This haunting happened back when I was 14-15 years old, around 1998. I'm finally able to tell this story because my parents had moved out to a new neighborhood. I couldn't bring myself to share this event because in the back of my mind, I was worried if the ghost would haunt my parents since they lived closer to her grave.
It was 1998, my family has been staying in a house with a vast front yard for around 3 years then. Next to that big yard is a cemetery, a typical Javanese - Muslim cemetery shaded in frangipani trees which gives eerie feeling even during the day. We never had any 'encounter' before. Grandma - actually she was my youngest sister's nanny but we consider her as family and called her Mbah (it's grandma in Javanese) told us that ghost or unseen creatures are scared of young kids. My 3 younger siblings were around 6-10 years old back then. It was said that Young kids could see them and it's their bad luck to be seen by kids.
Then, a distant neighbor's daughter got murdered by her husband after an argument. She requested divorce but he rejected and went furious when he saw her packed her clothes to go home to her parent's. The couple were living in a city called Surabaya back then. It was a horrifying murder as the wife's white shirt turned red because of the blood. The parent took her home to be buried in her home town and the cemetery is right nearby my old house.
The haunting started just three days after the funeral. People claimed to see a woman in red dress, standing right outside the alley which lead to the cemetery with a lot of luggage. She often seen trying to stop Ojek (motorbike transport) after midnight. If the Ojek stopped for her, they would ended up in the middle of cemetery.
I am a morning person, I woke up really early in the morning because I am the oldest daughter. I often saw ojek rider came out from the cemetery alley early in the morning. My Dad would say, "She's at it again." Soon the rumor about the lady in red dress spread all over the village.
I didn't really believe it back then. I thought it was just a rumor spread by some irresponsible people, because ever since the rumor started, the neighborhood night watch stopped and burglaries started happening.
But it turned out, it was the burglaries that took advantage of the ghost. It was my last year of junior high school and we went on a trip to the city of Jogja. I have 3 classmate lived nearby my house so we decided to go home together. It was 2 AM in the morning and my teacher decided to send all four of us home in his car. When we passed that alley lead to the cemetery, all 5 of us, including my teacher, saw that lady in red dress, standing under the street light, with the big suitcases next to her. She stretched her hand as if stopping my teacher's car. All four of us knew who that lady was and when our teacher about to stopped for her, we immediately shouted at him; NO! My teacher was pretty taken aback, wondering why we stopped him from stopping for that lady. I nudged my friend to tell the teacher later about that lady in red dress, because I had to get off first, and I thought my friend did tell my teacher about that lady in red dress.
To my shock, the very next morning, there was this uproar in my village; about a car in the middle of a cemetery. And the car was my teacher's! It was still a mystery how the car got there, the alley itself was very narrow and my teacher's car was an 8 seater. I asked my friend whether she told the teacher or not, and she swore she did. I guessed my teacher didn't believe us or he might be curious about that lady in red dress. Because after that, he tried as much as he can to avoid us. I graduated from junior high school a month later.
The lady in red dress still appeared sometimes, had an encounter with my father as well once or twice. My father told us that as long as she didn't disturb us, let her be. Because my house used to be pretty close to the cemetery where she was buried, I decided to kept the story to myself, we sort of treating her like a neighbor that we didn't want to associate with; we know she was there but we preferred not to disturb her. Two months ago, my parents moved out from that house after my mother retired. So I think I can share her story now that my parents are living away from her.
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I am already moved away from the village but according to my old neighbor, she is still occasionally showing up. Back in the late 1990s when she first appeared, the werent enough street light in the area though she always stood under one of the street light in front of the entrance the cemetery. The government recently fix the road as well as putting more street lights in the area. People in the neighborhood could only make assumptions on why she brought these drivers into the cemetery. Like I said earlier, probably because her family already moved out from that village or because she's in a loop, constantly repeating the last moment of her life (packing up to go home before her husband killed her)