Talking to my sister we remembered something very strange that happened to us in 2012.
Until then, we thought it had been someone’s joke, but remembering the facts, we came to the conclusion that it was something too bizarre to be that… Let’s get to the facts.
It was an October night, we were having a party with some friends here in the backyard of my house – that classic thing of friends getting together, drinking, full plastic swimming pool, music… Anyway.
Around two in the morning, we had to turn off the sound because the neighbors were complaining about the noise (despite it being a Saturday morning). As there was nothing else to do and everyone was too drunk to sit still, we decided to go on Omegle to make fun of whoever was online. For those who don’t know, Omegle is a chat where you talk to random strangers using your webcam. You enter, start chatting and go through people, if you don’t want to talk to a specific person. The site selects people from all over the world and asks them to talk to you.
Well, there we were, scrolling through Omegle, looking for someone cool to chat with. There were about seven of us, everyone crammed in front of the computer to fit on the screen. After passing by some guys showing off their genitals (this happens a lot at this time), we continued scrolling through the site, until we stopped at one person. Apparently, it was a man, sitting with his back to the camera. He was in an empty, beige room, with very dim light. We started shouting into the microphone things like “Dude, the camera is on this side, see?” or “Don’t turn your back on us, man!” and suddenly he turned around.
To our surprise, he was wearing a really bizarre mask. It looked like it was made of plaster or wax, it had two round painted eyes with large pupils inside, and its mouth looked like smudged lipstick.
We started joking, saying that his mask was really good. scary, asking how he had made it or where he had bought it, but he didn’t answer. He just stood there looking at the screen, and at most tilted his head to the side. His audio was an indistinct noise, as if a fan was on near the microphone
As he didn’t say anything, we pressed Esc to jump to someone else. The site warned him that he was looking for another “random stranger” for us, and when he came back, it was this same guy. This time, he was closer to the camera, and the sound was a high-pitched feedback noise. “You again,” we said. And that’s when he started texting. I will more or less reproduce the conversation that my sister and I can remember:
Him: let it in. Us: you can come in, man, but bring more beer. Him: we are family luizel mahker sara mahker uyhla mahker sylvia mahker strenio mahker mahker mahker mahker mahker…………………… Us: oh, cool. we are friends. Him: let it in, let it in, let it in, let it in, let it in. we are family
After that, he started sending some numbers, they looked like geographic coordinates mixed with times. We didn’t understand anything, and as we were drunk and messing around, we started typing random numbers too, but he didn’t stop. He kept sending these numbers, alternating with “let it in” or “we are family” and those names up there. We had nothing better to do, the other people on the site were just looking for virtual sex, so we continued talking to him, starting that clueless and unintelligible conversation.
Suddenly, he stopped typing. The strangest thing was that even when he was typing, the person didn’t move in the image. We started to think it was a recording and not an image from a real webcam. Anyway, he stopped sending things and started looking at the camera.
That was when my cell phone started vibrating on the table, and the caller ID showed a huge number, the area code was not from here and the country code was +7, which after researching, we discovered was from Russia. I answered the cell phone and a little music box song started playing. I put it on speakerphone. The sound was ominous.
After a few seconds of the music box, a kind of old country music started playing, with the sound of people tap dancing, clapping to the music, and eventually shouting “Hey!”, in the middle of the lyrics. Then he started in a voice similar to a commercial from the 80s, a bit nasal and muffled, saying things we didn’t understand (probably in Russian).
Then, a similar voice shouted in Portuguese “The show will start!” and some people applauded with circus music in the background. Then there was a noise of radio interference and the call dropped.
Soon after, he sent in the chat “let it in.” It was then that we started to get scared. At first, we imagined it was someone who knew us making fun of us. I started asking who he was, and he just replied that he was family and that bunch of strange names.
My sister’s cell phone rang, it was the same number, and when she answered, it was the same sounds. When the call ended, his camera went black for a few seconds and then suddenly came back. But he was no longer in the picture. Now, it was the image of a somewhat dark street, you could only see the lampposts and some houses. The image began to move, as if the person filming had started walking down the street.
We then realized that it was my street. He walked and, as the image began to approach my house, my sister and a friend ran into the living room to lock the door and looked out the window. I continued on the computer with the other friends, and the footage reached my house. A zoom in gave me a close-up of my sister and her friend’s face in the window, and I screamed at them to get out of there. They closed the window (this appeared in the image, too) and ran outside, terrified.
I asked who it was, and they said they hadn’t seen anyone on the street. So I typed into the chat that I was going to call the police, and he stayed there for a few more minutes, filming my house. Suddenly, the guy with the mask appeared in the image again and typed “LET IT IN LET IT IN LET IT IN LET IT IN LET IT IN LET IT IN“. The image went dark and he disconnected.
We called the police, who came here but found nothing. The next day, the guy in the mask added us all on Facebook, under the name “Luizel Mahker”. His profile said he was from Russia, had some posts in Russian, others in Portuguese, and a geographic coordinate that, after we played on Google Maps, we discovered was an empty plot of land in Russia.
There were also some photos on his profile of girls next to the guy with the mask, old photos of women with babies and captions like “Mother Sara” or “Grandma Mahker”. I rejected the friendship and my friends said they did the same, but he inboxed each of us a different time and wrote “let’s go in, we’re family”. Months later, he commented on a photo of me on Facebook, with a date and time
After that, we didn’t hear any more “news” from this guy. He didn’t post anything else on Facebook, and when my sister and I looked for him yesterday, as we reminisced about the story, we found nothing. His profile link in the comment he left on my photo is inactive, because the profile must have been deactivated or blocked.
Anyway, the fact is that we found this very strange, we thought it was someone who knew us but, after remembering today, we raised some questions that make this hypothesis unlikely: how would he enter Omegle and find us, with thousands of people online? How does someone we know have a Russian number? How could someone come to my house without disconnecting the internet and filming here, without my sister seeing anyone on the street, and suddenly disappearing?
Anyway, we got scared again hahaha. What was that? A hacker? A ghost taking advantage of technology to haunt others? I’m very skeptical about this, but… It’s strange, it’s…