I looked in the mirror, but somebody else was looking back at me. This person was masked, but I could see her long hair, or maybe it was a man wearing a wig. I turned around, but there was no one there. I turned around again to look in the mirror, and again I saw this masked person. Suddenly, she approached, holding a knife that looked very sharp. I screamed with all my might and woke up, and my wife woke up, too. I was dreaming, a nightmare.

I got up to wash my face because I had been sweating during my dream. When I faced the mirror in the bathroom, I saw the masked person appear again. I cried out even more loudly than before, and I felt my heart beating very fast. My wife ran up to me and told me there was no one there besides us. We looked everywhere in every room of the house, even in the cupboards, without finding anything. I looked on the Internet to try to understand what was happening to me. There, I found out about what they call virtual hallucinations syndrome, in which dreams appear in waking life, as real images.

The next day, I ran into our neighbor, who told me that a woman had been killed a few years ago in the house we had just bought six months ago. The murderer was caught on the door camera, running away from the house alone. But the woman’s body has never been found. I then understood why it had been so easy for us to find this house in a tight market and at an affordable price; it was a haunted house. But I didn’t tell my wife. 

Three weeks later, my wife told me that her company was offering her a much better-paid job, in a city in the north of the country, not far from mountains. I persuaded her to accept the offer on the pretext that I would like to take up skiing. Two weeks later, we moved and put our house up for sale. 

Today, what haunts me is not having told the buyer what I experienced there.