I bought my very first house a few months ago. I was determined to stop throwing away money by renting, and landlords jacking the rent repeatedly only expedited my transition to homeowner. It was close enough to the city and far enough from the noise, and I actually was able to afford it.

The layout of the house is essentially a loop. You can circle through it, passing through every room on the first floor. The front door leads into the carpeted living room. If you take a left, you enter my home office, and if you head straight, you enter the dining room. After the dining room is my small kitchen, which leads to the laundry room, which you take a left at to enter the home office.

I moved my stuff in and got settled rather quickly. It truly felt like home. Then, one overcast day a few weeks ago, I walked to my office to get some work done, but it wasn’t there.

A room was certainly there, but it was not a room of my home. The beige carpet from the living room stopped dead against a dark green, tighter knit carpet which was half the height. This room in place of my office was fully furnished. A Taylor green velvet sofa was placed against the wall, which was covered by a painted lattice pattern wallpaper of a pine hue with white flowers. In front of the low couch was a dark-stained, wooden coffee table, and on that was a jade vase holding a single black tulip. I looked around the strange room in wonder. I’d never seen this room or any of its contents before in my life.

A thing I noticed immediately upon entering was the fact the room was much colder than the rest of the house. There was also a sharp odor, a sour air of mildew and something else not quite chemical. The impossibility of the situation was overshadowed by a familiar feeling. It was the feeling of finding a tick on your body after a walk. The feeling that something nefarious is attached to your body, gorging on your livelihood. Still, curiosity compelled me to investigate the impossible room.

I ran my fingers along the cool walls, displacing slow trickles of dustfall. The room seemed ancient. The ornate trim in the corners resembled that of a Victorian townhouse, and clashed with the minimalist modern design of the rest of the building. I thought of my laptop, wondering where it could possibly be now that the room it should be in was simply gone. This compelled me to do a walkaround of the first story.

I walked through the doorway into the kitchen, then continued into the dining room, then the living room. Once in the living room I saw the opening to that impossible room that should not be a part of the home: but it was gone. Instead, my home office was back. My desk aglow in sunbeams, my laptop opened to the exact angle it had previously been.

My brain hurt trying to puzzle together how I’d witnessed what I had. Had I experienced some lapse in sanity? Some stroke or aneurysm that triggered a distant memory? Had I dreamed it, somehow vacant in a fugue state? But that acrid, stale air of the room was still in my throat and in my nostrils. It was too vivid for any of that, and that realization disturbed me greatly. The realization that it had been very much real, and nothing could explain it. I looped around the house multiple times, hoping to again see the bizarre room that had replaced my study, but it didn’t happen again for some time.

Work, laundry, and walking Benny—my black lab—took me back into my daily routines. Frozen meals and drive through coffee. I’d often replay the mysterious experience in the background of my mind. Still, my office remained my office, and the days turned to nights and weeks passed by. The more time passed, the less real the memory felt until I convinced myself I must have dreamed it. But then, roughly four weeks later, I came down the stairs and a chill traced its cold fingers up my spine. The room had returned.

The green velvet couch leered at me from within that foreign chamber. It was like some alien appendage had replaced my study. I slowly approached it, feeling the hairs rise on my arms. Observing the room from outside, I noticed two things.

Firstly, the room was darker than it should have been. It was as if the light from the living room stopped dead at the partition instead of spilling into it. The room was solely lit by an oval ceiling lamp; frosted glass shielding the wattage of the bulb. Secondly, I saw an insect fluttering about before landing on a wall. It flew similar to a moth, but it was larger and the wings looked translucent like that of a fly. I approached the room, getting closer to the strange bug. Once close, I could see the odd shape of its body. The bug's abdomen was shaped slightly like a seahorse, curled like a fiddlehead at the tail end. The head was something horrible; an almost human shape, at least until under the forward-facing eyes, where a clawed mandible extended out from beneath them. I stepped back from the thing, keeping my distance as I explored the impossible space.

I sniffed the air, realizing the odor of the room seemed to have magnified since its last appearance. The air was musty, as if mildew had taken over the couch, or perhaps mold was growing under that ornate, floral wallpaper. It smelled of sickness. Decay.

I walked over to the green couch and ran a finger across the cushioned back. It felt cool and damp, like it had been left outside overnight and had collected dew. How was it there? Where was my home office? Was some other home experiencing a mirrored situation, having my home office appear in place of their own room? I thought of my personal information available from my email and dread welled within me. My bank statements and routing number, my social security number and private conversations.

With a newfound sense of urgency, I walked out of the room and continued circling the first floor, eager to get the house back to its intended configuration. Sure enough, once I’d rounded the dining room and entered the living room, my home office was once again where it should be. A sense of relief washed over me for only a second. I saw a long, black mark on the far wall. It seemed disproportionately stretched out and anatomically wrong, but it resembled a handprint of something.

Something else had access to that room, and that scared me. My fascination with this mystical room was replaced by absolute dread. My study was tarnished by whatever person or thing had access to it. I moved my personal possessions outside of that study, every last one of them. The room itself had no doors; the wall openings were too wide to add traditional doors of any sort, but I browsed online for solutions in order to blockade that anomalous area until I felt safe to some extent. Worst of all, above any trickling fears of that hideous insect or the odd marking on the wall, I felt a compelling curiosity.

I wanted to learn the strange secrets of that space. Something that contrasted with the stable laws I thought governed this often mundane world of ours. This was something that seemed to exist completely outside of the wealth of knowledge known to man. Knowing that filled some hole inside me I had since childhood. I decided I was going to stay and document the room.

I placed two HD cameras on tripods facing the openings to the ex-study I decided to call The Occasional Room, as it was all I could think of it as. I filmed for hours, day in and day out. I began walking the circle through the chambers in hopes of triggering whatever event or circumstance set off the change, but every evening I returned home to unchanging footage of the barren study. I began to wonder if the act of observing it prevented the change, and after two weeks of nothing, I turned the cameras off and walked through the house in a test. When I arrived full-circle to the study, my heart raced in my chest upon arriving. The occasional room was back, but it was larger.

I stepped into the impossible space and my jaw dropped slack at seeing it continue on around the bend to where my living room should be. Instead, that dark green carpeting spilled out into a large area with door-sized windows where my living room’s windows should be. I noticed a faded chaise-lounge with a floral pattern from another era, as well as bronze standing lamps, ornately cast. There was a hanging chandelier from a bygone era and the haze of pipe smoke in the air, but nothing drew my attention more than those windows.

They were dark; bathed in the shadows of night, giving a minimal view out to some terrain vastly different than my own lawn that should be leading up to the edge of the woods. Instead there was a textured field of white that looked like some albinistic moss. A velvet-like surface stretching off miles into the dark horizon. I trembled as I stared at beacons of dim light glowing in the sky as my mind tried to make sense of it. Two orange spheres hung in the visible cosmos. They looked like moons.

A deep, bassy thumping sound rapidly approached from around the next corner, something large was running in my direction. Instinct drove me and I ran, nearly tripping over the odd furniture set in different areas than my own. A warped cabinet of some sort filled with books and bones, a black, slick-surfaced contraption like a wood stove of sorts but out of some black ceramic material. I barely glimpsed them as I ran around the bend to the original room, the occasional room, and I didn’t pause for relief when I saw my laundry room. Something was gaining on me. I sprinted through, into my better-lit laundry room, quickly unlocking the second door to the outside. I raced out onto the sunlit back lawn, panting and exhausted as I slammed the door behind me.

It took all my courage to go back inside, where I found the barren study where it should be; that alternate, alien place nowhere to be found.

I prayed my theory was correct; that the room won’t appear if it’s being observed, and I’ve set both cameras on a continual feed, streaming live and recording. Still, my curiosity has been growing, and every day when I come home and observe that empty study of mine, that desire to know more keeps growing. I’ve purchased a handgun, mace and a gopro camera. I’m just working up my courage now to go back in. I’ll tell you what I find in there if I make it back in one piece.

If you don’t hear back from me, I strongly advise against purchasing a two-bedroom house on Milford Lane. Even if it’s far more spacious than advertised.