The old landlady was hospitalized for treatment and rented out her house to a salesman.
The salesman was an outsider, in his thirties. Per company policy, he wore a white dress shirt every day, carrying himself with a gentlemanly air and speaking with impeccable courtesy.
On the surface, he was pleasant and agreeable. Inside, he was riddled with wounds — a spectacularly unlucky man.
No matter what he did, things always fell through for the most inexplicable reasons.
Strange things happened around him, too. He'd have nightmares at night — dreams of his wife being dismembered and stuffed into drawers. He'd toss and turn with worry the entire night, only to wake up in the morning and realize he didn't even have a girlfriend.
He'd step outside into clear blue skies, and halfway to his destination, a downpour would hit. Soaked to the bone, he'd duck into a breakfast shop to wait it out and grab a bite, only to pat his pockets and discover his wallet was gone.
No taxis would stop for him. He'd walk to the office, get chewed out by his boss for being late, and every customer he dealt with for the rest of the day would treat him like dirt. To top it all off, he'd come home to find his door pried open and a thief rummaging through his place.
What would be a rough day for anyone else was just a normal day for the salesman.
But what truly drove him to despair wasn't the bad luck. It was that the house he lived in seemed to be haunted.
He lived alone in the old house. At night he'd watch TV to unwind, and every time something funny came on, before he could even laugh, he'd hear laughter coming from right behind him.
There were plenty of other incidents like that. He'd be halfway through a shower, and someone would hand him the shampoo. He'd go to the bathroom without tissue, and a roll of toilet paper would roll in on its own from outside.
He'd once been a firm atheist, but his experience renting this house was slowly overturning his entire worldview.
To prove to himself he wasn't losing his mind, he bought a camera and set it up around the house.
After a week of recording, he discovered that there really did seem to be a ghost in the house — and it was hiding inside the drawers.
The salesman tried sealing off every wardrobe and drawer with wooden boards. The ghost never appeared again. But his luck only got worse. About a month later, he was fired by his boss, and on the way home, he was killed in a car accident.
It was only after death that the salesman learned there had been an evil spirit attached to him all along. Before, the ghosts residing in the apartment had been keeping it in check. But once he sealed off the drawers and wardrobes, the other spirits had no way to restrain the evil ghost anymore. In the end, it killed him.
The protagonist of the fourth story was an old landlady. Several consecutive tenants in the house she rented out had met with accidents. Wracked with guilt, she stubbornly believed everything was her fault.
Gradually, the old woman's mind began to unravel. She became convinced that her children and the previous two tenants had never left — that everyone was still living in that old house.
She asked the neighbors and people in the area over and over again. The old neighbors who knew the house's history kept their distance, thinking of her as an ill-omened woman and deliberately avoiding her.
Some even moved away as though fleeing a disaster. The building's tenants dwindled, and the old woman grew ever more silent.
At some point, rumors spread through the neighborhood that a certain room was haunted. The old woman herself became synonymous with ghosts and madness.
Everyone stayed far away from her. No one wanted anything to do with her.
This went on for a while, until one day the old woman met a destitute painter under an overpass.
The painter's face was bruised and swollen — he'd clearly just been in a fight. Feeling sorry for him, the old woman asked the painter to draw a portrait of her deceased son.
She'd only meant to use it as an excuse to buy the man a meal. But the sketch he threw together turned out to bear an uncanny resemblance to her son — not just the features, but the bearing, the expression in his eyes, all identical.
The old woman treasured the painter's drawing and hung it on the wall.
What she didn't expect was that the very next evening, someone came knocking to rent the room — and the new tenant was the painter.
The painter hadn't expected the landlady to be the old woman, either. He'd simply scoured the old part of town and found that this room was the cheapest one available.
Life is nothing but a string of coincidences woven together. The painter had met the first person who truly appreciated his work and gained his very first fan. And the old woman had found someone who wasn't afraid of her, someone willing to talk to her.
The painter became the new tenant in the old house. The old woman charged him only a symbolic fee and treated him like her own child. Her favorite thing to do was listen to him talk about his dreams.