The Girl in Red

Back in high school, a friend of mine showed me this story a friend of hers had told her.

At first, I thought it was just one of those creepy stories teenagers pass around to scare each other.

You know the type.

Someone's cousin saw something.

Someone's neighbor heard something.

Someone's friend knew someone who disappeared.

I didn't really believe any of it.

But the weird thing was, my friend wasn't laughing when she told me.

She said the person who originally told the story swore it actually happened.

It started with a girl named Emily.

She was a quiet student who always stayed late after school because her parents worked night shifts and she didn't want to go home to an empty house.

She usually spent an extra hour in the library or finishing homework in one of the empty classrooms.

One day, she noticed something strange.

Every afternoon around the same time, she would see someone standing behind the glass window of a classroom at the end of the hallway.

The classroom was supposed to be empty.

It hadn't been used in years.

The school had closed it because of a leak in the ceiling, but nobody ever bothered fixing it.

The first few times Emily saw the person, she assumed it was a teacher.

Maybe someone cleaning.

Maybe someone looking for something.

But every time she looked closer, the person disappeared.

One day, she decided to check.

She walked down the hallway and opened the door.

The room was completely empty.

No teacher.

No student.

Nothing.

Except for one thing.

A chair was placed directly in front of the window.

Facing the hallway.

Like someone had been sitting there watching people walk by.

Emily thought it was creepy but tried to ignore it.

Until she noticed something else.

Every morning, there was writing on the classroom's old whiteboard.

Not random writing.

Names.

Students' names.

At first, she thought someone was joking around.

Then she realized something.

Every name written there belonged to someone who had recently left the school.

Transferred.

Dropped out.

Or disappeared from everyone's lives.

The final name written was hers.

Emily.

She told her friends, but nobody believed her.

They thought someone was messing with her.

Until one afternoon, one of her friends followed her to the classroom.

They opened the door together.

Inside, the room was different.

The dust was gone.

The old furniture had been cleaned.

And on the desk at the front of the room was a stack of notebooks.

Each notebook had a student's name written on it.

Her friend grabbed one.

Inside were pages filled with drawings.

Drawings of students walking through the school.

Eating lunch.

Sitting in class.

Sleeping.

Every single drawing showed them from behind.

Like whoever made them was always watching.

Then they found Emily's notebook.

The first page was blank.

The second page had a drawing of her sitting alone in the library.

The third page showed her walking toward the classroom.

The fourth page showed her opening the door.

But the fifth page was different.

It showed something standing behind her.

A tall figure with no face.

That was when they heard the chair move.

Behind them.

They turned around.

The classroom was empty.

But the chair in front of the window was no longer facing the hallway.

It was facing them.

They ran.

They never went back inside that room.

Years later, my friend told me she tried searching for information about the school.

She found old articles about the building.

Before it became a school, it used to be a boarding house.

A student who lived there decades earlier had disappeared.

Nobody knew what happened.

The only thing they found was a notebook filled with drawings of people around the building.

The last drawing was of a girl looking through a classroom window.

My friend told me she never forgot that story.

Because the strangest part wasn't the room.

It wasn't the drawings.

It wasn't the missing student.

It was what happened after the school was renovated.

The old classroom was finally demolished.

The wall was removed.

The window was gone.

But when workers cleared the area behind it, they found something carved into the concrete.

Hundreds of names.

Written over decades.

And at the very bottom...

was the name of the next student who would disappear.