Prologue: A lonely afterlife

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5 years was a long time to be alone and it was devastating. Haunting a house was nowhere near as fun as the movies made it out to be. Annalise had not stepped a foot outside this house for 5 years. Not by choice, she had tried and tried but nothing happened. When people entered she screamed, shouted, bashed objects on the floor and ceilings. Turned the lights on and off. Yet they never saw her.

In fact most of them just saw the flashing lights and left, apologising to the realtor that this house just "wasn't for them". It was a bunch of bullshit, and she knew it. Though she had been dead for 5 years now, she wasn't stupid.

At first when she died, she had awoken in the house. Annalise had thought that terrifying ordeal had just been a dream, that nothing had actually happened and she was still alive. But the minute she walked out the house, a burning pain ran up straight from her toes to the tip of her skull. She had collapsed at the doorstep, screaming for help. But no one came.

When the pain continued and no one came to help, tears had pooled in her eyes falling to the floor. It took a while, but she finally noticed them... the tears never touched the floor. Through her shock, she managed to crawl away from the front door. She sat there, for what must have been days, just staring at the point where her tears should've been and at the door, where she should've been able to walk out.

After the first few days of shock, she finally pulled herself out of it enough to try again. Annalise touched the door, and the same thing happened. Pain rippled through her body like lightning and this time, instead of collapsing. She just blacked out. When she woke again, her body was in the hallway of the house. Exactly where she had been killed.

Then, she tried simply touching the wall.

She phased right through it.

In the wake of that discovery, it was hard to ignore the startling truth. And when a realtor walked inside the house, completely oblivious to her presence. It only made it more real.

She was dead. And no one could see her. 

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