Cebu, 2010. A group of Iran’s brightest future doctors dreamed of a day away from the sterile walls of the hospital. Their destination: a sunny resort in Balamban. But their journey was destined for a different, darker place.
They boarded the JB tourist bus, a vehicle bearing a plate number that would later seem like a sinister joke from fate: GWZ 666.
The ride started with laughter but the mood shifted as the bus began its descent down the Transcentral Highway. A witness said it was moving too fast. Then, the driver felt a cold dread—the brakes were gone.
A survivor recalled the helpless moment. “Instead of turning left, he went straight.” The bus, a massive metal coffin, hurtled off the road and plunged into a 30-meter ravine. It flipped, its fall only broken by a lone, gnarled tree—a small mercy in a great tragedy. Twenty lives including six medical students were lost. The excitement of a getaway was silenced by the wails of the injured and the stillness of the dead.
But the true terror began hours before the crash.
Mustafa, a fourth-year medical student, was supposed to be on that bus. A gut feeling made him cancel. “It was not my day,” he would later say, his voice hollow with shock.
His reason was a dream. A haunting, vivid premonition that jolted him awake at dawn, his face wet with tears. In his dream, he was in the Intensive Care Unit, surrounded by a flood of patients. He couldn’t see their faces clearly, but he knew—he knew—they were his countrymen, his friends.
He was not alone. Two others shared the same chilling vision. A warning had been sent to them from the shadows, a shared nightmare of what was to come.
But it was a message delivered too late.
As the bus with the ominous plate 666 carried his friends toward their fate, Mustafa could only wait, the images.
Back at the university, the tragedy left a different kind of wound. The seats of the students were left empty in their classrooms, as if waiting for a return that would never come.
But after a few days, the silence in the room turned into horror.
According to the janitors who clean the university at night, something strange happens on the floor where the classroom of the deceased students is located. Every midnight, they report hearing sounds from the room—sounds that mimic an ongoing lesson. They hear the distinct scraping of chairs being moved and the low murmur of voices speaking in a foreign tongue as if a lecture continues long after the living have gone home.
We don’t know if it’s grief playing tricks on the mind, or if the rumors hold a terrifying grain of truth. But those who have heard the sounds refuse to clean that hallway alone after dark.
The bus with the ominous number reached its final destination. But for some, it seems the journey is not yet over.
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