👻 The Horror of the Casablanca Tunnel 👻

The air above Jakarta is a perpetual haze of exhaust and humidity, but nowhere does it feel heavier, more suffocating, than around the infamous Casablanca Tunnel. It’s a modern scar on the city’s concrete face, a busy thoroughfare by day, yet a whispered legend of dread by night. Locals and seasoned taxi drivers alike tell tales of its oppressive atmosphere, of sudden, unexplained chills, and of the things that linger in the shadows cast by the relentless sodium lamps.
Our protagonist, Adrian, was a man of cold logic and colder resolve. A young architect tasked with a late-night survey of a nearby overpass project, he had dismissed the tunnel's notoriety as mere superstition—the overactive imaginations of a bustling metropolis. Until that night.
It was just past 2:00 AM when Adrian found himself driving alone towards the tunnel's mouth. The city’s roar had subsided into a low, menacing thrum. As his headlights cut into the blackness, the tunnel yawned like a colossal, hungry mouth.
He adjusted his glasses, gripping the steering wheel. The entrance sign was grimy, its once-bright yellow faded to a sickly ochre. The moment his car crossed the threshold, the air conditioning sputtered and died, replaced by a sudden, icy drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the external weather.
"Just a maintenance issue," he muttered, trying to sound convinced.
The tunnel’s interior was a long, desolate cylinder of grey concrete. It was almost perfectly straight, stretching out to what looked like a pinprick of light at the far end, yet it felt interminable. Normally, even at this hour, there would be the occasional speeding car or motorcycle. Tonight, the tunnel was utterly empty.
Adrian drove slowly, his tires whispering on the asphalt. The silence was the first horror. It was a thick, unnatural silence that swallowed the engine's quiet purr and magnified the erratic beating of his own heart. He reached for the radio, a sudden, desperate need for human noise. He tried multiple stations; all delivered the same, chilling static.
Then came the second, subtler dread. On the concrete wall to his right, a shadow flickered. It wasn’t cast by his car, nor by the spaced-out overhead lights. This shadow was too tall, too elongated, moving with a jerky, impossible gait. He slammed on the brakes, the sudden screech echoing deafeningly in the confined space.
He looked. Nothing. Just the bare, damp wall.
"Tired. Need coffee," he told the rearview mirror, his voice a pathetic croak.
He continued driving, but his eyes were now glued to the mirror. And that’s when he saw her.
In the faint, distorted reflection, standing impossibly close to his back bumper, was a figure. A woman. She was dressed in white, the fabric translucent and clinging, suggesting a damp burial shroud. Her long, black hair obscured most of her face, but the small portion visible was enough: skin the colour of old parchment, eyes that were only abyssal hollows.
Adrian's breath hitched. He accelerated, flooring the pedal. The car surged forward, but the woman... she wasn't running. She was gliding, her feet never touching the ground, maintaining the exact same distance behind him. She moved with an unnatural, terrifying grace.
Panic clawed at Adrian's throat. He risked a glance at the side mirror. In it, the figure seemed to be tilting her head, a slow, deliberate movement that finally exposed her face.
It was twisted in a silent, eternal scream.
But the worst part wasn't her appearance. It was the sudden, overwhelming sound that assaulted him—a collective, mournful wail that seemed to emanate not from the woman, but from the very walls of the tunnel itself. It was the sound of a thousand voices weeping, whispering, and shrieking, all simultaneously demanding his attention, his soul.
He covered his ears, momentarily losing control of the wheel. The car swerved violently, scraping the wall. The sound was deafening, a psychic assault that brought tears to his eyes and a sharp, stabbing pain behind his temples.
He fought through the agony, his foot hard on the accelerator. Must get out. Must get to the light.
He glanced back at the rearview mirror one last time.
She was no longer behind him.
She was inside the car.
Or, rather, the reflection of her was inside the car. She sat in the back seat, her form flickering between translucent and fully solid. Her head was bowed slightly, and when she slowly lifted it, Adrian saw what she held in her lap: a worn, muddied doll. The doll’s eyes were sewn shut, and its fabric body was riddled with holes, as if it had been buried and unearthed countless times.
As Adrian watched, horrified, the woman's mouth opened—wider, impossibly wider—and the ghostly wailing in the tunnel intensified to a maddening crescendo. She didn't make a sound, but the doll did.
A high-pitched, childish giggle, full of malevolence and cold joy, cut through the wail.
"Why did you forget me?" a voice, thin and reedy as a broken music box, whispered, right next to Adrian's ear.
He didn't scream. He couldn't. His vocal cords were locked in pure terror. He slammed the car into a lower gear and drove with a suicidal recklessness, the engine howling now, finally drowning out the spectral noise.
He saw the exit—a blinding, glorious beacon of white light.
With a final, desperate burst, he shot out of the tunnel.
The moment he emerged, the chilling wail vanished. The air-conditioning roared back to life, blasting hot, humid air. The car stereo instantly tuned into a cheerful pop song. The sun was a promise on the horizon.
Adrian pulled over, shaking uncontrollably. He checked the back seat. Empty. He checked the side mirrors. Nothing but the normal, polluted street outside.
He sat there for a long time, trying to reconcile the logical world with the sheer, unadulterated horror he had just witnessed. He was still a man of logic, but now, his logic was permanently etched with the knowledge of something terrible.
Later, a grizzled toll booth operator would tell him the story he refused to believe: of the pregnant woman and her daughter who perished in a collapse during the tunnel’s early construction, their bodies lost in the concrete. The locals said the girl, forever searching for her lost doll, often mistook lone drivers for her father.
Adrian never used the Casablanca Tunnel again. Even years later, in the dead of night, he could still hear that reedy, innocent, yet utterly evil whisper in the silence of his own home:
"Why did you forget me?"