3 True Scary Stories to Read Online

Some of the scariest experiences don’t happen in abandoned buildings or dark forests—they happen in ordinary homes, quiet roads, and familiar places. Bangladesh has its own share of unsettling stories where people claim to have witnessed strange sounds, unexplained figures, and events they still cannot fully explain. 

In this collection, you’ll read three scary stories from Bangladesh, each based on a disturbing encounter. Whether you believe in ghosts and the paranormal or prefer to look for a logical explanation, these stories are sure to leave you wondering what might be hiding in the darkness.

A True Scary Story to Read Online

1. That Terrible Afternoon

I'm Rasel. I live alone. That wasn't the plan — some family stuff happened and I ended up on my own in this flat, maybe 800 to 900 square feet. Old building. You walk in, then you walk in again, deeper, before you get to my room. Someone was supposed to stay with me once. They lasted five days. I've been here five years now, on my own for most of it.

It was an ordinary afternoon, about a year, maybe a year and a half, after I moved in. Somewhere between 12 and 1 pm — I remember the time because it stuck with me afterward. I was lying on my bed doing the usual nothing. I run a small online business, so I was on my phone, checking messages, replying to a couple of people, putting the phone down, picking it back up when something buzzed. That's it. That's all I was doing.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I started feeling like someone was standing behind me.

Not loud, not obvious. Just — you know that feeling when you're almost sure someone's come up behind you, and you can't explain why you think that, you just do? It was like that. I looked back toward my door, twice. Nothing there both times. I told myself it was nothing — I've lived alone here a long time, there's no reason anyone would be behind me.

But then I noticed something else. Every time I put the phone down, it was like whatever was behind me got alert. Snapped to attention. I felt that two or three times — this sense of something noticing the second I stopped scrolling. So I looked back again, out of curiosity this time, not fear. Nothing. I told myself the same thing again — I live alone, this isn't supposed to happen — and went back to my phone.

Then there was the sound from the water bottles.

I keep the big five-liter bottles behind my bed — some lying down, some standing, from bottled water I buy. I heard a sound like something trying to stand on top of them, trying to find a footing, take a position. Not the fan knocking them together, I know what that sounds like. This was a pressing, creaking sound, like weight settling somewhere it shouldn't. It genuinely spooked me.

I looked back one more time. Nothing there. I went back to my work.

After a while I put the phone aside for good and lay on my right side, arms loose, legs loose, trying to rest. Five minutes, maybe seven, maybe ten — I couldn't tell you exactly.

And then my surroundings started going dark. Slowly at first. Then all the way dark.

In the middle of the afternoon.

I want to be clear about this part because it's the part that made no sense to me even while it was happening: it was daytime. I had just replied to someone's message minutes before. I wasn't drifting off, wasn't dreaming, wasn't half-asleep. And the whole flat went dark like someone had switched off the day.

At the same time, something started pushing me. Not a person lying on me — I want to be specific about that, because it wasn't a touch, it wasn't a weight I could point to. It was a force, from above, pressing me down into the bed, so hard I genuinely thought I was going to break through the mattress and fall through the floor.

Something in me got curious even through the fear. I pushed up with both hands, tried to twist around and look behind me. All I saw was dark. Nothing. And then it threw me back down. Hard. Like it had been waiting for me to try that.

After that I couldn't move. Not my hands, not my feet, not even my lips. I wanted to recite something, anything, and I couldn't get my mouth to move. At some point — I think, I'm not totally sure — I must have closed my eyes, or something closed them for me, because I couldn't open them either.

I don't know how to describe that state except that it was the worst fear I've ever felt in my life. Nothing like it before or since. And lying there, unable to move, I remember thinking — clearly, in that moment — that some invisible force had gotten hold of me, and that it might be there to actually hurt me. Not just scare me. Hurt me.

So I thought — fine, if I can't move my lips, I'll do it in my head. I started reciting. Surah Fatiha first. Then Durood Sharif. Then Surah Falaq, Surah Nas, Surah Ikhlas — three times through. And then I started on Ayatul Kursi.

I got through it once. Started it a second time. Somewhere in the middle of that second recitation, I felt it start to let go. Slowly, like a grip loosening one finger at a time.

When I finally opened my eyes, the light hit me strange. It felt like my eyes had been shut for fifteen, thirty days — like they'd forgotten what light was supposed to feel like. I just lay there, stunned, thinking, what was that.

And then there was this other feeling, harder to explain. The flat felt empty. Not just quiet — empty in a specific way, like five or six or seven people had been living in that room for a long time and had all just left at once. I'd said goodbye to a group chat online maybe half an hour before that. I don't know why my mind connected those two things. It just did.

At first I brushed it off. Told myself it was nothing, some mental slip, the kind of thing a person living alone this long starts imagining. But then I'd think about it again and get stuck on the same detail — I'd been wide awake through all of it. Awake, and unable to move a hand or a foot. That's not something your mind just makes up while you're conscious. Or maybe it is. I don't know. I still go back and forth on it.

Thinking back on the bottle sounds, and the feeling of something behind me before all that — my own theory, for what it's worth, is that it had been standing there a while, testing me, waiting. And it made its move exactly when I'd stopped holding my phone, stopped moving, gone still and relaxed. Like it needed me to not be able to react. I can't prove that. It's just what it felt like, having lived through it.

Couldn't stand up properly for something like thirty to forty-five minutes afterward. The part where I genuinely couldn't move at all — that was ten, maybe fifteen minutes.

I didn't tell my landlord. It hadn't happened before, so I figured, why worry him. I told some friends instead.

That wasn't the only thing, though. About a year, year and a half later, a couple of smaller things happened.

Once, I came in through the main door, reached for the light switch, and before I could turn it on, I felt a hand on my shoulder. A real hand. Fingers, weight, for maybe two or three seconds. Then it was gone, right before the light came on. It felt exactly like a person's hand. I don't know whose.

Twice — always in that same daytime window, 12 to 1, never at night — I heard the sound of someone getting onto my bed, or off it. That specific creak a bed makes under weight. I'd be standing nearby and just hear it happen.

And then there's the thing with the rats, which I still can't explain, and I've stopped trying to.

About a year, two years after that first afternoon, I noticed something during Ramadan, around Sehri, right when the Fajr azaan would play — it seemed like something bolted out of my room, fast, the second the azaan started. I'd figured it was a small rat. One used to move around the flat at night, and I never bothered it.

Then one night — the same day I'd stopped noticing that rat around, actually — I heard a lot of noise from the room next to mine. Running, jumping, that kind of commotion, late at night. I just assumed it was the rat doing whatever rats do.

The next morning I found two rats. Dead. Side by side, inside an open bucket in that room.

I keep coming back to that. If they'd just died on their own, they'd be scattered somewhere — a corner, under something, wherever rats end up dying. Not arranged side by side in a bucket like that. There'd been no rain, nothing that would've driven them to shelter there. And it's not like there was anyone else in the flat who could have killed them and put them there. It's just me. So I don't have an answer for that one. I never found one.

I still live there. I still don't fully understand what happened that afternoon, or what that hand was, or why those two rats ended up where they did. But I pray before I leave and recite duas when I come back in. I pray before I sleep, and I recite duas as I'm falling asleep, too. That's what lets me stay.

Has anything like this ever happened to you — something you felt before you saw it, or something you still can't explain no matter how many times you go over it? I'd like to hear it.

2. The Thing That Followed My Family for Twenty-Five Years

I'm 24 now. This started before I was even born — while I was still inside my mother, sometime around 24 years ago. I only know the beginning the way you know a story that's been told to you a hundred times, not the way you know something you lived. But I lived plenty of it myself, and I'm still living pieces of it.

It started with my mother, long before I existed.

We didn't have a bathroom back then. Just a "kacha" house — mud walls, no electricity, that kind of place. If you needed to go, you went outside.

One day my mother took my older sister out to the washroom area. On the way, she bumped into something — a cat, she said. Just a cat. Nothing that should have mattered.

But after they came back inside, once my mother lay down to sleep, that's when it started. She told us she saw something coming up from under her feet, right there in the bed. It kept happening. Night after night.

They took her to kobiraj after kobiraj — traditional healers, the kind people in our area go to for this exact thing. Taveez, blessed water, all of it. Nothing held. Whatever they gave her would work for a little while and then just stop working, or go missing, or lose its effect. I don't know how to explain that part. Nobody in my family could either.

That's when the screaming started.

Growing up, I'd hear my mother scream at night. Not once in a while — regularly. Whenever it happened, something in her would just take over, and she'd walk straight out of the house, even if the door was locked.

Locked. From the inside. And she'd be gone.

My mother or my sister would have to go find her outside, sometimes after she'd literally run into a neighbor in the dark. And here's the part that still gets me — when she screamed like that and grabbed onto someone, she said she could see the thing itself inside that person. Not the person. The thing, looking out at her from inside them.

Whoever grabbed her first, she'd be terrified of just them specifically. It usually took one or two more people showing up before she'd start coming back. Sometimes it took four or five before she was really herself again.

When we asked her what she saw, she never described anything monstrous. No twisted face, no classic ghost. She said a kite — a bird, a chil — kept coming in her sleep and dragging her outside. Sometimes toward a pond near our house. And she'd say shadows sat around her when she woke up. Several of them.

I remember one specific night. I was in a neighbor's house watching TV — we finally had electricity by then — and I heard her scream from our place. I ran back and found two of our lights shattered and lying on the floor. When we asked her what happened, she couldn't tell us anything. She just knew the lights were broken.

Another time my sister went out looking for her and found her standing next to a dog. The dog walked off when my sister got close. They came back inside — but the door had been locked the whole time. The next morning we found two of our tin roof sheets pried open, swinging in the wind. However she got out, it wasn't through the door.

When it had hold of her, it took more than two grown people to hold her down. She was stronger than she should have been. I don't have an explanation for that. I'm just telling you what we saw.

Eventually the family took her for a bigger treatment, somewhere in Comilla. This is the part I only have secondhand, but it's the part that shaped everything after. Whatever was in her was made to speak, apparently, and when they asked how many of them there were, it answered: seven.

They managed to trap the main one. There was something about a large amount being taken there too — I honestly never understood that part, I just remember it being mentioned.

Some of the others — described almost like the young ones of the group — couldn't be caught. The healer warned that they might keep bothering her, but that she should come back in two or three years to deal with them properly. They gave her a written card. As long as she slept with it near her, she'd be left alone.

She still sleeps with that card today. On the nights she doesn't have it with her, it starts again.

Then it started coming for me too.

She told me once — this is what the healers said to her, not something I can verify — that no treatment had really been done for me specifically. But because I was in her womb when all of this began, I share her blood in a way that makes me a target too. As a man, apparently, it can't act on me as directly.

I don't know what any of that really means. I'm just repeating it.

What I know is what happened to me.

There's this thing that's just always been part of my sleep — I'll be out, completely asleep, and then all of a sudden I'm awake, no build-up to it, usually somewhere around two or two-thirty at night. If the light happened to be off when that happened, that's usually when I'd see a shadow sitting there.

When I was six or seven, I used to see a shadow figure sitting beside me like that. I couldn't move, couldn't speak, could barely register what I was looking at.

After I'd fall asleep, I'd feel something sit down on my chest — right on top of me. I'd try to scream and nothing would come out. Just silence, while I was screaming inside my own head.

There'd be a sound too, a kind of hissing — piss, piss — like something trying to form words and not quite getting there. My mother told me she heard that exact same sound too. That sound still comes back to me sometimes, even now.

I sleepwalked too, more than once. One time I still think about — my mother was away in Chittagong, so it was just me and my sister sleeping at home. I woke up already mid-walk, no memory of opening the door, and I'd gone out at least a few steps from the house, maybe two or four, just walking without knowing where.

I ran into a family friend — I'll just call him by his name, Yusuf — right outside. He stopped me and asked where I was going. And for a second I actually answered him, though I don't remember choosing the words — I told him I'd come to make a marriage proposal.

Then I came back to myself, panicked, and ran straight back inside to bed.

During the day, if I napped, I'd sometimes dream the ceiling fan was breaking loose right above me, about to fall on me. I'd bolt out of the room before I was even fully awake.

One of those episodes ended badly. We were in Chittagong at the time, staying with my mother. I ran out like that — she screamed, but I didn't, I never really scream during these.

Somewhere on the stairs between the first floor and the second, I fell. I honestly can't tell you anymore if I was going up or coming down — it's confused in my head even now.

Either way I split my face open near my mouth. That cut bled for what felt like forever and took much longer to heal than a normal cut should have. I still have the scar by my lip.

Years later, when I was older and working there for my job, it found me all over again.

Working there, I started sleeping with the light on. Every night. For two years straight, I don't think I turned it off more than a couple of times.

There was a night I woke up and every piece of clothing in the room looked white — and it felt like there were people standing around me, a whole room full of them, completely still. I shut my eyes, started reciting whatever prayer I could hold onto, and when I opened them again, everything was just clothes hanging where they always hung. Nothing moving. It happened again another night, close to the same way.

Another time I woke up already reaching for the steel door of my room, halfway to opening it, with no urge to use the bathroom, nothing pulling me outside that I could name. The second the door opened, I came back to myself and had no idea where I'd been about to go.

I never had anything grab me or come straight at me, not once. It was always the opposite — I'd wake up and catch something moving away from me, cutting across the room, gone out the window or through the door before I could really see it.

Around that same time, I had bags of goods stored in my room for work — the kind with rope tying them shut. I woke up one night and the rope looked like it was coiling on its own, twisting through the sack like a snake. I don't know what to do with that memory. I just have it.

And there were nights I'd wake up and swear my clothes on the hangers had shifted position — moved side to side — when I knew I'd left them still. Sometimes I felt watched, especially near the window, like something was looking right at me while I tried to sleep.

Not long ago, I woke up hearing what sounded like five or six people screaming at once, right near that window. I sat up and just tried to work out where a sound like that could possibly have come from. No answer came.

Not long after, I heard a scream nobody else did.

This wasn't a one-time thing either, hearing her. I've known the sound of my mother's real scream since I was a little kid, so whenever I hear something that sounds like it, I'm up and moving before I even think about it.

A few days after the window incident, I was staying in Keraniganj. I want to say it had been about a month since I got there — though honestly, thinking about it now, it might have only been six or seven days. I don't fully trust my own timeline on this one.

I'd gotten in around midnight after closing up the shop, gone to sleep in the first room. My mother was asleep in the last room of the house.

Around 2 or 2:30, I heard a scream. It sounded exactly like my mother. Clear. Unmistakable, at the time.

I got up immediately and went to check on her. She was asleep, completely fine, like nothing had happened. No one else in the house had heard anything at all. I went back to my room, sat down, and said some prayers. I remember thinking that on the nights I actually manage to pray properly before sleeping — I don't know. I lost that thought somewhere. Eventually I just slept.

The worst physical thing happened to my finger.

Around two years ago, back in Keraniganj, I was helping my brother with stonework — he had a job cutting or working stone, and I was assisting. I was worn out that night, fell asleep fast.

At some point while I was sleeping, I felt two of my fingers get grabbed hard from behind and bent — hard enough that it actually hurt. I don't know how else to describe it except that it happened to my body while I was lying there.

A handful of things like that have happened to me physically over the years. But I want to be clear about something — nothing has ever actually shown up in front of me, in the flesh, as an actual body I could see. It was always this: effects on me, or something glimpsed leaving a room. This was the worst of the physical ones.

My finger hurt for five days afterward. My sister turned the light on and found me sitting up, still gripping and bending my own finger, for what she said was twenty or thirty seconds, saying "la hawla wala quwwata" — the same phrase, over and over. When I finally stopped, I told her I felt like I was the one bending it.

There's a lot about this nobody in my family can explain.

People who've dealt with this kind of thing — and I've met a few now — all say the same thing: the second you lie down, sleep pulls you under before you can finish a prayer. I've tried to get through Ayatul Kursi more times than I can count and never made it. My mind just slides off onto something else halfway through, and by the time I notice, my whole face feels heavy, and I can't push through it.

My mother had scratch marks on her back sometimes, deep enough to leave a mark, like something with nails had dragged across her skin. Nobody in the house ever saw it happen. It was just there in the morning.

Her screaming, when it happened, was loud enough that at least two or three or four households near ours would wake up because of it. I was young when it happened the most. It terrified me, every single time, even though I'd already heard it so many times before that I should have been used to it by then.

I never was. I can still hear that scream in my head now, all these years later, like it never actually stopped playing somewhere in the back of my mind.

Out of five of us — my brothers and sisters — only two of us have ever gone through any of this. I don't know why it picked us and not the others. Nobody's ever been able to tell me.

And it isn't tied to one house. We've lived in Noakhali, Chittagong, our village, Dhaka, Comilla — wherever we go, it finds a way back into the picture. It doesn't even have to be a move. If I just go somewhere for a short visit, it can start up there too — two days in, three days, a week, sometimes it just takes a while and then one day it's just there again. It's been almost 25 years now. It's still with us.

Has anything like this ever happened in your family — something that followed you across houses, or across generations? I'd like to hear it if it has.

3. The White-Robed Man on the Demra Road

I've never believed in ghosts. Not really. In our religion, we believe the soul doesn't just wander around after death — it's reborn, again and again. That's what I grew up believing. Except, maybe, for the ones who die badly. Suicide. Murder. Those souls, some people say, don't get to move on so easy. They stick around as something else. I used to hear that and shrug it off.

Then this happened, and now I don't know what to think anymore.

It was a Monday. December 2nd. Early morning, and my phone rang. Nobody calls me that early — not my friends, not even my own family, really. So when I saw it was my younger brother, I already felt off before he even said a word.

He told me a relative of ours — I won't name him — had been killed. Murdered, by people we didn't know. Just like that, over the phone, before I'd even had my tea.

I don't remember exactly what I said back. I think I told him to hang up, that I'd call him in a minute. I remember going to the bathroom first — I don't know why, maybe just to have thirty seconds where nothing was real yet — and then calling him back.

He filled in the rest. Our relative had been missing all night. People had been searching. Eventually he was found in Amulia Model Town — some locals said there'd been a body there — and by the time anyone got to him, the body had already been moved to Sabujbagh police station. That's where they finally identified him.

My chest just went tight hearing it. I had to go to work at 8, so I rushed through getting ready, but I wasn't really there. By 10:30 or so, word came that the body was still sitting at the station. Nothing moving yet. It's a murder case, so I guess that's how it goes. Everyone who heard — my brothers, cousins, whoever — we were all just sitting with this heaviness all day.

Sometime after two, my brother called and said they were taking the body to Dhaka Medical for the post-mortem. I left work and got there myself around half past three, maybe four. Found my brother and the rest of them waiting.

We waited outside for fifteen, twenty minutes. Then a staff member came out and asked, loud enough for the area to hear, who was there for the Sabujbagh body. My brother and another relative went in.

And that's when it happened — the first thing.

A man walked up to me. All white. His clothes, completely white, head to toe. He asked me the exact same question the staff worker had just asked — who's here for the Sabujbagh body. I told him my people had already gone in.

Then he asked me straight out — are you the relative of the Sabujbagh body? I said yes. I told him again, my people are already inside.

The second I said that, he turned and walked in after them. Fast. Like he had somewhere urgent to be.

At the time I didn't think much of it. I figured he worked there, or he was someone's relative, or whatever — the kind of person you don't really look at twice in a hospital corridor full of strangers. Five, seven minutes later my brother came out and said they were done. A couple minutes after that, they brought the body out and loaded it into the ambulance we'd brought.

I sat up front. My brother and the other relative sat in back, with him.

We drove past the Burn Unit at Dhaka Medical, and right around there I noticed a smell coming from the back of the ambulance — something like raw meat, or raw fish. I didn't think much of it. It's an ambulance, I told myself. It carries bodies every single day. This kind of thing happens.

We got up onto the flyover. About halfway across it, the smell changed. Completely.

Now it was incense. Agarbatti. Except — and I noticed this clearly — it wasn't the kind of incense you smell around here. Not a Bangladeshi scent at all. It smelled almost Arab, if that makes sense, like something from a completely different part of the world. I looked out both sides of the flyover, thinking maybe it was drifting up from Old Dhaka, from around the old mayor's building down there — that's an incense kind of area, I thought. I told myself it made sense. I let it go.

We came down off the flyover onto the Demra road. And the smell changed again.

Both of those smells — the meat, the incense — gone. In their place was something rotten. Just decay. I remember thinking, well, it's been sitting since yesterday, of course it's started to turn by now, that's all this is. I still wasn't scared. Not yet.

We reached his family's home in the village. What you'd expect happened — neighbors coming by, crying, that whole heaviness of a house that's just lost someone violently. By the time we'd finished all that, it was evening.

There was a disagreement about what to do with the body. His mother — I think it was her — said something like she wouldn't let her son be burned, that she wanted to bury him. But in our religion, burial's really only for religious ascetics, holy men. Everyone else gets cremated. So in the end, that's what the family decided.

We passed the Demra staff quarters, somewhere around Trimoni I think — I'm not totally sure of the route anymore, honestly — and then past the new Demra police lines, toward the house. We took him to the cremation ground by the Balu river, right next to where the police station now sits. On the other side of the river was Koyetpara. And I have to say — that place felt wrong the second I walked into it. I can't really explain it better than that. Anyone new walking in there would feel like something wasn't right about the atmosphere. Like it was built for exactly this kind of dread.

They needed paperwork done, because it was a police case, and the family handed that over. While that got sorted, the rest of the preparations were already underway — mango wood, stacked and ready for the fire. But before they actually lit anything, it was already getting late, and I told my brother and the others I had to head back. I told them to take care, stay in touch, and they said go on, they'd manage.

So I left. Alone.

The road out was a bypass road, connecting toward Bonosree and the Demra staff quarters area. Quiet road. It was around 6:30, maybe 7 in the evening. Not late, but that kind of empty-quiet where you notice you're the only one walking.

I kept walking. Up ahead I saw an auto-rickshaw, and a guy sitting in it — hoodie on, even though it wasn't cold enough for that. And something about him — I don't know, the build, the age — reminded me of my relative. The one we'd just cremated.

I called out to him. Asked if he'd take me toward the main road. Called a few times. He didn't answer.

I got annoyed. I swore at him — something like, deaf bastard, forget it, I'll walk — and kept going on foot.

I walked for a while. No people around still, just some distant lights that might've been shops. I needed to pee. There was a dark patch off the road, some bushes, so I stepped off to go.

When I finished and lifted my head — he was right there. In front of me. The same hoodie. Also urinating, facing me, like we'd just happened to stop at the same spot.

I thought, okay, maybe he needed to go too, fine. Then I looked back toward where the auto-rickshaw had been.

It wasn't there.

I looked forward again.

He wasn't there either.

I don't know how to describe what happened in my body right then. Something just — dropped. A kind of fear I've genuinely never felt before or since. I kept telling myself it was nothing, that I was imagining things, that ghosts aren't real. But then I'd think about my relative, about how he died, about what people say happens to souls that die like that. And the resemblance. I started walking faster.

That's when I saw him.

An elderly man, up ahead on the road. Dressed completely white, same as the man from the hospital. In his hand, a hurricane lantern — the old kerosene kind, the kind nobody in Dhaka actually carries anymore. And that same attar smell, again, strong.

For a second I actually felt relieved. I thought, maybe he's just coming back from prayers, an elder from somewhere nearby. We were walking the same direction, more or less matching pace. I called out — murubbi, murubbi, three or four times — just wanting to ask how far the main road was.

He didn't answer. Didn't turn.

That's when the fear went from a suspicion to something certain. I looked back to see if anyone else was on the road — I remember seeing two men some distance behind, walking slow. I stood there a moment, thinking I'd let them catch up and walk the rest of the way with them. They didn't come any closer, though. I wasn't going to turn back for them — I just meant to keep going once they were near enough.

I looked back once more to check on them.

Then I looked forward again.

He was gone.

I don't remember deciding to run. I just remember running. Sweating everywhere, my whole body soaked, moving as fast as I could toward wherever the lights were. In my head I was just repeating God's name, over and over, not really thinking about anything else.

Eventually I reached a house right up against the road. A man was standing at the gate — and for a second, I genuinely couldn't tell if he was real or not. I wasn't sure anymore what I was looking at. I asked him anyway, how far the main road was. He said not far — two minutes, maybe.

I kept walking and started hearing traffic. Real traffic, big trucks, the ordinary noise of a real street. I got to the main road and there were people — actual people, finally — and a little stall selling tea, boiled eggs, muri, chotpoti, fuchka. The light there was that half-lit, half-dark kind you get at roadside stalls.

I was hungry. I know that sounds strange given everything, but I was, so I bought an egg and some muri from the vendor. He offered me a stool to sit on instead of standing.

I sat down at one end. At the other end of the same stool — someone in a hoodie. Face covered, so I couldn't see who it was. Eating, same as me. Right then I felt my body start to heat up, like a fever was already climbing. Whatever this was, it wasn't done with me yet.

I didn't wait to find out. I handed the man a 500 taka note and started walking away fast. He called after me — hey, brother, you gave me too much, it was only fifty taka — and gave me back 450. I don't even remember taking it properly.

I got to New Bazar stop, where the buses come through — Ashimoni, Rajdhani, that route. I stood there. Buses kept passing right in front of me and I just — didn't get on any of them. I couldn't tell you why. Twenty, twenty-five minutes, maybe, just standing there while buses I needed came and went.

A man walking behind me finally asked if I was alright, if I was sick. I told him yes, I think so. He flagged down the next Rajdhani bus for me and got me on it. I sat down, and the strange thing is, nobody ever came around to collect the fare from me the whole ride — even though the bus wound around a good bit before it settled onto the main route.

Not long after, I called my brother to check where they were. Still at the cremation ground, he said. I told him something felt wrong — I wasn't sure exactly what I meant by it even as I said it. The bus was already passing Bonosree, near the Ideal School, by the time we were talking, and I remember telling him I thought I was near there — except the bus should have been well past that point already. He just said I was probably disoriented from the day, the stress, and that the bus would take me where I needed to go.

I don't know if I fell asleep after that. I genuinely can't say. There's a stretch of that ride I can't account for. I know the trip usually takes under an hour, and somehow I looked up and we were already at Kuril Bishwa Road — further along than I should've been if it had only been an hour. I got off. I never paid the fare. I just got off and got into a rickshaw and went the rest of the way home.

I didn't tell anyone what had happened. Not that night. I went straight in, washed everything — even my shoes — and just sat with it alone.

By then the fever had already started coming on. I always keep medicine at home for that, so I ate some rice and took it. That night the fever climbed — bad, maybe 103, 104. I sweat through it, woke up once in the middle of the night. By morning it was completely gone. Not a trace. I almost couldn't believe I'd had a fever at all, except I remembered it so clearly. And the whole thing from the day before just kept replaying in my head, over and over, whether I wanted it to or not.

I was supposed to leave early that next morning for our village home — we have a temple right at the house, and there was something happening there that day. The fever was gone, but the fear wasn't. It just sat there.

I still don't believe in ghosts, not the way people usually mean it. But I believe souls exist, and I believe in rebirth, and I believe — now, at least — that a soul taken by violence, by murder, might not just move on quietly like the rest. Whatever I saw on that road that evening, it looked like him. It moved like him. And I still don't have a better explanation for it than that.

Has anything like this ever happened to you — right after losing someone, in the hours just after a death? I'd like to know I'm not the only one.

Disclaimer: These stories are presented as reported personal experiences. True Horror Feed has not independently verified the events described, and they should not be considered proven facts. We share them for entertainment and storytelling purposes.