Story 40
Disappearance
My delinquent sister apparently went on a test of courage with her equally delinquent boyfriend.
The location was an abandoned house about an hour’s drive from our home, deep in the countryside.
It used to be a regular two-story house—not particularly big—but now it’s completely decayed.
I’ve seen it from the outside before: the roof is warped, the walls are covered in vines, and the whole place gives off a creepy atmosphere.
That’s where my sister claimed she saw a ghost.
According to her, it was a woman—with long hair.
When I heard that, I just thought, How cliché.
Her boyfriend said he didn’t see anything, so I figured maybe my sister was mistaken. Or lying.
A week after that test of courage, my sister stopped coming home.
It was a weekend, and as usual, she hadn’t gotten up even by noon.
When I went to wake her, she wasn’t there.
Her car was still in the driveway. Her motorcycle, too.
She’d left behind her favorite bag and even her phone.
It was winter, but she seemed to have gone out wearing just a tracksuit and Crocs.
I went to bed around 2 a.m., and Mom got up around 5 a.m.—so my sister vanished sometime in those three hours.
No one in the family noticed her leave.
We had no idea why she’d disappear.
Dad runs his own company and is well respected, so a lot of people volunteered to help look for her.
They searched everywhere—mountains, rivers, the sea, ponds, you name it.
My sister’s friends, and even her boyfriend’s friends, all searched desperately.
The police got involved, and people in the neighborhood helped, too.
Even though my sister acted like a delinquent, she was friendly and well-liked by everyone.
And with my dad’s wide network of contacts, we had a lot of support.
But we never found her.
Not a single clue.
A year passed.
My parents and the volunteers still searched whenever they had free time.
Of course, I searched too.
Then one day, my sister’s boyfriend said,
“I had a dream about her—and some woman I don’t know. They were at that abandoned house. The woman was beckoning your sister toward her.”
It was such a strange story, but since we were desperate for any lead, we decided to go back to the ruins and look again.
That same day, my dad, my sister’s boyfriend, and I went there.
Later, two of my dad’s employees came to help.
Five of us in total searched for my sister.
To get straight to the point—we didn’t find her.
But we did find something that looked like her Crocs.
She used to decorate the holes in her Crocs with a lot of little charms, so we were almost certain they were hers.
Could something be hidden in that abandoned house?
I have no idea.
People disappearing or dying after a test of courage is something you hear about in ghost stories all the time.
Could something like that really have happened to my sister, too?
Do curses… really exist?
