abandoned school in the village
i am from an african country and this happened to me about 8 years ago.
i grew up in the city but sometimes we go to the village and spend a month there during the summer. the village we go to is in the desert and the house we stay in is at the extremity of said village. so far that if you walk for barely a minute or two you’ll find yourself outside the village in the middle of nowhere surrounded by dunes.
i have always found the atmosphere unsettling there at night. 80% of houses don’t have electricity, no street lamps either, so people have to either rely on the moonlight or a torch/flashlight to walk around the streets at night. that is if you find people outside to begin with, as villagers sleep very early and it’s completely still and quiet by 9pm.
there was an abandoned school right across the street from our house. it was so close to the dunes and uncared for that the sand started crawling in and swallowing it. it has always been there as far as i remember but i never ventured into it because in my faith we believe that abandoned places are inhabited by jinns (unseen creatures) and that we should not disturb them.
i have never seen or heard any activity there so i stopped paying attention to it and it just sat there in the background throughout the years.
that year we had guests spend the weekend over at our house, they were my cousins back from the city. we stayed up late chatting and eating food and by the time we finished our late dinner it was 11pm, everyone besides us was probably asleep and the entire village was quiet.
one of my cousins was helping me clean and tidy up after dinner and we realized there was a little leftover food so we decided to bring it out for the stray cats to eat.
we went out and it was completely dark and quiet. since the atmosphere was eerie i decided to tell my cousin about the abandoned school across the street to scare her. fair to say that backfired on me, she didn’t get scared, if anything she got super excited about it and wanted to go explore it. i was against the idea but she insisted and practically dragged me there.
we tiptoed there barefoot and without any source of light since we had no initial intention of going beyond our house’s front door to put down the stray cats food.
we were approaching the fence but everything in my body was screaming not to go inside so halfway there i decided i’m going to come up with a plan to scare her out of it and come back home. before i could even finish my thought process, someone threw a rock at us, it landed right next to my foot and i could tell it came from the school yard’s direction.
we ran so fast back home that i didn’t even process that we were back home until few minutes later and even then i still wasn’t sure what just happened. our parents noticed the state we were in and asked us, we told them, we were scolded for it and told us there could have been dangerous squatters and they probably didn’t want us to come close.
we visited the village multiple times since and the school got renovated in the meantime. but during summer, which is the time round which we visit the village, it’s vacant. and although it’s lit up now, it still looks hauntingly quiet, undisturbed and i can’t help but think whoever or whatever didn’t want us there is still living there.
i dont know how said squatters heard our faint whispers or saw us coming their way in complete darkness but, lets not meet again.