The Devil Appears After the Suicide of a Good Woman

In the village of Maasmechelen lived a woman whose heart was full of love, even though she could not bear children of her own. Yet she found a way to be a mother: she took in a foster child from Germany or Austria, a small being to whom she gave love and whom she cherished as if it were her own flesh and blood.

Years passed and the child grew up under her care. The woman gave everything for this child – her time, her love, her hope for motherhood that had been denied her by nature. But what she did not know was that happiness was not destined to remain hers until the end.

On a fateful day, news arrived that changed everything: the biological parents of the child wanted to reclaim their son or daughter. Years of love and devotion meant nothing to them. The child had to go with them back to their homeland, forever away from the woman who had loved it as her own.

The woman was mad with grief. It was as if her world had collapsed in a single blow. The thought of life without the child was unbearable, a pain that no words could describe. Every day felt like a thousand years of suffering, every night like an endless darkness.

No one could comfort her. Friends and family tried, but their words slipped past her like water off rock. The woman became increasingly lost in her mourning, overcome by despair and hopelessness.

At Christmas, the very festival that should bring hope and peace, her suffering reached its culmination. Early in the morning, around seven o’clock, she left her home. She walked to the railway station where the tram passed by. There, by the banks of the Maas and the railway line, she ended her life by throwing herself under the tram.

The village was shocked. A woman regarded by everyone as good and loving had taken her own life. She was buried in the cemetery of Maasmechelen, but many wondered: would her spirit find rest after such a tragic end?

Some days after the burial of the woman, strange things began to occur in the neighborhood. A friend of the deceased had a daily habit: every evening, when darkness fell, she would bring some clover to the woman’s horse. This was a simple gesture of friendship and care.

But on one of these dark evenings, she saw something that made her heart freeze. As she tended to the horse, she caught sight of a small black figure. The being was no larger than a meter, only about eighty centimeters tall, and it seemed not entirely of this world.

The friend told herself that she was mistaken, that the twilight was playing tricks on her. But night after night, whenever she visited the horse, she saw the same small dark form. It was no illusion – it was real.

She began to tell others in the village about this strange apparition. Soon the entire village was in an uproar. What was this mysterious phantom? Was it the spirit of the deceased woman, transformed into a demonic form as a result of her tragic death?

The appearance of the black phantom kept returning in the stories of Maasmechelen. Some said it was the remnants of the woman – her despair, her grief, her deepest misery – that had materialized in a physical form. Others believed it was the devil himself, who had come to claim the desperate woman after her suicide.

The friend of the woman saw the phantom many times. It was not an aggressive apparition – it did no harm to anyone. The being seemed merely to hover about, a witness to the life that went on without her. Perhaps it was the woman herself, seeking comfort or forgiveness.

As the years passed, the small black phantom was seen less and less frequently. Slowly, like a candle burning down, the sightings faded. But the memory remained vivid in the village’s consciousness. The story of the woman who could not bear children, of her foster child who was taken away, of her wild grief and of the demonic apparition that followed – all of this was passed down from generation to generation.

To this day, the story lingers in the streets of Maasmechelen, as a reminder of the price of love and the horror of despair. For who knows what may happen when a heart is broken so deeply that it can find no way to healing?