The haunted house

A certain man's first wife was taken into Allah's mercy, leaving him with six obedient and hardworking daughters. The man remarried, for it is not Allah's wish that a man live alone. His second wife also gave him six daughters, but they, like their mother, were lazy and complaining.

The father showed his love equally to all his girls, but the stepmother and her daughters grew jealous of the older girls. The stepmother wanted to get rid of her stepdaughters but did not know how. Then, one day, a neighbor told her a story of great secrecy: “On yonder hill, hidden from the eye by a clump of trees, there is a house. Once it may have been well-built and beautiful, but now it is empty. No one dares go there, and hardly anyone ever talks about it. Whoever enters the house will stay there forever, or perhaps die, no one knows, because nobody has ever returned from there to tell of what he has seen.”

This gave the woman an idea. That night, when her husband came home, she pretended great sadness. When he asked her what the matter was, she said: “My dear husband, I have not seen my parents for such a long time. Nor my two brothers, nor my two sisters. They all live in the city, so far, far away. When can I see them? My heart longs for them. Please, may I invite them to come and stay with us for a few days?”

“But where will they stay?” the husband asked. “We have barely enough room as we are.”

“Oh, that is simple,” she said. “On the hill there is an empty house without an owner. We can send our six eldest daughters to spend a night there, and when they come back we can send our six youngest daughters to spend the next night there, and so on.”

A ghastly sight. The husband, who had never heard about the empty house because few people in the village ever talked about it, consented. He even admired his wife’s resourcefulness. And so, when the guests arrived, the six eldest girls were sent to the empty house on the hill, totally ignorant of the terrible rumors.

Armed with brooms and buckets, food and perfumes, the girls worked hard to clean the dirty house with water from a nearby well. They also found plenty of firewood nearby. (Nobody had ever dared to collect it from that place before.)