We Used to Live Here Morse Code: The Hidden Message Decoded

We Used to Live Here Morse Code: The Hidden Message Decoded

Spoiler note: this article reveals a hidden message in the novel, but not the ending.

Marcus Kliewer's horror novel We Used to Live Here (2024) hides a secret in plain sight. Each of its strange interludes, the found documents, transcripts and group chats between chapters, ends with a short line of dots and dashes. Put together and decoded, they form one sentence that changes how many readers see the story.

Here's where the code appears, what it says, why so many readers decoded it wrong, and how to check it yourself.

About the Book

We Used to Live Here is Kliewer's debut novel, published in June 2024. It began as a story on Reddit's r/nosleep forum before being expanded into a full book. It follows a couple, Eve and Charlie, who let a family into their newly bought house because the father once lived there. The visit goes badly wrong.

Between chapters, Kliewer adds documents that seem to come from a conspiracy theorist's files. These interludes are where the Morse code lives. A Netflix film adaptation has also been announced.

Where the Morse Code Appears

If you're reading the print or ebook edition, look at the very end of each interlude. You'll find a row of dots and dashes after the main text. Audiobook listeners have reported hearing it too, as beeps at the end of chapters.

Each line holds a few words. On its own, a single line looks like a random fragment. The meaning appears only when you decode every interlude and read the fragments in order.

What the Morse Code Says

Decoded in order, the fragments form a single sentence about the mysterious old man with the scar. Put simply, it reveals that he has lived in the cabin for centuries and has gone by many different names.

Because the sentence is split across the interludes, it builds slowly as you read. Readers who decode it early often say it made them look at earlier chapters in a new light.

The Ellipsis Trap: Why Some Readers Got It Wrong

Many readers decoded the message and got nonsense words like "WITE" instead of "WITH". The problem wasn't their Morse code skills; it was typography.

In some editions, three dots in a row were automatically converted into a single ellipsis character. That breaks Morse code in a subtle way: H in Morse code is four dots ( .... ). On the page, it can appear as an ellipsis plus a dot. If you copy the ellipsis as one symbol, or skip it, you're left with a single dot, which is E. So WITH ( .-- .. - .... ) becomes WITE.

This is a real-world example of why spacing and exact symbols matter so much in Morse code. When you copy the code from the book, treat every ellipsis as three separate dots.

How to Decode It Yourself

Find every interlude and photograph or copy the line of code at the end.

Replace any ellipsis with three dots ( ... ).

Check the spacing. Letters are separated by a single space and words by a slash or a wider gap.

Decode each line one letter at a time, or paste it into our Morse code translator.

Read the fragments in order, from the first interlude to the last.

If a word looks wrong, check for merged letters first. Missing a single space can turn two letters into one, for example I ( .. ) and E ( . ) becoming S ( ... ). Our guide on how to read and write Morse code explains how to spot these errors.

Other Hidden Puzzles in the Book

Morse code isn't the only secret Kliewer planted. Readers have also found:

Capital letters that spell a message. Unusual capitalisation in one chapter spells out "The old gods see all."

A shifted-letter cipher. One passage is written in a simple letter-substitution cipher (a Caesar shift), which decodes into a scene description.

Unexplained symbols. Strange glyphs in the book have puzzled readers, and no widely accepted solution has been published.

Interactive extras. Some readers report that email addresses mentioned in the documents send replies.

What Does the Message Mean?

Kliewer hasn't fully explained the code, which leaves room for interpretation. Most readers see it as a clue that the threat in the story is far older and stranger than a single family. The old man becomes less a person than a recurring presence, tied to the place itself.

That's what makes the hidden message so effective: it rewards attentive readers with a deeper layer of horror without spelling everything out.

More Morse Code in Pop Culture

Artists love hiding messages in Morse code because it looks mysterious but anyone can decode it. For another example, read our breakdown of what Metro Boomin said in Morse code on "Like That".