Richard was living in a not-so nice neighborhood with his parents. Their house was badly in need of repair and none of the windows or doors ever locked properly. Richard complained to his mom about not being able to sleep because of the "scratching" noises in his room, his mom assumed that it was rats, or that some cat had managed to get in the house again and was in the room somewhere. After turning on the lights and not seeing any sort of animal, she told Richard to go back to bed. So Richard went back to bed and was awakened almost immediately again by the scratching. Insistent, ceaseless. He still couldn't tell WHERE the sound was coming from, but this time, he decided to ignore it. So he fell asleep again.
Richard had no idea how long he'd been asleep when he suddenly sat up in bed, crying out, his hands flying to his back. He'd been bitten in the middle of his back while he slept, yet he'd been LYING on his back. Richard decided that things were just too weird and went to get his dad. His dad looked at his back. The spot that hurt certainly didn't look like a bite. It looked more like a puncture wound. So he flipped on the bedroom light and inspected Richard's bed. There was a hole in the fitted sheet and some of the mattress stuffing was showing through the hole. At a loss to explain how it happened, Richard suggested that maybe a spring had come through, so Richard's dad flipped the twin bed over to see if the box springs were the culprit.
What he found was a long knife stuck in the mattress, pointing upwards, towards where a person might lie. He also found mud and dirt under the bed, the exact length of a person. Checking immediately outside the window he found fresh footprints in the mud leading to and then away from the window. Someone had slipped into Richard's room through the unlocked window and lain under his bed. The scratching sound he heard was the person using the knife to dig through the box springs and mattress to kill him!
