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.
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Contributor: Anonymous / Identity not disclosed
Country mentioned by contributor: Bangladesh
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Content type: User-submitted paranormal/horror account
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