Care for a Ghost Story in July?
We used to live in a haunted house.
Before my dad got married, he was already doing well for himself and bought this huge, old house near where his older siblings lived. Whenever he had to work abroad, he let his siblings and their families stay there. The place was always full of people, always noisy, always alive. There was never a quiet day in that house.
I never really learned its history. Growing up, nobody gave us a proper explanation. They would only say that the house had something in it. These are some of the stories from the people who actually lived there.
One afternoon, right after lunch, one of my cousins was alone in the kitchen washing dishes. The house had already settled into its usual siesta silence when she suddenly let out the most blood-curdling scream. Everyone came running, thinking she'd slipped or seriously hurt herself. Instead, they found her backed against the wall, shaking uncontrollably, pointing toward the bathroom.
The men immediately thought someone had broken into the house and searched the bathroom, then every room after that. My cousin kept repeating the same thing, "I saw one leg. Just one leg. It was wearing a boot. There was nobody. It just walked into the bathroom." It sounded completely absurd. They found nothing. Eventually, everyone brushed it off as a prank or a hallucination. But she never changed her story.
Another incident happened one morning, around eight or nine. Another cousin was cleaning the house when the doorbell rang. At the gate was an ordinary-looking woman. She politely introduced herself and said she was looking for my aunt. He let her in, seated her on the living room sofa, and went upstairs to get my aunt.
The whole thing took less than a minute or two. When they came back down, the woman was gone. My aunt immediately assumed she was a thief. Everyone searched every room, every corner, every possible hiding place. She even scolded my cousin for letting a complete stranger inside so easily.
But they found no one. What made it even stranger was that the gate had been locked from the inside the entire time, and the perimeter wall was far too high for someone to climb over and disappear quietly. The only thing my cousin clearly remembered was that she had long, straight black hair and was dressed entirely in white.
After my dad married my mum, he divided the house into three sections. One became their home, while the other two remained with relatives already living there.
My mum was pregnant with my older sister then. It was the middle of summer, hot enough that she left the bedroom window open, hoping a little night breeze would come through. Dad was abroad for work, so she was sleeping alone. The head of the bed was right beside the open window.
Around two in the morning, she woke to a voice right outside the window.
Not whispered. Not distant. Loud. Right beside her.
She shot up, convinced someone was playing a prank. She switched on the lights, searched the room, then looked outside the open window. But nothing. No footsteps, no movement, not even the sound of leaves. Just complete silence.
After that night, she refused to sleep alone whenever my dad was abroad. My grandmother stayed with her every single time.
Speaking of grandma, she, too, had her own experience in that house. She stayed with my mum after she gave birth to my older sister through a Caesarean section. Since Mum was still recovering and constantly exhausted, Grandma would stay up most nights to watch over the baby while Mum slept.
One night, she was suddenly jolted awake by a deafening noise outside the bedroom. It sounded like the heavy wooden furniture downstairs was being shoved across the floor, then dragged and rolled down the wooden staircase. Loud enough that anyone in the house should have woken up.
But my mum didn't. Neither did the baby. They both slept peacefully, completely undisturbed, as if they couldn't hear a thing.
Grandma carefully stepped out of the bedroom, expecting to find the living room in complete chaos; instead, nothing. The house was perfectly still. Every chair was exactly where it had been. Every table stood untouched. Nothing had fallen over. Nothing had been moved. The staircase was empty. The silence that followed was somehow far more terrifying than the noise itself.
There was another incident my mum never forgot. Back then, the old house didn't have a bathroom on the second floor. One night, sometime after midnight, she suddenly woke up needing to pee. She went downstairs and found the bathroom occupied. The door was locked, light was spilling from underneath it. She could clearly hear the shower running.
Figuring someone else had beaten her to it, she sat on a nearby chair to wait. It was well past midnight, and the silence of the house made her drowsy. She kept drifting in and out of sleep while the shower continued to run.
Minutes passed. Then more. Eventually, she couldn't hold it anymore. Already irritated, she walked toward the bathroom, ready to knock and tell whoever was inside to hurry up. The moment her knuckles touched the door, it slowly swung open on its own. The bathroom was pitch black, empty. Confused, she reached for the light switch. The floor was completely dry. Not damp, not a single puddle, not even a footprint as if nobody had been in there at all. And yet she was certain she had been sitting there for who knows how long, staring at the light beneath the door and listening to the unmistakable sound of running water.
For the longest time, my dad never believed any of the stories about that house. He was rarely home 'cause of work abroad, so every paranormal story told to him sounded exaggerated at best. As far as he was concerned, as long as the family was safe, that was all that mattered.
Then one afternoon, the house gave him something he couldn't explain. He was in the sitting room with a few relatives, having a small drinking session. It was around three or four in the afternoon when liquid suddenly started dripping from the ceiling, landing right in the middle of where they were sitting.
The sitting room was directly below my sister's and my bedroom. Back then, we shared one room, and my dad's first thought was that one of us must have wet the bed and the liquid had seeped through the old wooden floorboards.
He immediately went upstairs. My older sister and I were both fast asleep, taking our afternoon nap. The floor and the bed were dry. He even had my mum check us and the mattresses just to make sure. Nothing. Completely puzzled, he went back downstairs. By then, the relatives had already started mopping up the puddle.
"It wasn't urine," they told him, "It was just...water."
That was what made the whole thing unsettling. There wasn't a bathroom above the sitting room. It wasn't raining. No pipes had burst. Nothing upstairs could have possibly leaked. To this day, no one has ever figured out where that water came from.
There was another incident that my dad himself witnessed. He was, once again, in the sitting room with a few relatives, spending a lazy afternoon together. Nothing unusual. Just people talking, laughing, and passing the time. Then, out of nowhere, something landed right in the middle of them.
A fist-sized lump of human feces.
No one saw where it came from. No one saw anyone throw it. One second, the floor was clean. The next, it was just there. Everyone froze in disbelief, then scrambled to clean it up. Within seconds, the sitting room was overwhelmed by the foul stench.
Afterward, they tried to make sense of it. There was no one upstairs, no opening in the ceiling, no animal that could have dropped it, no explanation that made any sense. It was as if something unseen had deliberately thrown it into the middle of the room.
Even my dad, who had spent years dismissing every ghost story about that house, couldn't come up with a rational explanation for what had happened.
My older sister has a story too, although to this day, she still isn't sure whether it actually happened or if it was just an incredibly vivid dream.
She was alone in our parents' bedroom, quietly playing by herself. The bedroom window faced a neighbor's storage house, and behind it stood a gigantic old tree that towered over everything else in the area.
At some point, she happened to glance outside. That's when she saw him. Sitting among the branches was what she could only describe as a gnome. Not the tiny garden kind. He looked human-sized. He had the proportions and features of a gnome, but he was as tall as a grown man.
And he was staring directly at her.
It was broad daylight, sometime in the afternoon, so there was no mistaking what she was seeing.
The moment their eyes met, she panicked. She ran out of the bedroom, crying, and told her nanny that a strange man was sitting in the tree outside the window. Alarmed, her nanny immediately went to check. The tree was still; the branches were empty. Whatever my sister had seen, it was gone.
And then there's my story.
I had just turned three. My younger sister had only recently been born, so baby things were scattered everywhere. She was the newest addition to the family, everyone's little favorite, and because all three sections of the house were occupied by relatives, people constantly moved back and forth to help take care of her.
One afternoon, someone asked me to get a pack of diapers from my aunt's side of the house, the left house. I remember it being unusually quiet; no one was there, the adults were all in our section of the house, and my cousins were at school. I didn't think much of it. I walked in, went upstairs, grabbed the diapers, and started making my way back down.
Then it happened. I felt a shove. Not a loss of balance, not a missed step, but a push from behind. The next thing I knew, I was tumbling down the wooden staircase, falling roughly fifteen to twenty steps before crashing onto the floor below. The last image I remember was the dimmed dining room beside the staircase slowly fading into darkness.
When I opened my eyes again, I was already back in our house, and everyone was around me. They told me I had passed out and had been rushed to the hospital. When I said I felt someone had pushed me, no one could explain it.
My dad was abroad when it happened. After hearing the story, he was furious. He scolded his sister, or whoever had asked me to fetch the diapers for sending a three-year-old into an empty section of that house alone.
From that moment on, he stopped trusting the place. Whatever he had dismissed for years, something about my accident changed his mind. Not long after, he decided it was best for us to leave.
We left the house, and Dad wanted it sold. But before it was sold, a massive fire destroyed houses in that neighborhood. One of them was the old house.
As for me, I never really walked away from that fall. I've struggled with back pain for most of my life, and years later, I was diagnosed with scoliosis. Some family members believe it started because of that fall. Maybe they're right. Maybe they're not. I honestly don't know. All I know is that the house was unlike anywhere I've ever been. And even now, years later, I still can't explain any of it.
