Did you ever listen to certain horror urban legends told as if they were the only truth out there?
When I was a boy, the grandmother of one of my street-playing acquaintances would gather us every night to tell us a horrific story that would fall more into the land of urban legends than anything else.
We called her Horror Granny, of course, not in her presence.
According to Horror Granny, all these stories were real. But even to my mind at eight years old, it sounded too fantastic and way out there to be remotely true.
I announced my objections to her tales several times, and this eventually got me banned from her nightly horror tales. But not before listening to no less than ten of her horrific tales.
I will let you be the judge if they sounded real or not.
Here goes the first of those nightly horror tales, the tale of the downtown girl.
During the 1920s, Cairo was called little Paris. It was the place intellectuals from all over the world came to enjoy a strong tea over a long debate, while sitting in one of the ancient downtown cafes.
At that period of time, people followed a strict hierarchy of titles imposed by the ruling family. Mixing between those titles was frowned upon and scorned.
But some people didn’t attain any titles, even if they were excellent in their lines of work, intellectuals, or artists. People of high ranks favored them, lavished them with sweet trinkets, and extended getaways, but when it came to matters of the heart, they shunned them like the plague.
This nightly horror tale concerns a certain girl, a British merchant, or soldier’s daughter from an Egyptian belly dancer. He could have been a British nobleman, nobody knows for fact who was he.
Let’s call her Lisa because I honestly don’t remember her name as told by Horror Granny forty years ago.
Lisa grew up without a father. The man skipped town the moment she was born. But since Egypt then was under British occupation, her mother spread the news that her daughter was the daughter of a British nobleman hoping that the occupation forces would aid her in some way or another. Nobody contested her claim, as it was a shame to be born out of wedlock, and a bigger one if the father was a foreigner.
So, Lisa grew up under grandiose claims, and she had the blue eyes and golden straw hair to prove them.
Other than he semi-European features, Lisa was an Egyptian through and through and when she became sixteen, she followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a belly dancer.
The mixture of European features, with a curvy Egyptian body, made her an instant success among the high and mighty. But this is where the horror tale begins.
Lisa became one of those favored artists, and she joined the grand feasts the titled people held for the intellectuals.
Occasionally, she would grace them with a short routine of a dance. Even the staunchest cafe owners, were pleased to see Lisa dance in their prestigious establishments.
As I mentioned above, I don’t believe this story, even if some aspects rang true. As an adult, I researched the period, and to my amazement, many aspects of this horror story were true, but I will elaborate on that at the end of the tale.
A young man carrying the title of Baek, middle-low nobility, was entranced by Lisa. He couldn’t afford the lavishing the higher born threw at her feet, but he could at least attend them, secure in the knowledge that none can force him out of those occasions.
Let’s call him Botros. Botros followed Lisa wherever she went, and she took note of him. Botros was tall, dark, with classical Egyptian Coptic features. Large nose, big finely drawn eyes, thick eyebrows, full lips, and a thick mustache.
Both young, both not fully accepted in the halls of the high born, attraction happened and turned into infatuation.
Soon, Lisa joined only Botros in those ancient cafes. Everywhere they went, the eyes would follow them. Wasn’t she that belly dancer? Wasn’t he the son of Naguib Baek?
Eventually, word reached Naguib Baek, and he called for both his son and Lisa.
Nobody knows what exactly happened in the meeting, but some of the servants of the small mansion outside Cairo would say that they saw a blond lady running out with tearful blue eyes. They would claim that it was a horror to see such a beautiful girl in such dire conditions.
People would tell about Botros and how he ran after her by some minutes, but by the time he reached the main road, Lisa was gone.
I know what you would think by now, where the heck is the horror here? I wanted you to get as immersed as I did back then, forty years ago. Bear with me.
Botros left his father’s mansion and traveled back to Cairo. For the next month, he lived his own horror tale of searching for Lisa, but he found nothing.
One day, Botros would read in Al-Ahram newspaper that a blond girl burned herself on top of a building that housed the very cafe he sat on yesterday.
Botros jumped and entered the building to be stopped by the old concierge, who informed him that this is a family residence and single men were not allowed except with a written invitation, plus, the police were all over the place.
At midnight, Botros sneaked past the snoring concierge and bounded the stairs to the roof.
The old concierge woke up to the sounds of screams. He used his key and took the elevator to the last floor. Then he climbed the stairs to the roof.
The concierge would later say that what he saw was out of a horror novel. A man writhed in the flames near the fence of the roof, and the concierge swore that he saw a shadow of a girl made up of flames embracing the man until he was nothing but a charred corpse.
I mentioned that as an adult I did investigate the story. I visited all the old cafes downtown and chatted with the oldest of their serving people. One, in particular, mentioned the story of two lovers who burned themselves on top of this very building.
By then, the entire building had been turned into office spaces. I went to the roof to find no less than ten families who took over the place as their home. On questioning some of the oldest people around, a woman around the same age as Horror Granny affirmed the tale.
I still don’t believe the ghost aspect of the story, but I leave it to your judgment.
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