TV

My husband's father died long before we met. He was a heavy drinker, and eventually my mother-in-law left him. He started drinking even more heavily and one day died in his own home.

When we got married, my mother-in-law gave us a TV from her house. And then one night I woke up suddenly, as if someone had woken me up. My gaze fell on the TV, and in the off screen, I saw a man's reflection—he was pacing from one end of the room to the other. To say I was scared would be an understatement—I was gripped by sheer terror. I couldn't move or scream. I don't know how much time passed, maybe two minutes. When I recovered from the panic, I grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. I woke my husband and told him what I'd seen. Naturally, he didn't believe me. And I was shaking with fear until the morning.

In the morning, I asked my husband to go get some holy water. I sprayed every corner, door, and window in the house, and nearly flooded the TV—it's a wonder it even turned on after that. But it didn't help—I woke up again that night, and the same scene again: the man's reflection in the TV screen. He paced the room, and I lay there, afraid to breathe. When he approached the bed and leaned over me, I screamed at the top of my lungs, clinging to my husband. He woke up, turned on the TV, and tried to calm me down. I didn't sleep until morning.

The next morning, my husband took the TV to my sister. I didn't tell her anything about it—for some reason, I thought nothing weird would happen to the TV in the other house. We'd bought a new TV that same day, after all.

A day later, my sister called me and told me how she'd woken up out of the blue that night and seen a man's reflection in the TV, as if he were sitting in a chair and looking at her. After that, I confessed to her why we'd bought a new TV and given this one to her. I told my husband, and he told me it had been taken from the house where his father died.

My sister threw the TV out. For a long time, I was afraid to fall asleep with the TV off, but that never happened again.