"She Still Texts from the Grave" –

The first text came during her funeral.

It buzzed against my thigh like a rude, mechanical whisper amid the preacher’s eulogy. I glanced down at my phone, fully prepared to silence it—until I saw the name. Emily. My girlfriend. Deceased. Buried, at that moment, six feet beneath our feet. The message simply read: “Why aren’t you answering?”

At first, I thought it was some cruel trick—a hacker, maybe, or some weird phone glitch. I didn’t even tell anyone. How could I? “Hey, my dead girlfriend just texted me,” isn’t something you drop into casual conversation while people are crying over her casket.

I kept staring at the screen until my cousin nudged me. “Dude, it’s your turn to speak.”

I stumbled up, eyes still flicking back to the message. Emily’s voice echoed in my head, sarcastic and amused. “You better not make me sound boring, Ryan.” I managed a short, clumsy tribute. Said the right things. Left out the part where the dead were now digitally haunting me.

Later that night, alone in my apartment, I opened our old chat thread. The message was still there. Blue bubble. No glitch. No error.

“Why aren’t you answering?”

I typed back: “Emily…?”

Three blinking dots appeared.

I swear my heart stopped.

“It’s cold down here.”

The phone slipped from my hand. I let it lie face-down on the floor while my mind raced for a logical explanation. Ghosts don’t text. People don’t claw their way back through 5G networks. I remembered her phone had been buried with her—she wanted it, even joked that she'd be texting me from the afterlife.

Now I wasn’t laughing.

The next few days blurred. More messages followed—always short, always chilling.

“It’s dark.”
“I miss the light.”
“Why did you let them close the lid?”

I didn’t reply after that. I couldn’t.

Then came the audio file.

It appeared randomly in our chat one night around 2:17 a.m. No sender, no description. Just a waveform icon and the message: “Listen.”

My thumb hovered over it for a full five minutes. Finally, I pressed play.

A soft rustling, like fabric against wood. Faint breathing. A whisper: “Ryan…” Then scratching. Hard, desperate scraping. Something hollow thudding again and again, like fists against wood.

I threw the phone across the room.

But it didn’t stop there.

My lights began flickering. The sound of scratching echoed through the walls, even when my phone was off. My TV turned on by itself—static, then black, then her face for a split second, mouth open like she was screaming silently.

One night, I went to the cemetery. Needed to see for myself. Her grave looked undisturbed—but as I knelt beside it, my phone buzzed again.

“I can hear you. Don’t leave me.”

I dropped the phone and backed away. My breath clouded in the summer night air, the sudden cold impossible to explain. A sound rose beneath the ground—a muffled moan, like someone trying to scream with soil in their mouth.

I ran.

Days turned into a torment. Sleep became impossible. I saw her face in reflections—in my coffee, in car windows, even in puddles. Always looking up. Always staring.

I tried deleting the messages. They came back.

I tried destroying the phone. Bought a new one.

The texts resumed the next day.

Then, I remembered something Emily had said once, during one of our late-night talks, lying on the couch.

“If I ever die, and you ghost me, I swear I’ll haunt your ass. Love doesn’t just disappear, you know?”

I thought she was joking.

Now, I wasn’t so sure.

I contacted a psychic. She told me to visit the grave one last time and speak aloud the truth I’d never said while she was alive.

So I went. Night again. Same cold creeping in.

I stood at her headstone and whispered, “I’m sorry. I loved you, but I was going to break up with you. I didn’t want to lie anymore. I should’ve told you. I’m sorry, Em. I’m so sorry.”

Silence.

No texts came that night. Or the next. Or the next.

I thought it was over.

Until this morning.

I woke up to a new message. This one different.

“I know. But now… you’re mine.”

Then my phone died completely—battery fully charged, just gone black. Lights out. No signal.

That was three hours ago.

Now, there’s scratching inside my walls again. And the mirrors?

She’s not just staring anymore.

She’s smiling.