It first happened at Zoey’s birthday party.
The three of us posed for a picture. The phone flashed brightly in our eyes, lighting up the dark bar. And when I looked away, briefly—
There was something wrong with the afterimage.
There was the usual sort of shimmery brightness, floating in front of my vision. But in the center… there was a hole, or a darkened blob, or something. With a flash from a photo, it should’ve just been a uniform, shimmery circle… but it wasn’t.
It only lasted for a second, then faded away. I was back to staring at my friends’ smiling faces, the two men leering at us at the end of the bar, and the bright-pink drink in front of me.
So I forgot about it.
Until I was on my phone the next night. As usual, I was staying up way later than I should, doomscrolling through social media updates that made everyone else’s lives look perfect. When I finally turned my phone off a little before 1 am and closed my eyes, I saw the perfect imprint of the screen against the back of my eyelids, shimmering and glittering like stars.
Except there was a blob in the middle.
Since my eyes were closed this time, I could see it a little more clearly. The edges were blurry, as all afterimages are, but it almost looked like… a man?
Like a little man, standing there on the backs of my eyelids.
I frowned. Had I been looking at a photo of a man? I tried to think about what I’d looked at before I turned off the phone. I had been looking at photos… of Jesse’s baby shower, of Josh’s hike in the Appalachians…
I shrugged. The last photo must’ve had a man in dark clothing, standing in the middle of a bright background. Or something like that.
The afterimage faded and I drifted off to sleep.
***
Weeks went by and I never even thought about the afterimages. But then, one night, I was scrolling through Reddit posts, wasting time. And on one of those subreddits, like damnthatsinteresting or blackmagicfuckery or something like that, they had an optical illusion. There was a black-and-white drawing of a woman’s face, with a red dot on her nose. Supposedly, if you stared at the red dot for 30 seconds and then looked at a blank wall, you’d see her image on the wall.
I’d done optical illusions like this as a kid. Still, I had nothing better to do, so I went ahead and stared at the red dot for 30 seconds.
1… 2… 3…
Damn, this was harder than I remembered.
11… 12… 13…
My eyes were tearing up a little. I blinked.
28… 29… 30.
I looked at the wall—
And froze.
I saw the woman’s face. But there, slightly off-center—under her left eye—was the clear silhouette of a man.
I just stared, until the shimmering lines of the afterimage faded away. Until the wall was blank white, like it was supposed to be. I took a deep breath, walked over to the kitchen, splashed water on my face.
What the fuck was that?
No no no. That must be part of the illusion. I scanned the comments, looking for mention of a man. But there were only three (it was a new post) and they were perfectly ambiguous. Just saying things like ‘wow, so cool!’
I turned off the phone, slid it away from me, and hid my head in my hands.
I really needed to cut down on my screen time.
***
I used to play a game when I was little.
When I couldn’t sleep, I’d rub my eyes for a long time. It would create this strange pattern of colors and shapes, blooming over the inside of my eyelids, and my brain would turn it into a story. A movie playing before my eyes. Pareidolia—our brain’s ability to see faces in knots of wood, or see sheep and birds in fluffy white clouds—is a powerful thing.
I’d see strange patterns of colors that looked like weird lanscapes from a Dr. Seuss book. I’d see blobby shapes that looked like little fantastical critters scampering about. But weirdly, they’d all end the same way. Around ten minutes in or so, I’d see an annulus of shimmering color, surrounding a big circle of nothingness.
Almost like a ginormous eye, staring back at me.
I hadn’t done it in years. But here I was now, ready to start: lying in bed, eyes closed, hands raised. I was having trouble sleeping, and it occurred to me: if there really was this man I kept seeing, shouldn’t I see him when I close my eyes?
I began to rub my eyes. The colors bloomed before me, inside my eyelids. Vivid reds spiraled around each other. Sparkling darkness chased them back, ate them away. A psychadelic vortex replaced them, made of bubbling circles that reminded me of a Julia fractal. The pattern looked like something out of an LSD trip, a vortex pulsing with my own heartbeat.
And then—
A dot of darkness, at the center of my vision.
I continued rubbing my eyes, and the darkness grew. But it wasn’t the shimmery, sparkling darkness that appeared in the patterns. It was just… the absence of everything. As it grew, it looked more and more out of place; an empty void next to shimmering, dancing colors.
And then I saw it clearly.
It was the shape of a man.
A tall, thin man with arms that hung limply at his sides. A neck slightly too long, a gaunt stretched face. A complete absence of color. The silhoutte grew in my vision, slowly, cutting through the shimmering colors.
He’s getting closer.
And then he moved. A long, spindly arm slowly lifted up, stretching towards me, reaching out for me—
My eyes snapped open.
I stared up at the white ceiling. For a second—just the briefest, most fleeting moment—I saw his afterimage, projected onto the blank ceiling.
And then nothing.
I don’t know how long I lay there, panting, my entire body seized up like I couldn’t move. Then, finally, I turned on the lights and called a friend, who I told the entire story to, start to finish.
And now I’m here, on Reddit, posting about it to strangers.
Because I don’t know what to do. I’ve gone down every rabbit hole on Google. I’ve even seen an ophthalmologist. I’ve never been a superstitious person, but it’s hard for me to believe that what I saw is just something wrong with my eyes.
I think it’s something far, far worse.