One evening there was complete chaos after a little boy from the second floor went missing for almost two hours. The entire building panicked. People searched everywhere while his mother cried outside thinking somebody had kidnapped him.
Then suddenly the old woman appeared from nowhere and calmly said, “Check the laundry room.”
The boy was there.
Alive. Shaking. Hiding behind washing machines.
At random hours during the night, someone would bang loudly on different apartment doors and disappear before anybody opened. Sometimes the electricity in the hallway would switch off by itself. Other tenants claimed they heard footsteps on the roof around 3AM almost every night.
Everybody blamed the old woman.
She lived alone, walked slowly with a stick, and barely spoke to anyone. Sometimes she would stop tenants in the hallway just to ask weird questions like, “Did you hear the crying again last night?”
Nobody took her seriously.
But then strange things started happening in the building.
I want to thank @NetflixSA and @stainedglasstv_ for taking my story from print to film. This is such a surreal moment for me!!
#ThePolygamist is my debut novel, the book that got rejected by many publishers. So I took a bet on myself and self published. The bet paid off!!
The next morning the landlord finally checked the locked storage area on the rooftop that nobody had opened in years.
What they found shocked everybody.
Someone had been living there the entire time.
There was a mattress, empty food containers, bottles of water, newspapers, and stolen clothes from tenants hanging on wires. Whoever it was had apparently been moving around the building at night for months without anyone noticing.
When people asked him what happened, he said a “tall man” chased him downstairs and told him not to come out until he returned.
The problem was… nobody matching that description lived in the building.
That night tenants became terrified. Some families even slept with lights on because rumors spread fast that there was someone secretly living inside the building.
When I moved into my cousin’s apartment block, everybody warned me about the old woman who lived downstairs. People said she was strange, always spying through her curtains and arguing with invisible people at night. I thought they were exaggerating.
The woman looked harmless.
According to him, she tells people he’s dead because she’s ashamed of what he does to her and scared nobody would understand why she keeps letting him back in.
I can’t even explain the chills I felt in that moment because this whole time I thought I was living with a widow and her kids… meanwhile her “dead” husband had been walking into that house every week terrorizing them like a ghost.
The man looked at me dead in the eyes and said:
“Her husband didn’t die.”I just stood there confused.
Then he continued, “I’m her husband.”The entire house went silent, turns out she lied to everyone even the neighbors. The reason she told people he was dead was because he disappears for months, comes back drunk, violent, and abusive, then vanishes again.
One night it got worse than usual. I heard a loud crash and one of the daughters screaming, “Please leave my mom alone!” That’s when I finally stepped out of my room. I found this grown man standing there breathing heavily while she sat on the floor crying with blood on her lip.
I lost it.I asked him, “Who even are you? I thought her husband died. Why do you keep coming here to beat her?”
Sometimes he would arrive calm, then ten minutes later you’d hear slaps, furniture moving, her begging him to stop while the daughters cried in the other room. The weirdest part was that after every incident, she would act normal the next morning like nothing happened.
There was this man who kept coming to the house late at night. At first I thought maybe he was a relative or family friend. But every single time he came over, there would be shouting, things breaking, crying… then silence. The first time I heard her screaming, I honestly froze. I didn’t know whether to interfere or mind my business because I had just moved in.
But it kept happening.
I recently moved into this lady’s house as a tenant.
It was her and her two daughters living there. The place was peaceful at first. She was kind, always smiling, always acting like she had everything under control. One day while we were talking in the kitchen since we shared the kitchen, she casually mentioned that her husband died years ago. I felt sorry for her because raising two girls alone can’t be easy.
But after a few weeks, I started noticing strange things.
A factory worker was almost fired for stopping production over “nothing.”
That’s what management called it at first.
Nothing.
The worker operated one of the oldest machines in the building.
Every day for 8 years, he listened to the exact same sounds:
Grinding.
Clicking.
Pressure releasing.
Metal shifting.
One afternoon, he suddenly hit the emergency stop button and shut down the entire production line.
A story worth reading, my uncle disappeared for 9 years.
No calls. No texts. Nothing.
One day he simply vanished.
The police searched.
The family searched.
Nobody found anything.
My grandmother left the porch light on every night.
For 9 years.
Then one afternoon, during a family funeral, a black car pulled up.