I’ve never been the type to crave chaos. At 29, I live alone in the house I fought to buy, without a husband, kids, or pets. Just me and my one true luxury: my backyard pool.
That pool is my therapy.
It’s where I float on summer evenings with a cold drink in hand, headphones in, and the rest of the world shut out. I’ve always said that it’s the one thing keeping me sane. And considering who lives next door, I mean that literally.
Jason is my 40-year-old nightmare in human form. He’s loud, obnoxious, and always shirtless like he’s auditioning for some reality dating show that no one asked for. He moved into the house beside mine two years ago, and since then, every weekend has felt like I’m living next to a nightclub without walls.
Booming bass.
Shrieking, drunk laughter. Foul language echoing past midnight. And not just from Jason. His crowd is just as unruly. I once knocked on his door at 1 a.m. after a particularly horrible Saturday night. He opened it holding a beer, and just smirked like I was the uptight neighbor in a sitcom.
“We’re just having fun, Jules,” he slurred. “You should come by sometime.”
As if.
Still, I tried to coexist.
I bought noise-canceling curtains. Earplugs. I even tried meditating. But nothing helped when his speakers were blasting EDM remixes of ’90s hits at 3 a.m.
So when my job sent me out of state for a two-month project, I felt a weird sense of relief.
“No pool time for a while,” my best friend Kyle teased me as we did FaceTime the night before my flight.
I pouted. “Yeah, but also no Jason. So… silver lining?”
He laughed. “Just make sure he doesn’t throw a rave in your yard while you’re gone.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Not funny.”
But it turns out it wasn’t a joke.
Three weeks into my trip, halfway across the country, buried in back-to-back meetings, I got a text from Kyle at 11:47 p.m.
“Is this your house?”
Attached were photos.
The first thing I noticed was the pool.
But not my pool. No. This pool was murky; the water was a cloudy mess, as if someone had dumped a hundred cheap margaritas into it. There were floating beer cans and inflatable flamingos everywhere.
Random people I didn’t recognize were lounging on my pool chairs, some fully clothed, others in bikinis that left nothing to the imagination.
In the background were my backyard fence, my sliding glass doors, and my poor garden gnome — flipped over with a plastic cup balanced on its head.
The next photo showed a car parked right in the middle of my front lawn, its tires sunken deep into the grass like it had been there for hours.
My heart shot into my throat.
I barely remember dialing Jason’s number. My hands were shaking so badly I had to tap the screen twice just to hit “call.”
He picked up after three rings.
“Hello?” His voice was loud — music blaring in the background, laughter echoing.
“Jason?!” I snapped. “What the hell is going on at my house?!”
There was a pause. Then he chuckled.
“Oh, hey Jules,” he said, slurring slightly. “You wouldn’t believe it! Your place is, like, perfect for parties. That pool? Amazing.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
“You broke into my backyard? Are you out of your mind?!”
He actually laughed louder.
“Relax! We just hopped the fence. It’s not like we trashed anything.”
I nearly screamed. “I have photos, Jason! The pool is destroyed, there’s garbage everywhere, and someone PARKED ON MY LAWN!”
Another cackle. “That was Manny. Classic Manny. Don’t worry, he’ll move it in the morning.”
“Jason, this is breaking and entering! You can’t—”
Then it happened.
In the middle of his obnoxious laughter, his tone shifted.
“Wait… wait, what the—”
A beat of silence. Then a high-pitched, panicked scream.
“WHAT IS HAPPENING?! NOOO!!! NOT THIS!”
The call cut off.
I stared at my phone, blinking. What had just happened?
I called back, but it went straight to voicemail.
I texted Kyle. “He just screamed and hung up. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Kyle’s reply came quickly. “Karma?”
I wanted to agree, but a deep unease settled in my stomach.
That was three weeks ago.
I didn’t hear from Jason again.
By the time I returned home, I was a cocktail of emotions: rage, anxiety, curiosity. My Uber pulled into the driveway, and I braced myself for the worst.
The front lawn was ruined.
Brown tire tracks. Dead grass. Trash was tucked behind bushes like someone had tried to “clean up” and failed.
I unlocked my door and stepped inside. The house was untouched. Thank God for deadbolts.
But the backyard?
It was worse in person.
The pool looked like a science experiment gone wrong. The water was greenish-gray, and the bottom was coated with some slimy film. Beer bottles, a pair of men’s swim trunks, two broken plastic chairs, and, bizarrely, a soggy birthday banner that read “CHEERS TO 40 YEARS!”
I stood there, shaking.
“I’m going to kill him,” I muttered.
Kyle drove over that evening. He whistled when he saw the damage.
“Oh, wow,” he said. “You weren’t exaggerating.”
“I tried to file a report,” I said, handing him my phone. “But since there was no forced entry into the house itself, they said it’s a civil matter.”
“What about the pool?”
“Unless I catch him admitting it… It’s basically my word against his.”
I was furious. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that last phone call. That scream. That sudden cut-off. I hadn’t seen Jason once since I got back.
He wasn’t in his yard. His car was gone.
The lights in his house stayed off for days.
Days turned into a week.
Jason’s house remained eerily silent.
There were no parties. I didn’t hear footsteps on his porch. The usual half-dressed guests lounging on inflatable chairs in his backyard were gone. Even the booming stereo that used to shake my windows had fallen completely silent.
Nothing.
Kyle and I were sitting on my patio the following Friday, sipping lemonade. The pool guy had just finished draining what looked like radioactive soup from my pool. The smell still lingered in the air, like wet beer, sunscreen, and something decaying.
“You know,” Kyle said, “I haven’t seen his car once.”
“Me neither,” I replied, frowning. “It’s like he vanished.”
“Maybe he skipped town before you could sue him.”
I shook my head. “He’s too cocky for that. Something definitely happened.”
I meant it.
That scream I heard over the phone wasn’t some drunk guy goofing off. It was pure terror. It had haunted my dreams since the night it happened. My brain kept trying to fill in the blanks, like flipping through static on a broken TV.
And then one morning, I got my answer.
I was watering the front garden when a white sedan pulled into Jason’s driveway. Out stepped an older woman and a teenage boy, maybe 15 or 16. The woman looked exhausted, with deep circles under her eyes and her lips tight. She walked up to the door, rang the bell, and waited. Then rang it again.
Curious, I walked over. “Hi. Are you looking for Jason?”
She turned, startled. “Yes. I’m his sister, Denise.”
“Oh,” I hesitated. “He hasn’t been home in weeks.”
Her face fell.
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
I glanced at the boy beside her. He looked nervous, hands shoved deep in his pockets, eyes darting around like he didn’t want to be there.
“What happened?” I asked gently.
Denise sighed. “It’s complicated. Do you mind if we sit for a second?”
We sat on the brick steps of Jason’s front porch, the sun warm on our backs, the silence between us unusually heavy.
She finally spoke.
“Jason started acting strange about three weeks ago. He called me in the middle of the night, panicked. Said something was wrong in his head. He kept repeating, ‘It’s not mine. It’s not mine.’ I thought he was drunk. He always parties, right?”
I nodded slowly.
“He said he was hearing voices. Someone — or something — had followed him home. He couldn’t sleep. Said the house didn’t feel like his anymore.” She paused. “Then he hung up, screaming.”
My chest tightened.
“That was the night he was at my house.”
Denise turned sharply. “What do you mean?”
So I told her.
Everything.
I told her how I’d been out of state, how he’d trespassed, and about the party — the pictures, the damage. Then the phone call, where he laughed until something suddenly terrified him. He screamed, and the line went dead.
Denise looked horrified.
“He didn’t tell me any of that.”
“Did he say what he saw?”
She hesitated. “He kept saying he saw… a woman in the water.”
My blood ran cold.
“He said she was floating face-down. Long dark hair. Pale skin. But when he got closer, she vanished. Then he said the water started turning black.”
I stared at her.
“There was no woman,” I whispered.
Denise exhaled shakily. “I know. But he swore it. Then he said he started hearing music at night that wasn’t playing. Wet footprints inside his house. The sound of water dripping, but nothing was leaking.”
Kyle had stepped outside by then, listening with wide eyes.
Denise continued, “Three days after that call, I found him curled up in my basement. Shaking. He was unable to speak.”
I didn’t know what to say.
She looked away. “Then one morning, he just disappeared. No call, no message. Nothing. I started to think maybe he’d come back here.”
We sat there for a long moment, the sound of birds in the trees the only thing breaking the silence.
Eventually, she stood. “I’m really sorry about your house. Jason’s always been reckless, yes, but he’s not a bad person. Just… lost. I just hope he finds his way back.”
I nodded gently.
“Thanks for telling me. I hope he’s okay. But if you haven’t heard from him at all, you might want to consider filing a missing person’s report.”
She nodded with a tired smile, then turned and walked back to the car with her son. As they pulled away, I stayed on the porch, still trying to make sense of everything.
That night, I sat on the edge of my newly cleaned pool, toes skimming the surface.
The moon cast silver ripples across the water.
I thought about what Jason saw. Or thought he saw.
I’ll never know if it was guilt, a bad trip, or something none of us could explain. But something in him cracked that night, like the chaos he built finally caught up and folded in on itself.
And the strange part is, I never had to lift a finger. I didn’t press charges or file a civil suit. I didn’t scream or threaten or hunt him down for revenge.
Life handled it for me.
Whatever he saw in that pool — whether it came from his conscience or somewhere darker — it shook him to the core. It stripped away the arrogance, the noise, the reckless ego that used to pour through our walls every weekend.
He was found days later, not far from his sister’s home, in the middle of what she called a “severe break.” He got help. He’s in recovery now. Taking it day by day. And from what I’ve heard, he’s doing better.
The silence since then has been its own kind of calm.
A few weeks after everything settled, I finally threw a quiet little get-together. Just close friends, soft music, and laughter that didn’t rattle the walls or wake the neighbors.
Kyle handed me a glass of wine as we sat by the freshly cleaned pool, the surface calm and clear.
“Hard to believe that all of this started with your backyard,” he said, half-smiling.
I gave a small laugh. “Yeah. Feels like another lifetime.”
He glanced at me.
“Are you doing okay now? I mean… after everything with Jason.”
I nodded. “I think so. I feel calmer, like things finally found their balance again.”
He raised his glass. “To peace, and water that doesn’t need a hazmat team.”
I clinked mine against his. “I’ll drink to that.”
I still don’t know if I believe in ghosts. But I do believe in consequences.
And sometimes, they don’t come with courtrooms or angry confrontations.
Sometimes, they arrive quietly — like a whisper in the dark or a ripple across still water.
And maybe that’s what Jason needed. Not punishment. Just enough of a wake-up call to find his way back.
Wherever that leads him, I hope he gets there.