MY MENTALLY ILL UNCLE BROUGHT HOME A BEAUTIFUL GIRLFRIEND, NOT KNOWING THAT SHE WAS A GHOST.
WE BELIEVED SHE MIGHT BE HIS BLACK CAT GIRL ONLY TO DISCOVER A SHOCKING ENDING.
My Uncle’s Girlfriend Was a Ghost
I still don’t know how to explain what happened in our family, but to this day, it remains the darkest and strangest thing I’ve ever witnessed.
My uncle has always struggled with mental illness. He was never stable. Every morning at 5am he would run off into the streets and spend the entire day digging into bins, scavenging, and talking to himself. At night he would come back exhausted, reeking of dirt and garbage. Bathing him was a battle—we would sometimes have to tie him down just to clean him, but even then it only happened once in a very long while. His smell was unbearable, so we eventually made him sleep in the outside room.
That’s the uncle we knew—until one day, he shocked us all by walking into the yard with a beautiful woman by his side, claiming she was his girlfriend.
We thought it was a joke. How could a woman like that fall in love with a man who couldn’t even take care of himself? But she kept coming back. And strangely, my uncle started changing. He began bathing more often, looking cleaner, acting more normal. Slowly, we saw him improving, and it was clear it had everything to do with her.
The woman said she was from Lesotho and that she had been dating my uncle for a few months. She was very shy, never looked anyone in the eye, and hardly spoke, but she treated my uncle with love. Eventually, she moved in with him. She said she worked in Midrand as a domestic worker, leaving very early in the morning and returning late in the evening.
We all grew to like her because she was taking such good care of him. For the first time in years, my uncle seemed genuinely happy.
But what we didn’t know was that she was not of this world.
She had been murdered on her way to work one morning, her body hidden away. And she had come into my uncle’s life for one reason: to be found.
The day the truth came out, we were preparing for lobola. She directed us to Soweto, where she said some of her family lived. But as soon as we arrived, she vanished before anyone could see her. Confused, we explained ourselves to the family—and that’s when they told us she had been missing for almost a year. They had been searching for her with no luck.
We brought her relatives home with us, hoping she would return. But she never did.
It was only later when my uncle led us to the place where he had first met her—in the bushes near a railway line—that the mystery was solved. Buried in a shallow hole, wrapped in a plastic bag, were her skeletal remains.
The police were called, forensics came, and DNA confirmed it was indeed her.
After that, my uncle slipped back into his old ways, mentally unstable once again, as if the presence that had kept him steady had finally left for good.
Sometimes I wonder—was she really in love with him, or was he just the vessel she needed to lead us to her forgotten grave?
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