There’s a smiley face on every page I visit lately.
I started noticing it a few days ago, usually at the bottom of the page. At first, I kinda just wrote it off as some quirky feature of the websites I was on, like a watermark or something. It was weird, but harmless. But the more I saw it, well… The weirder it seemed.
Look, maybe my memory isn’t perfect but I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anything like that on the header of Reddit before and even if there was, it struck me as a little bit weird that I was seeing it on Facebook, YouTube and Google as well. I’ll admit, I did try looking it up and I did sorta find an answer, but it only half made sense. On some sites built with WordPress, that smiley face in the footer is just an indicator that a certain kind of analytics software is working. I didn’t read that much into it, but that was the answer I got.
That still didn’t exactly sit right with me though… First off, according to what I read, the Wordpress smiley is supposed to be in the footer. At the bottom of the page. Not up top in the header. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure most social media sites aren’t built through WordPress. Sure, maybe some of them are using the same third party for analytics, but I was seeing that goddamn smiley face on every site. Every. Goddamn. Site.
I dunno… I told myself that I was probably just overreacting to it. Sure, it was weird but there was probably some dumb, mundane explanation. But that didn’t really change the fact that it was fucking bothering me! Look, I’ve been on the internet for way too fucking long. I remember when Google was just becoming a thing. It completely blew my mind. Eight year old me had a blast browsing Wikipedia, learning everything I could about whatever mundane topics interested me. Back then, the coolest thing I could imagine doing was Googling shit like ‘Octopus’ so I could see pictures of a real live octopus, or looking up the Dino people from that overly violent shooter game my parents let me play for some reason. I remember that, that particular search led me down the rabbit hole of some weird porn, and I vividly recall not understanding why the dino people were fucking each other since one was a carnivore and the other was a herbivore and they obviously wouldn’t be friends… But now I’m getting off topic.
My point is, I grew up with the internet. I know it very well and I’ve seen everything. The shock sites, the gore, the weird porn. I’ve seen it all. Logically, I shouldn’t have been this bothered by some weird smiley face. And I guess it wasn’t just the stupid smiley that was bothering me… It was the lack of context. It was just there and I couldn’t seem to find any explanation as to why.
Granted, I didn’t really dig that deep at first… It wasn’t one of those gnawing questions that kept me up all night. More like an annoyance that I begrudgingly tolerated. Right up until I realized I was the only one who had it…
I’d gone over to my friend Allen’s house to catch the hockey game, and we’d gotten into talking about movies during the break between the second and third periods. He’d mentioned that this one coming out was supposed to be really cool and ended up bringing out his laptop to show me the trailer.
There was no smiley on his browser. Not on Google or on YouTube. Everything just looked… Well. Normal.
I had to ask.
“You ever see that weird smiley in the header on Google?”
He’d looked over at me, obviously confused.
“Smiley?” He’d asked, “What smiley? Where?”
“In the header.” I said, pointing to where it would be on my screen. “I’ve been seeing it for like a month now. I thought it was just part of the websites now.”
“Uh… No. I’ve literally never seen that. You said it’s on the sites? Not like, in your browser?”
“No, I’ve tried a couple of different browsers and it’s always there. Chrome, Firefox, Safari. I’ve even been seeing it on my phone.”
I took my phone out of my pocket and brought up the same video we were watching on YouTube just to show him. Sure enough, the smiley was there.
“That’s so weird, man… Maybe it’s something in your settings?”
Maybe?
I’d checked my browser settings to try and figure out if that was causing it, but maybe I’d missed something? I didn’t know…
I left Allen’s palace that evening feeling a little more uneasy about this whole stupid smiley thing… My higher brain told me that this wasn’t really a big deal. Maybe I had some software on my computer that was causing it? But what? I’d deleted a lot of the bloatware off my laptop ages ago, and I didn’t have that many apps on my phone. Hell, I’d just gotten the damn phone! It had to be something else… But what?
I started looking for answers again that night, clicking into some old computer help forums, looking for some answer to just what the fuck was going on. It probably could’ve waited until morning but this was on my mind now, I had a feeling I wouldn’t sleep until I had something resembling an answer. Most of what I found though, was more or less completely unrelated. The only thing I saw that seemed to be even remotely helpful came from an archived forum post from 2007… And it didn’t exactly calm me down.
It was on a small tech support forum from the UK. The original post read:
‘Been seeing this on every site lately. Is this normal? My mate doesn’t see it on his computer. How do I get rid of it?’
The first reply came from one of the forums admins.
‘Weird. Never seen that before. Some sort of app or something?’
The next couple of replies echoed the same sentiment, offering a few suggestions that the poster said hadn’t worked. Then, there was this:
‘Get offline. Delete everything. Leave. Stay off the grid. He is Watching.’
After reading that, my first thought was that whoever had said it was full of shit. It was probably just some troll, screwing around. I scrolled past it, but there wasn’t much else to see.
I clicked on the original posters profile, hoping that maybe I might see another post where he actually got this resolved. But no. They hadn’t posted since 2006 and their last post was the one I’d just read.
Out of curiosity, I went back and looked for the ‘Get offline, delete everything’ comment. The guy who’d posted that had been offline for about the same amount of time. That comment had been one of his last. I checked out the other ones but they seemed… Well. Normal. He talked about the PC he’d built and gave what looked like pretty standard tech advice. That one weird comment was the only thing that stood out.
Look, I know not to believe everything you see posted online. I don’t know who needs to be told this, but people tend to post a lot of bullshit. I know. Shocking. Who would’ve thought that a more or less unregulated space where people can more or less say whatever they want with a certain degree of anonymity would be full of fake news and horseshit made up just to get attention? I’ve read comments from a million trolls over the years, and this really didn’t seem that much different.
But the fact that, that was on the only forum I found talking about my problem didn’t really sit well with me. I dunno. Maybe it was just the weirdness of my situation spooking me… Maybe I needed to go out more, get some fresh air. Hell, adopt a cat or something so I wouldn’t just be alone in my apartment most of the time. I tried to brush the whole thing off, shut down my laptop, and went to bed.
I wish I could say I slept well, but I didn’t.
The next morning, I slept in.
By the time I got out of bed, it was closer to 11. It wasn’t a big deal. I had the day off, so I could afford to sleep in a little later if I wanted. I’d sorta avoided going on my laptop for the better part of the day, partially because this whole stupid smiley face thing was still kinda creeping me out. But after loafing around the house for most of the day, I eventually picked it up to watch a movie. I booted it up as usual, opened Google Chrome, and expected to be greeted by the Google homepage.
I was not.
What popped up on my screen made me actually push my laptop away in disgust.
Several new windows opened up. At first, I didn’t see what was in them and maybe that was a good thing. But when the last one popped open and loaded in, I was greeted with the close up of a dead man on a morgue table, most of his face missing. One lidless eye stared out of a broken socket. His cheek and lower jaw had been messily torn off leaving his tongue hanging there. I closed the window immediately, not wanting to see any more. That didn’t do much to help…
The window behind it had a picture that looked fresh out of some really gross porn. Two women were holding a plastic bag filled with something brown and judging by the residue all over their faces…
Yeah.
They looked like they were eating shit.
The sight of that almost made me want to throw up.
When I closed that window, another one was waiting for me… And another, and another. Gore, castrations, sick porn, you name it. It was open on my fucking laptop. I didn’t need to see that much human feces, but hey. Now that’s a thing I’ve seen and I will never unsee it!
Look, I’ve seen some fucked up things. I said before, that you’re doomed to see them on the internet. But this was extreme even for me! I don’t know who the fuck could’ve looked through that stuff without feeling the urge to puke! Have you ever seen or heard something that makes you feel as if you just lost a little part of your soul that you’ll never get back? Yeah. It was just a gallery of that. I didn’t have the stomach to go through all of them. I slammed the screen shut and gagged. I almost spilled my breakfast all over the floor.
I put my laptop on my coffee table, staring at it as if it was about to explode while I tried to process just what the fuck had just happened. Obviously, I hadn’t looked that shit up! So where the hell did it come from? My mind drifted back to the comment from that forum last night…
‘He is Watching.’
Suddenly, that felt a lot less like a troll comment…
The thought that someone had hacked me felt outlandish to even entertain, but that’s mostly just because you never think it’ll actually happen to you. I couldn’t think of any other rational explanation for all of this. Someone was obviously fucking with my computer from the outside! Maybe the smiley face had been a symptom of that? Some subtle change he’d made just to fuck with me? Were there other changes too? Things I’d missed? I couldn’t think of anything off the top of my head… I don’t suppose it mattered either.
I sat on the couch for a few moments, trying to think of what to do next before cautiously taking out my phone and opening its browser. I wasn’t shocked to find more of the same crap open there… I just ignored it and looked up the address of the nearest computer repair shop, before shutting my phone off.
I told the guy at the shop what I’d seen. Someone had access to my computer and was screwing with it. I told him more or less everything, from the weird smiley, up to the barrage of gore and scat porn that had greeted me when I’d tried to log on. He just said that he’d see what he could do and I figured that would be the end of that. I told myself that he’d find some weird software on my computer, delete it, and I’d be good to go. Easy peasy.
That is not what happened.
The police picked me up while I was getting ready for work the next morning. The officer at my door asked me if I was Caleb Wright, and obviously, I said yes.
I didn’t expect them to take me in for questioning, and I sure as hell didn’t expect them to put a photograph of a dead woman on the table of the interrogation room!
“Recognize her?” The Detective asked. My hand instinctively went to cover my mouth as I saw the woman in the picture. She was clearly outdoors and stripped naked… Her throat was cut and her eyes were still open, but it was more than clear that she was dead.
“What the fuck… No! What is this?” I asked.
“Sylvia Ford. Back in 2008, they found her body outside Chilliwack, BC. She was 19 years old.”
“Alright, that’s horrible, but what the hell does that have to do with me?”
“A man found this photo on your laptop yesterday.” The Detective replied, “Along with a few others… Some were taken before she was killed. These aren’t crime scene photos. These were most likely taken by whoever killed her. So what I want to know is, why did we find them on your laptop?”
“I don’t fucking know, man!” I cried, “I told the guy at the repair shop that someone’s been fucking with my laptop. He put all this messed up shock porn on there yesterday. Maybe he did this too? I’ve never been to BC! Ask my parents, Christ, I was like 13 in 2008! I didn’t fucking do this!”
“And you’ve got no idea who did, right?” The Detective asked. Look… I know it was his goddamn job to question me. But I was not in the mood to deal with it.
I kept my cool as best I could, considering I was being asked about a cold case from 2008. I won’t go over the entire interrogation, but needless to say, they eventually let me go since I was 13, and living with my parents in Ontario on the other side of the country at the time of the murder!
Christ, this was becoming too much for me…
I called my parents that night and asked them if I could go over and stay for a little while. Obviously, they said yes.
I told them about everything that was going on when I got there, with nothing but a backpack full of my things in tow.A home cooked meal and a good night’s sleep in the guest bedroom made the day feel just a little less shitty. I called in some PTO from work the next day just to let myself relax and process all the stupid shit that had just happened.
I’d kept my phone off since I’d left the police station. Obviously, whoever was fucking with me had access to that, and maybe it’s paranoid of me to think so, but I was sure they could probably track me through it. I’d given the Detectives my parent’s number just in case they needed to contact me. I figured I’d be better off that way.
A couple of days later, I went back to work and for a little while, things were quiet… I wish I could’ve enjoyed it.
Funny thing… When you’re scared out of your fucking mind, you don’t enjoy the quiet moments between everything going horribly wrong. Your mounting dread of whatever will go wrong next is always at the back of your mind while the last horrible thing that happened sinks in.
I didn’t sleep well while I was at my parent’s… I thought about the goddamn murder investigation this fucking asshole had implicated me in, I thought about the fact that he was obviously stalking me! I didn’t know what to do! Sure, I’d told everything to the police. But I didn’t exactly have a lot of faith that they’d swoop in, drag this guy out of whatever basement he was in, and dish out some justice. The comment I’d read about this guy was from 2006 and from the UK. He’d been active for the better part of 15 years, probably doing this exact same thing to other people. If nobody had caught him so far, he probably wouldn’t get caught this time. So what exactly were my options here? Wait it out until he got bored? How long would that take? Would he even get bored, or was this just my fucking life now?
At least I knew that my bank account was okay… But that was a small comfort. After some thought, I ended up transferring most of my money to my Mom’s account just in case this guy had my passwords and tried to rob me. And at least I got about a month and a half of anxious peace… So that counted for something.
There was one little blip on the radar when a letter addressed to me came in the mail. I found that a little weird since my mail usually didn’t come to my parent’s place, but I figured it was just junk mail. I opened it anyway, expecting another letter from the bank about how I’d been approved for a personal line of credit.
Instead… All I saw was a single sheet of paper with a smiley face printed on it.
I took it straight to the police.
It was a Sunday morning, about a month after I’d gone back home that I woke up alone. I’d slept in a little bit. Not as late as usual, but it was still moderately late. And I woke up slowly, brushed my teeth, and went down to the kitchen to say good morning to my parents.
Only when I said it, nobody replied.
I looked at the time. It was 10 AM. Usually, my parents were up by 8, and by 9, my Dad had usually started breakfast. Had they slept in too?
I went back upstairs to their bedroom, only to find the door open. The bed was empty. They were gone.
Now, I didn’t really think too hard on that. It was a little later in the morning and my Dad had been saying he’d wanted to head to the store that day. I could connect the dots. They’d probably gone out. Maybe they’d already had breakfast, or maybe they’d decided to go out for breakfast. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d done it. I just set to making my own eggs and bacon. I can’t fry an egg as well as my Dad can, but I do an okay job. I figured I could eat, shower and be ready to help them bring stuff in when they got back. Then, maybe I’d check in with Allen and see how he was doing.
I heated up the pan, added the butter, and cracked my two eggs. As I did, I saw the TV turn on from the corner of my eye.
I paused, looking over. My parent’s kitchen looks into the living room, so I had a pretty good view of the TV from where I was standing. The manufacturer’s logo displayed for a moment, before fading to black. And from that black came a single image. A white smiley face.
I felt my heart seize up in my chest. The smiley face sat on screen for a few moments, flickering slightly before vanishing. It was replaced by the YouTube homepage as if someone was casting to the TV. Looking at it, I could see that it was logged in to my account… And I could see something in my recommended videos.
YOUTUBE POOP - CALEBS FAMILY FUCKING DIES :)
The thumbnail was a picture of my parents… I felt a slow, queasy feeling starting to build up in my stomach.
“No, no, no, no…”
I left the stove, running upstairs to grab my phone. I’d left it in my bedside table and with shaking hands, I turned it on and opened YouTube. The video was right there, saved to ‘Watch Later’.
My breathing was frantic and uneven. I hesitated to click on it… I didn’t want to see what was there. But I had to know…
I opened the video.
It started with bass music from ‘Fresh Prince of Bel Air’ and I could see my parents walking down the street. The video was shot from a car parked nearby. Neither of them seemed to notice it as they walked past. The next scene was one I recognized… A home movie. Christmas of 2011…
Only it didn’t play as normal. In the video, teenage me opened his presents and marveled at the fact that I got Skyrim. The camera cut to my Mom, sitting on the couch. I remember that in the real video, she’d said: “Merry Christmas, honey!” But the video cut together snippets of her dialogue to make her say something else.
“Honey, you suck fat cocks.”
Behind the camera, my Dad laughed. That laugh sounded like it was taken from a different video. Most of the rest of the video played out like this, cutting between different scenes from old home movies, editing together dialogue to make my parents say new things. Most of them were just insulting me… Some of them were just meant to be as shocking and offensive as possible.
Clips of porn were cut in, along with ‘jokes’ about my Mom participating in it… Every now and then, the video would just sort of cut to an image of a giant, lidless eye or a smiley face. It was disgusting… Even with its stupid, juvenile sense of humor, it was too much. And that’s not even touching the fact that this was made with my family’s home fucking movies! I watched the video play out in disgust, and almost shut it off to go to the police.
But before I did, the scene changed.
It was a video of my parents… But not one that I recognized.
No.
This was something new.
My heart began to race again as I looked at them. Both of them had been stripped from the waist up and were hanging in some dark, dingy looking area that looked like a basement or something. It was flooded, with the water coming up to around their waists. My Mom had clearly been crying… My Dad looked pale and shaken.
He spoke, but the poster had edited his voice, splicing together bits of audio to make something new.
“This is your fault, Caleb. Why did you have to be such a fuck up?”
My Mom spoke next, her voice edited in the same way.
“I wish your father had cum inside my ass…”
Then, offscreen I heard someone laughing. Just a cold, childish snicker…
The camera turned towards a light switch nearby. I heard my Dad cry out.
“No… Wait…”
A gloved hand reached out and hit the switch.
Both my parents seemed to scream. Their bodies went stiff as they were electrocuted. The video cut out… And the last image was that of a white smiley face on a black background.
With tears starting to fill my eyes, I closed out of YouTube.
I knew there was no point in calling my parents… But I still tried. I hoped that maybe, the phone would ring and I’d hear my Dad’s voice, asking me what was wrong. Instead, all I heard was an unfamiliar voice on the line.
It sounded like it belonged to a young man. His voice was breathy, almost as if he was in the middle of laughing… He only said one word.
“Smile!”
I’ve gone to the Police. I tried to show them the video, but it’s gone. I can’t find a trace of it anywhere. But I know what I saw. The cops have searched my parent’s house. They’ve declared them as ‘Missing Persons’ and they say they’re actively looking for them. But I don’t think they’ll ever find them… Hell, I don’t even know if they really care enough to find them.
I’ve gone back to my apartment. I don’t know what to do anymore.
I bought a new laptop, but the smiley face is still there on every website, reminding me that He is still watching me. I’ve tried looking for information, but there’s nothing to find. Maybe He won’t let me find it…
I don’t know how much longer I can deal with this. I don’t know what he’s going to do next, if it’ll be some disgusting, childish prank or another hellish nightmare that’ll ruin my life even more. I’ve never been so scared in my life, and there is no one that is helping me. The Police say they’re looking into it but they’ve turned up nothing! If I avoid the internet, he still finds me! I’ve thought about running away, but where would I go? How do I know he won’t just keep following me?
I got an email earlier today… A link to a new YouTube video. It’s another ‘YouTube Poop’ titled ‘Allen Fucking Dies :)’.
I tried calling Allen earlier… He’s not answering.
I thought about watching the video but I… I can’t… God, I feel like such a fucking coward but I can’t.
I need help. I need to know what I can do to stop this, because I can’t deal with this anymore. I won’t! This fucking guy can’t just do this shit and get away with it!
I need help…