I’m not even sure why I’m writing this. I’ve been to so many therapists and psychologists and even spent two weeks in a hospital for an “evaluation” when I was nineteen, all because I tried to tell someone about this. To ask for help. To beg for help.

I feel like I should start with the fact that I’m not crazy. I’m sure that makes me sound more crazy, but I’m being honest. All I’ve ever wanted is for someone to make this stop, but no one has ever believed me so how could they help me? My parents were some mix of embarrassed and furious that I wouldn’t “just be normal,” and my brother only used the information to alienate me at school. If I ever did mention it, I got yelled at, or grounded, or sent to therapy, or medicated. But none of it — and I mean none of it — has ever helped. The woman has always been there, she’s always waiting, and eventually I learned to just keep my mouth shut.

That’s how I’ve made it to 32 years old. It’s how I graduated college and got a job and most days I can almost pretend I’m like everyone else. Normal, just like my parents always wanted.

But I don’t think I can keep pretending.

I’m just so tired, and I think if I put the truth down here, even if no one reads it, maybe it will help me pretend for just a little longer. Maybe I’ll even find someone else who knows about the woman.

I guess I should start at the beginning, so that you can understand what my life has been like. There’s a picture of me as a baby, I think it was one of those Sears Portrait Studio ones, and in it I’m propped up on this pink blanket, wearing a frilly dress and white patent leather baby shoes. My face is flushed and red and it’s obvious I’ve been crying, which babies often do, but the cameraman was able to catch a moment where I’m looking at the camera and my mouth is closed. From afar it really does look like a normal photograph, but when you look closely at my left sock it’s obvious that the pale reddish smear and red dots aren’t a pattern. The other sock is pristine white, ruffled at the top, with no red.

I think it’s the first documentation of what’s been happening to me all these years, and it’s proof of just how long it’s been going on.

I don’t remember that photo being taken (I think I was 6 months old) but I do remember a few years later when I was three or four and begging my mom to let me go to Sunday School barefoot. It was summertime and I never wore shoes — except when we went to church. She told me no, I threw a tantrum, she started yelling, then my dad started yelling, and after a lot of crying and screaming, I still ended up in the back of the car wearing my “church shoes.” They were white, a lot like the ones in my baby picture, actually, and I remember being so afraid in the back of the car that I sat as still as possible and didn’t make a sound, even when I felt the little pricking sensation across the bottom of my toes.

I’ve felt it a thousand times since, and the only way to explain it is to imagine someone poking the pads of your toes with a tiny needle over and over. It’s not agonizing, but it hurts. It makes you jump and leaves your skin tender and mottled with tiny bloody dots.

Of course, after church when I took my shoes off my mom was furious that I’d messed up my socks and she lectured me about not walking around without my shoes on in Sunday School. I tried to tell her that I hadn’t taken my shoes off, and I even tried to explain it was my blood and showed her the tiny dots on my toes, but she either couldn’t see them… or she refused to see them.

Over time I learned to deal with the little needle pricks whenever I had to wear shoes, and I stopped mentioning it to my parents and my teachers because they would just shake out my shoes and insist I was making it up for attention. I think I even started to believe them.

But then the first bite happened.

I was seven, in first grade, and I’d successfully managed to wear open sandals or flip-flops through all of Spring, Summer, and most of Fall, but by Thanksgiving the temperatures were getting colder and my parents insisted I wear “real” shoes. They even got me ones that had tiny lights on the side that lit up when I jumped, and the shoes looked so fun that I was even a little excited to wear them to school. My parents wanted me to break them in, so I put on the shoes and went outside to run around and do cartwheels in the grass. It wasn’t very long before I felt a sharp pain on the outside of my left foot and I fell down and called for my mom and dad while I yanked the shoe off. I remember the eerie feeling that filled me up and tensed my stomach as I saw the bloody stain on my sock that looked exactly like a bite mark. I could even see the individual teeth, although they were definitely sharper than any of my own.

You’d think my parents would have realized something was wrong, but maybe their denial is part of this curse. Maybe no one else can see what I can see? I don’t know. All that happened that day was my parents getting mad and insisting I had “bitten myself” to get out of wearing my new shoes. I tried to show them I couldn’t get the outside of my left foot into my mouth, and I even pointed out that I was missing two teeth but the bite mark wasn’t missing any. They ignored me, told me to go to my room until I would apologize for telling stories, but as I sat in my room staring at the shoes in the bottom of my closet… I knew I had nothing to apologize for. They’d convinced me to ignore my pain before, but I couldn’t ignore this.

Something had bitten me from inside my shoe.

As the years went on, I both got better at finding ways to not wear shoes, and simultaneously got worse at keeping my mouth shut. Maybe it’s because as I got older I felt more confident in explaining myself, or found a kid or an adult who was nice to me and I would hope and pray that they would believe me. They didn’t. No matter how many bite marks, or bloody socks, or bruised toenails I showed them — no one believed me.

My first therapist was when I was eleven. They told my parents I probably had ADHD and was very creative but had no impulse control to keep my thoughts inside. So, they medicated me, and the medicine made my muscles twitch, which eventually made them take me off of it.

The psychiatrist I saw at thirteen believed I had early signs of schizophrenia and put me on a medication that made me feel numb and sleepy. They left me on that one for a year, until I showed up to school with a broken toe and told the school nurse my parents didn’t believe me about it even though it was purple and blue and swollen.

One parent/principal conference later and I was off those meds and seeing a new doctor. No medication, but twice a week I had to sit in his office and tell him that I knew there wasn’t a monster in my shoes biting and stabbing me.

All he and I ever did was lie to each other.

I would lie and say everything was fine, and he would lie and say that someday I’d realize this was all just my mind telling me stories.

At sixteen I got interviewed by a bunch of therapists (or people in school to become psychologists or something like that) and they begged me to tell them the truth. So, I did. I told them about the pain, showed them pictures and bloody socks, and I thought I’d finally found some adults who were taking me seriously. Until they mailed my parents a copy of the journal they published their paper in that described me as “delusional” and “detached from reality” and “self-harming to create consistencies within my fantasy world.” There was other shit too, and there were other teens mentioned with different problems, but in the end it was just another harsh lesson in not trusting people.

After that, I did better at keeping my mouth shut for a while. I tried to hide the limp when something would happen — always to my left foot — and I’d lie if someone asked me about it. I started doing my own laundry to hide the blood from my mom, and I did everything I could to pretend like I was fine.

I think it’s because I stopped talking about it and paying attention to it that my parents stopped hounding me about wearing shoes, which was great.

But then she finally showed herself.

As I mentioned before, my parents had me committed to the psychiatric ward of a hospital when I was nineteen so I could be “evaluated,” and it’s the only time I don’t really blame them for the decision they made, because the night that I finally saw the woman who lives in my shoe I think I really did lose my mind.

There was only one pair of sneakers in my closet amidst all the flip-flops and sandals that I wore as often as possible, and because I was only taking a few classes at our community college I hadn’t had to wear the sneakers in months and months. I had one of those shallow closets with double doors that opened outward into my room, but I always kept the doors shut. So, one night I was watching the TV in my room and it was really late so I had the volume low, which is why the pop of my closet door opening made me jump. I sat up in bed and stared at the pitch black gap where the door was cracked open, waiting to see if it would move again.

I had almost convinced myself that something in my closet had just pushed against it when it began to slowly swing open, making the dark gap wider and wider until the flickering light of my TV spilled across the floor and into my closet.

It lit up her hand first. Grayscale in the dim, flashing light of the television, and weirdly small… but I saw it crossing the boundary between pitch darkness and the hazy glow. At first it was the size of a child’s hand, only the fingers were gnarled and knuckles swollen, with wrinkly, age-spotted skin. But as it moved forward, I saw the thin, bony arm connected to it, and then the tangled mop of greasy, graying hair that hung over a face that held so much malice, so much evil, that I couldn’t move. I was too terrified, or shocked, or both. As she pulled herself out of the shoe, she shifted further into my room, and I could see the way her body was growing to normal size, but her hips were still horrifyingly twisted and narrow above her noodle-like legs that coiled out of the dark hole of my shoe.

She wore only rags, tattered and filthy, and where the old fabric didn’t cover I could see her paper-thin skin hanging off her bones like some dead thing left to dry in the desert… except this was moving, hissing, and looking right at me.

So much of her was gray and ashen and bone-pale, everything except the dirt staining her rags, and her mouth. Her horrible, horrible mouth. Stained with something dark and putrid, her teeth were pointed and shaped wrong, like she’d somehow grown them longer than teeth should be and then broken them at different angles to give herself sharper, more jagged edges.

A crackling wheeze came when she eventually pulled air in over flaking lips, inflating lungs that seemed to finally reach adult size as she planted one gnarled foot beside my shoe and stood up. Her thick, scaly tongue scraped over her lips, spreading more of the dark ooze across the dry skin, and I could smell something that was both sweet and rotten.

I don’t know what I expected from the walking nightmare, but when she raised her bony arm and pointed at me, I was surprised to hear her speak.

“Betrayer,” she croaked, the harsh whisper as stiff and dry as the rest of her. “Unfaithful one. You deny what I am owed.”

Her voice had an accent, something thick and from far away, but I understood every word — even if they didn’t make sense.

“I am owed,” she repeated, taking a lumbering step toward my bed.

I remember wanting to run or scream or kick at her, but my body wouldn’t listen. I was sitting up in bed, but I was frozen in position, with this horrific woman between me and my bedroom door.

“Owed…” She said it one more time as she grabbed onto the edge of my mattress, fisting the comforter and sheet in her ancient fingers so she could shove them out of the way. Off my legs, to the side, until my feet were revealed. Then the monster from my shoe bent over me, grabbed my left foot in cold hands, and bit off one of my toes.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I pissed the bed in sheer fear and pain, trapped in my body as I heard the crack of my bone and then the crunch as she chewed, followed by the nightmarish slurp as she lapped at the blood fountaining up from the place beside my smallest toe where there used to be a longer one.

I have no idea how long it lasted, but I remember her face was fuller when she stood up. There seemed to be more weight on her old bones, and a new shine in her terrible eyes. I couldn’t move until her shadowy figure twisted and bent in ways that aren’t possible to slither back into the darkness of my shoe.

Then I screamed.

I kept screaming even when my parents and my brother burst into my room, turning on the lights to see the end of my bed covered in blood, my toe missing, and my closet door still open with my left shoe on the carpet. They called for an ambulance and police, and sometime between the call for help and their arrival I remember trying to explain through hysterical sobs that there was a woman in my shoe. An evil, monstrous woman that had climbed out and bitten my toe off and lapped at my blood. But even as I was screaming, watching my mom hold a cloth over the stump where my toe used to be, I could see their expressions changing. Shifting from panic and fear and concern… to embarrassment and shame and finally a resigned, solemn silence.

I was still too panicked to even think about keeping my mouth shut. When the EMTs arrived, I begged them to look in the shoe, I begged the police officer with the kind eyes to believe me, but they all just looked at my parents with these sad expressions, and then one of them sedated me.

I spent two weeks in the psych ward where doctors asked me how I cut off my toe, why I cut off my toe, and even why did I eat my toe. When I shouted at them that I hadn’t done it, that the woman in my shoe did it, I had men and women with soft smiles explain that people had looked for the toe in my room and it wasn’t there, which meant they thought I ate it.

Apparently they searched through my waste for two weeks trying to find my toe’s bones, and then decided I must have hidden my toe somewhere. They put me on a long list of medications, assigned me a new psychiatrist, and sent me back home.

The first night I spent in my room after that, she came back. Whispering the same strange things as she pricked my big toe with a needle plucked from her rags and lapped at the blood as it welled to the surface. I thought she was going to take another toe, but she didn’t, and when she disappeared back into the darkness of my shoe, I didn’t scream.

There was no point.

I finally understood what she wanted from me — my blood.

So, ever since that night, I wear my shoes once or twice a week and lay down on the couch or on my bed, and wait for the pricking sensation to come. Now I know it’s her needle, and I know she’s swallowing my blood, even if a little of it gets on my socks. If I go too long without putting on shoes, then she bites instead of pricks, and I have to appease her before she returns to the needle.

I don’t know what she is, and I don’t know where she goes, but she’s always there. It doesn’t matter if I buy new shoes, or move, or pour animal blood into the shoe (yes, I tried it, it didn’t work), she is always waiting to steal just a little more of me.

I’ve been trapped in this nightmare for 32 years, and it’s been 13 years since I first saw her, but her image is burned into my mind. I have nightmares about her even on the nights I don’t wear my shoes, and I feel so tired and weak all the time.

I think there will come a day when she finally drains me dry, when I won’t wake up to the sticky sensation of blood in my sock, because I won’t wake up at all. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just give up and let her climb out and eat me whole. I don’t want that, I don’t want to die, but I’m worried it’s already happening. That whatever she gets from feeding on me, means I’m dying a little faster.

But I think even after I’m gone she’ll live on. She’ll find someone else, some other child to latch onto, and this will become their burden.

So, in a year, or five, or ten, if you hear a child say, “There is an old woman who lives in my shoe,” please believe them and tell them this story. Warn them about her.

Because I won’t be able to.