Chapter 8: The Strange Shadow in the Old Compound: A Supernatural Entanglement That Lasted Nine Years

The Strange Shadow in the Old Compound: A Supernatural Entanglement That Lasted Nine Years

My family lived in a six-story red-brick building with no elevator inside a military compound. The walls were mottled and peeling, and the stairwell was filled year-round with a damp smell of mildew mixed with a faint trace of disinfectant. Most of the residents in the compound were retired soldiers or their families. By rights, it should have been a place full of upright, righteous energy. But none of us expected that hidden there was a strange shadow that would cling to me for nine years.

Those supernatural events truly happened. From my initial confusion and ignorance to the later terror that made my hair stand on end, even now, whenever I think of them, my back still turns cold.

In 2007, I was in high school. At that time, we were still living on the third floor of the old building. Ever since I was little, I had been timid and afraid of the dark, yet I loved listening to ghost stories. I always thought those frightening plots were made up—until my first experience of “ghost pressing the bed,” or sleep paralysis, completely shattered what I believed.

That afternoon, I was chatting with a high school classmate in the dormitory. He described his own experience of ghost pressing the bed in vivid detail: his mind was awake, but he could not move; there were strange sounds by his ears, and he could see a vague black shadow in front of him. It was the first time I had ever heard the term “ghost pressing the bed.” Listening to him made my scalp prickle, yet I could not help being curious.

Unexpectedly, not long after, misfortune fell on me.

It was a hot summer afternoon. I was home alone, lying in my bedroom with the air conditioner on, half asleep and half awake. I do not know how long I had slept when I suddenly wanted to open my eyes, only to discover that my eyelids were as heavy as if they had been filled with lead.

After struggling for a long time, I finally opened them a crack. I could clearly see the phone on my bedside table, but my body seemed to have been nailed to the bed. No matter how hard I tried, my hands and feet did not move at all.

An invisible force pressed down on me. My chest felt so tight that I panicked, as if something were riding on top of me, pinning my arms and legs down with deadly force. I wanted to shout, but I could not make a sound. It felt as if my throat had been blocked.

At that moment, fear swallowed me like a tide. I screamed desperately inside my heart, using all the strength in my body to struggle.

I do not know how much time passed before I suddenly felt an electric current shoot from the top of my head down to the soles of my feet. With a buzzing sensation, feeling returned to my body all at once.

I sat up abruptly, drenched in cold sweat. My hands and feet were still trembling, and my heart was pounding so hard it felt as if it might leap out of my throat. I did not dare stay there even one second longer. I grabbed a few pieces of clothing, putting them on while running toward the door, and rushed out of the house in a panic.

When I walked out of the stairwell and saw people coming and going in the compound, and felt the warm sunlight falling on me, that recovered sense of safety was something I still remember clearly.

I quickly called my family, crying as I said I wanted to go find them. Only after I saw them did my tense nerves finally relax.

In 2008, our family moved to another, slightly newer red-brick building inside the compound. It was still six stories high and still had no elevator. I thought that once we changed homes, those strange things would come to an end. I never expected that this was only the beginning of the nightmare. The things that happened afterward became more and more sinister, and more and more terrifying.

After we moved, ghost pressing the bed still happened from time to time. But the thing I remember most clearly was the strange incident with an old radio one winter.

There was an old desktop radio in our kitchen. When my family cooked, they would usually turn it on and listen to FM programs. The radio was very old. It had no automatic start function. To turn it on, someone had to press the button on the side of the body by hand.

One night, around one or two in the morning, the whole family was already sound asleep. I was sleeping in a daze when I was suddenly jolted awake by a loud noise.

The sound came from the kitchen. It was the old radio. The volume had been turned all the way up, and it was playing an FM program so loudly that it hurt my eardrums.

Still half asleep, I heard my parents getting up. They turned on the light and went to the kitchen to switch off the radio. I could vaguely hear their voices, full of confusion.

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

“Maybe it wasn’t turned off properly?”

“That can’t be. I clearly turned it off last night.”

After turning off the radio, my parents went back to their room and continued sleeping. I was far too tired at the time and did not think much about it. I turned over and fell asleep again.

The next morning, while eating breakfast, my parents brought it up again, still completely puzzled. I lay in bed listening to their conversation, and only then did I realize how strange it was.

That radio could not possibly turn itself on unless someone pressed the button. But that night, the whole family had been asleep. Who would have gone into the kitchen to turn on the radio?

The incident lodged in my heart like a thorn, leaving me vaguely uneasy. But because nothing similar happened again afterward, we gradually forgot about it.

Yet the calm did not last long. Even stranger things followed one after another.

The room where I slept had a sliding door. It was heavy and smooth, and whenever I slept alone, I would fasten it shut. I had a dog, and every night it slept in the same room as me, lying on the floor beside my bed. Every morning around four or five, I would get up and open the door a crack for it, so it could go to the balcony to relieve itself.

One morning, I was awakened by the sound of my dog’s claws walking across the floor. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the sliding door had somehow opened a crack, and the dog had already gone to the balcony.

I thought someone in the family must have woken up early and opened the door for me, so I did not take it to heart. I turned over and went back to sleep.

After I got up that morning, I casually asked my parents who had opened the door for me. But both of them said they had not.

My heart gave a jolt.

That sliding door was very heavy. A dog alone could never have pushed it open by itself. The incident puzzled me, but all I could do was comfort myself by thinking that maybe I had forgotten to close the door the night before, or maybe I had not fastened it properly.

But what happened later completely shattered that self-comfort.

Once, I was startled awake by the whooshing sound of the sliding door opening. When I opened my eyes, I happened to see my dog walking toward the balcony, its claws making a crisp sound against the floor.

It was after four in the morning. The sky had not yet brightened, and the room was pitch-black. I was so frightened that I did not dare move. I quickly felt around and switched on the bedside lamp.

I was certain that no one had opened the door for me that night, because I had not heard any footsteps, and everyone in the family was still asleep.

So how had that door opened by itself?

From then on, I fastened the sliding door tightly every night before going to sleep, afraid that something like that would happen again. I thought that this way, it could not be a family member helping me open the door, and it could not be me forgetting to shut it. Surely then I could finally feel at ease.

But reality struck me hard once again.

One early morning, I suddenly opened my eyes and found that the sliding door was open again. The dog was no longer in the room.

A wave of fear rose in my heart. I reached out to press the switch of the bedside lamp, wanting to see whether the door had not been fastened properly.

But the instant I pressed the switch, the bulb burst with a sharp pop, and the room was instantly plunged into darkness.

I was so frightened that my heart nearly jumped out of my chest. I quickly felt around for the phone beside my bed, turned on the flashlight, and with trembling hands pressed the main light switch in the room.

The moment the light came on, I stared at the open sliding door, cold all over.

The door had been fastened. But it had still opened.

That night, I did not sleep again. I sat on the bed holding my phone until dawn.

The strange incidents that happened one after another made me more and more sensitive, and more and more afraid. But the thing that truly broke me was what happened during a livestream.

One night around midnight, I was doing a video livestream in my room with a friend. We were using FaceU special-effect stickers. Halfway through the livestream, I suddenly noticed that the screen kept recognizing a face in the empty space behind me. It flashed past and disappeared, appearing several times.

I began to panic a little and said to my friend in the livestream, “Look, why does it keep recognizing a face behind me?”

My friend also thought it was strange and told me to turn around and look. I turned back and checked. Behind me was empty. There was nothing there.

But right then, the screen suddenly recognized a face extremely close to the camera—and only half of it appeared.

The feeling was as if someone had quietly leaned in behind me and was staring at my phone screen.

I screamed, immediately ended the livestream, grabbed my phone, and rushed out of the room. I ran straight into my parents’ bedroom and insisted on squeezing into bed with them.

My parents were startled by me. After asking what had happened, they comforted me and said it might have been an error in the special-effect recognition. But I could see a trace of unease in their eyes too.

That night, my father went to sleep in my room, while I squeezed into the same bed as my mother. I did not sleep all night. From then on, for a very long time, I did not dare sleep alone in my room.

The peaceful days did not last long before another strange thing happened.

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

Suddenly, I heard Siri’s female voice come from the phone, clearly saying one sentence:

“Until we meet again.”

My whole body froze, and my scalp went numb.

I had clearly not awakened Siri. The phone had been charging with the screen black the entire time. Trembling, I got up, walked to the tea table, and picked up the phone, only to find that the screen was still black. No matter how I pressed the power button, it would not turn on. I unplugged the phone from the charger and plugged it back in, but the screen still showed no response.

Those four Chinese characters—hou hui you qi, “until we meet again”—echoed in my ears like a curse. The more I thought about them, the stranger they felt.

I no longer dared stay at home. I grabbed my keys and ran out the door, heading straight for the nearest phone shop.

But after the staff at the phone shop checked it, they said they had never encountered that kind of situation before. They suspected it was a system failure, but could not say exactly what had caused it. In the end, to get the phone to turn on, they reflashed the system, and all the data inside was wiped clean.

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

After my friend drove over, I got into the car. I had just fastened my seat belt when the radio in his car suddenly began making a crackling hiss. The signal became terrible.

My friend frowned and said, “That’s strange. My radio has always worked perfectly fine. How did it break the moment you got in?”

I told him about all the strange things that had happened at home. He was silent for a long time before saying, “Maybe there’s something wrong with the magnetic field in your home. Or maybe… something unclean is following you.”

His words made my whole body turn cold.

Yes. From the first ghost pressing the bed in 2007, to the radio turning itself on, the sliding door opening for no reason, the light bulb bursting, the livestream recognizing a strange face, and Siri speaking eerily from my phone—these things had happened one after another. How could they all be coincidence?

Later, many more strange things happened in our home.

At night, we could often hear footsteps in the living room, but no one could be seen. Things placed on the table would inexplicably move to different positions. Sometimes we would smell a faint, unknown fragrance, but could never find its source.

Even now, I still do not know what those strange things were really about. That red-brick building in the military compound carried too many of my fears and memories. Some people say it was all psychological. Some say I simply had too much imagination. But only I know that those experiences truly happened. Every detail is carved into my mind and refuses to fade.

I often wonder whether something unclean really was hidden inside that old building, or whether I had unknowingly provoked something.

But no matter what the truth is, those supernatural events taught me that there are many things in this world that science cannot explain. And toward the unknown, we should always keep a heart of awe.

Now, I have already moved away from that red-brick building. But those strange experiences remain the shadow that returns whenever I wake from dreams at midnight.

I do not know whether “it” will still follow me. Nor do I know what those four Chinese characters—hou hui you qi, “until we meet again”—really meant.

But I know that those supernatural events that truly happened will accompany me for the rest of my life, becoming a mystery in my heart that can never be solved.