The familiar sound of the computer starting up filled the room as I leaned back in my chair waiting for the screen to light up my otherwise, by my own choice, darkened bedroom. Another school week was over, the summer had at last said its final goodbye and outside the draped windows the now slightly coloured leaves were rustling in the wind and the rain danced on my windowsill. You could hear the difference in the sound of the leaves when the season started to change, the soft sound the trees made in a summer breeze were gone and had seemingly overnight transformed into the sharper tones of the dry, withering sound of nature slowly giving up, a foreboding signal of the months of darkness and cold to come.
Like most teenagers these days, I didn’t spend much time outside of my comfort zone, AKA – my bedroom, in front of my computer. That’s not to say that I didn’t spend time with friends, on the contrary, I had a close group of friends that I hung out with on a daily, or more correctly - nightly basis, We just didn’t do it in person. This was of course in large because none of my closest friends even lived in the same city as me. The fact is, not one of us lived in the same city as one of the others. Scattered across the country in different settings, from different backgrounds, and varying in age between us with a few years apart, we had all found each other online in the chatrooms and in games that we all shared a common love for. It was always the same tight group of five that hung out;
Me - Jake, 16 years old living with my parents and my little sister Helen, age 7, in a classic suburban middle-class neighbourhood outside Seattle.
Henry, 17 years old, was born in the Philippines and moved to the US as a small boy with his parents. Unfortunately, he lost his father in a freak accident at the factory where he worked just a few years later. He was raised by his hard-working mother in Brooklyn, NY.
Jennie, age 16, or “Jen” as she liked to be called, lived in a small town on the west coast, just north of San Francisco. Her parents were divorced, and she and her little brother Ben had to jump between homes every other week. She would never admit it to her mom, but she enjoyed staying at her dad´s house a bit more than with her mom and her new husband. In part because of their new baby that would just never stop screaming. But also, because her dad often worked nights she could stay up as late as she wanted with no adult supervision. She did however have to look after Ben, but he usually went out like a light around 7.30 pm anyways and could sleep through Armageddon without waking up, so that was never a problem.
Allison, or “Ali” for short, was at 15 years old the youngest of the group. She lived with both her parents and her older brother John at a similar neighbourhood as Jake, in the suburbs of Chicago.
And finally, there was Warren, 17 years old, who lived in a tiny little rural town in the middle of nowhere – Maine. Here he lived with two younger sisters and their very stern father. Warren and his siblings were raised with a firm hand and with Christianity as the centre of the household. As the only African American family in the small community that they lived in, their father had always been very strict about curfews and what friends Warren could and could not hang out with. He just didn’t want his kids to go through what he himself had had to put up with when he grew up under similar circumstances. Racism, bullying, and fights hiding behind every corner. And ever since his wife passed away at a young age, his grip on the children had tightened ever more, to the point of him almost not seeing that Warren soon would be a grown man of his own.
A blue hue filled the room and I leaned back up towards the desk to log in to my computer, my fingers running across the keyboard with explicit precision, like I’ve had done nothing else since the day I was born. Almost instantly, as the programs started to pop up across the screens of my, if I may say it myself, impressive workstation, complete with three big screens, backlit of course, an impressive sound system and a bunch of other nerdy gadgets connected to the system, my favourite thing being a little bear sitting between my two main monitors, who’s head would light up in different colours whenever someone spoke in the chat, a voice-chat notification appeared in the corner, and the bears head lit up.
We liked to watch movies together, we used to count down and all press play at the exact same moment so that we could watch it all together simultaneously. If anyone had to go to the bathroom or pause for whatever reason, we did the same, counted down and paused.
“I think it was Ali´s turn, wasn’t it?” Henry answered.
“Yeah, it’s my turn”, Ali said,” but I haven’t really found anything good yet, give me a sec.”
“Anyone heard from Warren yet?” I asked in a yawn while stretching out my body so much I almost fell off my chair.
“No, nothing yet, haven’t seen him online at all since yesterday as a matter of fact.” Henry responded in an equally tired voice.
“He’ll be here, probably some church thing his dad has dragged him of to.” Jen said with an audible smirk on her face.
“So y’all up for some horror tonight?”, Ali asked.
An array of thumbs up and ghost emojis filled the main chat, accompanied with “yup´s” and “hell yeses” over the headphones, confirming that this was a good choice.
This was another thing that our group had found a collective love for, all things supernatural, be it Cryptids or Aliens, Ghosts and Demons, abandoned asylums, Big Foot, Ouija boards or old local creepy tales of hauntings, witches, satanic rituals and so on. Everything and all that flew the flag of the unexplained scratch an itch we all had. We were always on the lookout for something new to delve into, and even though most of us whole heartedly believed in “something” out there, we usually kept a somewhat collective sceptical view when looking into the ever updating and oncoming flow of weird new videos that popped up to the web every single day.
These days it is hard to tell the real gems apart from the CGI and AI-created content, and you usually had to look really close to see if anyone had been editing or messing with the clips. Ever since I was a little kid I had an interest in photography and video editing and was usually the one spotting the edits. Warren was, even though he was the only one truly raised in religion, the most sceptical of the bunch. We used to tease him, wondering why it was so hard for him to believe in Aliens or ghosts when it was so easy for him to believe in an invisible god. “It’s just not the same”, he would respond, clearly tired of having to explain himself, and leaving it at that.
But sometimes, we would come across videos that none of us could debunk or explain, and those were the ones that kept the amber burning in our chase of the unknown. They were few and far between, but when they did appear, once in a blue moon, a special kind of shill went down the spines of the collective, and once again piqued our interest.
Our favourite thing to look for were live streams of the odd and weird. Mostly because these were the hardest to fake. If you live stream something, it’s not as easy to get away with faking it. You could usually tell if the acting was amateurish and bad, and there would be no CGI or editing. Unfortunately, there weren’t many of these streams to be found on a regular basis, which also tipped the scale in the favour of most other videos being fakes. Otherwise – why not just stream what you see when you see it?
“Hey guys, sorry I’m late, there was a thing at church…” Warren said, connecting to the group chat.
“Ha! Told you so!”, Jen said in a laugh
“No worries man”, I responded. “We only just met up.”
“So, I found an old horror movie”, Ali stated. “It’s like from the 80’s or something.
I’ll send you the download-link in a bit. It looks like a low budget, indie-kind of film, but whatahell, let’s give it a try.”
We all went over to the link that Ali had sent them and started to download the movie. This was the unspoken cue for everyone to use the bathroom, pop some corn and do what needed to be done before getting into our movie-position a few moments later.
A mumble of yeses filled the headphones. Ali started the countdown;
Everyone started the movie and got into position. It was a classic 80’s slasher movie set at a lakeside environment, with foolish teens running of one at a time to be brutally murdered by some axe-wielding maniac that lived in the woods. Finally, the one character remaining after have seeing all his friends massacred, managed to get the upper hand of the lunatic and to all appearances, managed to kill him and jump in one of the cars and speed of to safety. Only for the last scene to reveal that the murderer’s body wasn’t where he had fallen over, seemingly defeated a few moments earlier. Classic cliff-hanger ending, promising one or more mediocre movies to come.
“Man, that was so unpredictable!”, I gawked in an obvious sarcastic tone.
“Yeah, there’s never anything new anymore, is there”, Jen said. “We’ve been numbed by watching too much of the same old stuff. It’s always the same old jump scares and predictable endings”
“I honestly can’t remember when a scary movie last actually scared me”, Ali sighed.
“Hey guys…” Warren almost whispered.
“What?”, I asked.
“I lost interest in the movie”, Warren continued, “so I started to look around online for something else. Check this out” He sent a link out in the main chat. “It’s a live feed from some woman’s house, she claims it’s haunted and want’s help to catch whatever it is on video. She rigged her living room and kitchen with cameras and have a continues live stream going!” Warren exclaimed excitedly.
This got everyone’s attention, this was what we lived for, the live stuff. I quickly opened a drawer and pulled out an external disc which I connected to my computer and started a screen capture, to save whatever might appear on the stream for later investigation. Everyone was on high alert, and no one had said anything for several minutes when the silence was suddenly broken by a high pitch scream followed by what sounded like someone demolishing a room.
“Jesus f…, christ!”, Jen panted. “Ben, what the hell are you doing up? And why are you screaming like that?” We heard how Jen left her desk to take her, normally calm, deep sleeping brother, back to bed.
“Fuck, that scared the shit out of me” I laughed with the others joining in with relieved nervous chuckling.
“Wait, look!” – Warren said suddenly, “At the stream!”
“What? What are we looking for” – Ali asked while leaning in so far, her nose almost touching the screen.
“Right there!” – Warren continued. “Look at the living room camera, in the back there´s a mirror, you can see a reflection of what must be like the hallway or something, there´s someone standing there! In the reflection Do you see?!”
You could almost make out the shape of a person in the mirror, but it was hard to tell. These were obviously not the most expensive cameras, and to monitor a dimly lit room at night, it is like begging your eyes to play tricks on you.
“Yeah, but that’s probably just the woman, right? The owner?” – I said.
“Then who the hell is the woman in the kitchen”, Warren said quietly.
We all fell silent, looking back and forth between the two cameras.
“Well…”, Henry said slowly, “We honestly don’t know if this woman lives by herself, do we? Could be a family member, no?”
“I suppose.” Warren answered in a mumble”, But I mean, wouldn’t that be useful information to give if you want help with this kind of stuff from people online? Maybe introduce yourself, tell us how many who lives in the house, if there’s any pets that might be knocking shit over?”
“What information is there about this place?” – I asked
“Not much”, Warren answered, “I was just looking around for new live content on YouTube and this popped up. There’s really no info about the owner of the channel anywhere, it looks like a brand new channel to me. All it says is that the house is haunted, and that they need help monitoring it, and if possible, catching whatever it is on video.”
“Hey, Ali said. “Try commenting the video, asking if she’s alone or not!”
“That’s a good idea” I agreed. “Warren, do the honours!”
“Alright”, he said, somewhat reluctantly, and continued to type in the comment under the stream.
“Hey, I don’t mean to sound creepy or anything, but are you alone in the house?”, Warren wrote in the comment section.
“Hey, I’m back”, Jen said in a sigh while picking up her chair from the floor. “Man was Ben acting weird”, she continued. “Never seen him like that!
“What happened?” Henry asked.
“He was just inconsolable, wouldn’t stop crying. He was trying to talk through his tears and sniffles, must have had a bad dream or something. The only thing I could make out was “mirror lady”.
I could feel through the headphones how everyone else, just like me, froze in complete fear and astonishment.
“ Ah..Jen..” I said, and continued to tell her what had happened on the live stream while she was gone.
“Nah ah”, no fucking way” – she responded. “There is not a fucking ghost from a live stream, telepathically waking my little brother up from God knows how far away. This is a coincident! I mean, you’re not even sure what you saw! It could just be another person, or a damn coat hanging in the hallway, right?”.
“It’s true”, Warren said. “We don’t know. Still, creepy coincident don’t you think” he said with a laugh, a laugh that was cut short a second later.
“Alone” – Warren whispered.
“What?” – I said.
“Alone”, Warren repeated. “The channel owner answered my comment, he said slowly. “And she’s alone in the house”
We all went back to gluing our faces to the screens.