I still remember that cursed day.
It was Friday the 13th, in the month of June, way back in 1930. I was only three years old—barely able to spell my own name—but some memories just carve themselves into your brain and refuse to fade.
That morning, my grandfather behaved... differently. Normally, he was a man of few words and many routines. But that day, he seemed unusually alert, anxious even.
Before he stepped out, he made a bold announcement to the entire household:
“I need to visit the temple priest. Nobody—nobody—should enter my room until I return.”
He then took a giant, rust-covered padlock—the kind that looks like it guards ancient treasure or imprisons mythological demons—and slammed it on his door. With chalk, he scrawled on the wooden panel:
“NO ONE ENTERS UNTIL GRANDPA RETURNS.”
We chuckled. Grandpa and his theatrics. Always dramatic.
But then… he didn’t return.
Later that afternoon we learnt: Grandfather had died in a motor accident.
At the funeral, the mood was understandably grim, but something about it felt heavier than ordinary grief. When the temple priest, pale as a ghost, arrived to pay his respects, he seemed fixated on the locked room. We watched in silence as he walked to the door, took out a key with visibly trembling hands, inserted it into the padlock…
And dropped dead on the spot.
“Heart attack,” the village doctor mumbled.
But people whispered otherwise. Everyone noticed the lock: the old, iron-braced curse of a thing. The numbers etched onto it: 1313.
Two deaths. One door. One date: Friday the 13th.
Word spread like wildfire.
People began calling it the "Cursed Room." The priest's assistants refused to touch the door. The neighbors crossed the street to avoid even glancing at it.
No one ever went inside. Not even out of curiosity. Eventually, we moved out. The house was left to crumble, like an unsolved riddle growing old with time.
And then came the clocks.
Every wall clock in the house—three of them—stopped at 1:57 a.m. the very night after the priest’s death. The batteries were checked, replaced, cursed, blessed, even rotated with lemons under a full moon (thanks to Aunt Kamala’s superstitions). Nothing worked.
People started reporting strange noises. Whispering. Footsteps. Whistling that didn’t sound quite human. Some even claimed to hear chanting from the locked room at odd hours.
And so the legend was born.
Cut to 13 years later.
I'm 16 now. It's the middle of a long, uneventful summer, and I’m standing in front of that infamous door.
What changed?
Yesterday, I was swimming in the old village well—because yes, swimming in a century-old mossy hole seemed like a great idea—and I saw a frog. Not unusual. But this frog had something shiny in its mouth. Thinking it was a coin, I lunged after it.
It wasn’t a coin. It was a key.
The key. The same one I remembered from childhood photos. Long, heavy, jagged, with “1313” carved onto its base.
Was this fate? Coincidence? Or a very specific frog-related divine intervention?
Who knows.
All I knew was: the universe was giving me a chance. To break the rule. To solve the mystery. To do what no one had dared to do in over a decade.
So I stood there, in front of the creaky old door, sweating through my shirt, key in hand, heart hammering.
I inserted the key. It turned with a sickeningly smooth click.
The door creaked open. The smell hit first—dust, wood rot, and something… ancient.
The air inside was ice-cold, despite the summer heat. Dust lay thick across everything. Cobwebs hung like curtains.
But right in the center of the room…
A massive cobra skeleton.
Coiled.
Its mouth frozen open in an eternal hiss.
I stared at it for three full seconds. Then screamed. Then ran.
I didn’t stop until I was back home, gasping for breath, hands shaking, shirt clinging to my back with sweat.
I told my parents everything.
They looked at me like I had grown a second head.
“Let’s take you to the temple priest,” Dad said, too calmly.
I pleaded with them. “No, listen! Grandpa wasn’t cursed—he was hiding a snake! He locked the room, went to tell the priest for help, forgot his helmet, and bam—accident. The old priest probably peeked through the keyhole, saw the cobra inside, and had a heart attack from shock!”
Mom blinked. “Then why write ‘No one enters until Grandpa returns’?”
“Because I was three! He probably meant it for the adults. Maybe he figured you’d understand what was going on.”
Dad scratched his head. “And the clocks?”
“They were all cheap. Probably got installed on the same day and died together. Batteries weren’t exactly NASA-grade.”
Mom raised an eyebrow. “And the noises?”
“Okay, that one was spooky. But I figured it out. There was a radio buried in the wall. Grandpa had rigged it with a pressure plate. When the floor shifted due to humidity or rats or something, the plate triggered the radio to turn on. He probably set it up as an alarm system or... honestly, just for fun. He was weird.”
They didn’t believe me. I got booked for a counseling session with the new temple priest.
So yes, I broke the one unbreakable rule.
And what did I get for it?
A dead snake.
A free therapy session.
An irrational, lifelong fear of frogs.
But I also got closure. Answers. And a story so absurd it sounds fake.
Turns out, the only ghost in that house was everyone’s overactive imagination.
And possibly Grandpa’s horrible handwriting.
Fun fact: if you add the digits of the year he died—1930—you get 1+9+3+0 = 13.
Coincidence?
React
