Horror story: 1st floor of the funeral home. The empty coffin.

okay I wasn't going to post this but it's been eating at me.

"Someone's funeral. The coffin was empty. The family said nothing. Mourners just bowed in silence. And after it was over... the coffin disappeared."

Summer 2023. My friend's uncle died and I went to pay my respects. Small funeral home on the outskirts of Seoul. Sweltering outside but inside it was weirdly, unnaturally cold.

First thing I noticed walking in: too quiet. No crying. No murmuring. Just thick incense smell hanging in the air. And then I saw it. A coffin on one side of the room. Open. Not like cracked open. Just. Open.

I glanced inside by accident.

Empty.

I figured maybe he'd been cremated already, or the body hadn't been brought in yet. Nobody mentioned it. I quietly asked my friend and he just shook his head.

"I don't really know. The family isn't saying much. They just told us to bow."

So we bowed. At an empty coffin. And nobody said a word about it.

That night I had a dream.

The same funeral home. The same coffin. Except this time there was someone inside.

It was me.

My face, eyes closed. Lid still open. People standing around me one by one, all in black, all completely silent, just staring down at me. And the person at the front, head bowed, spoke to me.

"You need a place too, don't you."

I woke up gasping. Middle of the night, soaked in sweat. And I swear to god the incense smell from the funeral home was just. IN MY ROOM. Filling the whole space.

A few days later I texted my friend again.

He told me something that made my stomach drop.

"Hey so. The coffin from that day. It's gone. CCTV went out in the early morning and when they checked the next day the coffin just wasn't there anymore."

Police got involved. No leads. Every single CCTV camera in the building had the same gap, same time window. No record of anything going in or out. The coffin was just gone.

After that things started getting weird for me.

Every time I looked in a mirror I'd see myself lying in that coffin. Overlaid on my reflection like a double exposure. And every night around 3-4am, incense smell seeping in through my front door.

Then one morning I found a small piece of paper stuck to my door.

"The empty coffin was yours."