But the exclamation point had been smudged into a question mark.

I told myself I must have brushed it with my bag.

I didn’t look too closely at how the rest of the letters were untouched.

The Basement Door That Wasn’t Supposed to Be There

Day two was busy. Wedding prep, hair appointments, last-minute errands. I was gone most of the day and kept telling myself: It’s fine. It was a fluke. You’re tired. You’re suggestible. You read too many creepy reviews and now your brain’s playing with you.

When I came back that afternoon to change before the ceremony, the kitchen light was on.

I was 90% sure I’d turned everything off.

Annoying, but not exactly demon-level unsettling.

I set my stuff on the counter, grabbed a glass from the cabinet, filled it at the sink.

That’s when I realized I could hear something faint behind me.

A soft, repetitive sound. Like something tapping gently in a slow rhythm.

I paused the water. Listened.

Tap. Tap. Pause.

Tap tap tap. Longer pause.

Tap.

It was coming from the other side of the locked door in the hallway.

Every hair on my arms stood up at once.

I told myself: Old houses make noises. Pipes expand. Foundations settle. Mice do mouse things.

Except this didn’t sound random. It sounded… intentional.

I knocked back.

Just once. Just to prove to myself there was no pattern.

The tapping stopped.

The silence that followed had weight to it. Like the pause in a conversation when you’ve said something you shouldn’t have.

I laughed—too loud, just for me—and walked away, forcing myself not to hurry.

I got dressed, drove to the wedding, cried at the vows, danced to bad pop remixes, and let champagne blur any memory of the door.

By the time I stumbled back into the house close to midnight, my shoes in my hand, I was tired and just tipsy enough to be bold.

The hallway light was off. The kitchen was dark.

But the outline of the door was there, faintly visible in the glow from the microwave clock.

I told myself: You are not going to be the idiot in the horror story who opens the door. You are not going to be the plot device.

Then I saw it.

The lock.

It was no longer turned straight up and down.

It was horizontal.

As in: unlocked.

For a second, I thought the owner must have come by for something. But he’d messaged earlier to say he was out of town for the weekend.

I stood there barefoot on the cold tile, one hand on the wall, staring at a door that had absolutely no reason to change states while I was gone.

I should have gone upstairs.

I should have gone to bed.

Instead, I turned the knob.

The door opened an inch with a soft sigh, like it had been waiting.

The smell hit me first.

That same faint floral sweetness from the entryway, thicker now, mixed with something damp and mineral. Like wet cement and old perfume and air that hadn’t moved in years.

I flipped on the hallway light and saw a set of narrow stairs leading down into blackness.

No light switch.

Just steep wooden steps, a seam of darkness, and my own heartbeat drumming in my ears.

I stood there for a long minute, convincing myself that this was normal. Houses had basements. Basements smelled weird. Someone had forgotten to lock the door properly.

Then, from the darkness below, something shifted.

Not a small animal sound. Not scurrying or scratching.

It sounded like someone putting their bare foot carefully on a wooden stair.

Slow. Deliberate.

Not coming up. Not going down.

Just… testing the step.

I slammed the door so fast the frame rattled, turned the lock, and backed away until my shoulders hit the opposite wall.

I slept with the lights on that night.

The voice didn’t say my name.

But in that heavy, buzzing silence, I had the strong, nauseating feeling that whatever was down there now knew mine.

Because I wasn’t Emily.

The Message from the Host and the Name on the Wall

The next morning, I woke up to a new message from the host.

“Hey! Meant to ask earlier—everything okay with your stay so far? Getting along with our ‘friendly roommates’? 😅”

My fingers hovered over the keyboard.

I wanted to say: “Your basement door unlocked itself, something is tapping and walking on the stairs, and your chalkboard is either sentient or I’m losing my mind.”

Instead, I wrote:

“Hey! Overall it’s fine, but the door off the kitchen was unlocked when I came back last night. I thought that was private storage?”

He replied quickly.

“Oh shoot, yeah that should always stay locked. Sorry about that.

Just don’t go down there. It’s not safe tbh—old steps, low ceiling.

I’ll make sure it’s locked after you check out.”

Just don’t go down there.

That’s the thing about real-life haunting stories: they’re usually tangled with human negligence.

He should have said that in the listing. He should have put a sign on the door. He should have changed the lock to something that doesn’t just “decide” to unlock itself.

I typed, “Is that where the ‘activity’ happens?” then erased it.

Because I realized something: I hadn’t told him I’d opened the door.

He had assumed I hadn’t.

I shoved my stuff into my bag, hesitated, then made a dumb decision I still can’t properly explain.

I went back to the basement door.

The lock was vertical again. Locked.

I pressed my ear to the wood, feeling like an idiot.

Nothing.

I turned the knob gently.

Still locked.

That should have been where the story stopped. It could have stayed a weird weekend I told friends about with a laugh.

Except I went back one more time before I checked out.

I carried my suitcase down to the entryway, did the little ritual check—chargers, bathroom bag, dress, shoes, last look around.

When I passed the console table, I noticed the chalkboard was blank now.

No “Welcome, Emily!”

No question mark.

Just a smeared gray square.

I picked up the chalk, half tempted to write my own name, like I was somehow claiming the house before it claimed me.

Instead, I set it down and walked toward the kitchen to make sure I hadn’t left anything in the fridge.

The door was closed. The lock was vertical. I felt silly even looking at it.

Then I saw, on the bottom panel of the door, close to the floor, carved into the wood:

EMILY

The letters were shallow but deliberate, like someone had dug them into the soft painted wood with something sharp and small. A key. A nail. A frantic fingernail.

There were little crescent scratches near the last letter, like someone’s hand had slipped.

I crouched, stared at it, and felt that sweet, stale perfume smell again, faint as a memory.

I took a picture.

And then I very calmly, very quietly, picked up my suitcase, walked out, locked the front door, and sat in my car with my hands on the steering wheel for a full five minutes before I could make my body move.

I didn’t leave a review.

I couldn’t figure out how to say, “The discount is real, but the house wants to know your name,” without sounding unhinged.

What I Learned from Sharing a House with Something That Stayed in the Basement

I know how this sounds.

If you’re practical, you’re already cataloging the reasonable explanations: previous guest carved her own name as a prank, the smell is mold, the chalkboard smudge was me, the tapping was pipes, the footsteps were old wood shifting, the voice was a half-dream.

I’ve given myself those explanations, too.

They help when I wake up at 3am in my very not-haunted apartment and swear I hear someone say my name from the hallway.

But this is what stuck with me more than the fear:

I was willing to risk being uncomfortable—in a very real, very visceral way—to save money and have a story.

That discount hooked something in me.

The part that says: It’s fine. It’s just vibes. You can handle it. It won’t be that bad.

I ignored all the low-level alarms because the cost was lower and the aesthetic was cute and the reviews were written by people who treated the weirdness as a badge of honor.

What nobody said in the listing was: There’s a door that doesn’t want to stay locked, and a basement you are explicitly not supposed to go into, and a name carved where no one should have been sitting long enough to carve it.

What nobody wrote in their reviews was: “I thought I could laugh it off until it wasn’t funny anymore.”

That’s the part I wish someone had told me.

Not “It’s haunted lol.”

But: “You might feel watched in a way that doesn’t feel playful. And that feeling doesn’t fully leave when you do.”

The Takeaway I Didn’t Expect

I still rent Airbnbs. I still stay in old houses. I still love creaky wooden floors and chipped porcelain sinks and the feeling that a place has lived multiple lives.

But that weekend rewired something small and stubborn in me.

Now, when a listing says “quirky,” “haunted,” or “lots of character,” I don’t just picture cozy ghosts and TikTok content. I think about locked doors and missing information.

I pay attention to what people don’t mention.

I pay attention to the parts of myself that say, You’ll be fine, when another quieter part whispers, This doesn’t feel right.

And sometimes, when I’m scrolling through rentals late at night and I see “Friendly paranormal activity reported by some guests :)” wedged between photos of string lights and latte art, I think about Emily.

About how her name ended up at the bottom of a door to a basement no one’s supposed to open.

About how easy it is to talk ourselves into spaces—and situations—because the price is good and the story will sound cool later.

Here’s what I carry from that house, more than anything that went bump in the basement:

If a place, or a person, or a situation comes with a warning disguised as a joke, believe the warning, not the punchline.

Some doors stay locked for a reason.

And if you’re standing in front of one with your hand on the knob, telling yourself you’re overreacting—maybe the bravest thing you can do is walk away without ever finding out what’s on the other side.