Do you believe in ghost?

This is Chike Okoro, 28 years old, captured on a grainy CCTV footage withdrawing money from an ATM on Allen Avenue, Ikeja. It was 9:14 PM on a Tuesday, September 12th, 2018. This was the last confirmed sighting of him.

Chike was a pragmatic man, an engineer with a well-defined life. He was saving to build a house in his village, Umuanunu, and had just been promoted. The money he withdrew that night was for his younger sister’s bride price ceremony, scheduled for the coming weekend.

He never made it home to his apartment in Ogba.

The police found his Honda Accord two days later, parked neatly off a quiet street in Ilupeju. The doors were locked, his phone and the envelope of cash were gone from the passenger seat, but his laptop bag, with his work credentials, was still in the boot. It looked like a classic robbery. A violent, but sadly common, big-city tragedy.

His family mourned. They held a funeral for him after a year, a small, grim affair without a body to bury. His mother, Ebele, never truly recovered. She died two years later, her neighbors said, of a "broken heart."

The case went cold.

Life, as it does, moved on. His sister got married. His father, a stoic man, learned to navigate the silence that had replaced his son's laughter.

Then, in January of this year, his father's old Nokia torchlight phone, a relic he refused to upgrade, began to ring. The calls always came between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM. When the old man, now hard of hearing, fumbled to answer, the line would be dead. The number was always "Unknown." He told his daughter it was just network problems, bad lines, a ghost in the machine. She agreed, advising him to switch off the phone at night, which he never did. It was his only direct line to the outside world.

The calls stopped as abruptly as they started.

The strange part began two months ago. Chike’s sister, Nneka, started receiving them. She had moved to Abuja with her husband. The calls came to her sleek iPhone, again from an "Unknown" caller, always in the dead of night. She would jolt awake, her heart hammering, and see the blank screen. She dismissed it as spam, a glitch, until one night she answered on the first ring.

There was no voice. But she heard something. A sound so faint she had to press the phone to her ear. It was the distinct, rhythmic clatter of a generator—not the smooth hum of a modern one, but the specific, coughing sputter of the old, yellow "I better pass my neighbour" generator they had in their family house back in the village.

She told her husband, who shrugged. "It's Abuja, everyone has a generator. Crossed lines."

But she knew that sound. It was the soundtrack of her childhood.

The final call came last week. Nneka was in Lagos, visiting her father in the same Ogba house Chike had left from. She was sleeping in her old room. At 2:30 AM, her phone blared, shattering the silence. The screen flashed "UNKNOWN". This time, a cold dread settled in her stomach. She didn't want to answer, but a force she couldn't explain made her swipe the screen and put the phone to her ear.

Again, no voice. But the generator was louder now, a deafening rattle. And beneath it, she heard something else. A faint, wet, gurgling sound. Like someone struggling to breathe through fluid. Then, a whisper, so thin and strained it was almost carried away by the generator's noise.

It spoke in Igbo.

"Nne... ọ na-agu m mmiri... Nna m, the water is cold..."

(Sister... I'm thirsty... Father, the water is cold.)

The line went dead.

Nneka screamed. Her husband and father rushed in. She was trembling, hysterical, pointing at the phone. They calmed her down, convinced it was a vicious, sick prank.

But the next morning, her father, looking older than his years, went out into the small backyard. He walked to a corner, near the fence where the old, disused well was sealed shut years ago with a heavy concrete slab after they got running water. Weeds had grown over it.

He noticed something. A single, fresh crack ran through the center of the concrete. It was thin, but it was there. And from within that crack, a faint, almost imperceptible chill seemed to emanate, a stark contrast to the warm Lagos morning.

He hasn't touched it. He hasn't told anyone. He just stands there sometimes, staring at the crack, listening to a memory only he can hear.

The police report from 2018 stated Chike's phone was last pinged off a tower near Ilupeju. No one ever thought to check the tower logs for the area around his own family home in Ogba. No one thought to look in the one place he was truly trying to get back to.