In photography, releasing the shutter is a deeply vulnerable moment. You spend all this time and energy focusing deeply on your subject, questioning your choice of lens, interrogating your lighting, running the math over and over to make sure your exposure is right, second guessing the zebra stripes because of that one time they lied to you and your sharp focus was a soft mess, and wondering if you even understand your choice in composition at all. At the moment when all of your concerns and questions and worries reach equilibrium, you give in, accept that this is the moment you are in and there is nothing more you can do, release the shutter, and hope for the best. With that mixture of high emotion, calculation, and visual processing all happening at once, it seems like a perfect time for a little pareidolia to pop up. So when it started happening, I didn’t really question it.
That’s why the first time I saw something, I thought it was just a trick of light. I’d release the shutter, and with my eyes focused on the camera whatever was in the periphery of my vision would just kind of congeal into something. I didn’t even put much thought into it. I noticed something weird, but then it was gone, and it was while I was concentrating on something else. Pareidolia, right? Like laying in bed at night reading a scary story and the pile of dirty clothes emerging from the basket suddenly takes on a sinister air. Same thing.
I was doing a landscape and architecture gig for some rich guy who wanted to sell off one of his estates. Max. I didn’t really know anything about him. He kept a fairly low profile. He had a Facebook account set to private and that’s all I could find for social media. There were a few newspaper articles going back a decade or so that would mention him in passing, often related to real estate but occasionally as a prominent shareholder in some random company. He definitely had money and attracted the kind of attention anyone with enough money attracts, but it seemed like he wanted to have an otherwise quiet life. At any rate, it certainly looked like he could afford to pay me and the job wasn’t terribly difficult so I figured I’d just do it and be done. I was still just figuring out drone photography anyway, so that’s wins all around. Make money. Practice a new skill. Hopefully have a happy customer who can recommend me to his rich friends. It was an easy yes.
“I went to school for photography, you know. I loved it, but I sucked at it. Everything I shot was just completely dead. Soulless,” he told me as he punched in the security code at the gate.
“How did you get into what you’re doing now?” Not that I had any idea what that was. I figured I’d get two answers for the price of one question.
“Pure, dumb, blind luck. Here’s what nobody really tells you about money. All you need is one really fucking lucky turn, because once you have enough money it tends to start making itself. There’s a period when you first get it where you could possibly lose it again real fast, but once you get through that it just goes like rabbits. I don’t really do much these days.” He gestured at my camera equipment. “I’ll do something like this every once in a while to keep things running, but otherwise I don’t have to do anything, and the money just keeps coming in. I can take all the shitty, soulless photos I want and never have to worry.”
“Not a bad gig if you can get it,” I told him. I can’t imagine being in his place. I’m not sure I want to. Something about the idea of doing nothing and having wealth just pour in feels… Well… Morally questionable. Not that I would say that to the guy paying me a good day rate to take some pictures. That’s not exactly a bad gig either.
He brought me to a table on an outdoor cooking and dining area and laid out a set of blueprints. “You’ll want to do the outdoor shots first, otherwise the shadows from the trees will start screwing up your shots. Then move through the house. You have free reign over everything in there. Nothing is locked, it’s all staged, everything is done. Don’t move things around unless you absolutely have to, I paid good money to get it set up right, but if you need more room for your equipment or whatever it’s fine. Just put it back when you’re done.”
There were three levels. The main floor was a flat, modernist box. It looked smaller than it was, and then there were two subfloors all completely done out. It was honestly one of the more beautiful places I’d ever seen. I’ve done a few of these shots for realtors selling houses for rich people, but those all felt like bigger, gaudier versions of your average suburban house. This was a whole different level. Whatever you wanted, the estate would provide. It just blows my mind - the differences between the lives of the members of the 1% as you move that decimal point to the left.
Everything had already been set up very well. This would be an easy job. Most of the floor plan was pretty open so I could get loads of wide angle shots covering almost the entirety of each floor. He had already marked out good places to set up, I suspect as a way of showing off his photography training. He was right about the shadows though, so I got into it right away.
I did the drone shots first. It was pretty unremarkable. I managed to get a good shot peaking over the trees to see the house sitting at the end of the driveway like a popsicle on a stick. That and a couple top down shots were all I could really get without losing things to the trees. I tried to get a few artsy shots, but the light was already starting to move on so I got the drone landed and packed away and pulled out my camera.
I set up to take a shot that showed off the back entrance and the outdoor cooking and dining area. I got the camera on the tripod, set the exposure, composed the shot, focused, and when the only questions left were whether or not I had any photography skills at all, I had my moment of acceptance, released the shutter, and saw it. Just out of frame, at the edge of my own vision. Something that looked vaguely human, but a little bit wrong. Distorted. It reminded me of those panoramic photos where someone moves a little. Like a person, but slightly wrong.
I blinked and it went away. I didn’t really put much thought into it. Pareidolia at a moment of vulnerability. A little unsettling, but no more so than that dirty clothes basket in the middle of the night. These things are a little sticky though, like waking up from a dream. It left me feeling mildly creeped out as I moved on to take the next shot.
Another shot of the outdoor cooking and dining area, this time with the sliding glass door in the background. From this angle, you could see all the way through the house. The sun was just starting to stream in through the huge plate glass windows of the opposite room and the open floor plan allowed a totally unobstructed view. You just see the driveway in the distance through the front windows and follow that line through the house and out back to the patio area, with the line continuing out of frame as a stone path didn’t really terminate anywhere, but just gave in to the mossy grass. Money shot. It wouldn’t be difficult to get interest in this house.
Same process here. Worry, fret, do some math, check exposure, wonder about the zebra stripes, question the very existence of your ability, give in, find acceptance. There’s another figure just out of frame. Lopsided and elongated, smeared out. You could just make out a look of intense grief, as if it had been bent around a corner and stretched out.
Gone before the shutter even closed. I was more than a little shook up, but still convinced it was pareidolia. What else could it be? A hallucination, maybe? That’s sort of just advanced pareidolia, right? I’ve never had any issues like that before, and I had no reason to believe it would be possible, but there’s always a first. I figured it was far more likely that the first instance of pareidolia got me in a spooky frame of mind and now I’m just getting more spooked. I’m pretty certain that’s what happens on all those ghost hunter TV shows. People go get themselves a little spooked up and start imagining things. Advanced pareidolia.
Nothing to be done about it either way, just move on and get the next shot, but I’ll admit to picking up the pace a bit so I could be done a little sooner. The inside of the house was cooler than I expected. Everything was well set. The natural light was starting to really fill the space. The furniture was minimalist but inviting, and there were splashes of color and decoration in all the right places. You could tell this was done by a professional. I had that feeling now, though. Like something is off. That feeling you get after a good ghost story, like there could be something right behind you, but you’re pretty sure there isn’t. Something felt off. I wondered if the stager had that same feeling as I entered my moment of acceptance, opened the shutter, and right fucking there it is. Just out of frame.
A body. Clearly a body, but wrong. You could see the deadness in it’s eyes and the rigor setting in to the jaw, causing it to take on the shape of mourning. Like a figure from a romance painting hung over the couch, the image itself bent and stretched. The middle of the face was a smear of color dragged out a little further than it should have been, exaggerating the agony of death. One arm reached into the sky, the upper arm stretched and the forearm compressed and ending in stubby finger grasping at nothing. The shutter closes and it’s gone.
Max stepped through the sliding door. “This place is a little creepy. It always gives me bad vibes. It’s beautiful, but I have no mixed feelings about letting it go.”
“Yeah, bad vibes, you’re not kidding. I swear I keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye,” I said.
“You’re definitely not the first person to say so, and I doubt you’ll be the last. Don’t worry, it’ll be all done soon. Just a couple more shots here and we can move to the first subfloor. It’s pretty open too. I think there’s only maybe 10 shots tops until it’s all over.”
Ten shots. I could handle that. I found it reassuring to hear I wasn’t the only one who thought this place was bad news, and the conversation helped break up the tension. I wasn’t going to do a lot of reshoots, though. Set it up, get the shot, and fix it in post if I had to. Just grab the tripod, move, set up the camera, check for exposure, frame the shot, question your every life decision, accept that they all lead to this moment, open the shutter, bodies. Just out of frame. In a mirror this time, but no less disturbing. I could almost make out enough features and details to recognize them in a line up before the shutter closed.
“I’m considering trying some longer exposures,” I told Max. “Just to try to maximize the natural lighting.” That was a lie. I wanted to see what was happening.
“I mean, you’re the pro, but I don’t think I’d do that,” he responded.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I really didn’t want to anyway. It seems like a good experiment, but what would I have done if it worked? Marvel at the bodies? I still had to get the shots done, and knowing wouldn’t make anything any easier. “Sometimes the artist in me likes to try to sneak out when I need it to be just business. Get it done right, get it done well, but most of all, get it done,” I said.
Move. Adjust. Exposure. Frame. Question. Accept. Open. Bodies.
I wasn’t really looking forward to going downstairs at that point. I think if I’d been alone I would have probably just left and blamed an equipment failure or something, but it’s surprising how easy it is to do something you don’t want to do when there’s someone else there. It’s a weird quirk of humanity, that they lose a piece of themselves when there are others around. Sometimes it works out great. Sometimes, though, you just wish you could turn that function off.
We went down the stairs. It was beautiful. The staircase was a big, spiral, wrought-iron job that sat just next to a wall. You wouldn’t even know it was there if you didn’t look right at it, but when you were there it gave every sense of being well constructed, safe, and beautiful. It was simple, like the rest of the house. The beauty came from the quality of the wholeness of it. As you walked down the stairs, you can see outside one of the huge plate glass windows the whole way down until you start to turn on the spiral, then there’s a few inches of floor and it opens up to the second level. Another vast and open floor plan, with surprisingly high ceilings. Coming out on the turn drives home the size of it. You go from looking at the vastness of outside to the vastness of inside.
On the far side is a small pool lit by a combination of electric lighting and natural light piped in through fiber optic cables on the roof. It kept the area well lit, but gave the lighting a sense of being alive. The slight dapples here and there moving with the clouds and leaves and angle of the sun. Next to the pool was an open overhead shower, and the kitchen was beyond that. Every appliance matched and blended in perfectly. You could tell it was a kitchen, but it didn’t feel like a different space. Natural lighting from the light pipes faded toward the counters and prep spaces, where the lighting was stable and designed for the work of cooking. The kitchen and pool emerged on the far side of a small theater and another dining area, this one designed around a gas fireplace in the center, also dappled with light pipes.
“If it wasn’t for the ceiling you’d never know you were inside,” Max said. “Which is probably true for every indoor space, but just feels a bit more true here. That’s one of the things that really drew me to this property. So much of it feels a little bit more true than anything else.”
“It’s beautiful, that’s for sure. I’m sure you’ll get a pretty good selling price for it,” I said as I set up for a shot of the spiral staircase. I close my eyes and accept the shot before opening the shutter. The shutter closes. I open my eyes, and catch the fading image of a body reaching out to me in agony, its entire being stretched out behind it.
“A little bit more true than everything else,” Max says from behind me. “Let’s maybe hurry this up some. Get the shots that will sell it, skip the rest.”
I could not have agreed more. I had no reason to believe the images could harm me in any way, but they were disturbing, and I had a bad feeling building up. I didn’t want to be there any more than I had to. I turned around and set up the camera so I could capture the vastness of the underground space. It really seemed to just go on forever, and the shifting lighting gave it a liveliness. A breath, warm and moist on the back of your neck. I could feel where the bodies would appear as I was adjusting the focus, like memories I was trying to ignore. I did ignore it, and I opened the shutter, and there they were. Just like I remembered.
Bodies. Clear as day now, some of them still twitching. The one closest to me looked up at me with deep, pleading sadness. Its eyes sunken in and still shining with the light of awareness. They were beyond their own moment of acceptance, no longer pleading for their life, but for mine. The sorrow of seeing another living creature while they succumb to their forever death. I closed the shutter. The images were outlast the camera noticeably now.
I turned to Max and told him, “Hey I don’t want to be inconsiderate here, but I think it’s time for me to leave. I don’t know what’s going on here, but it doesn’t feel right. I’m scared, I’m uncomfortable, and I’m feeling a little sick. I’d like to leave.”
“I know. It’s bad. Let’s just get one more shot of this level and a couple shots of the subbasement and call it a day,” he responded.
“No, I’d rather just leave, thanks.”
“Just a couple more shots and I’ll get you a bonus. An extra $500? Would that do it? For two more shots? I know this place is creepy, but it’s just a house. I’ve always been fine here. $500 for you and we can both get out of here, then I can get rid of this place.”
It’s hard to not consider that. Photography isn’t really a business of tremendous wealth, and I really understood why he wanted to get rid of it. I agreed.
“If I was you, I think I’d just take a bulldozer to it and eat the loss,” I told him.
Max just shrugged. “Yeah I get it, but you have to keep the machine running,” he said.
We crossed the basement to get a shot from the other direction. I set up with the camera facing away from the stairs down to the second subfloor, getting the entire space in the frame. I could feel something breathing behind me as I set focus. I didn’t care if the photo came out terrible, I just wanted to get out of there. I closed my eyes and felt a deep sense of grief settle into my chest as I pressed the button to open the shutter while something warm and moist wrapped around my chest.
I fell backwards down the stairs, the camera remote dragging the whole setup over the ledge behind me. I couldn’t quite make out what was holding me, but it stopped my head from hitting the stairs. My legs bounced the whole way down, leaving bits of skin and blood on the edges of the stairs and stinging deeply at each impact. Max turned the corner and walked after me, clearly unsurprised.
“Sorry about this. Like I said, I have to do this once in a while to keep the machine running,” he said as the thing dragged me across the lowest floor away from the stairs. Max stood there on the last step, blocking the way out. I turned to look where I was headed and met the gaze of Max’s latest victims. There were three of them, all still breathing, still struggling towards the stairs. Each of them had a slick tentacled arm wrapped around their chests, pulsing. No, it was swallowing. The arms were swallowing something, bringing it in to the body of a beast I still couldn’t see.
“I don’t know where it came from, but it’s your vulnerability that lets it in,” he said, as I felt something scratching at my sternum.
“Every time you had that moment of acceptance it was there, tying itself in.”
I looked down to see a single, large tooth at the end of the tentacle, pressing into me.
“That’s what allows it to cross over. I could never get there. Close, but not quite”
The pressure was increasing in pulses.
“It makes for shitty art, but it gave me the opportunity to make a deal. I feed it, and good things happen. The machine keeps humming,” Max said. “I mean, what am I supposed to do? Money takes care of itself. What would I do if it was gone? You understand. I have to do this!”
I could feel the thing starting to crack through my sternum. Hot, sharp, digging pain radiated out of my chest and through my whole body. I felt something pouring into my chest, swelling against my skin. My adrenaline slammed on and endorphins flooded my body. I looked over at the others, silently screaming while they were being hollowed out. It was keeping them alive, and swallowing their emotions while they slowly rot away.
I reached behind me and grabbed at the tentacle and wrapped myself around in it. I had to see it. Each tentacle led to a single fleshy lump. Subtly shifting light bathed down over a slowly pulsing mound of flesh. Layer upon layer of skin rose up from the floor, piling and pouring over itself to form a single towering pustule. Each swallow of the tentacle came with a flush of red branching out into the body from the joint, deep crimson spiderwebs wrapping around it. At each swallow the whole of the beast would jiggle into the tentacle arm, pulling it in slightly, and then the mound would slip towards another arm for its next drink. Just beneath the skin a single eye floated around, pulling the skin taut enough to just make out the edge of an iris and pupil. The eye bounced contentedly with each undulation. Joyfully.
Soulless photography. That’s what got Max here. Just for a minute I have to be like Max and shut this thing out before it really gets into me.
I pulled my camera around and put it on auto. I just started letting the shutter fly, taking whatever pictures I could. Max laughed “An artist to the end! Maybe I’ll sell some of those. I bet some of them will be beautiful.”
I turned the camera towards Max. He laughed and struck a pose “Like this? Is this how you want me? I should have brought a swimsuit!” I just kept snapping while Max laughed away. Then I got it. I found my shot. Max was looking satisfied with himself, but his old mournfulness crept in. He recognized himself in me. With that came the vulnerability the creature needed. It fumbled out of me and latched onto him, dragging him down to take my place.
I ran out of the house. Max’s car was locked, so it was a long walk back. I should probably go back and put up a condemned sign or something to keep people out. I don’t know. I threw my camera in a dumpster on the way back. I think it’s time to go back to school. Maybe accounting this time.