There was no going to sleep after this. No way. I had been sitting in front of the screen for a good twenty minutes trying to convince myself that I wasn’t currently going insane. That these things were actually happening, and not just to me. If it hadn’t been for the others also witnessing all these events, I would have had myself committed, but no, I wasn’t going insane. I took a couple of deep breaths and calmed myself down before slowly opening my eyes and moving closer to the computer again. “If this is happening to us, this has got to have happened to someone else before”, I thought. I need to do some research.
I opened my browser and started to search for “hauntings”, “ghosts”, “paranormal events online”, everything I could think of that could match what we were going through. There were of course an enormous number of articles, websites, YouTube videos and so on tagged with these words, but after scrolling and reading for about two hours, my eyes were drawn to an article about paranormal portals and haunted objects. I started to read and learned that many paranormal investigators believed that there are portals all over the world that spirits and other, not-of-this-earth-entities, use to travel from one place to another. The most common were ordinary mirrors. When hung or placed by themselves, they were harmless, but if you place two mirrors facing each other, apparently, according to this and many other articles, they create a portal which basically works like an open front door. You are just welcoming everything and anything in when doing that.
I started to think; “What if…what if there is a more modern version of these portals, everything evolves and changes over time, why wouldn’t that be true for things like these? What if, the stream itself is a portal of sort? We willingly connected to the stream, creating a link between us and the house, what’s to say that connection hasn’t opened a gateway in other ways than the one intended, just to watch…?”
I kept reading and came to the part about haunted objects, and here I found something really interesting. There were documented cases of people experiencing actual hauntings after having just looked at an object from afar, even just online! There was one that kept reappearing in article after article; Robert The Doll. Apparently, he’s a haunted doll that you can visit in a museum in Florida, but there are strict rules to follow when doing so. You must introduce yourself to Robert, and if you want to take a picture of him, you must ask his permission first. Before you leave, you also need to say goodbye. These rules were apparently once ignored by a youtuber-paranormal investigator who shot a live show at the museum, and later learned that many of the people watching the live stream, experienced weird things happening to them, and in their house afterwards. Some even got physically hurt claiming they’d been pushed down stairs, tripped, or nearly electrocuted. Of course, all these things could have natural causes, but the amount of people sharing similar stories without any ties to each other were alarming, and quite convincing.
I was deep into the rabbit hole when my little bears head suddenly lit up. I took a quick glance at the time, 6.30 am, “Damn I should be more tired” I thought. My headphones were lying beside my keyboard, but I couldn’t hear anyone talk so I opened the chat window to have a look. It was Henry, he was back online. I grabbed the headphones and put them on.
“Uh…huh”, I answered quietly, getting a feeling I knew where this was heading.
“That fucking woman from the house man!” He was in tears now. “I had her distorted blurry god damn face just inches from mine! I don’t know what happened after that, maybe I passed out or fell or something but the next thing I know, Im waking up INSIDE that fucking house, in the living room, right next to Warrens lifeless body lying there on the floor where we saw him fell!” He could barely get the last words out he was crying so hard.
“And I tried to get up and get out, but every time I reached the front door and opened it, I just ended up back at the kitchen table and the whole fucking thing started all over again! I must have gone through it at least fifty times last night! It was only just now that I finally woke up and realized it was just a dream, looping over and over again!”. I didn’t want to, but I knew I had to show him my footage and tell him my story. Just as I was about to go into it, Jen popped up in the chat.
Before I could answer, and tell them both about what had happened, and what I had found out, Ali slowly started to walk towards the front door and proceeded to knock, hard and repeatedly in a rhythmic bang, bang, bang, until the door finally swung open and she entered the house, all the time without even a flinch or a change of expression on her face. We couldn’t do anything. Just like with Warren, all we could do was just to sit there and watch our friend, our fifteen-year-old friend, unexplainably be some 1200 miles from her home, in what can only be described as a trance, walking into what would have sounded like a scene from a horror movie just a few days ago. The door shut behind her as she entered, and she too made her way into the living room, standing right where Warren had collapsed, right where Henry said he had been standing in his “dream”.
Suddenly it appeared she woke up from her hypnotic kind of state and immediately started to look around in a panic, eventually realizing where she was, and looking straight into the camera we were all watching her on. She screamed at us, we could clearly see it, but there was no sound. She was crying. And then, then we saw her… The woman. At first, she appeared as a reflection in the mirror in the hallway, but it didn’t take long before she too was in the living room. And just like with Warren, it seemed Ali had no idea she wasn’t alone. The woman slowly made her way towards her, and we all had to re-live what we had gone through with Warren a few days ago as we watched as the woman approach her. As the woman slowly raised her hand and placed it on Ali’s shoulder, history repeated itself and we saw her fall to the ground as struck by lightning. The woman slowly turned her head towards the camera, and we could faintly hear a distant laugh disguised as radio static before the stream went dead again.
I proceeded to tell them all about my experience, my walk in my neighbourhood that ended up at the house, and I showed the video of me. When Henry heard about this, he got even more freaked out as he realized that his dream might not have been a dream at all.
“Yeah man, and the weird thing is I haven’t even slept.” Warren continued as if in a daze. “I see her everywhere man, in our mirrors, in the shadows, outside my windows, at the end of the hallway. I even hear her in my head. She keeps telling me to come back to the house, that we’re not finished, and I’m…I’m thinking of going, it feels…right somehow, like I need to be there”
They proceed to send a priest over the next day to investigate, and after spending some time there, he determines that they have a full-blown possession on their hands. And as the priest comes back with a complete exorcist kit, the woman flies out of bed, snaps the priest’s neck and proceeds to kill the husband by repeatedly beating him over the head with a bedside lamp! As if this isn’t fucked up enough, she then continues from room to room and murder all four children, before she herself finally collapses and dies from a heart attack, according to the information I could find. And take one guess where she collapsed?”
“I don’t know what she, it is” Jen answered, “Honestly, I have never believed in these kinds of stories, a ghost story here or there fine, but possessions, demons, exorcists? That has always been a reach for me! But non the less, we have all seen what we have seen here, hell you have even been at the damn house yourself, Jake! Even though you KNOW that’s physically impossible, yet there you are, on video! So yeah, we are probably dealing with something powerful, and beyond our capability of explanation”
“We can’t”, Warren said. “Someone needs to go to the house, and physically kill the connection…” We all sat in silence for a while, trying to figure out any other possible way to beat this thing.