I haven’t slept properly in half a year.
Not since the night they carried Mrs. Ellery’s body out of her apartment in a zipped black bag.
She lived alone.
She was quiet.
Sometimes she baked too much bread and left warm slices at my door.
And sometimes, late at night, she screamed.
Everyone in the building got used to it—her “night terrors,” the doctors called them.
But the night she died, the screaming stopped.
For exactly six days.
On the seventh night at 2:14 AM, I heard it again.
A raw, ripping, throat-shredding scream tore me out of sleep.
“HELP! PLEASE! HELP ME!”
I bolted upright. My room was dark, but the screaming—I knew that voice. It came from the wall I shared with her bedroom. Her EMPTY bedroom.
I pressed my ear to the drywall.
“Someone… please… I can’t see… it’s so dark…”
My blood ran cold.
“Mrs. Ellery?” I whispered, instantly hating myself for it.
The voice didn’t acknowledge me. It just kept begging, sobbing, wailing. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped—cut off like someone hit mute.
I didn’t sleep again that night.
_______
The next morning, I called the landlord.
“Someone’s in her apartment,” I said. “I heard screaming.”
He exhaled sharply. “Her place is locked. Still sealed. Coroner hasn’t released it.”
“Then someone broke in!”
“No one broke in,” he snapped. “If you heard something, it wasn’t from her unit.”
He hung up.
That night at 2:14 AM, the screaming returned. This time, I recorded it. I heard every second of it—but when I played it back in the morning…
Nothing. Not a whisper.
Like the screaming only existed when it wanted to be heard.
_______
On the 12th night after it started, I saw something new.
Her bedroom light flicked on.
I froze. The apartment had been empty for six months. No electricity. No access. No one had touched it since she died.
But now the light was ON.
I stepped into the hallway. Her apartment door was still sealed with police tape, completely intact.
Suddenly the screaming burst out again—so loud it vibrated the hallway wall.
“HELP ME! PLEASE—DON’T LEAVE ME HERE!”
I slammed both palms against her door.
“Mrs. Ellery! Who’s in there?!”
The screaming choked off instantly.
Then, from the other side of the door, a whisper pressed so close I could hear the breath behind it:
“…you left me.”
I stumbled back.
_______
The next day, I found her obituary online.
June Ellery, age 72. No children. No close family. Cause of death: heart failure.
But there was something else.
A comment, posted three days ago:
“Did anyone hear her screaming lately? I still do.”
A second one:
“Her soul didn’t leave. It’s trapped.”
A third:
“If you live next door, RUN.”
_______
I didn’t run.
I should have.
_______
Three nights later, the screaming changed.
It wasn’t coming from the wall anymore.
It was coming from inside my bedroom.
“DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES!” she shrieked.
I threw myself out of bed, crashing onto the floor.
“PLEASE—HELP ME—DON’T LEAVE ME HERE—PLEASE—”
Her voice ripped through the room, bouncing off the walls, circling me like a storm.
Then it stopped.
A quiet breath brushed my ear.
“I found you.”
_______
After that, the screaming didn’t follow a time anymore.
2:14 AM.
4:52 AM.
1:03 PM.
Sometimes right as I walked in the door from work.
But the worst part wasn’t the screaming.
It was the knocking.
Late one night, half-asleep, I heard a faint sound. Slow. Heavy.
Knock
Knock
Knock
I followed the sound, heart in my throat.
It was coming from INSIDE my closet.
I gripped the doorknob with shaking fingers.
“Mrs. Ellery?” I whispered.
There was a long silence.
Then a voice, broken and wet with despair, whispered from inside:
“…please don’t put me back…”
I let go of the doorknob instantly and stumbled backward.
Put her back WHERE?
_______
I began researching “screaming after death,” “ghost stuck in walls,” “neighbor haunting.” Nothing prepared me for what I learned next.
I found an old news clipping about the apartment building. Twenty years ago, a tenant vanished without a trace. Last seen entering apartment 2B.
Mrs. Ellery’s apartment.
Rumors said she used to lock him in a crawlspace behind her closet “to keep him safe.”
They never found his body.
But her night terrors—her screams—had started the same year he disappeared.
Oh God.
She wasn’t the victim.
She was the jailer.
And now SHE was trapped in the dark she once trapped someone else in.
_______
Last night was the worst.
I woke up at 2:14 AM—like always—but this time there was no screaming.
Just a soft, rhythmic scraping behind my wall.
Like fingernails.
Then her voice came, but not frantic. Not begging.
Calm. Too calm.
“You’re kind,” she said. “You listen to me. No one else ever did.”
I pressed my back against the headboard, shaking violently.
“Please stop,” I whispered.
The scraping grew louder. Closer.
“I don’t want to be alone in the dark anymore,” she murmured. “Let me stay with you.”
“No—no, you can’t—”
Her voice cut me off.
“Don’t worry. I know how to get through.”
The drywall began to BULGE outward, like something was pushing from inside.
A handprint pressed through the paint.
Then a second.
Then a face.
Her face.
Skin gray. Mouth open from endless screaming. Eyes black and empty.
She pushed against the wall, stretching it like wet skin.
“I found the way out…”
I ran. I grabbed my phone, my keys, didn’t even put on shoes.
As I fled down the stairwell, her final scream shattered the silence behind me:
“DON’T LEAVE ME HERE ALONE!”
_______
I’m writing this from a hotel an hour away.
I haven’t gone back.
But the front desk called a few minutes ago.
A woman came to the lobby asking for me.
Screaming my name.
They said she looked:
“About seventy. Pale. Shaking. Like she’d been trapped somewhere dark for a very, very long time.”
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know where to go.
But I know one thing:
If you ever hear your dead neighbor screaming…
Don’t answer.
Don’t listen.
And whatever happens—
Don’t let her find you.
Credit: Midnight D whisper
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