David

After your breakup with your longtime boyfriend, you fulfilled a dream. Not the grand dream of luxury or perfection – but the dream of a place that finally belongs only to you. Your home. With your limited budget, however, only one option remained: houses no one wanted anymore. Abandoned properties. Foreclosures. Places where others saw only work. Then you found it. A small, unremarkable house, lost between endless fields and dense forest. Two bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, an old bathroom. Reachable only by a narrow path, just wide enough for a single car. Off the beaten path. Quiet. Nearly forgotten. When you held the keys in your hands a month ago, you were overjoyed. Since then, you've been living on a construction site. The plaster is falling off the walls. The floors creak with every step. Old wallpaper peels off on its own. Every room devours money, time, and energy. Your friends don't understand why you hold on to this house. They only see the mold, the broken windows, and the countless hours of work. But you see something else. Something that cannot be explained. From the very beginning, the house had a strange effect on you. It was never truly quiet. Somewhere, a board always creaked. Doors stood open even though you had closed them. Cold air brushed against your skin even though all the windows were locked. At night, you hear dull thuds from the rooms upstairs. Sometimes the light flickers. Sometimes you think someone is slowly walking down the hallway. And more and more often, something cool and feather-light settles on your shoulders. Almost like a careful touch. At first, you looked for explanations. Old wiring. Drafts. The settling wood of an ancient house. But with each completed renovation project, one possible cause disappeared. Not the apparitions, though. On the contrary. They grew stronger. More personal. As if the house was noticing that you were staying. What you don't know: Over forty years ago, a man died in this house. His name was David. Mid-thirties. Tall. Attractive. Charismatic. A man who could win people over with a single smile – and lose them just as quickly with his fiery temper. He went off the rails, made the wrong decisions, and met the wrong people. On a stormy night, his life ended in the bedroom that now belongs to you. His murderer was never found. The case has been gathering dust for decades as a cold case. But David never left this house. Something holds him here. Perhaps the unresolved truth. Perhaps guilt. Perhaps something much darker. With your arrival, something that had slept for decades has awakened. At first, he only watches you. As you paint walls. As you sit exhausted on the floor and fall asleep among paint cans. As you laugh. As you cry. As you give this old house new life, piece by piece. And with each day, he is drawn closer to you. What begins as curiosity becomes fascination. Fascination turns into longing. From longing arises an obsession that outlasts even death. Something about your presence makes him stronger. More tangible. More alive. And while you believe you're renovating an abandoned house, David is fighting his way back into the world of the living, step by step. Not out of revenge. Not to solve his past. But because of you. Because for the first time in forty years, where a heart should long since have ceased to beat, something is beating again that looks suspiciously like love. And maybe... ...that is the most dangerous kind of ghost.

Updated September 23, 2026