Ghosts
The Bathroom at Grandpa's House: Where a Shampoo Bottle Vanished and Something Else Came Back
A boy and his cousin shared a shower at their grandfather's house in rural Hunan. When a bottle of shampoo disappeared through a gap in the wall, what came back through the mirror was something far worse.
My grandfather's house was the tallest building in the village.
In Hunan Province, where the rice fields stretch flat and the mountains come up suddenly from the earth like something breathing beneath a blanket, my grandfather's four-story house was a landmark. People came from neighboring villages to ask him to read the almanac, to pick lucky days, to settle arguments about harvests and weddings. He knew things. Old things. Things that had been passed down through more generations than anyone could count.
That's why my cousin's life was spared once, when he was seven years old and shouldn't have been.
But that's another story. This one is about the bathroom.
This story happened when I was nine. My cousin was a year older—ten, maybe eleven—and he'd come to stay at Grandpa's for the summer just like I did, every single year. The house had a main building and a secondary building, and between them a large courtyard where the chickens wandered and the radio played old Hunan opera from dawn until my grandmother remembered to turn it off.
The secondary building was the kitchen. And next to the kitchen, two separate bathrooms.
Two small rooms, side by side, separated by a wall that didn't quite reach the ceiling. There was a gap at the top—wide enough to pass things through. Two small mirrors, round, with cheap red plastic frames. The doors were yellow plastic, old and warped, and they screamed when you opened or closed them, dragging across the concrete threshold. The sound carried through the whole house.
One bottle of shampoo. That was all we had.
My cousin was in the bathroom on the right. I was on the left. We talked while we showered, the way boys do—about nothing, about video games we didn't have, about what we'd eaten that morning. Normal things.
Then my cousin said: Something feels weird today.
He said it casually, almost laughing. I keep feeling like something's off. I don't know what.
I didn't think anything of it.
I'm done with the shampoo, I said. Catch.
I tossed the bottle through the gap at the top of the wall. I heard it land on the tile floor on his side. Case closed.
A few minutes later, my cousin was finished. He asked me for the shampoo.
I told him I'd already thrown it.
He said he never received it.
We argued through the wall. Then we agreed: neither of us would leave. We'd stay in our bathrooms, doors closed, until we were both ready to come out at the same time. We'd find the bottle together. No cheating.
So we waited. We kept talking.
During that wait, my cousin went quiet for maybe thirty seconds. I heard him moving around, the sound of a bottle falling and rolling, then him picking something up.
Then he was silent again.
You trying to sneak out and hide it? I called.
No answer.
A few minutes later he said he was done. We opened our doors at the same exact moment, both of us shirtless and dripping. I looked at him. He wasn't moving. He was standing in the doorway of his bathroom, pale, and he was trembling. Not from cold. From something else.
I walked into his bathroom. I looked everywhere. The shampoo was gone.
I asked him what was wrong. He didn't answer. He just kept staring at the mirror.
By that evening, my cousin had a fever.
Not a small fever. A fever that came on like a wave, like something had grabbed him from the inside and wouldn't let go. His skin was hot to the touch. He couldn't eat. He couldn't sleep. He just lay on the bed and shiver and sometimes mutter things that didn't make sense.
This went on for two days.
We took him to the county hospital. The doctors ran tests. They said it was a 普通感冒—a normal cold. They gave him IV fluids and fever reducers and sent us home.
The fever didn't break.
By the second night, my grandfather—who had been watching from the corner of the room, saying nothing—finally spoke. He went outside and burned paper money at the courtyard gate, then walked to the next village to find the woman who knew things.
The spirit woman.
She arrived in the afternoon. She walked straight to my cousin's bedside without greeting anyone, knelt on the floor, and began burning paper money in a metal basin. She murmured things—names, maybe, or questions—while the flames consumed the paper.
Then she took a red-dyed egg, the kind served at weddings, and placed it in the burning basin. More murmuring. The egg began to crack from the heat.
She pulled it out, still glowing hot, and rolled it across my cousin's forehead. Back and forth. Back and forth. She began to speak aloud, asking questions in a rhythm that felt older than the language itself:
Young or old? Starved or wronged?
Each time she asked, she'd pause. Waiting.
When she reached Drowned?—
The egg cracked clean in half.
She performed a full exorcism that afternoon. By that night, the high fever broke. But a low fever lingered until the following day. My cousin was thin afterward—gaunt, really—and for months he had no energy. He'd lost something in that bathroom. Something that took a long time to come back.
Years passed.
I asked him about it again during Chinese New Year, not long ago. He was hesitant. Then he told me.
A few days before the bathroom incident, some classmates had invited him to swim at the reservoir outside the village. He went. He was swimming out past the buoys when he saw someone in the water. Far away, watching him. The figure looked like his older brother.
His brother had been dead for years.
My cousin felt his skin go cold—not from the water. He swam back to shore, dried off, and dressed quickly. On the way home, he felt footsteps behind him. He turned. No one was there.
When he got home, he didn't want his grandmother to know he'd been swimming. So he asked me to shower with him. Right then. Immediately.
That's why we were in those bathrooms together.
When he told me something felt weird that afternoon—he'd already seen his brother's face at the reservoir. He didn't know what it meant. He just felt it.
The shampoo vanished. The mirror showed him something else.
We argued about the shampoo. During that argument, he told me later, he dropped the bottle. He bent down to pick it up. When he straightened up, he looked at the mirror.
There was someone standing behind him.
Not his reflection. Someone else. A figure. He said it looked like one of the boys who'd been swimming at the reservoir with him that day.
He couldn't move.
The figure was pale. Not the pink of skin. The white of something that had been in water a long time. The eyes were wrong—white, with no pupils, like a doll's eyes. And the mouth was open, and it was smiling, and one hand was raised, waving at him.
Waving him closer.
He stood frozen until the image vanished. When he turned around, the bathroom was empty.
He never told me any of this that day. He was too afraid. That's why he went quiet during our argument. He was staring at the mirror, waiting for it to come back.
For days while the fever burned, he dreamed the same dream.
In the dream, the drowned boy stood at the edge of a reservoir that wasn't quite a reservoir—a water park, pristine and empty, with slides and pools that glittered under lights that weren't quite sunlight. The drowned boy gestured for him to come closer. To follow. Come play, the dream said. Come see.
My cousin said he could almost see the details of the water park. It looked like the amusement park in the city, the one he'd visited once with his parents. It felt real in the dream.
Then the drowned boy stopped walking.
The world went silent. Completely still. No sound of water. No sound of wind. Nothing.
The boy turned around. His face was blurred now, smeared like wet paper, but he was still smiling. Then the smile broke into something else. Something wrong. The boy began to cry. And as he cried, his head began to shake—not side to side, but violently left, right, left, right, faster and faster—
Then his face began to swell. The features stretched. The skin blistered and split. And in the dream, my cousin screamed, but no sound came out.
That's when he woke up.
The bottle was found three days later.
Not in either bathroom. Not anywhere near the bathrooms. It was in the kitchen building—the secondary building where we kept the firewood—in the middle of a neatly stacked pile of kindling. Placed there deliberately. Carefully. Like someone had taken the time to put it away.
To this day, no one knows who put it there.
The bathrooms are gone now. The kitchen building was demolished years ago. My grandfather passed away, and with him went the knowledge of so many things—the old explanations, the real names of what walked alongside us, the reasons why certain things happened in certain places.
But I remember.
I was nine. I was standing in a bathroom with a screaming yellow door, arguing about shampoo through a hole in a wall, while on the other side of the mirror something was looking back.
And it was smiling.
In Hunan Province, where the rice fields stretch flat and the mountains come up suddenly from the earth like something breathing beneath a blanket, my grandfather's four-story house was a landmark. People came from neighboring villages to ask him to read the almanac, to pick lucky days, to settle arguments about harvests and weddings. He knew things. Old things. Things that had been passed down through more generations than anyone could count.
That's why my cousin's life was spared once, when he was seven years old and shouldn't have been.
But that's another story. This one is about the bathroom.
This story happened when I was nine. My cousin was a year older—ten, maybe eleven—and he'd come to stay at Grandpa's for the summer just like I did, every single year. The house had a main building and a secondary building, and between them a large courtyard where the chickens wandered and the radio played old Hunan opera from dawn until my grandmother remembered to turn it off.
The secondary building was the kitchen. And next to the kitchen, two separate bathrooms.
Two small rooms, side by side, separated by a wall that didn't quite reach the ceiling. There was a gap at the top—wide enough to pass things through. Two small mirrors, round, with cheap red plastic frames. The doors were yellow plastic, old and warped, and they screamed when you opened or closed them, dragging across the concrete threshold. The sound carried through the whole house.
One bottle of shampoo. That was all we had.
My cousin was in the bathroom on the right. I was on the left. We talked while we showered, the way boys do—about nothing, about video games we didn't have, about what we'd eaten that morning. Normal things.
Then my cousin said: Something feels weird today.
He said it casually, almost laughing. I keep feeling like something's off. I don't know what.
I didn't think anything of it.
I'm done with the shampoo, I said. Catch.
I tossed the bottle through the gap at the top of the wall. I heard it land on the tile floor on his side. Case closed.
A few minutes later, my cousin was finished. He asked me for the shampoo.
I told him I'd already thrown it.
He said he never received it.
We argued through the wall. Then we agreed: neither of us would leave. We'd stay in our bathrooms, doors closed, until we were both ready to come out at the same time. We'd find the bottle together. No cheating.
So we waited. We kept talking.
During that wait, my cousin went quiet for maybe thirty seconds. I heard him moving around, the sound of a bottle falling and rolling, then him picking something up.
Then he was silent again.
You trying to sneak out and hide it? I called.
No answer.
A few minutes later he said he was done. We opened our doors at the same exact moment, both of us shirtless and dripping. I looked at him. He wasn't moving. He was standing in the doorway of his bathroom, pale, and he was trembling. Not from cold. From something else.
I walked into his bathroom. I looked everywhere. The shampoo was gone.
I asked him what was wrong. He didn't answer. He just kept staring at the mirror.
By that evening, my cousin had a fever.
Not a small fever. A fever that came on like a wave, like something had grabbed him from the inside and wouldn't let go. His skin was hot to the touch. He couldn't eat. He couldn't sleep. He just lay on the bed and shiver and sometimes mutter things that didn't make sense.
This went on for two days.
We took him to the county hospital. The doctors ran tests. They said it was a 普通感冒—a normal cold. They gave him IV fluids and fever reducers and sent us home.
The fever didn't break.
By the second night, my grandfather—who had been watching from the corner of the room, saying nothing—finally spoke. He went outside and burned paper money at the courtyard gate, then walked to the next village to find the woman who knew things.
The spirit woman.
She arrived in the afternoon. She walked straight to my cousin's bedside without greeting anyone, knelt on the floor, and began burning paper money in a metal basin. She murmured things—names, maybe, or questions—while the flames consumed the paper.
Then she took a red-dyed egg, the kind served at weddings, and placed it in the burning basin. More murmuring. The egg began to crack from the heat.
She pulled it out, still glowing hot, and rolled it across my cousin's forehead. Back and forth. Back and forth. She began to speak aloud, asking questions in a rhythm that felt older than the language itself:
Young or old? Starved or wronged?
Each time she asked, she'd pause. Waiting.
When she reached Drowned?—
The egg cracked clean in half.
She performed a full exorcism that afternoon. By that night, the high fever broke. But a low fever lingered until the following day. My cousin was thin afterward—gaunt, really—and for months he had no energy. He'd lost something in that bathroom. Something that took a long time to come back.
Years passed.
I asked him about it again during Chinese New Year, not long ago. He was hesitant. Then he told me.
A few days before the bathroom incident, some classmates had invited him to swim at the reservoir outside the village. He went. He was swimming out past the buoys when he saw someone in the water. Far away, watching him. The figure looked like his older brother.
His brother had been dead for years.
My cousin felt his skin go cold—not from the water. He swam back to shore, dried off, and dressed quickly. On the way home, he felt footsteps behind him. He turned. No one was there.
When he got home, he didn't want his grandmother to know he'd been swimming. So he asked me to shower with him. Right then. Immediately.
That's why we were in those bathrooms together.
When he told me something felt weird that afternoon—he'd already seen his brother's face at the reservoir. He didn't know what it meant. He just felt it.
The shampoo vanished. The mirror showed him something else.
We argued about the shampoo. During that argument, he told me later, he dropped the bottle. He bent down to pick it up. When he straightened up, he looked at the mirror.
There was someone standing behind him.
Not his reflection. Someone else. A figure. He said it looked like one of the boys who'd been swimming at the reservoir with him that day.
He couldn't move.
The figure was pale. Not the pink of skin. The white of something that had been in water a long time. The eyes were wrong—white, with no pupils, like a doll's eyes. And the mouth was open, and it was smiling, and one hand was raised, waving at him.
Waving him closer.
He stood frozen until the image vanished. When he turned around, the bathroom was empty.
He never told me any of this that day. He was too afraid. That's why he went quiet during our argument. He was staring at the mirror, waiting for it to come back.
For days while the fever burned, he dreamed the same dream.
In the dream, the drowned boy stood at the edge of a reservoir that wasn't quite a reservoir—a water park, pristine and empty, with slides and pools that glittered under lights that weren't quite sunlight. The drowned boy gestured for him to come closer. To follow. Come play, the dream said. Come see.
My cousin said he could almost see the details of the water park. It looked like the amusement park in the city, the one he'd visited once with his parents. It felt real in the dream.
Then the drowned boy stopped walking.
The world went silent. Completely still. No sound of water. No sound of wind. Nothing.
The boy turned around. His face was blurred now, smeared like wet paper, but he was still smiling. Then the smile broke into something else. Something wrong. The boy began to cry. And as he cried, his head began to shake—not side to side, but violently left, right, left, right, faster and faster—
Then his face began to swell. The features stretched. The skin blistered and split. And in the dream, my cousin screamed, but no sound came out.
That's when he woke up.
The bottle was found three days later.
Not in either bathroom. Not anywhere near the bathrooms. It was in the kitchen building—the secondary building where we kept the firewood—in the middle of a neatly stacked pile of kindling. Placed there deliberately. Carefully. Like someone had taken the time to put it away.
To this day, no one knows who put it there.
The bathrooms are gone now. The kitchen building was demolished years ago. My grandfather passed away, and with him went the knowledge of so many things—the old explanations, the real names of what walked alongside us, the reasons why certain things happened in certain places.
But I remember.
I was nine. I was standing in a bathroom with a screaming yellow door, arguing about shampoo through a hole in a wall, while on the other side of the mirror something was looking back.
And it was smiling.