Wheelchair

The Wheelchair is a scary story about a detective who investigates a murder in an old mansion.

In 1984, there was an old lady who lived alone in a 2-story mansion. The woman was paralysed from the waist down and she was in a wheelchair. She was completely immobile and unable to care for herself. Ever since the death of her husband, she had a nurse who would visit her every day to help with various tasks.

What made it even more difficult, was the fact that the two floors of the house were only connected by an old staircase inside. When the old lady needed to move between the two, the nurse would have to pick her up and carry her frail body like an infant, up and down the stairs.

One day the police received a frantic phonecall from the old widow. There had been a murder. Since police units were scarce at the time, and the murderer had already fled the scene, only one detective was sent out to conduct the initial crime scene report.

When the detective arrived, he found the nurse lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Her arms and legs were splayed out at odd angles and her throat had beem ripped out. The old lady sat in her wheelchair at the top of the staircase watching him, still and silently, seemingly in shock. He could immediately rule her out as a suspect, due to her inability to move up and down the stairs, and because she was trapped up there the time the murder took place. It was similar to the death of her husband many years ago, who had suffocated in his sleep on the couch downstairs.

The detective put on his gloves, took photos, swabbed for evidence, and covered the body until the coroner arrived later – all routine business. He searched every room downstairs, looking for clues, then asked the old lady if he could look upstairs. She insisted that she was upstairs the whole time and no one apart from her had been up there that day, but regardless of this the detective ascended the staircase to which she hesitantly moved aside.

Beyond the staircase, there was a narrow corridor, with three closed doors along it. He checked behind each of the doors, the empty bedroom – nothing, the bathroom- nothing. He became anxious as he slowly made his way to the final bedroom where the old lady slept. He opened it and everything looked normal. A bed, a wardrobe and a bedside table with a lamp. He checked every wall of the room in horror, as it was not what he discovered, but it was what he didn’t discover that made him stop dead in his tracks and slowly reach for his gun in its holster. It was a detail so minor that they had completely overlooked it on the last investigation of the husband’s death.

There was no phone upstairs.

The detective pulled out his gun and rushed down the corridor. When he came to the top of the stairs, all he found was an empty wheelchair.