On the day Old Zhou retired, he brought a box of case files to my secondhand bookstore.
“They’ve been buried for thirty years. It’s not that they couldn’t be solved, it’s that they couldn’t be.”
He’d been a criminal investigator for half his life. The box was filled with handwritten witness statements, police report receipts, and crime scene photos. Every page was enough to make your hands tremble.
I’m just a bookstore owner, an ordinary person responsible for sorting them out.
The people in these files are just like you and me: delivery workers, women sharing apartments, night-shift nurses, and drivers traveling after dark. No protagonist’s halo, no masters of the supernatural arts, just the most real fear and the most helpless attempts to escape.
Some disappeared. Some went mad. Some still don’t dare sleep with the lights off.
Old Zhou says these things aren’t caused by ghosts, but by the human heart.
Open this file and you’ll see
A call bell that rings at exactly three in the morning, though the bed is empty;
Money wrapped in a red cord by the roadside: whoever picks it up dies;
The person in the mirror moves half a beat faster than you do.
Every story is based on an ordinary person’s firsthand experience.
They’re so real, you’ll think, perhaps it happened right next door.
“First rule: If someone calls your name in the middle of the night, never look back.”
“You never know what might be watching you from somewhere you can’t see.”
(This story is entirely fictional. It promotes positive values and opposes superstition.)
