# Chapter 2
When I first entered college, I already knew that my campus life would be a little different from that of most other students.
I majored in midwifery, and one of the rules we had to follow was living in a dormitory for a year.
There were three dormitories for female students and one for male students. They were in separate locations, but all of them were still fairly close to campus.
Of the three women's dormitories, I chose the newest one.
The building had just been completed and had never been occupied before.
The dormitory was reserved specifically for my class.
When I first moved in, everything seemed pleasant. The building still looked new, the rooms were clean, and there weren't any strange stories about the place.
At least, I didn't know anything yet.
Orientation lasted for one week.
Every night, upperclassmen would come to the dormitory to take attendance. They called our names one by one and made sure no students had left the dormitory without permission.
The first few days passed normally.
Until the third night.
As usual, after every name had been called, we began scattering back to our rooms.
Each room housed four female students.
I lived with three roommates.
We had just entered our room when suddenly—
"Aaaaah!"
A hysterical scream rang out from the room directly across from ours.
My three roommates and I immediately looked at one another.
The scream was so loud that we instinctively rushed out of our room.
And we weren't the only ones.
One by one, the doors to the rooms on the second floor opened.
The other residents came out too, asking what was going on.
"What happened?"
"Who screamed?"
"That came from the room next door, right?"
One of the female students who lived across from us suddenly came out.
She looked panicked.
"She... she suddenly started screaming!" she stammered. "Maybe she's having a seizure!"
After saying that, she ran down the stairs to call the upperclassman on guard duty on the first floor.
Meanwhile, we were still standing in front of our respective rooms.
The screaming was still coming from inside the room.
The screaming student's two roommates were trying to hold her down.
Her body kept thrashing, and she cried and screamed without stopping.
A short while later, an upperclassman arrived.
She immediately entered the room and tried to assess the student's condition.
I didn't know what she saw at that moment.
But her expression changed.
She said the student wasn't having a seizure.
She was possessed.
I fell silent.
Possessed?
In my entire life, I had only ever seen something like that on television or heard stories from other people.
I had never imagined I would see it with my own eyes.
The upperclassman then tried reciting the prayers she knew.
Several others joined in to help.
The student was still crying.
Sometimes she screamed.
Sometimes her body thrashed.
Then suddenly—
"Aaaaaah!"
Another scream came from the far end of the second floor.
Everyone immediately turned toward it.
Another upperclassman ran toward the source of the sound.
A few moments later, we heard someone else crying.
Then another voice.
I began to feel that something was wrong.
Before the situation in the first room had truly calmed down, a scream came from another room.
Then from the next one.
One after another.
As if the screams were moving from one room to the next.
The upperclassmen on guard duty began to feel overwhelmed.
Even the security guard came up to the second floor to help.
But the situation only grew more chaotic.
Screams came from every direction.
Some people were crying.
Some were screaming.
Some had to be held down by their roommates.
In a matter of minutes, the second floor, which had been filled with students getting ready for bed, turned into a scene of utter panic.
I stood with my roommates, not knowing what to do.
Honestly, I was covered in goosebumps.
For the first time in my life, I witnessed a mass possession with my own eyes.
And what frightened me most was that the number of victims kept increasing.
In the end, the students who were still conscious were separated from those experiencing the incidents.
We were told to evacuate to campus.
We didn't sleep in the dormitory that night.
We took only what we needed and left the building, while the upperclassmen, the security guard, and several other people continued trying to handle the situation there.
I still remember what it felt like to walk away from the dormitory that night.
The building, which had felt like an ordinary new home for the past three days, suddenly felt different.
As if I had just seen another side of the place.
It wasn't until the next day that we learned the story that made everything seem even more plausible.
Before the dormitory was built, the land had apparently been the site of a public cemetery.
I had actually seen the cemetery area around the dormitory before.
From my room's window, if I looked to the side, I could indeed see several graves. A wall separated the area from the dormitory.
But I had always assumed the graves were only on the neighboring lot.
I had never known that the land where our dormitory stood had once also been part of the cemetery.
After learning that, I immediately thought back to the previous night.
The dormitory was still brand-new.
It had never been occupied before.
There was no history of previous residents.
There were no stories about anything strange ever happening there.
But maybe the problem wasn't with the building.
Maybe the problem was with the land it stood on.
That day, we all held a group Quran recitation gathering.
We prayed for anyone who had once been in that place before the dormitory was built, while also asking that those of us living there be granted safety and peace throughout our education.
From then on, the atmosphere in the dormitory gradually returned to normal.
We went back to sleeping in our own rooms.
Classes continued as usual.
And during all the time I lived there, nothing nearly as severe as that night ever happened again.
But every time I opened my room's window and looked toward the wall separating the dormitory from the cemetery next door, I always remembered one thing.
On the third night of orientation, we thought we were dealing with one person who had suddenly begun experiencing something.
It turned out...
it wasn't just one person who woke up that night.