If you’ve ever lived in Lagos, you know landlords don’t joke with two things: rent and wahala.
Mine, Mr. Ajayi, was the chairman of both.
So when a mysterious tenant showed up in our compound, paid one full year rent in cash, and disappeared less than 24 hours later… the entire neighborhood went mad.
Let me tell you exactly what happened.
I’ll never forget the day he came.
His name was Mr. Dami — or that’s what he wrote in the visitor’s logbook.
Tall, calm, dark-skinned, with a quietness that felt too… heavy.
He arrived in a black Toyota Camry with no plates.
Not tinted, not flashy.
But something about that car made people shift.
He stepped out wearing a simple grey shirt, black trousers, and slippers.
No bags.
No box.
No load.
Just himself.
As the compound gossip a.k.a Mama Tola put it:
“Person wey no carry bag, no carry friend, no carry even toothbrush — that one get secret.”
But Lagos is Lagos.
People mind their business until it becomes sweet gist.
I was in my room upstairs when I first heard the noise downstairs — voices arguing, someone shouting “I no get change!” and the landlord coughing dramatically.
Curiosity finished me.
I came down.
And that’s when I saw it.
Bundles of cash.
Neatly wrapped.
Stacked like towers.
And the mysterious man standing beside them.
Mr. Ajayi was sweating like someone frying akara with no apron.
“A whole year rent,” he repeated for the fiftieth time. “In cash. No negotiation. No installment. You people should learn from this respectable gentleman o!”
The tenants hissed.
Someone whispered, “Na ritualist.”
Another said, “Maybe Yahoo boy wey don repent.”
One added, “Or maybe EFCC dey find am.”
But Mr. Dami didn’t react.
He just smiled politely, signed the agreement papers, and collected the single key to the empty downstairs apartment.
The entire time… he didn’t blink much.
I know that sounds strange, but it was the first thing I noticed. The man blinked maybe once every two minutes.
Who lives like that?
His first hour in the compound was the strangest.
He entered the apartment.
Closed the door.
No sound.
No movement.
No light.
Nothing.
“Maybe he dey sleep,” someone suggested.
“But he never bring bed,” another argued.
“Maybe he dey meditate?”
“Maybe he dey on phone call?”
“Maybe—”
Everybody kept guessing.
Night came.
Still no sound.
Not even generator hum.
Everyone else had theirs on.
His apartment was dark.
Mama Tola (who has the spiritual gift of monitoring everybody’s business) kept pacing past his window every ten minutes.
Around 8 p.m., I peeked from my own window upstairs.
Nothing.
Just stillness.
Dead stillness.
Something about that silence crawled under my skin.
At around 11:45 p.m., something happened.
I was dozing off when I heard it.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Soft, rhythmic knocking.
But it wasn’t on my door.
It was coming from downstairs…
from his apartment.
Someone — or something — was knocking inside his room.
Knocking from the inside.
I sat up sharply.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Then silence.
I waited.
Five seconds.
Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds.
Nothing.
Maybe I imagined it.
Maybe it was the building settling.
Maybe—
TAP. TAP. TAP.
This time louder.
I jumped.
My heart pounded.
It wasn’t coming from his front door.
It was coming from the back wall of his apartment… the wall that faced the bush behind our compound.
I opened my curtain slightly.
That wall was shaking.
Not violently, but… pulsing.
Like someone was pressing it from the other side.
I felt fear creep into my bones.
Before I could blink again—
Light.
A faint, blue light leaked through the edges of his window.
It flickered.
Soft.
Strange.
Unnatural.
He had no bulbs.
No generator.
No phone light could glow like that.
Then the light moved — as if someone was carrying it around inside.
I swallowed hard.
This wasn’t normal.
The next morning, I was ready to gist everyone.
But someone beat me to it.
By 6 a.m., the entire compound was gathered downstairs.
The landlord looked confused.
The neighbors looked terrified.
Mama Tola looked like she hadn’t slept.
“What happened?” I asked, brushing my teeth at the corridor.
She pointed dramatically at the mysterious man’s door.
“Go and check!”
I walked slowly, toothbrush still in hand, and knocked.
No response.
I knocked again.
Still nothing.
I placed my ear on the door.
Silence.
Then I tried the handle.
It opened.
The room inside was empty.
No bed.
No bag.
No shoes.
No clothes.
No tenant.
Just emptiness.
As if no one had entered there at all.
But that wasn’t the scary part.
The scary part was:
The key was inside.
On the floor.
In the middle of the room.
As if someone had locked the door from inside… and vanished.
Then I saw the wall.
The back wall — the one facing the bush — was not just cracked…
It was burned.
A perfect, rectangular burn mark, the size of a door…
but there was no door there.
Just a wall with black scorch marks outlining a shape that definitely wasn’t made by fire alone.
People started murmuring.
“Ha! Ritual!”
“Ghost!”
“Portal!”
The landlord nearly fainted.
“This is why I don’t like taking cash!” he shouted.
Mama Tola began praying loudly.
“This compound must be sanctified! I said it! I said it since yesterday!”
The landlord scratched his head.
“Where is the man now? How can human being disappear overnight?”
Someone suddenly shouted:
“Check the CCTV!”
We all froze.
CCTV?
True true — the landlord installed CCTV last year after someone stole his generator coil.
We all rushed to the sitting room where the monitor was.
He rewound the footage to midnight.
Then he pressed play.
What we saw still haunts me.
At exactly 11:47 p.m. — the time I heard the tapping — the man got up from the floor (yes, floor, not bed) and stood facing the burned wall.
He placed his right hand on the wall.
The wall glowed blue.
The same blue light I saw through the window.
Then the glow grew brighter.
Brighter.
Brighter—
Until the camera lens glitched.
Static.
Then nothing.
When the picture returned four seconds later…
the man was gone.
The wall was black.
Burned.
Silent.
The entire compound gasped.
The landlord fell on the floor.
Mama Tola screamed, “Ayemitemi! I said this thing is not ordinary!”
One neighbor whispered:
“Where did he go?”
The question echoed in my head.
Where did he go?
Because there was only one answer…
Through the wall.
Through… something.
A portal.
A doorway.
A place not meant for humans.
But the scariest part wasn’t that he vanished.
The scariest part was that as the CCTV glitched, a frame flashed with static…
…and for one second — one terrible second —
a tall, shadowy figure appeared behind him.
Watching him.
Waiting.
And it wasn’t human.
For a long moment, nobody in the compound spoke.
Everyone stared at the frozen CCTV screen where that shadowy figure appeared for exactly one frame — tall, thin, monstrous, and wrong in every human way.
The landlord finally broke the silence.
“Please… somebody tell me this is camera problem.”
It wasn’t camera problem.
We all knew it.
Because shadows don’t glitch like that.
Shadows don’t stand upright like humans.
And shadows don’t look back at the camera with glowing eyes.
My heart hammered in my chest.
“What exactly entered our compound?” Mama Tola whispered, clutching her wrapper.
But the question nobody asked out loud was the one burning in my mind:
Why did it follow him?
Who was he?
And what was that blue light?
Before I could think further, the landlord turned to me.
“You!” he pointed, voice shaking. “You were the last person awake yesterday! You heard something! Tell us what you saw!”
All eyes turned to me.
My throat tightened.
“I only heard tapping,” I said.
“From the back wall. Like someone was knocking.”
The landlord swallowed hard.
“From the bush side?”
I nodded.
Fear rippled through the crowd.
Someone muttered, “This compound is cursed.”
Another said, “We should all pack out.”
One added, “I knew this place was too cheap.”
But something else caught my attention.
The burned wall wasn’t just burned…
There were tiny carvings inside the scorch marks.
Symbols.
Faint.
Jagged.
Circular.
Not Yoruba.
Not Igbo.
Not Hausa.
Older.
Something about them felt ancient.
And familiar.
My stomach flipped.
Where had I seen these symbols before?
Around 3 p.m., police arrived — after the landlord fainted the second time and neighbors insisted on reporting “a missing man.”
But as expected…
Police don’t like supernatural stories.
They checked the empty room.
They inspected the wall.
They watched the CCTV.
Then one officer asked the landlord:
“Are you sure this camera no get problem?”
“Are you blind?” the landlord shouted. “Can’t you see the shadow?!”
The officer leaned back.
“That thing fit be your generator reflection. You know say NEPA dey misbehave for this area.”
We all hissed.
Generator reflection?
Please.
But the police didn’t care.
After arguing lazily among themselves, one officer finally said:
“There is no crime here.
The man paid rent.
Paying rent is not illegal.”
Mama Tola screamed,
“DISAPPEARING IS ILLEGAL NA!”
They ignored her.
The landlord begged them to at least file a report.
They shrugged and left.
Typical.
By evening, everyone started locking doors early.
Even though it wasn’t my business, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something in that room wasn’t finished.
That night, around 10:30 p.m., I heard footsteps in the corridor.
Slow.
Heavy.
Dragging.
My heart sank.
Who would be walking around at that hour?
I peeped from my window.
It was the landlord.
Holding a lantern.
Walking toward the mysterious man’s apartment.
Why?
What for?
Curiosity pinned me to the window.
I watched as he entered the empty room.
His lantern cast a shaky orange glow inside.
He stood in front of the burned wall.
Stared at it.
Then he reached out…
and touched the scorch mark.
At first, nothing happened.
Then the wall glowed.
Very faintly.
Blue.
Just like the night before.
I gasped.
The landlord jerked back in fear.
The lantern dropped to the floor.
He stumbled out of the room and ran faster than a 65-year-old man had any right to.
I didn’t sleep.
Not that night.
Not after what I saw.
Because it meant something horrifying:
The portal — or whatever it was — wasn’t tied to the tenant.
It was tied to the room.
And anyone who touched that wall…
…could activate it.
The next morning, something even stranger happened.
A car pulled up in front of our compound.
Black SUV.
Tinted windows.
No plates.
The same kind of strange vehicle mysterious people in Nigerian movies use when they want to look suspicious.
A man stepped out.
Not tall.
Not short.
Wearing a black suit despite the Lagos heat.
He walked into the compound confidently, ignoring everyone’s questions.
He knocked on the landlord’s door.
The landlord tried to pretend he wasn’t home.
But the man said loudly:
“Mr. Ajayi.
We know you’re inside.
We need to enter the room your tenant used.”
Everybody froze.
WE.
Who is we?
With shaking hands, the landlord opened the door.
“S-sir, good morning. How can I help you?”
The man smiled politely — too politely.
“We are here about the man who rented your apartment.”
The landlord’s voice cracked.
“You people know him?”
The man tilted his head slightly.
“Let’s say… we’ve been tracking him for a very long time.”
My heart thumped.
Tracking?
Why?
The man’s calm expression didn’t match the weight of his words.
“We need to see the room. Now.”
The landlord obeyed instantly.
They walked into the empty apartment.
Everyone gathered outside the door as the man examined the burned wall.
He didn’t touch it.
He didn’t lean forward.
He just observed.
Then he said something chilling:
“It is still open.”
A shiver shot through the entire crowd.
Before anyone could ask questions, he turned to face us.
His eyes were dark.
Too dark.
Like he was hiding worlds inside them.
“We need everyone to leave this compound for the next twelve hours.”
The landlord squealed.
“Twelve hours?! For what?”
“For your safety,” the man replied calmly.
Mama Tola hissed.
“Safety from WHAT exactly?”
The man looked at her with mild pity.
“If you stay, you will find out.
And you will not like the answer.”
Unease filled the air.
People began to panic.
“Where will we go?”
“We have work!”
“Is this eviction?”
But the man clapped his hands once.
The sound echoed unnaturally.
And he said:
“This is not a request.”
Then something happened.
Two more men stepped out of the SUV.
I hadn’t seen them arrive.
I didn’t even hear the doors open.
They were just… suddenly there.
All dressed in black.
All carrying identical metal cases.
And inside one of those cases…
I saw the hem of a black robe.
And something that looked like an ancient tool.
A jagged hook.
The man in the suit pointed at the burned wall again.
“He went through without permission.
He wasn’t supposed to.”
Everyone gasped.
Then he added:
“And now that doorway is unstable.”
Doorway.
A real, actual doorway.
I felt the blood drain from my face.
The man closed the case gently, turned to the landlord, and said:
“If we don’t seal it today…
something else will come through.”
My heart dropped.
“What… what kind of ‘something’?” the landlord whispered.
The man finally answered with a voice too soft for the terror it carried:
“Something far worse than the one that took him.”
Silence.
I felt fear lock my spine in place.
Something worse?
Worse than that shadow?
The man signaled his colleagues forward.
They entered the room.
Locked the door behind them.
And the last thing we heard before bolts slid shut…
…was one of them whispering:
“It’s already moving.”