Ghostly Encounters: Unbelievable Coexistence with Spirits

By Mika

Back when I was in my first year of high school, I started encountering all sorts of strange and frightening things for no apparent reason. Let me start with the time I worked at a resort. That year, I had a part-time job at a well-known resort in central Taiwan. My sister also worked there and lived in the staff dormitory (a company-rented dormitory, not within the resort grounds), and I would stay there one day a week for convenience. Since it was close to where I worked, my sister, another female coworker, and I lived on the second floor, while two other girls shared the room next to ours. The building had three floors in total, and the upper floor was also occupied by two interns. Because the area was on a slope, our windows opened directly onto the road (our rooms were on the second floor).


▲ The "roommates" you can't see might be right... (Photo/Stock image, unrelated to this article)

At first, things were okay, except I occasionally heard the sound of footsteps climbing the stairs (in the middle of the night), and my sisters often asked who had called them (when no one had). Even stranger, despite it being summer, we felt the need to wear jackets indoors, and winter was even worse—freezing cold. There were also times when dogs barked at my room from outside (the road), but those were minor issues.

Then came the big incident one night. It was around 11 PM as usual, time to sleep, but everyone else was already fast asleep. My sister and I were the last ones to go to bed.No sooner had we lain down than we heard someone knocking on the door—not ringing the bell, but knocking. Wait, that’s odd. It was the first floor, yet we could hear the knocking on the second floor so clearly. But at the time, we didn’t think much of it because the knocking and shouting sounded like Ling’s voice from the next room: “Jingyi, open the door!! Jingyi, open the door!!” She kept calling out. My sister, annoyed by the noise, went downstairs to open the door, but when she did—no one was there. Outside, everything was silent except for a few barks from a dog. Thinking she might have misheard, my sister went back upstairs.

But the moment she lay back down, it happened again. The calls for her to open the door grew louder and more irritating. This time, there was even car horn honking. Fed up, my sister—against her better judgment—told me to go down and open the door. Under pressure, I went down three times, and each time, no one was there. Just nothing. We were so annoyed and exhausted by the noise that we were convinced Ling was messing with us. But we had no choice but to keep opening the door because it was so loud. In total, my sister opened the door four times, and I did it three times—seven times in all.

After the third time, I started to feel it was something supernatural, so I flat-out refused to go down again. My sister, furious, kept cursing and opening the door herself. The last time she did, a neighbor finally woke up and asked, “Jingyi, what are you doing running up and down all night?” My sister, crying and angry, said it was Ling, that Ling was haunting her.The neighbor paused and said, “Ling went to bed ages ago. She’s even snoring!” My sister replied, “No way. It was definitely her voice, and her boyfriend’s too, both calling for Jingyi to open the door non-stop.” The neighbor said, “Well, why don’t you check the slippers?” Sure enough, Ling was sound asleep in her room.

My sister cried, “Then who was it?” The neighbor said they hadn’t heard any of the voices—just the sound of us running up and down the stairs. My sister ran back to her room, hid under the blanket, and sobbed uncontrollably. I was shaking too, because the voices had sounded so real. Just then, the shouting and car horns stopped, but then... the sound of wooden geta clogs echoed from the unoccupied room upstairs. It sounded like someone wearing geta was running, the noise was deafening, and it went on for a long time. We were stunned—truly stunned.

With no other choice, we got up and looked at each other. Then we woke up the other sister sharing the room with us (who was sleeping like a log). The moment she woke up, the noise upstairs stopped. And right then—honestly—we immediately treated her like our savior. We explained everything to her, and she bravely stayed up with us. The three of us played cards, snacked, and shivered our way through until dawn. The temperature fluctuated wildly—one moment freezing despite being under blankets, the next sweltering without them. Meanwhile, my sister kept hearing a woman whispering, “Jingyi, Jingyi~” over and over again.

We managed to get through the night and went to work as usual the next day. But as soon as we got up, all the roommates came asking why—they hadn’t heard a single thing we experienced. For the next couple of days, commuting to work was agonizing, and no one dared to stay there. It was really inconvenient, but after a long while, we eventually decided to move back in. After some back-and-forth with the ghost, things finally calmed down.

(The following part gets a bit supernatural. Believe it or don’t, I’m just sharing what I saw and heard.)

A couple of days into our commute drama, we finally told the company about it and also reported it to the landlord.It turned out that the house had once been inhabited by the landlord’s two deceased sons. So we initially suspected it was them, but the landlord insisted it wasn’t.Over a decade ago, there was a plane crash on the nearby mountain, and many people died. Locals at the time said they only saw the plane explode mid-air, with passengers falling one by one. Those who didn’t fall crashed into the mountainside and exploded, leaving no remains. A colleague mentioned how families were washing clothes or resting when suddenly someone would fall from the sky, still strapped to their chair or seatbelt, crashing through roofs and causing all sorts of terrifying incidents. Some speculated it might be the vengeful spirits of the crash victims. The company even hired a Taoist priest to perform an exorcism, but apparently, previous attempts had failed, so they decided not to try again this time.

The landlord also refused to acknowledge or deal with the haunting. Eventually, we decided to take matters into our own hands. We went home and asked my dad (since my family runs a Buddhist shrine, maybe that’s why I keep encountering these strange events) to help us with talismans. He specifically instructed us to place them at all entrances and exits, but secretly—so the spirits wouldn’t notice. However, we had to leave the third floor untouched for them to stay (i.e., not drive them out completely).

That night, we were curious to see if it would work. Coincidentally, a coworker came to visit and asked as soon as they walked in, “Hey, did you install a heater? It’s so warm in here—used to be freezing!” We were shocked because they had no idea what was going on.That night actually went smoothly, and things remained peaceful afterward. The only issue was the occasional loud party upstairs, with the protest-like noise of geta clogs.

But the strangest part came later.After we put up the talismans, my dad dreamed that night of two men who angrily scolded him for meddling.But my dad wasn’t afraid. He negotiated with them directly. They claimed to be wandering spirits and asked the landlord to hold a memorial service for them so they could move on. We had mentioned it to the landlord before, but he ignored us (understandable—he didn’t live there or experience anything). So instead of resolving it, we just confined them to the third floor. And so, things remained peaceful until I left.

Aside from the occasional geta sounds, everything else was fine!! Later, I heard the company moved to a new dormitory...