When your Airbnb comes with extra spirits

I held my breath.

I could swear someone was rapping on the walls. Wife — then girlfriend — snoozed cozily next to me, but the rest of the Airbnb was supposed to be empty.

I muted the TV and stared at the locked bedroom door until I fell asleep, ears peeled as something clicked about the house on the other side.

What’s Halloween without a good ghost story, right?

Granted, I’m no sucker for the supernatural. A Ouija board is a schmuck’s game. Look, the planchette is moving now: Y-E-A-H R-I-G-H-T.

I’ve long since stopped fearing bumps in the night. I doubt any other-worldly presence, and if someone broke in, let them face the wrath of the Phantom or find me in my boxers.

Not sure which is more traumatic.

But about a week before we arrived at this place in Jacksonville, Fla., the creepies started crawling.

Wife received a message from the host days before arrival. Something along the lines of, “Family emergency. Out of the country. Won’t be there as planned.”

Free rein of the house. A blessing, I thought.

When we arrived, I did my routine surveillance, checking all the unlocked rooms and closets.

The place had those old-school light switches, the kind you damn near have to hang from until they THWACK as they drop into place.

One room at the front of the house was locked. An adjacent bedroom was sketchy as all get out. A door across the house, beside the kitchen, was locked.

The fridge was full of food, all perishables swarming with gnats. Quite the buzz for a “few days out of town.”

The instructions for the house recommended memorizing the door code and keeping the physical key on your person because the door had a funny tendency to lock.

It did. Frequently. Not just a mechanical shift, but a full-on tab twist.

Each day we’d head out into the city, and when we returned, there would be a light on that I knew for certain I’d cut off before we left. We texted the host, who guaranteed us that no one should be coming by the house, not even to clean.

I assumed I was wrong and I’d missed switches before leaving.

On the second day, I heard a shuffling behind the locked door by the kitchen.

Worried an animal had gotten in, I jiggled the door handle, prepared to force the door open and apologize later. The door floated open.

It was a bathroom just beside our bedroom, and the toilet was running as if it had been flushed. It didn’t run again the entire trip aside from when we used it.

Being the Macho-Man that I am, I didn’t let Wife — then too-hot-to-mess-this-up girlfriend — know that I was paralyzed with the fear that someone stalked around the house when we slept and when we were away.

Instead, I checked the valuables we’d brought with us and put the mask back on.

On the second to last day, we spent time at a beach about an hour away. As we ate, I watched a navy-grey storm rippling with lightning over the horizon.

It was the kind of storm you feel in your bones, watching from what seems like an eternity away, knowing it’s preying on you and will soon overturn whatever rock you hide under.

I swore that when we returned to the rental, if anything seemed off, I wouldn’t stay another night. I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, and I know what happens to the guy who doesn’t catch the hint.

Our entire drive back, my mouth felt like I’d swallowed sand. My hands, clammy and cold, wrapped around the car’s wheel until my knuckles were Casperish.

When I turned onto the block where the house was, my stomach plummeted into my rectum.

Every light in the house was on.

The windows were bright and warm and yellow, beckoning us to come in and unwind. Even the final locked room’s window shimmered underneath the nearly-overhead thunderclouds.

I parked in the driveway, told Wife — then fellow potential victim — every mystery I’d noticed the entire trip, and explained I would be renting a hotel room across town. She agreed.

We didn’t go inside to get our stuff, deciding daylight seemed safer for extraction.

I got a cheap room above a dingy nightclub. Some shady guys stood in the parking lot and watched us, obviously out-of-towners, as we clambered into our hotel room. There were lipstick imprints on the walls and music thumping through the floor, but I slept like a rock that night.

The next morning, we returned to the BNB. No lights were on. I checked the entire house for someone and found no one. I left every light off, aside from the kitchen, as we silently packed our luggage into the car.

The one caveat Wife had: we needed to eat breakfast there because we had purchased groceries she didn’t want to waste and we had a long drive back to North Carolina.

As we sat at the kitchen table, quietly eating fried eggs, I heard a timid THWACK somewhere in the house, which I ignored.

We decided to take a video of the rental before we left — something to show our friends or use as evidence in case something happened after we left.

When I opened the final door to the creepy room, the lightbulb emitted a golden glow.

I flicked the switch off, closed the door, and we left Florida as fast as the car would allow.

I didn’t say a word about the experience until we’d crossed the state line into Georgia, when a semi-truck pulled up behind me with a front license plate that read “GHOST” in big white letters.

Happy Halloween.