I’ve been a skeptic my whole life. Ghosts, demons, the supernatural - it was all just excuses for things we didn’t understand. Or that’s what I thought until my cell phone started acting up last week.
It all began when my old college buddy, Mike, sent me a random message asking if I ever sorted through our road trip photos from years back. We had taken hundreds of pictures during our travels, most forgotten in the abyss of my digital archives. Curious, I scrolled way back on my camera roll to the time period he mentioned and started thumbing through the pics.
There were plenty of memories there, but nothing unusual. Until I came across a photo that I had no recollection of taking. It was an image of an old gas station we had stopped at—nothing remarkable, except the timestamp. It was dated two days ago.
I chuckled, assuming it was a glitch, and swiped to the next photo. But the image I saw made my blood turn cold. This one was of my bedroom, taken from the foot of my bed, while I was sleeping. The timestamp once again showed a recent date. I live alone.
Then the whispers started. At first, I believed they were faint echoes from my neighbors or maybe even the wind, but they grew sharper, almost as if someone was quietly speaking just behind me. No one was ever there when I turned around.
I tried rationalizing what was happening. I checked my phone for malware, changed all my passwords, even did a factory reset, but the photos kept reappearing, each one closer to the present moment, each one more intimate than the last.
And the whispers… they started to form words. Words that seemed nonsensical, but filled me with dread I couldn’t explain.
I contacted Mike, and he said he was just joking about the photos—I had never shared them with him, and he’d never seen them. Knowing I needed to escape, I booked a hotel room out of town. One night, in the sterile hotel room, I hoped for respite. Instead, I woke from a shallow sleep to the glare of my phone screen illuminating the darkness.
Squinting against the light, I saw my camera roll was open, filled with new photos. Photos of me sleeping taken moments ago—from within the room. I was alone, the door locked, no sign of intrusion.
Terrified, I called the front desk for security. But when they arrived, the photos were gone, replaced with innocuous images of the hotel parking lot. The guards left, chuckling about the scared guest.
After they left, the whispers returned, now clearly a voice, chanting my name over and over. They were coming from my phone, yet it lay on the table, powered off. I could feel it crawling in my brain, a primal fear seizing control.
I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but these whispers… they seem to know me. As I’m typing this, the camera on my phone flickers on and off, and I swear I can see shadows shifting within its lens.
I don’t know what will happen next, but I need to share this. If you’re reading this and understand what’s happening to me, please tell me what to do.
I can’t tell if I’m making new memories, or if the whispers are writing them for me. The whispers became more incessant, more demanding. They flooded my dreams with images of places I didn’t recognize and people I’d never met. Faces twisted in horror, crying for help I couldn’t give. Was the phone somehow capturing these images from my nightmares, or was it dictating them?
I tried to get rid of the device. I threw it in the lake on the edge of town. But the next morning, it was back on my bedside table, dry as a bone and with no sign of damage. The camera blinked as if it had an eye of its own, watching.
I started feeling like I was being followed. Not just by the whispers, but by something palpable, a presence that loomed just on the edges of my vision. I’d whip around to catch it, but there was nothing—just the lingering sensation of being watched, and sometimes, a cold spot in the air where it seemed something had just been.
As the days progressed, I stopped going out. My phone was no longer just a device; it had become an appendage, an extension of the unseen force that haunted me. My camera roll was now full of images that chilled me to the core—shadowy figures standing over my bed, my own face contorted in sleep, unaware of the silent observer.
My friends started asking if I was okay, said that I hadn’t been myself lately. How could I explain that I was terrorized by my own phone, by whispers that no one else could hear?
One evening, in a moment of relative silence, I dared to ask a question into the void that surrounded me. “What do you want from me?”
The answer, when it came, was a picture message. An image of a decrepit house I’d never seen before in real life, but one I recognized instantly from my dreams. The whispers all at once chorused coordinates, latitude, and longitude that pointed to an isolated spot just outside of town.
Driven by a mixture of fear and desperate curiosity, I went to the address the whispers had given me. The house was exactly as it appeared in the photo and in my nightmares. Its windows were darkly staring eyes; the door ajar like a crooked mouth. It emanated a air of decay.
I stepped inside the threshold, the whispers now silent, and my phone vibrated with life. Picture after picture flooded my screen, each one a moment from my past, mixed with snapshots of the decrepit house over time. It was as if my entire life had somehow centered around this place.
The final photo was of me, standing at the doorway just moments before. But behind me in the photo was a figure—a dark, indiscernible shape, but with a peculiar familiarity.
I turned around, and face to face with nothing but the empty room, my phone emitted a final whisper, loud and clear.
“Welcome home.”
The last thing I remember before passing out was the sound of the camera shutter and the sensation of falling.
When I awoke, I was lying in my own bed, with no recollection of leaving the house. My phone was back on the bedside table, and when I checked it, there was only one new photo.
It was a picture of me, sprawled on the floor of the old house. But this time, there was no shadowy figure. The message was clear: whatever was haunting me wasn’t in the phone or in that house.
It was me all along.