The story
Back then, Mateo lived in his parents' house, a high-ceilinged home with clay tile roofs on the outskirts of Jamundí. In that part of Valle del Cauca, the stifling heat usually lets up only in the early morning hours, leaving behind a heavy silence broken only by the chirping of crickets and the occasional creak of old timber. At that point in his youth, his family home was the safest, most predictable place in the world—a haven where nothing ever upset the daily routine.
That night, however, his ordinary sleep turned into a suffocating trap. Mateo slipped into a thick stupor he couldn't break free from. In the clammy murk of what he thought was a nightmare, a pale silhouette emerged from thin air, materializing right beside his bed. It was a woman draped in snow-white garments, a long dress whose folds seemed to blur into the bedroom mist. Before the young man could react or grasp what was happening, the figure lunged with an icy fury. Two stiff hands, with ash-gray skin as cold as marble, clamped viciously around his throat.
The pressure was relentless. Trapped inside that choking dream, Mateo felt the air being violently crushed out of him, sparking an unbearable burning in his chest. His lungs cried out for oxygen in vain while the woman’s glassy eyes stared into his from an overwhelming, suffocating proximity, unblinking. The weight of the apparition seemed to pin him to the mattress, snuffing out any chance to scream; all that escaped his mouth were muffled, agonizing gasps.
Driven by pure survival instinct, the young man fought back. Still locked in the trance, he tensed his arms and began striking out at the woman in blind fury to defend himself. He threw desperate punches at her face and ghostly torso, struggling with every ounce of strength he had in an agonizing attempt to break the murderous grip cutting off his breath.
That violent struggle finally snapped the dream's hold. With a sharp jolt that shook the bed, Mateo woke up. He bolted upright, drenched in a cold sweat that soaked through his clothes and plastered the sheet to his skin. His breath came fast, ragged, and loud, filling the quiet room as his trembling fingers reached for his neck, searching for the physical marks of a strangling that had felt horrifyingly real.
A thick, ominous silence hung over the house. His room didn’t have a standard wooden door; instead, the doorway was covered only by a thick, faded curtain that separated his bedroom from the rest of the house. Spurred by a sinister gut feeling, Mateo locked his eyes on that opening. The dim light outside barely revealed the outlines of the hallway, and the stillness in the air told him it was around four in the morning—that hour when the night turns deepest and most hostile.
That was when terror shattered any boundary of reason. Beyond the curtain's threshold, sharply silhouetted against the dark, he saw the exact same woman in white pass by. The figure moved with an inhuman lightness, floating from one room to another right before his wide-open, awake eyes. As she crossed the hallway, the apparition let out a low, crystalline laugh—a mocking, wicked cackle that echoed off the walls of the house, chilling him to the bone. There was no doubt about it: what had been on top of his bed was no nighttime hallucination, but a tangible presence now gloating over his torment.
Mateo sat petrified, not daring to blink or make a sound until the first rays of sunlight lit up the corners of the house. That incident marked a permanent turning point in his life. From that morning on, he developed a visceral terror of being left alone and of sleeping in the dark; flicking off a lamp became an agonizing ordeal.
Over the years, the torment proved to be far from an isolated event. Mateo discovered that whenever he finds himself alone under a roof, the shadows seem to come alive all over again. Subtle noises, the sudden sensation of an icy chill on his throat, and the faint echoes of that distant laughter all return to remind him that the woman in white is still lurking, waiting for the exact moment when solitude leaves him defenseless once more.
