The Woman in Green

****

This story takes place in an apartment in the very center of Krasnoyarsk. It has an address, but I won’t give it—first, the owners might not appreciate me sharing information about their property, and second, I keep a close watch on the apartment and am almost certain it will give me “material” again. Naming the address would attract either some “Society of Karma Awareness” trying to contact its astral residents or overzealous priests wanting to bless it… So, suffice to say, it’s a crappy apartment in the tiny historic center of Krasnoyarsk, among normal stone buildings, not some soulless five- or nine-story boxes. It’s easy to reach: three minutes’ walk from the big transport junction near the Lokomotiv stadium.

The story began two years ago, when a young woman rented the apartment. She was from the recently closed Krasnoyarsk-26 (now called Zheleznogorsk). Life there was bleak—work scarce, markets narrow—and young people tried to escape. This woman, Liza (surname withheld), was a flight attendant.

At first, she only felt a vague sense that someone else was in the room whenever she went to bed. But after about a week, it got worse. Suddenly, a woman in green appeared in the room. A woman, yes—but with a neck unnaturally long and flexible, “inhumanly so,” Liza said. Her gaze was strange, unpleasant—not exactly frightening, but definitely off-putting. The clothing was long, flowing to the floor, and Liza couldn’t tell what it was—perhaps a dress, a skirt with a top, some kind of night garment? She couldn’t identify the fabric either. Only the hands protruded from the sleeves; the legs were completely invisible.

The woman didn’t speak, at least not with words. She gestured in ways reminiscent of sign language, nodded, smiled, beckoned Liza toward a specific corner of the room. Liza knew where the woman was leading her, but each time the woman reached the corner, her expression changed—sly, predatory, unnerving. Liza never went there; the corner remained unexplored.

The woman in green continued to appear on other nights, gesturing and beckoning, but Liza never approached the corner. It seemed the only way to understand what was “special” about it would be to step into the space she was being led to—a risk Liza avoided. The observer in me can’t help but compare it to Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees, Gerald Durrell observing lizards, or Lucien Fabre watching wasps hunt spiders: I watch the apartment with the same morbid curiosity, waiting to see who will dare approach that corner.

Liza had a boyfriend, and renting the apartment excited both of them: platonic encounters had grown dull, and naturally, she invited him over. She insisted she needed his help with something mysterious and potentially dangerous.

But the woman in green never appeared in his presence. The boyfriend wanted to take advantage of the moment, but Liza panicked: the woman might reappear at any moment, turning invisible into visible. He struggled to understand this, and it nearly caused the classic argument: “You don’t love me anymore.” Liza was too shy to explain herself properly, so she even ran out onto the stairwell to escape the frustrated boyfriend.

He never fully believed her—who could, seeing a woman with a flexible neck? Yet he forgave her and remained curious: would similar paranormal phenomena appear if he rented another apartment, or could they be avoided?

The moment Liza returned alone, the old acquaintance appeared again—the woman in green, gesturing, beckoning, pulling toward the corner. Eventually, Liza fled to a friend’s place to spend the night, leaving the woman with the inhuman neck behind.

She fled several times like this. When the woman grabbed her sleeve and tried to drag her along, Liza felt the presence was solid, substantial, and far from weak. The expression in the woman’s eyes and across her face was so intense that Liza nearly fainted and rushed to her friend’s apartment with desperate speed.