It Happened and It Is Not a Figment of Her Imagination

No one wants to talk about this; they don't want to give an impression of questionable state of sanity to others.

It exists, and it's happening.

Photo by Daniel Tseng on Unsplash

But Mio didn't know what was happening, nor did she have the slightest hint. She felt uncomfortable at each encounter, brushing it off as imagination, unaware that this was just the beginning of the darkness unleashed upon her.

She would get the chill and goosebumps for no apparent reason while she was at Sumio’s home, though the reason was, in fact, the altar in that house itself.

She and Sumio had just started dating officially. His family had an altar at their home, but it seemed like any other family altar she'd seen—nothing menacing, just an altar.

Still, she felt uneasy, but she kept it to herself.

Soon afterward, Sumio moved in with her, and the matter of the altar seemed to fade into the background until his mother, Rikka, imposed on Sumio to install it at their new home, leaving him no choice.

Their new place, intended as home offices for both of them, had businesses to run, and professionalism needed to be maintained. The presence of this altar was simply unsuitable, making the space look like some haunted den.

It was deeply disturbing and indeed being haunted, by what Rikka had invited in.

Mio began receiving a lot of weird, though well-intentioned, advice from friends and sometimes even strangers. They were always something about her aura and dark entities that surrounded her.

If only one or two related people had mentioned it, she wouldn't have taken it to heart. But it was too frequent, and most of them were unrelated, knew nothing about the altar, and were from different religious backgrounds.

In hindsight, Mio should have been more alert when these warnings started. She wasn't, because she had pushed it to the back of her mind with her heavy workload.

Livelihood was naturally more important than all this supernatural stuff; there were bills and deadlines to meet, after all.

Mio's mood changed every time she reached home. She could be having the best day outside, and suddenly everything would turn gloomy.

This shift, along with the frequent fights she'd been having with Sumio, had started since they moved into this place, and were all compounded by the hauntings and his family's incredibly intrusive nature.

Rikka would come and go as she pleased. Mio felt this was the very reason Rikka insisted on having the altar in their home—an excuse for altar maintenance. She had all sorts of outrageous demands and would move things around to suit her liking.

Mio's work suffered significantly because of this.

She was unable to transition her esthetics practice to this home office. People stopped coming after a while, and it was later revealed that they had some eerie sensation at her place. One client even mentioned, after Mio pressed on, that she had seen some dark figures.

Actually, Mio saw them too, but she tried very hard to convince herself it wasn't what she thought it was.

These dark figures would hover around her most of the time, and sometimes right behind her, because her pets would freeze and stare at the space behind Mio all the time. Her peripheral vision would often catch darting movements.

She would often feel petrified for no reason, even when she was busy with something, freezing momentarily too afraid to turn her head.

It would happen at the most unexpected moments, like when she was engrossed in balancing her accounts. She had no mental space for such things.

Who could do math while thinking about ghouls? It wasn't as if she had the time to dwell on all this.

When Mio told Sumio what had happened, Rikka dismissed her concerns almost instantly, but not before a brief, theatrical pause in which she pretended to recall the faces of the dead spirits from the altar.

How would she know? Could she communicate with them?

All these hauntings only happened in this house, since they moved in together with the altar. Mio had never experienced anything like this before.

She was hoping they could move that altar somewhere else.

Rikka probably knew it would come to this, so she'd keep insisting that they were outsider spirits, defending her altar.

One day, Mio discovered that Sumio had mindlessly poured the water from the altar onto her herbs. It was quite unacceptable; what was used for dead spirits or ghost worship, he used to feed the living.

As Mio fumed and cursed under her breath about this stupidity, something grabbed her ankle and dragged her down the stairs. She tried to get up, but it dragged her further down. The entire length of her thigh was covered with unusually dark, almost sinister bruises for weeks.

Thank goodness she managed to break the fall with her palm; her wrist was injured and never healed to this day. Otherwise, she would have fallen face-first, injuring not just her limbs but a split face.

This wasn't just basic poltergeist activity; beyond the objects moved to Rikka's liking, the house was experiencing a major oppressive manifestation.

They told Rikka about this worrying incident, but again she dismissed it, blaming outsider spirits, as if her own spirits were blameless.

What?! Wasn't this altar supposed to be installed to protect the occupants?

So, they could allow outsider spirits to harass non-family members like Mio?

If it's truly outsider spirits as Rikka claimed, who would ever know their origin?

Who would ever know if it's not Rikka’s familial spirits?

Given Rikka's history of manipulation, her attempts to use a medium to expose Mio’s past, and her efforts to plant pervasive superstitious elements in their home designed to cause division, her word was the only proof of anything.

The thing is, a haunting in the house, no matter whose spirit it belongs to or if it acts on its own, is aggressive and harmful and isn't normal, but Rikka stood her ground.

After that, she issued even more demands, including the daily mandate for a coffee so sweet it required ten spoonful of sugar.

She'd even threw a feast for those spirits, with a table set for ten in their yard. As if what was happening inside wasn't enough, she invited more into their home now.

The instinct of any normal person would be to protect the living, but Rikka's continued denial and her insistence on piling on more harm was a deeply wrong and unnatural act.

Mio was left with two terrible possibilities, and she couldn't see another way to explain it: either Rikka's mind worked in a completely different, insane way, or the whole ordeal had been intentionally calculated after all.

Mio bitterly observed that it would be a whole different story if Sumio were the one being attacked.

When the home offices became unsustainable and they needed to move into a much smaller space, Rikka again insisted that the altar follow them, even declaring the new place clean.

That very evening, Mio saw it the clearest ever: a man walking around the house whom she initially thought was Sumio.

Both Mio and her cat stared at the moving figure. Her cat was standing in between, which is how Mio caught its response to the presence.

The haunting continued, and Rikka continued to bring in seemingly sinister objects into their home. Until one day, Mio got so frustrated by Rikka's imposing nature that she smashed the altar.

No more unseen chatters, no more dark figures, and no more people walking around the house.

It wasn't because Mio was psychotic; she was never psychotic in the first place, but she had to go through the torture of medication side effects just because of Rikka’s manipulation. Mio could only connect this long after the events.

The motive for inviting otherworldly entities into another person’s living space is undeniably questionable.

Why invite them there, and not back to the inviter's own home?

This didn't seem accidental; rather, it was directed, intentional harm.

Given her family’s long history of dubious cult practices and fanatical claims of magick—a power whose true nature no one could ever confirm—it’s hard to believe she didn’t know exactly what she was doing.

While this story may sound fantastical to some, Mio has indeed come face to face with an oppressor driven by avarice and a desire for subjugation—one who manipulates both the dead and the living.

This isn't a myth: Rikka had opened a portal, inviting these entities in and causing tangible harm that went far beyond the bogeymen we merely hear about but never see.

One should keep a wide berth, for who knows what kind of Faustian bargain these people have struck.

©Britt H.

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