First of all, I’m Asian, and English is not my first language, so forgive me if there are any grammar mistakes or misused words.
Back when I was a child, my whole family had lived in the suburbs for like 20 years. The neighborhood was kinda creepy for me though. Drug dealers, gangs, prostitutes were everywhere. “Never play with the kids nextdoor,” my mom used to tell me. I used to hate my parents for that because I had no friends, and I could only play alone or with my siblings. That’s when we all started to notice what the heck was wrong with the house…
I think it happened when I was 8. My sister and I were playing around in the bedroom. Sometimes we put the blankets on our shoulders to pretend we were some ancient Chinese men. That’s when we saw a white blur flashing past the bedroom door. At first, we thought it was our older brother, Kevin. He always pranked us when there were no adults around. We looked everywhere for him, but he was nowhere to be found. We asked our mom if she had seen Kevin, but she told us that he was sent to a buxiban (something like a Chinese Learning Center if you don’t know) that morning and didn’t return yet. We told her what we saw, but she thought it was just our imagination and ignored us.
One day when my siblings and I were all at school, and my mom was alone in the house, she heard my voice calling her, and she responded out of habit. It didn’t take long for her to realize what was happening, but she kept calm. There was nothing she could have done anyway. That night, she saw someone standing behind her in the mirror by the stairs. It was an old lady in a white dress according to her. “Her eyes were bleeding. She kept calling me, but she didn’t sound like an old lady. I heard voices of you coming out of her mouth,” she told me.
A few days later, my mom invited some sort of medium to the house. “Wow,” the medium said. “I didn’t expect so many spirits in one house.” The medium suggested that we move immediately, but we stayed because we couldn’t afford to move.
A few years later, my grandparents got very sick, probably because of aging, and my mom was the only person who could take care of them. My dad wanted to help, but he had to work 2 jobs to support the whole family and pay the medical bills. Most of the time my parents were not home. They just left cash on the table every day so my siblings and I could get some food. Since we didn’t have any friends back then, we usually stayed home right after school. One night when everyone else was asleep, I heard some noise coming from the living room. At first, I thought it was a burglar because it was a terrible neighborhood, but when I got to the living room with a baseball bat in my hands, there was no one but the TV on full volume. I turned it off, but it turned itself back on, so I just pulled the plug. It didn’t turn itself back on again like horror movie plots, but everything else did. The lights, the AC, a piggy bank that plays music, literally everything electric started to make noises. I panicked. I tried to wake up my brother and my sister, but they just didn’t wake up. I even slapped them in the face, but they just didn’t wake up. I dashed out of the house out of fear. Something told me that if I stayed in there, bad things would happen.
The noise in the house got the neighbors to call the cops. When they arrived, they just saw me standing outside, crying. “Hey kid, are you ok?” I tried to tell them what happened, but I was too terrified to make up a full sentence, so I just led them into the house to see for themselves. Interestingly, everything went off as soon as the cops stepped inside. One of the cops said he had never seen things like that before. “Noob,” the other cop replied. I guess he was used to supernatural events because people here in my country are quite superstitious. The police took me to the hospital to find my mom and told her what happened. After that, my parents sold the house and moved to another village. My siblings were fine though, they just slept through everything. Lucky them.