It’s probably nothing.
I was putting some dishes away in the kitchen (no fridge or icebox, but at least there was piped-in spring water and a decent-sized Franklin stove) when I heard something from down below. It was a faint crunching sound, like somebody heavy walking over gravel, and I wasn’t really sure that I was hearing something at all. When you’re in a house that you don’t know, strange stuff gets magnified, and everything is strange. But every time I had almost convinced myself that I was hearing nothing, the sound came back. Maybe.
After about a minute of this, a certain part of my brain suddenly remembered that I was in a secluded cabin in the middle of the Haunted Woods; and that this was maybe not the smartest life strategy to adopt. We don’t know what’s out there, in the deeper parts of the Woods. We’ve only got vague stories, and some of them aren’t even that bad. But we do know that whatever’s out here is so strange that it makes Bigfoots look positively normal.