Chapter 8: Shadows in the Old Military Compound: The Haunting That Followed Me for Nine Years

Shadows in the Old Military Compound: The Haunting That Followed Me for Nine Years

My family once lived in a military residential compound, in a six-story red-brick building with no elevator. The walls were peeling in patches, and the stairwell always carried the same damp smell—mildew mixed with a faint trace of disinfectant. Most of the residents were retired soldiers or their families. It should have been a place of discipline and order, a place where nothing dark or unclean could take root.

But none of us knew then that something had been waiting there.

Something strange.

Something that would cast its shadow over nine years of my life.

The things that happened were real. At first, I was too young to understand them. Later, when I did understand, they became the kind of memories that could still make my scalp tighten and send a chill crawling down my back years afterward.

In 2007, I was in high school, and my family was still living on the third floor of the old building. I had always been timid, especially afraid of the dark, but for some reason I loved listening to ghost stories. I told myself the frightening parts were exaggerated, little embellishments added by people who enjoyed scaring others.

Then I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time, and that belief shattered completely.

That afternoon, I was chatting with a classmate in the dormitory. He told me, in vivid detail, about his own experience with sleep paralysis: his mind fully awake, his body unable to move, strange sounds near his ears, a vague black shape hovering in front of him. It was the first time I had ever heard the term. The story made my skin prickle, but curiosity kept me listening.

I never imagined that, not long after, the same thing would happen to me.

It was a sweltering summer afternoon. I was home alone, lying in my bedroom with the air conditioner running, drifting in that blurred space between sleep and waking. I don’t know how long I had been asleep. I only remember suddenly wanting to open my eyes—and realizing my eyelids felt as heavy as if they had been filled with lead.

I struggled for what felt like forever before I managed to force them open a narrow slit. Through that thin blur, I could see my phone clearly on the bedside table.

But my body was fixed to the mattress.

No matter how hard I tried, my hands and feet would not move.

An invisible weight pressed down on me. My chest tightened until panic began clawing at my ribs. It felt as if something were sitting astride me, pinning my arms and legs with a strength I could never hope to fight. I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. My throat felt sealed shut.

Fear rushed over me like floodwater.

Inside my own head, I screamed again and again, throwing every last bit of strength into struggling against whatever had me pinned.

I don’t know how long it lasted.

Then, without warning, a current shot through me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. There was a low buzzing sensation, and in the next instant, my body was mine again.

I lurched upright, drenched in cold sweat. My hands and feet were still shaking, and my heart was pounding so hard it felt as if it might burst out through my throat. I didn’t dare stay in that room another second. I grabbed a few pieces of clothing, pulled them on as I ran, and rushed out of the apartment in a panic.

The moment I stepped into the stairwell and saw people moving about in the compound below, with warm sunlight spilling over me, I felt a kind of safety I have never forgotten. It was as if I had been returned to the world of the living.

I called my family immediately, crying and telling them I wanted to come find them. Only when I finally saw them with my own eyes did my nerves begin to loosen.

In 2008, my family moved to another red-brick building inside the same compound. It was a little newer than the old one, but still six stories high, still without an elevator. I thought that changing apartments would put an end to the strange things.

I was wrong.

The move was not the end of the nightmare.

It was the beginning.

After that, sleep paralysis still came from time to time. But the incident I remember most clearly happened one winter night, and it involved the old radio in our kitchen.

It was a bulky desktop radio, outdated and worn from years of use. My family usually turned it on while cooking, listening to FM programs as they worked. It had no timer, no remote control, no automatic function of any kind. If you wanted to turn it on, you had to press the button on the side by hand.

One night, around one or two in the morning, the whole family was asleep. I was sunk deep in that heavy, dream-thick haze when a burst of noise jolted me awake.

It was coming from the kitchen.

The old radio was on.

The volume had been turned all the way up, and an FM program was blasting through the apartment so loudly it made my ears hurt.

Half-asleep, I heard my parents getting out of bed. They turned on the light and went into the kitchen to shut it off. Their voices drifted back to me, low and puzzled.

“What’s going on? How did the radio turn itself on?”

“Maybe it wasn’t switched off properly?”

“That’s impossible. I clearly turned it off last night.”

After they shut the radio off, they went back to bed. I was too exhausted to think much about it, so I turned over and fell asleep again.

The next morning, while we were eating breakfast, my parents brought it up again, still confused. I lay in bed listening to them talk, and only then did the strangeness of it settle over me.

That radio could not turn itself on.

Someone had to press the button.

But that night, everyone in the house had been asleep.

So who had gone into the kitchen and switched it on?

The incident lodged in my heart like a splinter. For a while, it left me uneasy. But nothing similar happened again right away, and little by little, we let it fade from our minds.

The quiet did not last.

Soon, stranger things followed.

My bedroom had a sliding door—heavy, smooth, and impossible to move without real force. Whenever I slept alone, I would secure it. I also had a dog, and every night it slept in my room, curled up on the floor beside my bed. Every morning around four or five, I would get up and open the door a crack so it could go out to the balcony to relieve itself.

One morning, I woke to the sound of my dog’s paws clicking across the floor. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the sliding door had opened by itself, leaving a narrow gap. The dog had already gone out to the balcony.

I assumed someone in the family had woken early and opened the door for me, so I didn’t pay it much attention. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Later, after I got up, I casually asked my parents who had opened my door.

Both of them said they hadn’t.

Something dropped in my chest.

That sliding door was heavy. A dog could never have pushed it open on its own. Still, I tried to reassure myself. Maybe I had forgotten to close it properly the night before. Maybe I hadn’t secured it tightly enough.

Then something happened that destroyed that explanation completely.

One night, I was jolted awake by the sound of the sliding door being pulled open.

Whoosh.

Sharp, sudden, unmistakable in the dark.

When I opened my eyes, I saw my dog walking toward the balcony, its claws tapping crisply against the floor.

It was after four in the morning. The sky had not yet begun to lighten. My room was pitch-black.

I was so frightened I didn’t dare move. I reached out blindly and switched on the bedside lamp.

I was certain no one had opened the door for me that night. I had heard no footsteps. Everyone else in the apartment was still asleep.

So how had the door opened?

After that, I secured the sliding door tightly every night before bed. I told myself that if it was properly fastened, no one could say a family member had opened it, and I could no longer blame my own forgetfulness.

Surely that would put my mind at ease.

But reality struck again.

One early morning, my eyes snapped open.

The sliding door was open once more, and the dog was gone from the room.

A chill spread through me. I reached for the bedside lamp, wanting to check whether the door had somehow come loose.

The moment I pressed the switch, the bulb burst with a sharp pop.

The room plunged into darkness.

My heart nearly stopped.

I fumbled for my phone on the bedside table, switched on the flashlight with shaking hands, then forced myself to press the main light switch in the room.

When the ceiling light came on, I stared at the wide-open sliding door, cold from head to toe.

The door had been secured.

And yet it had opened.

I did not sleep again that night. I sat on the bed clutching my phone until dawn.

After so many incidents, I became more sensitive, more watchful, more afraid. But the thing that nearly broke me happened during a livestream.

One night around midnight, I was in my room doing a video livestream with a friend. We were using FaceU filters—the kind that recognize faces and add special effects.

Halfway through the stream, I noticed something strange.

The app kept detecting a face in the empty space behind me. It would flash for an instant, vanish, then appear again. It happened several times.

Panic began crawling up my spine.

I said to my friend on the stream, “Look. Why does it keep recognizing a face behind me?”

My friend thought it was strange too and told me to turn around and check.

I looked back.

There was nothing behind me.

The space was empty.

Then, on the screen, the app suddenly recognized a face extremely close to the camera.

Only half of it appeared.

It felt as if someone had silently leaned in behind me and was staring over my shoulder at my phone screen.

I screamed, shut off the livestream at once, grabbed my phone, and ran out of the room. I rushed straight into my parents’ bedroom and insisted on squeezing into their bed.

My parents were startled awake. After I told them what had happened, they comforted me and said it was probably just a glitch in the filter’s face detection.

But I saw the trace of unease in their eyes.

That night, my father went to sleep in my room while I lay beside my mother, wide awake until morning. For a long time after that, I did not dare sleep alone in my room.

The quiet days did not last.

Soon, another bizarre thing happened.

One day, I was home alone, playing on the computer in the living room. My phone was charging on the tea table behind me.

Suddenly, Siri’s female voice came from the phone, clear and distinct.

“Until we meet again.”

My whole body froze. My scalp prickled.

I had not activated Siri. The phone had been charging the entire time, its screen dark.

Trembling, I got up and went to the tea table. I picked up the phone. The screen was still black. No matter how many times I pressed the power button, it would not turn on. I unplugged the charger and plugged it back in.

Still nothing.

Those four words—until we meet again—echoed in my ears like a curse. The more I thought about them, the stranger they became.

I could not stay in that apartment another moment. I grabbed my keys and ran straight to the nearest phone repair shop.

The staff checked the phone and said they had never seen anything like it. They suspected a system failure, but could not explain what had caused it. In the end, just to get the phone working again, they had to flash the system. Everything stored inside was erased.

I called a friend and asked him to pick me up.

When he arrived, I got into his car and had barely fastened my seat belt when the radio suddenly began to hiss and crackle. The signal deteriorated so badly it was almost impossible to hear anything.

My friend frowned.

“That’s weird,” he said. “My radio has always worked fine. How did it break the moment you got in?”

I told him everything that had happened at home—the sleep paralysis, the radio turning on by itself, the sliding door opening in the dark, the exploding light bulb, the strange face detected during the livestream, Siri speaking from a dead phone.

He was silent for a long time.

Then he said, “Maybe the magnetic field in your apartment is wrong. Or maybe… something unclean is following you.”

His words made my whole body go cold.

Because he was right.

From the first sleep paralysis in 2007, to the old radio switching itself on, to the sliding door opening by itself, to the bulb shattering, to the unknown face appearing in the livestream, to Siri’s eerie voice speaking from a black screen—how could all of that be coincidence?

After that, more strange things happened in our home.

At night, I would often hear footsteps in the living room, but when I went to look, no one was there. Objects left on the table would somehow change position. Sometimes a faint, unfamiliar fragrance drifted through the apartment, and no matter how we searched, we could never find where it came from.

Even now, I still do not know what those things were.

That red-brick building in the military compound holds too many of my fears, too many memories I cannot set down. Some people say it was all in my head. Others say I simply had too much imagination.

But only I know that those things truly happened.

Every detail is carved into my mind. None of it has faded.

I often wonder whether something unclean really was hidden inside that old building, or whether I accidentally disturbed something I should never have touched.

Whatever the truth may be, those encounters taught me one thing: there are many things in this world that science cannot explain. And before the unknown, we should always keep a heart capable of awe.

I have moved away from that red-brick building now.

But those strange experiences remain with me, shadows waiting in the hour when I wake from dreams at midnight.

I do not know whether it is still following me.

I do not know what those four words—until we meet again—were truly meant to mean.

All I know is that the things I lived through will follow me for the rest of my life, becoming a mystery in my heart that can never be solved.