I’ll preface this by saying I don’t believe in ghosts. None of that supernatural stuff. I’m a person of science, and if you can see it, there’s an explanation for it. It just happens to be that I haven’t found an explanation for this one yet.
It was the middle of the night, maybe 2 AM or so, and my phone started buzzing. I was waiting on a response from a job interview, so even though I didn’t recognize the number, I picked it up. Now, you might ask, what kind of an employer calls back at 2 AM? I have no idea. It was 2 AM, and I was sleep addled, and there are time differences, and mostly I was really desperate for this job. So I answered, and I said, “Hello?” And a woman started responding, with a thick, accented voice, speaking really quickly, but it was all in a language I didn’t understand. I speak a decent amount of Arabic and I took Spanish in high school and I spent the summer backpacking Europe, so I’m not pretending to be multilingual or anything, but I’ve heard a lot of foreign languages before. This woman didn’t sound like she was speaking in any of them. I figured it was a prank call or a wrong number and I hung up.
The next night, around the same time, the phone rang again with the same number, and again, I picked it up. The same thing happened, but this time, I blocked it. I was a college student. I didn’t need any unnecessary phone calls interrupting what little sleep I was getting.
But the next night, the phone rang again. And it was the same number. I didn’t even understand how that was possible. I picked it up, confused, checking my Blocked list to see if I had somehow deleted it. The number was still Blocked. The woman started talking again, and I said, “Excuse me, but I think you have the wrong number. I’m going to have to ask you to please stop calling.”
And the woman screamed into the phone, at the top of her lungs, a violent, wordless, blood-chilling howl. I jolted and dropped the phone, scrambling to pick it up and end the call, but right before I could, she said in perfect English, “I’m watching you, Sarah.”
I was scared shitless. I left my phone in my room and went down the hall to my boyfriend’s apartment. My heart was pounding out of my chest. Nobody called me Sarah except for my grandmother, and she had died years ago. I went into his room and woke him up, insistent that I didn’t want to sleep alone that night. Now, I hadn’t mentioned any of these phone calls to him, or to anybody else. But as soon as I shook him awake, he sat up in bed, eyes wide and breathing heavy. He told me had just a horrible dream about me. I asked him what it was, and he said, “There was a woman standing over you with a knife. She spoke really fast, in a different language, and she was going to kill you. She kept calling you Sarah.”