Dead Woman

The Dead Woman is a scary ghost story about a man who lives next door to a haunted house. It is supposedly a true story that happened to a man in Russia.

A few years ago, I rented a house in the countryside. My neighbors were a married couple named Lisa and Michael. They had two young children, a boy and a girl. They were a nice, quiet family and pretty much kept to themselves.

One night, I was awakened by a blood-curdling scream. It sounded like it was coming from the house next door. I jumped out of bed, threw on my dressing gown and ran downstairs.

When I got to my front gate, two small figures came flying at me and almost knocked me off my feet. I realized it was the kids who lived next door, but I was stunned by their appearance. The boy was in his pyjamas and the girl was in her nightie. Their faces were deathly pale and they looked up at me with terror in their eyes.

Both kids held onto me and began to cry. Their mother came rushing towards us and I could see she was terrified as well.

“What happened?” I asked. “I heard screams.”

“There’s someone in our house!” Lisa gasped, her voice shaking with fear. “I… I heard someone in the kitchen… I was too afraid to go check… Then I heard someone climbing the stairs and I heard the door to my children’s bedroom opening… Then I heard my daughter, screaming. It was terrible! I immediately got the kids and we ran out.”

“Did you see who it was?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “The children ran out of the bedroom… I didn’t dare to check it… Please help us… We need to call the police.”

I looked at the children, still trembling with fear.

“Where’s their father?” I asked.

“He’s working the night shift,” Lisa said.

I told them to go into my house and call the police. She thanked me, took her children by the hand and ran to my house.

I decided to check out their house. The front door was standing open. It was dark and silent. All of a sudden, I felt a cold chill run down my spine. I had the strangest feeling that someone was watching me.

In the back of my mind, a little voice kept telling me, “It’s a trap!”

I don’t know what came over me, but at that moment, I was very scared. Scared of the unknown. Scared of what might be lurking inside the darkened house.

“Pull yourself together,” I muttered. “You’re not a child anymore.”

I started to walk up the garden path, but then I saw something that made me stop in my tracks.

Click! In one of the upstairs windows, the light suddenly came on.

The house was supposed to be empty. I looked up at the lighted window, but I didn’t see anything, just curtains blowing in the breeze.

“There’s something up there,” the little voice in my head whispered. “And it’s not afraid of being found. In fact, it wants you to find it.”

I tried to tell myself I was just being silly. How stupid was it for an adult man to be afraid to go into a house because he is afraid of ghosts!

“If it’s a thief,” I thought to myself, “then why would they switch on the lights?”

Click! The light turned off.

“What the hell?” I thought and took a few steps back.

I still did not see anything in the darkness, but I felt goosebumps rising on my skin.

Click! The light turned on again.

When I looked up at the window, my heart skipped a beat. There was a dark figure standing there. It was a woman. Her skin was taut and shrivelled and her hair was long and unkempt. She looked like a corpse. She just stared down at me with her hollow, empty eye sockets and she smiled a dead smile.

Click! The light went out.

I turned and ran back to my own house. When I got to my front door, I banged on it until the neighbor lady let me in. She looked at me with a mixture of fear and anxiety. My face was pale and my eyes were so frightened that the children began to cry again.

“Water,” I panted. “I need water.”

Lisa grabbed a glass, filled it with water and handed it to me. I downed it in one gulp. My heart was pounding and I had broken into a cold sweat. I was afraid that I was having a heart attack.

“Did you call the police?” I asked, trying to pull myself together.

“They’re on their way,” she said. “Did you check the house?”

“Um… Let’s just wait for the police,” I replied.

A few minutes later, the police finally arrived. They searched the house from top to bottom, but they didn’t find any thief. There was no one there at all.

The police questioned the neighbors, but nobody had seen or heard anything. When they questioned me, I didn’t tell them what I had seen. What could I tell them? That I had seen a dead woman in the window, smiling an unearthly smile? Nobody would believe me.

The police eventually finished up their business and left to take care of more important things. Around 7 o’clock in the morning, the woman’s husband came home. The children were glad to see him and together, the family returned to their house. I tried not to look at their house, especially at the upstairs window.

After that crazy night, I began to have trouble sleeping. As soon as I closed my eyes, I would see the face of the dead woman.

Then, life seemed to get back to normal. The neighbors gradually managed to forget all about the incident, no one screamed during the night and I didn’t see any dead bodies standing in windows. Everything seemed to be back on track and life was good!

But one evening, about a month later, I heard someone knocking on my front door. The knock was loud and strong. They kept banging and banging as if they were going to break my door down. I looked through the peephole and saw that it was the neighbor lady, Lisa.

I opened the door and found her standing there, grinning at me.

“What happened?” I asked.

She didn’t reply. She just smiled and walked straight past me. She went into my house and turned left, into the living room. She left me standing on the doorstep, dumbfounded. That fixed smile on her face unnerved me. It was so creepy… almost inhuman… It made me shiver from head to toe.

It was dark outside and no birds were singing. I was about to follow her inside, when I heard voices coming from the house next door. When I glanced over the fence, I saw the neighbor children playing in the front yard.

Then, I froze. I could not believe what I was seeing. Lisa was there! She was standing there in her front yard, playing with the children.

I couldn’t move. It felt like my entire body was paralyzed with fear. The little voice in my head was asking only one question: “If Lisa is over there, then who is in my living room?”

I didn’t stop to check. I immediately ran to the house next door and asked my neighbors to call the police. Two officers arrived and searched my house from top to bottom, but they didn’t fina a living soul. How could they? The only person in my house was a dead woman.

The next morning, I left the house and I didn’t come back.

Now I live in a city where there are more live people and less dead. I heard that my former neighbors, Michael and Lisa, moved out soon after I left. I asked around and one of my friends said that the reason they moved was because the mother and father of the family had gone insane.

“They’re such fools,” my friend laughed. “They thought that their house was haunted!”

I tried to laugh along with him, but I couldn’t even muster a smile.