An Old Phone Rings and a Cold Room at the Dacha

There were a couple of strange cases in my life.

1. We're sitting with my grandma in the room relaxing, grandma's watching TV, I'm glued to my phone. We had a Soviet-era "wall" made of various cupboards and china cabinets, rags of all kinds in the cupboards, and in the china cabinets various holiday dishes, vases and all sorts of junk. So anyway, we're sitting there chilling and suddenly in one of the vases an ancient portable Motorola phone started ringing, the one with an antenna. We looked at each other, freaked the fuck out, and while we were still processing what the hell was going on, the ringing stopped. The phone is really ancient, it probably hadn't been charged in like 10 years and was just gathering dust in the china cabinet, it didn't even have a battery in it. But the ringing did happen. The phone originally belonged to my great-grandfather, who died about 7-8 years before this story.

2. At our dacha, on the 1st floor we have 2 bedrooms and a big terrace. So in 1 of the rooms, which was big and had two beds, I mostly lived with my sister in the summer when we were herded off to the dacha, and in the neighboring one nobody really lived, idk why it ended up that way. My parents were always in their room on the 2nd floor. So anyway, that second room was about 2 times smaller, it had only one window instead of two like the big room, and it was constantly dark and cold. Eventually my sister moved there for the summer when we got older. Well, not the point. Anyway, that room always had this strange and creepy atmosphere, it was constantly cold in there despite 30-degree heat outside, and when I went in there as a kid to poke around out of curiosity I always had an eerie feeling that someone was watching me, and I couldn't stay in that room for long, it really presses down on you with its creepy atmosphere, plus there was a huge wardrobe in there that a full-grown person could fit inside, and I was always afraid that my great-grandmother's ghost was standing in there. The second room was the complete opposite, it had 2 windows, there was always light and it was warm, a bright big room. By the way, my great-grandmother lived in that small creepy room, and my great-grandfather, whose phone rang in the story above, lived in that big room. I remember opening the door to the small room and something small and ginger just darted toward the bed and disappeared, I got pretty freaked out back then, but I was like an adult at 13 and thought like "yeah I don't give a fuck, I'll beat the shit out of you" and boldly went on doing my business in the room.

Just remembered more while writing. Around '18, when we were already packing things at the end of summer to move back to the city, I was lying in the big room chilling and reading some girly book like sorceresses, there's no internet there, you had to reread old magazines and random books, and suddenly I hear someone breathing in my wardrobe. Fuck, I got so freaked out and started calling my sister, who was in the next room. As soon as she came in, we both fucking bolted out of there.