Hell Theater
Try smiling

Try smiling (Try to Smile) is a story about a foreign teacher who lives and teaches in Japan. He found something strange in the apartment where he died.

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I lived in Japan for 2 years, far away on the island of Kyushu, in a very rural town. I teach English there and I live in an apartment complex with 9 other English teachers and several Japanese families.

All of our apartments are two-story, townhouse-style. My apartment is the latest of the group. Before me, there was another English teacher who lived there for 2 years, but before that as far as I knew, that the apartment was empty.

I first moved in early August, which was very hot. The only AC in the apartment was downstairs to avoid the scorching heat in my room.

That's how it all started.

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One day, I came home from school and found my back door wide open. It was a sliding glass door and before I went to school, I had locked it safely. I locked the front door too. At first, I thought maybe someone had barged in, but nothing was taken and nothing shifted from its place.

That night, I was downstairs and I was just lying in bed to sleep. Suddenly, I heard footsteps upstairs. At first, it sounded like someone was pacing between the two-bedroom hallways. Then, they suddenly stopped.

At this point, I was still lying on the bed, shaking and holding my breath. I was afraid that anyone who had entered earlier managed to hide upstairs or the crawl space. After a minute of silence, I heard a very loud explosion, as if something big and heavy had just fallen and hit the floor above me.

I ran out of my apartment and went to my neighbors house. I convinced my neighbor to come back with me and we searched upstairs, but we found nothing.

It happens every night, like clockwork.

One night, I was at a local bar with one of the other English teachers. He's been living there for 5 years. I started telling stories about strange things that kept happening every night and how I couldn't sleep because of it.

"Well, there's a reason for that" he said. "Before you, there was another teacher in the apartment, but before him, the apartment was empty. No one will stay there because a woman hangs herself on top after her husband leaves her. The Japanese would not rent it because they thought the place was cursed, so it was empty until the Education Council decided to rent it out to foreign teachers. "

At the time, I thought he was just making it up to try and scare me, but one day, I asked the boss about it. He immediately turned pale and said that the other teachers should not say such things to me. I tried to dig in for more information, but he was unwilling to confirm or deny it.

One day, while cleaning the apartment, I noticed something at the bottom of the window sill. Someone has engraved the words "Try smiling", in Japanese, about 10 times. When I saw that, my blood was completely cold.

I still don't know what really happened in that apartment, but every night during the summer, until I started sleeping upstairs again, the noises kept happening.