This story happened to my aunt. My aunt never really hid the incident — our whole large extended family knew about it, and over time what had happened turned into a kind of family legend. Back then she was still a young woman of thirty and a mother of two small children, and she went through a terrible tragedy: her husband, with whom she had been married for ten years, died of leukemia at the age of thirty-one. After the funeral, the family was preparing to hold the memorial meal for the deceased. In the largest room they set up a big table for the guests. Once everything was ready, my aunt and her sister lay down to sleep in another room. The memorial itself was scheduled for the following day. In the middle of the night, my aunt suddenly woke up to the sound of water running from a tap. According to her, she could clearly hear someone turn the water on in the bathroom, wash up, come out, and head for the living room. She could distinctly hear the footsteps of someone walking. The door of the room where she was sleeping was slightly ajar, but the apartment was dark and it was impossible to make anything out. Besides, the entrances to the bathroom and the living room weren't visible from where she lay. Instinctively, my aunt glanced sideways at her sister — she was sleeping right beside her. There was no one else in the apartment. She couldn't move from the wave of terror that had swept over her and, barely breathing, she lay there listening to what was happening in the living room. And in the living room someone was making their way along the memorial table — she could hear the chairs that had been pushed up against the wall being moved. My aunt mentally followed the movements of the mysterious guest, and suddenly she went cold with a horrifying realization. She remembered that there in the living room, by the window, they had left the towel that had been used to wipe the body of the deceased. According to folk belief, the towel used to wipe a deceased person must either be placed in the coffin or burned immediately after the funeral — otherwise the spirit of the departed may return. But both at the funeral and afterwards, everyone had forgotten about that towel. The sounds in the living room died down, but my aunt didn't close her eyes until morning, ready at any moment to hear or even see absolutely anything. In the morning it turned out that the chairs in the living room really had been shifted slightly. Her sister confirmed it, too — she remembered exactly how she had arranged them the evening before. With the towel things were a bit trickier: neither my aunt nor her sister could recall exactly how or where they had left it the night before, so they couldn't say with certainty that anyone had touched it. Later on, my aunt — who had grown up in a non-religious working-class family — kept trying to convince herself that the whole thing had been a hallucination or a dream. But then how to explain the sounds she heard that night and the chairs that had been moved? To that, my aunt has no answer.