Your House Isn't Haunted, There's Just a Lady Living in Your Walls

The disembodied shouting that keeps you up at night, the lonely footsteps seemingly belonging to no one, the local old men who stay stuff like “Why, that house hasn’t been the same since Mrs. Butler mysteriously went missing in double-aught-six!” when you tell them where you live. Have you ever considered that all of these things — these things that happen to you all the time — don’t so much stem from a haunting like you previously thought, but are actually just coming from a living lady who’s been trapped in your walls and yelling and for help?

Well, maybe you should start considering it because that’s exactly what happened to the residents of a home in China’s Anhui province who heard a voice yelling from inside their walls. They then came to the logical conclusion that the shouts were coming from a ghost and and that they were being haunted so, naturally, they ignored the cries for seven hours.

Unfortunately, it was not a ghost. It was a living, human woman (with working lungs, a pumping heart and everything) who had attempted to take a short cut home by walking through an incredibly narrow ally only to get stuck in between the two buildings. Rescue workers eventually found her and she escaped with minor injuries and a thirst for vengeance that will likely keep her spirit tethered to this planet long after she is actually dead. In the home’s residents defense, she very well may have been screaming for help like this: “ooooOOOooooOOOoo.”

I once lived in an old house where, every morning at 5am, I would be woken up by a frantic scratching and growling noises coming from the wall right next to my head. At first, I thought it might be a ghost, though I eventually realized it was actually a raccoon. One day, the scratching and growling stopped, probably because the raccoon died, so in the end, it maybe became a ghost and my initial reaction was right after all. I guess the moral of the story here is that sometimes the person you think is a ghost is actually a human being in need of help and you shouldn’t get so scared that you don’t help them. Oh, and also your bedroom really stinks when a raccoon dies in your wall.