I had much trouble sleeping that night. If I as much as started to drift off, intense nightmares would set in and wake me up, drenched in sweat and with heavy breathing I still saw and felt the dreams. They were weird dreams, like nothing I had ever had before, dreams of being in an unfamiliar place, with a feeling of dread and utter helplessness waying down on me, a feeling of not being seen or noticed by people around me, only – there were no other people there, I was alone. I did however finally doze off, probably due to pure exhaustion. I woke up to a massive crash outside my window and ran up to see what was happening. A huge branch of the old oak just outside my room had broken off and crashed down in our backyard. This weather was out of this world. Never before had I seen a storm last this long, and only intensify as I went on. I stood there in the window, looking at the scenes playing out in front of me. Grey, almost black clouds passing by and the rain coming down so hard it almost looked like a snowstorm. The wind causing havoc everywhere you looked. I was so mesmerized by natures show that I almost didn’t hear my phone ring. Finally, I snapped out of my trance like state and realized it was ringing and buzzing beside me on the table.
I couldn’t let go of the horrifying experience with my screen the night before, to the point where I was almost too afraid to turn my computer back on. But I needed to tell the rest of the group what had happened, so I took a deep breath and pressed the power button on my computer and once again, like so many times before, sat down and listened to the sound of the fans starting up and discs starting to spin inside my neon-lit chassi that doubled as a foot stool under my desk. One by one my screens came back to life, except the screen that had had the message on it the night before. It didn’t respond. The light behind the button was glowing green as usual, but the monitor remained black. It took a good five minutes before it slowly started to fade from black into its normal settings, but when it did, I saw that the lines with the message were gone. The screen was once again back to normal, not a trace that anything had been wrong with it the night before. I immediately started to question my own experience. Had I dreamt it? Could that be possible? I did have nightmares through out the night, was that just another one of them? Just more realistic than the others? That did seem to make the most sense, I convinced myself. What else could it be?
I was back in the chat, and it seemed, to my surprise, that all the others were online as well already. It wasn’t even one o clock in the afternoon, usually no one would be here for another five or six hours.
“Absolutely!”, Henry answered. I once again decided not to go into what I had experienced, or dreamt, the night before. I didn’t want to sound like this thing was getting to me and making me see things that weren’t there.
“Hey guys!” Warren suddenly said in an exited voice. “Check out the stream, she’s added another camera!” Everyone opened the stream again, but I let the cursor hover over the link for a while. I hesitated. “Maybe all the things that was happening wasn’t dreams and mind tricks, maybe it did in fact have something to do with this damn stream “, I thought. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and went along with the others and clicked the link. The site started to load, and just like Warren had so excitingly proclaimed, there was another camera added to the stream. This one was of the exterior of the house, pointed in an angle towards the front door down on the left side and the front yard for the larger part of the shot, revealing some of the area surrounding the house. It looked like a normal suburb, houses of different sizes with fences & bushes separating the front yards. Nothing out of the ordinary. In the distance you could see a church tower that looked like it had been damaged. It seemed it was missing the silver painted roof panels on one side of the top of the tower. Based on the heavy rain coming down in front of the camera, and the trees trying to withstand the hard winds in the background, it seemed that wherever this stream was broadcast from, they too were hit by a storm like the one we all were experiencing.
Even though we all felt a bit sketchy about looking into this even further and feeling almost stalkish about looking up someone’s house like this, we couldn’t help ourselves from feeling a little excited about it. And hey, it gave us something to do for a while, so we started to investigate and check angles, try to determine distances, and look for more things to use as checkpoints to determine the correct street. We looked at the houses across the street if there was anything standing out. There was one house for instance, built in a Victorian style that had a small tower on one of the corners that no other house seemed to have. Another one had a small fountain in their front yard. Small details like that could help us pinpoint the exact street. After splitting up and taking parts of the map between us, it really didn’t take long before Ali with an exited “Got it!” had found the house with the tower. She sent over the link with the address to us, and we all went over to check it out. In street view, all we had to do was turn the camera 180 degrees and there in front of us was the house that must be the source of the stream.
We all listened as we heard Warren talk to the local cops, explaining the whole thing, that we were watching this house live on a stream, and that it seemed like something had happened to the owner. The cops had at first been somewhat reluctant to buy the story, but finally agreed to send a squad car to check it out. We sat fully ingulfed in the stream, trying to see if we could spot any movement at all from the woman, while eagerly awaiting the cops on the external camera. After what seemed like forever, a cop car finally pulled up on the street in front of the house. Two officers exited the vehicle and holding on to their hats, less they would take of in the harsh winds, and trying to shield themselves from the whipping rain coming from what looked to be every direction, they made their way up to the front door and knocked hard a couple of times. The angle of the camera didn’t reveal who opened the door, but we could clearly see the cops communicating with someone, gesturing, and nodding as if listening to someone. They were let in the house, and we continued to monitor their way from the interior cameras. We saw the reflection of someone leading them inside in the mirror in the living room, and we saw them walk right past the woman laying on the hallway floor into the kitchen, like they didn’t even notice her. There was no one else but the two officers, but we could still clearly see them talking to what seemed to be a third party.
“Shit, I need to record this”, I thought while quickly connecting my external drive and hit record on the screen capture software.
The officers where then, seemingly, led into the living room where they stood and looked around for a bit before once again moving towards the front door. Tipping their hats to whoever was there with them and exiting the house. We all sat with our moths wide open, not believing what we were witnessing.
Once again, we heard him talk to the cops, but this time it seemed he was doing more of the listening than explaining.
“I don’t understand” Ali said, with a clearly frightened voice. “I don’t get any of this” We all agreed and continued to look at the three cameras, still showing the same images we’d seen for a good hour now.
We obviously couldn’t talk him out of it, and silently all agreed to follow his moves closely. It would take him about fifteen to twenty minutes to get there, and we all sat in silence the entire time waiting for him to show up on the external camera of the stream. After a while, we saw him standing there on the street, looking at the house, then straight into the camera, giving a small wave of his hand in our direction. We could see him reach for his phone, and a couple of seconds later he popped up in the chat.
The door opened.