Several years ago, during the summer of 2019, I found myself home alone in the evening while the rest of my family enjoyed a cookout with our neighbors. At that time, I was somewhat of a recluse, avoiding social gatherings and mostly sticking to my room. I was in a Discord call with a few friends discussing which mods we would use for our upcoming Terraria playthrough. While my friends chatted, I silently scrolled through YouTube. Amid my recommended videos, something caught my eye unexpectedly. It was a video with zero views titled “Misses and Skin” or something equally strange. My curiosity got the best of me, and I clicked on it, revealing a highly pixelated video with a color scheme of gray, dark green, and yellow. Although the video was indecipherable visually, the audio featured muffled, low-bitrate breathing. The video lasted around 20 seconds and left me feeling uneasy.
I decided to explore the uploader’s channel and checked their about section, which contained a cryptic sentence mentioning dedication to someone along with a link. This link led to a download page, possibly Mega or Dropbox; I can’t recall precisely. Inside the zip file were six or five other zip files, each labeled with gibberish text. My naïve curiosity got the best of me, and I downloaded the sketchy file and unzipped it. As the files were extracting, my friends informed me that they were logging off since it was getting late. I said goodnight and continued with the file extraction.
To my surprise, all the extracted archives were encrypted and required a key, except for one. I opened it, revealing a single file named “Mangled.avi.” The title immediately filled me with dread, but my morbid curiosity prevented me from stopping.
Now, I will describe the video as best as I can recall it:
The video quality was abysmal, showing a person holding a shaky camera in a messy, unkempt bedroom. The camera slowly panned to a door leading to what appeared to be a kitchen. In the kitchen stood a woman, her limbs grotesquely twisted and bent. Her legs bent backward, her elbows twisted around, and her neck contorted backward as she gazed up at the ceiling with her mouth open. Her hair seemed neglected, and her body bore numerous long scars. She was completely nude, and she emitted animal-like noises, as if in pain and attempting to speak but unable to. The person behind the camera spoke in an unknown language, barely audible due to the poor audio quality. After briefly watching the woman, the person closed the door, walked to a table in the room, and placed the camera facing it. The video went black. After a moment, a door could be heard opening, followed by shouting and louder noises from the woman, ending with a series of loud bangs. The video abruptly cut.
After watching this video, I was terrified. It left me profoundly uncomfortable, and I immediately turned on the lights. I sat for a few minutes, trying to process what I had seen. My antivirus software started displaying numerous pop-ups about deleted trojans, and both the folder and zip file were removed. I decided not to restore them from quarantine, already too frightened to delve deeper. I shut down my PC, left the dimly lit house, and went to my neighbor’s backyard for comfort. Being around others helped ease my unease for the rest of the night. Eventually, I pushed the memory aside and went to sleep.
However, during the night, I had a terrible night terror. I was in my room, stuck to my bed, unable to move, as my door slowly opened by itself. In the doorway, stood the same woman from the video, staring right at me with a dead gaze, with her mouth open. I awoke in a cold sweat as the sun was rising. My mom and step-father were getting ready for work, and I kept the lights on for comfort. I desperately wanted to share my experience with someone. I searched through my YouTube history, but I couldn’t find the channel or video. When I checked my browser history, the channel had been deleted, and the download was taken down. I felt sick, feeling someone knew I had accessed it and had covered their tracks. Despite my paranoia, when I tried to confide in my mother and friends, they dismissed it as if it I were just describing a horror movie or just flat-out lying to them.
As time passed, I gradually forgot about the experience. However, a few years later, and a few weeks ago, I had to move into my aunt and uncles place, since money was getting tight and they were willing to support me. After settling down and making my room comfortable over a few days, I finally finished the way I wanted it to look, and I went to bed. The nightmare returned. I was alone in my room, struggling to turn on the light. I repeatedly flipped the switch to no avail. I heard that unnerving screech again, and I turned to see that same woman outside my window, staring at me with that same dead gaze. This triggered a flood of memories, and now, I can’t help but feel on edge. The memory of that video haunts me, and in recent days, I’ve become increasingly paranoid about various things. I can’t even get up to go to the kitchen for water in the dark without imagining that woman in the dark corner, watching me. I’m hoping that by posting my story here, I can at least get some of this shit out of my head again, or encounter someone else that has seen this video.