This happened back when I was in elementary school. It was during winter break, just before the new semester was about to start, when my best friend’s mother, who lived right next door, passed away. We were told it was a sudden subarachnoid hemorrhage. My friend was completely devastated. Her parents had fought constantly—it was something everyone in the neighborhood knew about.

The wake was held at their house, and her father seemed terribly shaken. It was obvious enough that even an elementary school kid like me could tell. My friend was heartbroken and begged between tears for me to sleep over that night. I asked my mom, and she let me stay at their house.

Late that night, I woke up to the sound of people talking. We were sleeping in an upstairs bedroom, while her mother’s body was laid out in a room just off the first-floor living room. It sounded like her dad was speaking to someone downstairs. My friend woke up too. “Who could Dad be talking to at this hour when there’s nobody else here?” she whispered. We crept down and peeked into the living room, only to see her father desperately holding the door to that back room shut with all his weight, pleading, “Forgive me, please forgive me.” Then, listening closely, we heard a faint voice from behind the door: “...Open it. Open the door.”

Instantly convinced her mother was still alive, my friend bolted toward her father. “She’s alive! Mom’s alive!” she cried, trying to yank the door open. Her father blocked her, shouting, “You can’t open it!” Yet the tiny voice kept filtering through from the other side. Desperate to reunite my friend with her mother, I rushed over and shoved the door with everything I had.

“It’s open!...” But inside, her mother was simply lying there, motionless and dead. “She really is gone, isn’t she...” my friend wept, while her father stood by with an agonized expression on his face.

The next morning, my friend and I talked about what had happened, rationalizing that the grief and shock of her mother’s death must have made us imagine things. Then we went downstairs to pay our respects to her mother. Just as I went to slide the door shut, I realized with chilling certainty that the voice pleading to open the door the night before hadn’t been our imagination at all.

Scrawled on the inside of that door were the words: “Your father killed me.” When I looked at her mother’s fingernails, scraps of torn paper from the sliding door were wedged beneath them. I realized she had used the final moments she had left in her body to desperately tell us who took her life.

Soon after, her father turned himself in and went to prison. My best friend was taken in by distant relatives far away, and I never saw her again.

That is the eerie experience I went through as a child.