Future's bright

Cheryl is a young woman fresh out of school. She is what one can expect of a 23-year-old.

With her whole life ahead of her, she has already put her studies behind her.

A graduate trip beckons in a few weeks, before she embarks on her first job proper.

With everything good, what else could go wrong?

But not quite right

It turns out, it is that one thing in the house that is just getting to her that none of her equally well-adjusted family has noticed.

For how long she has had this feeling, Cheryl cannot tell.

She honestly cannot remember exactly when that oppressive sense of dread and foreboding occurred. But whenever she walks into the laundry room, it is always a bit ominous. It's like there's a heaviness in the air, as if the dryer was left running before she walked in and someone turned it off.

The funny thing was, her family doesn't even own a dryer.

But it's not just the altered humidity of the place or the dew.

And then strange things begin to happen.

Washing machine is not working right

Initially, there were a few odd stains on her clothing and she would notice it, but shrugged it off, and continue picking her clothes from the laundry pile and putting them in the wash.

Then there are more odd stains, some even resembling dried blood, even though the clothes are coming out of the washing machine -- after they have been washed.

Like what the hell, washing machine? You haunted? LOL?

But the stains always appear at the same few places on different pieces of clothing. The side of the left knee is always scraped and the cloth looks flimsy. The left shoulder and collar appears to have stains. And are those clumps of hair stuck on it? And some of her clothes in the laundry pile even look like they are torn at certain parts or have frayed quite badly.

After a week of getting annoyed her clothes have been getting ruined, she decides she needs to inspect the washing machine -- even though it is scary as heck, because who hasn't watched horror movies? Never mind that, as she takes a deep breath and a torch light to it, by shining a light inside the front loading machine, sticking her head as far in as she can possibly go without wanting to scream.

But first, of course, she makes sure the plug is not in the socket.

If her sense of smell is working just fine, there isn't anything amiss. But if her sense of smell is a bit off and she is feeling paranoid? Well, she is quite sure there's a stench of something dead inside, or is that her imagination because WTH, it is just a washing machine that is falling apart?

Machines can be changed, but not fate

With each passing day, Cheryl would notice more of her clothes getting stained with what increasingly looks like even more real dried blood.

All this while she is getting even more disturbed, like someone or something is reaching out and trying to connect with her. The washing machine continues to sit in the corner and appears to be staring back at her, which she can tell by now, as she can always tell from the corner of her eye, in that particular dark, dank, humid, dew-ridden part of the house.

There's only so much she can take. She is going to purchase a new, more high-tech washing machine with AI fuzzy logic system that will not only drain fluids and spin faster, but even uses less water because, hey, environmentally-friendly.

Coming clean

And this is the moment that would change her life. Well, not exactly, but yeah.

Even though Cheryl has returned to the routine of doing her laundry again and again, this time she looks down at her summery blue dress she has on and sees a splotch of crimson red becoming bigger, and redder, and wetter, as it spreads in an ever-growing patch, a miasma of haemoglobin and bile, and are those bodily fluids?

Because the coagulated mess is not recognisable just by looking at it, but it sure smells like what happens when someone spills her guts out...

And that is when it hits her: She recognises that the splotch on her body is of blood oozing out of an open wound in her abdomen, because that is exactly the last thing she ever saw.

When she was alive.

Where the stains come from

A sudden flashback -- like her whole life literally flashed before her eyes -- she saw the scene that was the last scene in her life.

She had just stepped off the curb and walked right into the path of an oncoming car. And she got hit.

The car's fender, being the first part that came into contact with her left knee, broke her lower limbs in multiple places, ploughing right into her and scooping her off her feet.

The left side of her skull shattered the windscreen, dislodging flesh and hair, her body getting twisted and mangled before it even landed on impact.

Cheryl was rolling on the roof of the car -- only to get thrown off again when the car braked hard.

Her broken body laid on the asphalt, with blood oozing from her head, abdomen, shoulders scarped, knee broken...

In that moment of clarity, she could see the washing machine wasn't haunted.

It just couldn't wash away the stains of her death.

Because the washing machine all along was just trying to tell her: She was already dead.

The end.

This Almost True Singapore Ghost Story was brought to you by Honestbee. Now, that's eerie.

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