My Granny's Tale by Rita NA1

I am writing a composition based on an actual true story, which I have heard from my Jewish granny a long time ago when I was child.

On Sunday morning a man disappears on his way to the bakery. His wife liked her bread with butter, so every Sunday morning at 10 o’clock he went to buy it. 

The husband always comes back into the house at 10:10 o’clock. However, this morning, he did not come back. Twenty minutes after his wife got up and decided to go out, too.  If Wellington is speaking with that silly neighbour again, I will be quite annoyed, she thought. She walked quickly through the streets which were unusually empty at that  time. Faraway a dog’s bark had broken an uncomfortable silence when she arrived at the opened bakery door.  

There was nobody in the bakery; the baskets were full with ready-backed croissants and cakes, which smelled especially tasty for Gudrun. It seemed that no one bought any bread or anything else that morning. She shouted, but got no answer.  On the left of the bakery the neighbours’ houses were completely calm. Gudrun thought that the village was like a ghost village now, but in her mind found this idea absurd. So convinced she went to ring the doorbell next house, the Murphy house. She waited while she listened whether a noise in the house indicated that somebody was inside. The silence was deep and icy so that she could hear only her heartbeat. Scared, Gudrun went from house to house and knocked at the door and shouted her neighbours’ names. If they had heard her broken shaky voice, they could have answered her. But nobody answered.

Suddenly Gudrun saw several footsteps on the early snow, some big and some little, leading away from the village.  The woman began to run desperately following these footsteps. They were the only evidence of living human beings.  However she did not catch up to anybody and the early snow had melted and the footsteps had vanished, so that Gudrun exhausted and hopeless came down.

In brief, this is a story about a ghost village, whose people disappeared and nobody knows until now, what is really happening with them. Gudrun felt really terrified after this experience, said my granny, and she hid in the mountains where she lived alone without human contact until she shuffled off.  So, if truth be told, that was the most frightening story that I have heard in my life.