A True Scary Story: 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.
Story Disclaimer This story was submitted to True Horror Feed as a personal account by the story sender. The events and experiences described are based on the sender's own account and have not been independently verified by True Horror Feed. Story Sender: Rasel, Story Sender Location: Bangladesh, Edited by: Subham Halder. The story has been edited for grammar, clarity, formatting, and readability while preserving the sender's account and meaning. Publication of this story does not imply that True Horror Feed confirms or endorses the supernatural or unexplained claims described.
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