This just happened to me this morning, and I’m genuinely afraid for my life right now. My parents are scared to let me leave the hotel room we’re in, since we have no clue where it is. For all we know, it’s already in the room. I don’t know what to do at this point except post this story and warn you all.
About a month ago, I downloaded a sleep tracker. I don’t necessarily sleep poorly, but I was intrigued by the thought of what my sleep patterns were like. After a little bit of searching on the app store, I found a sleep tracker that had a perfect 5 stars. It had a few hundred reviews, and none of them looked botted or fake, so I downloaded it. The app was just called ‘Sleep Tracker 2023’, uploaded by a company named ‘Sleep Tracker App’, which was an odd name to me, but it wasn’t anything too strange.
I set it up that night. The way it worked, and I assume how most of these apps work, is that you’d put your phone next to your pillow and click the button that said ‘bedtime’. After that, you’d set an alarm, turn off your phone, and go to bed. It would track your breathing patterns throughout the night, and in the morning, you’d get an overview of how you slept. It showed you how long you snored, how long it took you to fall asleep, all of the basic things. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary yet, and it was fun seeing my sleep data every morning.
After a few weeks, the first odd occurrence happened. One morning I woke up, and there was a new section in the data section, labeled ‘audio’. I clicked on it, curious, and I saw 3 audio samples taken from throughout the night. All of them were about 5 seconds long, and each had a time stamp on them, with each sample being about 2 hours apart.
I clicked on the first one, and heard me snoring extremely loudly for the full 5 seconds. I knew I snored, but I didn’t know it was that loud.
I clicked on the second one, and I heard me roll over, and then fart into the microphone, which got a giggle out of me.
I clicked on the third one, and heard me just mumbling in my sleep. Barely any of it was coherent, except for something about missing schoolwork, which was funny because I just graduated the past year.
The only thing really weird about this was that I couldn’t find a mention of it in the patch notes, and there was no text tutorial for it like all the other features, but I quickly brushed that aside. I figured they had just forgotten to mention in in the update, and since it was a part of the sleep data, it didn’t really necessitate a tutorial of its own. Everything after that was relatively normal. All of the audio recordings were pretty mundane, most just being me snoring.
A little bit after this, about a week, someone had broken into our neighbor’s house and robbed him, which shook up my parents pretty badly. My dad ended up going out and buying a bunch of those security cameras that you connect to with an app and can see through them on your phone. Everyone in the house was connected to it, since each of us were home alone often, so I could check the cameras at any point. Then something really odd happened. It was maybe two weeks later, when I woke up and checked the app. There was now a fourth section, labeled ‘photos’. This seemed odd to me, as I didn’t know what photos it would have taken, seeing as my phone was off and under my pillow. I clicked on it, and…
It was photos from the security cameras. It never asked me to update the app’s permissions, and I hadn’t even updated the app in about a week. I clicked through the photos, and everything was normal, save for a rabbit in our yard visible from the outside cam. It wasn’t the pictures that weirded me out, it was just the fact that the feature shouldn’t have even been there in the first place. Again, I simply brushed it aside, figuring it was already a feature that just unlocked after I connected to the cameras or something. The photos themselves were always pretty normal, with the most interesting ones being when a deer, rabbit, or stray cat found itself in our yard. Everything was fine, everything was normal.
Until this morning.
I woke up earlier than normal. I felt oddly tired, despite a full night’s rest, but I chalked it up to the missing hour of sleep. I decided to stay up, seeing as I wasn’t doing anything that day, and checked the app. I immediately noticed the first thing that was wrong. On my data graph, it said that I hadn’t snored at all throughout the night. As mentioned before, I snore a lot, and quite loudly, too. I figured it must have been a microphone error, and moved on to the audio section. Instead of the usual two hour interval, these ones were only five minutes apart.
I clicked on the first one.
Nothing. No noise came through in the video. Not a breath, not a movement. It was dead silent. Why did it capture this? Was my mic broken?
I clicked on the second one.
I heard myself breathing into the phone, so I knew my mic wasn’t disabled. As I listened, I couldn’t help but feel like something was very wrong with the audio. I replayed it and strained my ears. I felt like my stomach had just fallen out of my body.
I heard it.
Just barely audible over my own breaths, there were other breaths being taken by something else in the room. They were sharp, ragged breaths, with no pattern to them. I was sweating. What the fuck else could have been in here? My parents slept in their own room downstairs, and had never sleepwalked before, so it couldn’t have been them. Was it a burglar? Did someone break in? Why were they just standing in my room?
I clicked the third one.
I heard what sounded like shuffling on my carpet, like if I were to drag a plastic bin across the floor, followed by a few creaks and bumps. It was disturbing to listen to, with the context of what I’d just heard, but I had no clue what I was hearing. I still had a pit in my stomach as I pressed onto the photos.
Even from the thumbnails, I could tell something was seriously wrong. Each thumbnail was just a black square, with no preview of what awaited me when I clicked on the images.
I viewed the first photo, and I wanted to cry. I felt nauseous at the sight before me.
Standing in my backyard was this… creature. There’s no other word to describe it. Based on how tall it was against our fence, it was easily over 6 feet tall. It was skeletally thin, but no bones pushed through its taut skin. No elbows, no knees, no ribcage, no spine, nothing. It was completely smooth. Its proportions were all wrong. Most of its height was derived from its torso and neck. The midriff of the thing was impossibly long, with a neck twice the length of a human. Its arms stretched down to its knees, with spindly fingers that reached to its calves. The worst part about it was its face, or lack thereof. It had no facial features, not even eye sockets or a mouth. It looked like someone took a mannequin head and stretched skin around it. It stood upright, seemingly reaching toward the front door.
I clicked to the kitchen.
The front door was wide open, which should have been impossible. My dad locks and deadbolts the front door every night, so there was no way the thing could have opened it. It stood in the middle of the kitchen, holding on to the counter, seemingly for balance. Its head was turned toward the doorway, at a degree that would be impossible for a person. I clicked to the dining room. It was uncomfortably close to the camera, already at the living room doorway by the time the photo was taken. Only its head was visible in the frame.
I clicked to the living room, and I was horrified by what I saw.
My living room is a relatively tight squeeze, with the couch and TV on opposite ends of the room, with a coffee table taking up most of the space in-between. The thing was splayed out like a spider, crawling across the couch, its grotesque arms reaching towards the arm of the couch. Its knees were bent the wrong way, not to the point that they looked backwards, but far more than should be attainable by a human. I held my breath as I knew what the next cam was.
I clicked to my parents’ room.
I let out a long sigh of relief when I saw that everything was normal there, my mom and dad peacefully sleeping, no creature visible in frame. I lingered there, happy to see a normal photo in this nightmare.
I clicked to the stairs, and any sense of joy I had was torn away.
It was still positioned like it was on the couch, crawling up the stairs, about halfway there in the photo. Its arms now looked like its knees, bent the opposite direction at the elbow, or at least where its elbow would be. I felt lightheaded as I realized where it was going.
I clicked to the upstairs hallway.
The upstairs has a lower ceiling than the downstairs, not even being 6 feet up. The thing was bent at an ungodly angle, and looked like someone snapped it in half. It was grasping toward my doorknob, and I felt a knot in my chest. My mind flashed back to that horrible breathing at my bed. How was that even possible? This thing had no face, how was it breathing? I then remembered that third sample, the creaking.
The creaking. The sound of something sliding on carpet, and the creaking of the bed. The sound of this thing bending and twisting onto the floor and dragging itself. Under my bed. Where it probably was right now. I felt sick.
I sat there, huddled in my blanket. I was like a little kid, scared of the boogeyman under the bed and hiding under my covers. But this wasn’t an irrational little kid fear. I had 6 photos and two audio samples proving that this was a very real fear. I was breathing heavily, and felt like I was going to pass out. Was it there? What should I do? If I stay in bed, it might crawl out. If I get up and run, it might grab me, or give chase. I decided that laying there was the wrong choice. I built up my courage, mustering all the strength left in my fear-ridden body. Clenching my eyes, I took a breath, and bolted toward my door.
Nothing happened.
I turned my head to my room, and didn’t see it. I ran downstairs, and into the kitchen.
My mom was standing there. She asked me why I was so panicked, and what had happened. I explained the audio and photos, and even showed her a few to prove that I wasn’t bullshitting. She thought I was pulling some sort of prank, and checked the cameras herself. I saw her look of mild amusement vanish, and her face turn white. I explained how I had downloaded the app, and the random unexplained features, and how I felt drained this morning and looked through everything. She grabbed her keys, phone, and wallet before we got into the car. As we drove, she called my dad and explained what was happening, and he, of course, didn’t believe her. She told him to check the cameras and to meet her at the hotel near our house before hanging up. As we passed the house, I looked into my window, and could’ve sworn I saw its fleshy hand pressed against the glass.
I’m currently in a hotel room with my parents. We don’t know what to do at this point. We sent the photos and audio to the police, and they said they’d search the house, but they said there was nothing. Just a few minutes ago, the app sent me a notification. I clicked on it and it was an image of the outside of the hotel. I didn’t even look through the photo. I knew what I’d find. I tried to find the app’s page on the app store and it’s gone. I don’t know what’ll happen tonight. I don’t want to fall asleep. But I know I’ll have to sooner or later. I wrote this as a warning, to make my fate worth something in the end.
So please, For the love of God. Don’t make my mistake. It scratches at the door now. My parents are asleep. My eyelids grow heavy. I hear it open the door. My eyes close. I hear the shallow breaths. I slip into sleep. I hear its flesh as it reaches forward. Death shall set me free.