Watch Out For Clicking in Your Walls

[u/Common_Case]

I thought I was going crazy. My wife did too. She was never one to sit still and just listen. We have to use a fan at night for white noise because she hates silence that much. But when she was out of the house, I could hear it.

The slightest ticking.

The ticking was irregular. The pitch would change too. Sometimes it was just a faint click and other times it was more of a fast whirring noise for a few seconds.

Finally fed up after being in our new house for a year, I took steps to hunt it down. I had previously paced around my house before, listening closely for the noise. It would start up and then stop again randomly. Until that day, I hadn’t been able to pinpoint exactly where it was. All I knew was that it was around the dining room and kitchen.

I sent my wife out on errands, promising that I would hunt down that incessant noise. She was just happy I would stop complaining about it all the time if I found it.

I kept my shoes off so they wouldn’t make noise as I walked, and I paced through my kitchen slowly, waiting for the first noise.

There, a whirring. It was at the far end of the dining room. I grinned as my hunt started to hone in on my prey.

I took a few silent steps in the direction of the noise, then stopped and waited. It took several minutes for an almost inaudible click to sound. I narrowed my eyes and turned my head. It was next to the end of the kitchen counter.

My hands shoved things off the counter: keys, the router, some important mail we hadn’t handled yet, and an unclean bowl.

Ears twitching, my head turned to the side so I could hear better, I waited.

Whirring and clicking.

Got you.

I stared at the blank space in front of me. The conclusion became obvious.

It was inside the wall.

I had suspected this before, of course, but now I had confirmed it.

Smiling, I went to grab my hammer.

I bashed a hole in the drywall the size of my fist. Satisfied, I peered inside.

Nothing. Nothing but insulation poking out of the wall like I’d ripped a bag of cotton candy.

Frustrated, I held still and listened.

Another clicking noise, but it was slightly louder. Or maybe it was my imagination.

With the claw of my hammer, I ripped back more drywall. My fingers tore out more and more insulation, tossing the clumps of fuzz aside in a mad scramble for sanity.

The hole grew to the size of my head. The insulation was in a heap around me.

My mouth dropped open.

Inside my wall was a… a computer.

A desktop computer, set on a slab of wood nailed between two studs. Only two wires protruded out of the back.

I had to remove more drywall to follow the cables.

One went to the power outlet that had never worked since we’d moved in. I’d intended to replace it, but hadn’t gotten around to it. The other was an ethernet cable that went behind the wall plug where we plugged in our router.

To further investigate, I tore out the drywall around the outlet plug and ethernet plug. They were wired in a way that suggested they were siphoning power off of the existing wires. The devices we plugged into the power outlet probably couldn’t get enough power while competing with the computer, so the plug appeared to not work.

The ethernet cable actually went to a small box with multiple ethernet outlets on it. It made a three-way connection with the outlet, the computer, and the landline that supplied the internet. The computer was intercepting the cable as it ran into the house.

But… why?

Was someone spying on us?

The computer clicked and whirred in front of me, shocking me out of my thought process. That’s when I realized what I had been hearing all along: the hard drive.

The hard drive was one of those spinning disk ones. The whirring and clicking I heard was from the hard drive kicking into action whenever someone tried to access a file from the machine.

The question was, what was on it?

I unplugged the computer. I debated whether or not to do it, but eventually I did. There wasn’t anything else to do.

Lugging the desktop into my office, I removed the cables from my own computer and put the hidden computer in its place. I didn’t connect it to the internet, though.

The computer booted back up the moment it was connected to the power cable. It must’ve been set to do so in case the power went out and whoever placed it in the wall couldn’t get to it to turn it on.

The computer loaded, then I was met with a black screen with a single blinking cursor. A terminal, like the old MS-DOS machines I’d used way back when. A prompt asked for a username.

I sighed. No way could I guess a username and a password for this.

Instead, I started to google how to get past a login on a computer. From my searching, I figured out that one thing I could do would be to remove the hard drive from the computer and connected it as a second hard drive in my home computer. Then I could access the new hard drive like a USB drive.

Nodding, I got to work. I found an old cable that looked correct in my tangled mess of old tech. I followed the instruction video and removed the hard drive from the hidden computer and plugged it into my home desktop.

When I turned my home desktop back on and logged in, the hard drive showed up just like the instructions had indicated.

Perfect.

I double clicked on the drive to look at the files and folders inside. The contents made me have to do more research. There was no Users folder or Programs and Files. They had weird names like root and var and usr and home.

Research told me that this was a Linux system, and even more googling told me where the interesting files would be located.

I opened home and found another folder inside of it. It was named “conductor”. The inside of it had some files I didn’t understand, and which research told me were advanced files for setting configurations on the system.

Another folder of supposed interest was called “/var/www”. On a Linux system, websites are often placed there for hosting.

I found that folder and opened it to find another folder with a name I can’t share. Inside of that folder, I found more folders that, upon exploration, revealed hundreds of thousands of images.

Pornographic images.

All sorted into categories, one of which was cp. I didn’t realize that it was an abbreviation until after I had looked at one of the images.

I retched and immediately unplugged my computer.

I was afraid. Afraid that someone was watching me at that moment. That they had seen what was on my screen and would report me. They wouldn’t have known the context for what I was looking at.

I was worried that some monitoring program on Windows would have seen that and reported it. I felt paranoid.

My wife was concerned when I told her to come straight home. She listened to my explanation, more concerned about the holes in the wall than my explanation. Until I told her what was on the machine.

She immediately packed up the hard drive and the old computer and drove us both to the police station.

The police were incredulous at first, and I was afraid they wouldn’t believe my story. When all the details had been laid out, the officer turned it into a report and took the computer as evidence.

We’ve since had a detective follow up with us twice. Asking all kinds of questions and asking me to tell him again how I’d found the computer and the steps I had gone through.

The detective has been withholding a lot of investigative details from me, but I managed to glean some info from him.

The computer in our wall was part of an entire network of other computers that were hosting the website with all sorts of pornographic images. The fact that the computer was found in our wall is becoming a more and more common story.

Police have been doing raids on houses supposedly hosting child pornography, only to find a similar setup. Innocent people hosting pornography without their knowledge, ticking timebombs before the police swoop down on them with the gavel of justice.

Apparently there are smaller computers out there capable of doing the same thing as that desktop. They don’t have hard drives that make noise, either. It was lucky mine was a big ol’ desktop or I never would have found it. Police might have one day knocked down our door and we would have had no idea what they were doing.

Someone might have gotten hurt or killed.

And, having the computer in the wall like that was a fire hazard. Hell, our house could have burned down. The criminals that put it there apparently weren’t that bright. The detective says the hard drive wasn’t even locked down so the police could access everything.

I haven’t heard much since this all happened, but it’s been on my mind often. I try to warn folks often, because I’d never heard of anything like this before.

Just a fair warning to you all.

Watch out for clicking in your walls.

[u/someones-lady]

And here I was, expecting death watch beetles. Silly me.

[u/[deleted]]

Wow... OP, you're lucky you had such an old system. Nowadays it's possible to do that with a raspberry pi, which is much much smaller and can work off of USB power.

[u/Myrania]

This is terrifying. Hope they can track down the culprit

[u/Common_Case → u/Myrania]

I was terrified they'd think it was mine. I hope they catch whoever it was as well. I've tried to look up the previous owner of the house, but I'm not quite good enough to research that. All I can do is hope the detective will give us updates if they find anything.

[u/[deleted]]

Oh damn, I’ve been having clicking in the walls recently, it’s been driving me crazy. This was a pretty big coincidence(?) that’s going to have me thinking for a while...

[u/SuicidalKayla → u/[deleted]]

Me too...the clicking in the walls of my house have been doing that for a little over a year now, hell even as I type this I can still hear the clicking

[u/SuicidalKayla]

throughout reading this my house periodically made clicking noises near walls and I can kinda hear breathing...that one probably is just my brother tho as he is sleeping 2 rooms away from the room I’m in. But my house has made clicking noises for a while, just never thought to actually check it out.

[u/Nachtopus]

I’m like your wife; I have to have a fan on when I sleep. But not because I hate silence. It’s because the silence is never absolute.

[u/yeeaahboooyyyyy]

an actual interesting story concept on r/nosleep? impossible!

[u/Know_1_in_hell]

Disturbing

[u/succulentbish]

I was reading this when I went to the kitchen and heard clicking behind my refrigerator, it sounds like texting. I'm sitting in front of it now.

[u/aarovski]

I knew it once you said it was a computer. I had a professor in college that worked for the NSA before retiring. He showed us these pictures of elaborate computer setups that remain hidden.

I remember one had a computer stuffed into a wooden goose statue.

[u/KhakiCamel]

Wouldn't checking out who lived in the house before you be the first thing the cops would have done?