Shush

Shush is a true scary story about a girl who is tormented by terrible nightmares whenever she stays in her grandmother’s cottage. It is supposed to be a true story, told by a girl named Sabina.

My name is Sabina. When I was a little girl, my parents took me to visit my grandmother. She lived in a little village in the countryside. Her cottage was very small and there was only one bedroom. My grandmother slept in one bed, my parents slept in the other and I had to sleep on some cushions on the floor.

We stayed there for a few weeks and I was troubled by terrible nightmares. Every night, I would wake up screaming. My parents tried to calm me down and asked me what was wrong. All I could tell them was that a man was coming to get me.

I can still remember the cause of my terror. Every night, I saw a shadowy figure emerge from behind the curtains in the corner of the room. He was pitch black and all I could make out was his outline. He was tall and hairy.

I would watch in horror as he came crawling towards me, with a sickening slowness. He came up to me and whispered something in my ear and just as I was about to scream, he would placed a finger against his lips and whisper, “Shush… shush… shush…”

He tortured me every night to the point where I dreaded going to sleep. As time went on, he began to appear not only at night, but also during the day.

One evening, we were all watching TV in the living room and at some point I happened to glance to my left. The curtains slowly drew back and I saw the man standing there, staring silently at me. He raised his hand, put his finger to his lips and whispered, “Shush… shush… shush…”

I let out a horrified scream and immediately told my mother what I had seen. She got up and went over to the curtains, pulling them back and forth and showing me that there was nothing there, but of course by then he had already disappeared.

When the holiday was over, we went back to our apartment in the city and the nightmares stopped. After that, my grandmother would always come to visit us instead, so we never went to her cottage on vacataion again. As time went on, I stopped thinking about the man and eventually forgot about him altogether.

One Summer, when I was 13 years old and my little brother was 5 years old, we went to stay with my grandmother again. My parents were in the kitchen, having a cup of tea with my grandmother. THey asked me to get my little brother ready for bed. While I was preparing a mattress on the floor for both of us to sleep on, my little brother was sitting on one of the beds.

I noticed that he was being unusually quiet. When I looked up, I saw that he was staring at something.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

Then, suddenly, he jerked head around and looked at me, his eyes wide with fear.

“Sabina,” he said, pointing at the curtains. “The Shush man is standing there…”

Needless to say, my brother and I spent the night sleeping in the kitchen and we never went to visit my grandmother’s cottage again.