⚰️Episode 4 Script: The Burial of a Living Man. The Dream Funeral.

Episode 4: The Dream Funeral.

The Burial of a Living Man

By Grace Antiedu

On the fourth day, Nfor no longer responded to his name.

He sat in the corner of his room, legs crossed, eyes distant -staring at something only he could see. When people spoke to him, he blinked slowly, like waking from underwater. His voice was no longer his. He whispered things in old dialects, names no one knew.

Ma Gundo returned that evening.

She walked straight into the house, her feet bare, her face unreadable. The air turned still the moment she entered. Even the birds outside fell silent.

She burned herbs and sprinkled ash in a circle around Nfor, who began to wail. Not in fear. In resistance. Something inside him was holding on.

“They have dug the grave,” she said.

“But the soul is not yet lost.”

What followed was not a ritual—it was a battle.

For hours, Ma Gundo chanted and called upon the ancestors. Nfor thrashed and foamed, at times going completely still. At one moment, he spoke in the voice of a child. At another, in the gravel tone of an old man.

“You were not meant to die this way,” she told him.

Finally, just before midnight, the air shifted. The burning stopped. Nfor collapsed, unconscious.

He slept for two days.

When he woke, he was himself again, but quiet. Humbled. And afraid of mirrors.

Ma Gundo explained that someone -a relative, jealous and quiet, had consulted dark forces to “bury his destiny” while he lived. They had performed a mock funeral in the spirit world to trap his soul, replacing him with a hollow version.

But the burial failed. His soul had fought back.

Nfor never returned to carpentry.

He left town, lived simply, and often walked barefoot on the earth to feel the ground under him—to know he was alive.

And every year, on the same date the dreams began, he lights a candle and says:

“May the ground never call me before my time.”

End of Story – “The Dream Funeral”

Next: A haunted necklace passed down through three generations of women. Its curse? Love followed by loss. Thank you for watching. Subscribe, like, and share for more.