Speaker 1: Story one. I'm justin. I live in Stockton, California, with
Speaker 1: my dad. It's just the two of us in a
Speaker 1: two story house on a quiet street that always feels
Speaker 1: like it's holding its breath. This happened a year ago,
Speaker 1: one incident. One minute, everything made sense, the next I
Speaker 1: don't know anymore. It was around twelve thirty am and
Speaker 1: I was headed downstairs to grab something sweet before going
Speaker 1: to bed. The hallway light was off and the staircase
Speaker 1: creaked like it always does when you try to move quiet.
Speaker 2: The house was still.
Speaker 1: I thought my dad had passed out on the couch
Speaker 1: like usual after coming home from the late shift. But
Speaker 1: when I hit the bottom step, I saw him standing
Speaker 1: near the entertainment center, looking kind of irritated. Hey, he said,
Speaker 1: without looking up, you seen the remote. I blinked. I
Speaker 1: thought you were asleep. He shook his head. Nah, got
Speaker 1: up to watch something, and it's gone. I've been looking
Speaker 1: for it for like half an hour. I even checked
Speaker 1: the kitchen and under the rug. It's not here. That
Speaker 1: wasn't strange in itself. The remote disappears all the time.
Speaker 1: But what caught me off guard was what he said next.
Speaker 1: Can you go get the one from your room, the
Speaker 1: universal one just for tonight. I nodded and went to
Speaker 1: head upstairs, But then I paused. I felt guilty watching
Speaker 1: him move the couch cushions like he was on the
Speaker 1: verge of losing it, so I said, hold on, let
Speaker 1: me help look a bit more before I go grab mine.
Speaker 1: We turned the place inside out, sofa cushions off, pulled
Speaker 1: out the TV stand, shook out blankets, even checked the
Speaker 1: bathroom for no good reason. We tore that living room
Speaker 1: apart nothing whatever, he muttered. Finally, just get yours. So
Speaker 1: I grabbed my remote for my nightstand, same place it
Speaker 1: always is, came back downstairs, handed it to him and
Speaker 1: said this will do right. He nodded, thanks and dropped
Speaker 1: onto the couch with that heavy sigh he always makes
Speaker 1: after work. I went back upstairs, got in bed, and
Speaker 1: set my foe alarm. I remember this part clearly. I
Speaker 1: put my remote back on the nightstand right there. I
Speaker 1: was just about to plug in my phone when I
Speaker 1: heard my dad call me again. Justin, he said from downstairs,
Speaker 1: voice normal, not urgent. I groaned, got out of bed
Speaker 1: and walked to the top of the stairs. What I
Speaker 1: shouted down you left your remote down here, he said.
Speaker 2: I froze.
Speaker 1: No I didn't, I said, I brought it back up.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it. Then, what's this, he asked. I
Speaker 1: heard the couch creak and then a beat of silence.
Speaker 1: I came down. He was sitting there staring at something
Speaker 1: on the cushion next to him. It was my remote,
Speaker 1: the exact one, same scratches on the battery cover, same
Speaker 1: little white sticker on the back that says Jay. I
Speaker 1: stared at it like it might vanish. I thought you
Speaker 1: said you brought it upstairs, he said slowly.
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 1: I said, I put it on my nightstand. He laughed once,
Speaker 1: a short, confused sound, and handed it to me. I
Speaker 1: turned it over. It was mine, not just a similar one,
Speaker 1: my remote. I walked back upstairs, and there it was,
Speaker 1: still sitting on my nightstand. I picked it up. Now
Speaker 1: I had two identical remotes in my hands. I stood
Speaker 1: there for what had to be a full minute, just
Speaker 1: holding them both, blinking like that would explain it. I
Speaker 1: went back down. He was still sitting there, staring at
Speaker 1: the screen. I held them up. Okay, look, He turned
Speaker 1: and looked at me, then looked at my hands. What
Speaker 1: the hell he said, I don't know. I told him,
Speaker 1: I swear to God, I only have one of these,
Speaker 1: always have. I grabbed it, brought it to you, came
Speaker 1: back upstairs, put it down, and now there's one up
Speaker 1: there and one down here.
Speaker 2: He stood up.
Speaker 1: You're messing with me, he said, I'm not. I snapped.
Speaker 1: Are you messing with me? He didn't answer. We both
Speaker 1: walked upstairs. I handed him one of them. He followed
Speaker 1: me into my room. We looked at the one on
Speaker 1: the night stand again, still there. So now we had three, three,
Speaker 1: three remotes, all identical, all physically there. He sat down
Speaker 1: on my bed. Okay, okay, this is I don't get it.
Speaker 1: Are you pranking me? I asked again. This time's sharper,
Speaker 1: like some kind of joke. He looked at me and
Speaker 1: he was pale. My dad doesn't get rattled easily, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't playing. I know what his jokes look like.
Speaker 1: This wasn't it. I held both remotes out and told
Speaker 1: him look, try both, see which one works.
Speaker 2: He did.
Speaker 1: They both worked, both controlled the TV downstairs. I brought
Speaker 1: the third one down. That one worked. Two three identical
Speaker 1: universal remotes, all fully functional, all physically real, all here,
Speaker 1: I tried to make sense of it, like maybe we
Speaker 1: had another backup one we forgot about.
Speaker 2: But I know we didn't. We only he.
Speaker 1: Ever had one universal remote, and I kept it in
Speaker 1: my room. He'd always borrow it when the living room
Speaker 1: one disappeared. That's what started this whole thing. I stood
Speaker 1: there in the middle of the living room holding one remote,
Speaker 1: my dad holding another, the third one sitting on the
Speaker 1: coffee table between us. You think maybe we just missed
Speaker 1: one earlier, I asked, voice tight, No, he said, without
Speaker 1: looking up.
Speaker 2: We checked everything. He was right.
Speaker 1: We had flipped that room upside down. The couch cushions
Speaker 1: were still tossed on the floor. There was no remote
Speaker 1: there before that third one appeared out of nowhere. And
Speaker 1: the worst part, the next morning, there were only two.
Speaker 1: The one on the coffee table was gone. Dad said
Speaker 1: he didn't touch it. I didn't touch it, but it vanished.
Speaker 1: I still have mine. He still has his, but I
Speaker 1: don't use it much anymore. Just seeing it makes me
Speaker 1: uneasy because for one brief moment, the rules of reality
Speaker 1: didn't add up. Something doubled, something showed up where it
Speaker 1: shouldn't have, and then disappeared again. There's no reasonable explanation.
Speaker 1: We both saw it. We both held them. Three real
Speaker 1: solid working remotes, then two story two. You ever hear
Speaker 1: your dad say something so random and off the wall,
Speaker 1: it sticks with you for life. When I was nine,
Speaker 1: mine told me, if you're going to sleep outside, don't
Speaker 1: ever sleep with your mouth open.
Speaker 2: Spiders will crawl in.
Speaker 1: That was the one rule he had when I started
Speaker 1: dragging blankets out onto our trampoline in the backyard. Didn't
Speaker 1: care about mountain lions, didn't care about frostbite, just spiders.
Speaker 1: I live in a small town outside Durango, Colorado, forests mountains.
Speaker 2: The whole postcard scene.
Speaker 1: Our house backs up to about two hundred yards of
Speaker 1: pine before the land starts to rise into rocky slopes.
Speaker 1: I was always an outdoor kid. I hated walls, hated
Speaker 1: the feeling of air conditioning. Summers, I'd sleep out back
Speaker 1: almost every night, flat on my back, staring at the
Speaker 1: stars from the middle of our trampoline. My parents gave
Speaker 1: up trying to drag me back in after the first
Speaker 1: few weeks. That's why I remember the night so clearly,
Speaker 1: not because anything strange led up to it. It was
Speaker 1: the opposite. Everything was normal, No bad dream, no creepy noise.
Speaker 1: I wasn't even cold. I just remember waking up with
Speaker 1: this awful pressure on my neck. Not the kind you
Speaker 1: get from rolling over onto your pillow weird. This was
Speaker 1: pulling me up, not down. My first instinct was that
Speaker 1: I'd wrapped myself up in a blanket and twisted it
Speaker 1: around my throat. I jerked forward, choking a little, and
Speaker 1: my arms went up on instinct. That's when I felt rope,
Speaker 1: actual rope, rough, dry hemp, frayed at the ends. And
Speaker 1: then this is the part that makes my stomach flip
Speaker 1: every time I think about it.
Speaker 2: I felt a knot a noose.
Speaker 1: I shot upright air rushed in, but it burned going down,
Speaker 1: started clawing at it, and when I finally got it off,
Speaker 1: I fell sideways off the trampoline and hit the grass hard.
Speaker 1: I remember spitting in the dirt and trying not to
Speaker 1: throw up. My eyes were watering, I could barely breathe.
Speaker 1: The rope was still hanging from my neck. It was short,
Speaker 1: less than a foot from the loop to the end,
Speaker 1: the kind of length you'd get if someone had cut it,
Speaker 1: not frayed by age, not snapped, clean cut. I stared
Speaker 1: at it, lying in the grass, dumb as a rock.
Speaker 1: It didn't make sense. I hadn't tied anything like that.
Speaker 1: We didn't have ropes like that around the house. This
Speaker 1: thing looked like it came out of a barn from
Speaker 1: eighteen oh two. I ran back inside carrying it. I
Speaker 1: don't remember what time. It was, probably just before sunrise.
Speaker 1: My dad was already up making coffee. I stood in
Speaker 1: the doorway of the kitchen and dropped the rope on
Speaker 1: the tile. He stared at it, then looked at me,
Speaker 1: Where the hell do you get that? I woke up
Speaker 1: with it around my neck like I was kidding. Then
Speaker 1: he saw the burn. My neck was red, not bruised,
Speaker 1: not gashed, but raw and irritated all the way around,
Speaker 1: like I'd been yanked up by it like a leash.
Speaker 1: His face changed fast. He asked me again, quieter this time,
Speaker 1: where'd you get that? I don't know. I started crying.
Speaker 1: I didn't even feel scared at first. I felt confused
Speaker 1: and embarrassed and cold, like I'd done something wrong and
Speaker 1: didn't know what. He touched the rope, turned it over,
Speaker 1: then handed it back like it was diseased. We don't
Speaker 1: have this kind of rope, He said, I haven't seen
Speaker 1: this kind of weave in thirty years. He had that
Speaker 1: look like when a parent wants to fix something but
Speaker 1: knows they can't. He didn't ask if I made it.
Speaker 1: He didn't even accuse me of lying. That said more
Speaker 1: than anything. I ended up lying on the couch for
Speaker 1: the rest of the day. He didn't make me go
Speaker 1: to school. I kept the rope with me, just staring
Speaker 1: at it, turning it over and over, trying to see
Speaker 1: a trick in the knot or some tag that would
Speaker 1: tell me it was from a store, something manufactured. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't. This was hand twisted. The noose was old school,
Speaker 1: perfect practiced, meant for one purpose. That night, I asked
Speaker 1: him if anyone had ever died back in those woods
Speaker 1: behind our house. He didn't answer it first, then he said,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't ask questions like that. I
Speaker 1: never slept on the trampoline again. We left it out
Speaker 1: there for years, but I wouldn't even step on it. Eventually,
Speaker 1: the snow rusted out the springs and we cut it
Speaker 1: up for scrap. I kept the rope, though for years
Speaker 1: it sat in a shoe box under my bed. I
Speaker 1: think part of me hoped I'd figure it out, like
Speaker 1: it was some kind of prank I didn't understand yet.
Speaker 1: But it never unraveled, never changed. It stayed dry and
Speaker 1: stiff and smelled like dirt in old wood, like a
Speaker 1: barnbeam or a coffin. I finally threw it into a
Speaker 1: fire pit during a camping trip with friends when I
Speaker 1: was sixteen. I didn't tell them what it was. I
Speaker 1: just watched it burn and felt sick until the last
Speaker 1: ember died. Even now, I don't have an explanation. No
Speaker 1: one could have gotten back there without making noise. Our
Speaker 1: dogs would have heard. There was no ladder, no sign
Speaker 1: anyone had been near the trampoline, no tracks. The gate
Speaker 1: was locked, and I checked every rope in our garage
Speaker 1: and shed nothing matched.
Speaker 2: The only thing I can think, if.
Speaker 1: I let my brain go there, is that I woke
Speaker 1: up after it happened, like maybe whatever or whoever put
Speaker 1: that noose around my neck had already done what they
Speaker 1: meant to do, but something stopped it, or someone or
Speaker 1: maybe I did die. Maybe I was dead for a
Speaker 1: few seconds. Maybe that short rope meant someone had cut
Speaker 1: me down just in time. I don't know, and I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I want to Story three. I'm not the
Speaker 1: type to believe in signs or spirits or anything you
Speaker 1: can't see, touch or prove. I was raised in Anaheim, California,
Speaker 1: in a tiny two story house built in the eighties
Speaker 1: with paper thin walls and carpet that never quite stopped
Speaker 1: smelling like dog. Nothing special about the house, just like
Speaker 1: there was nothing special about us. My brother Jason was
Speaker 1: the only one who ever seemed like he might get
Speaker 1: out and do something different. He was eighteen, healthy, sharp,
Speaker 1: bit of a screw up sometimes, but nothing serious. Then
Speaker 1: one morning he just didn't wake up. It was two
Speaker 1: days before his high school graduation. The coroner's van came
Speaker 1: and went. They didn't say much. The cops showed up
Speaker 1: because of his age. They kept asking about pills, substances,
Speaker 1: things like that my mom was a wreck. My sister
Speaker 1: and I had been at a friend's house for the
Speaker 1: weekend and we got the call in the middle of
Speaker 1: a movie. When we got back home, the place was
Speaker 1: swarming with police. They tore through his room for hours
Speaker 1: looking for his phone. They said they wanted to check
Speaker 1: texts calls, see who he'd been talking to, maybe someone
Speaker 1: had sold him something, maybe he'd said something before it happened,
Speaker 1: but the phone was gone completely. They flipped the mattress,
Speaker 1: empty drawers, even pulled the vent cover off the wall
Speaker 1: like they thought he'd hidden it.
Speaker 2: Nothing.
Speaker 1: Eventually they gave up, said they'd check again later. That
Speaker 1: night was quiet, too quiet, the kind of quiet that
Speaker 1: doesn't feel peaceful, it just makes your ears ring. I
Speaker 1: slept on the couch. My sister was upstairs in our
Speaker 1: shared room. My mom hadn't gone up there, since she
Speaker 1: wouldn't even go near the steps. She just sat at
Speaker 1: the kitchen table in the same clothes, nursing a mug
Speaker 1: of cold tea and staring out the sliding glass door
Speaker 1: like something might show up out there. Three days passed,
Speaker 1: the grief wasn't fading, it was just turning heavy and strange,
Speaker 1: like the air itself had changed. Then that night, God,
Speaker 1: I still don't.
Speaker 2: Know what made her do it. It was around three am.
Speaker 1: I was half asleep on the couch with the TV
Speaker 1: on mute when I heard the stairs creak. I sat up, startled,
Speaker 1: and saw my mom going up slowly, barefoot, her hand
Speaker 1: trailing the wall like she was half blind. She didn't
Speaker 1: look at me, just move like she wasn't fully there.
Speaker 1: I followed her without saying anything. She reached the landing,
Speaker 1: paused outside our room and said, why is the light on?
Speaker 1: I frowned. It shouldn't have been. She pushed the door
Speaker 1: open and just stood there. I stepped in beside her.
Speaker 1: There at the end of my sister's bed was one
Speaker 1: of Jason's pillows, folded over it like something someone had
Speaker 1: placed neatly. Was his phone and his charger, the cord
Speaker 1: wrapped the way he always did it tight and tucked in.
Speaker 1: It was just sitting there. Is this some kind of
Speaker 1: sick joke? My mom asked, barely above a whisper. She
Speaker 1: reached for the phone like she didn't want to touch it,
Speaker 1: like she expected it to vanish. But she picked it up,
Speaker 1: held it, flipped it around. It was off. He never
Speaker 1: turned it off, I said, My voice cracked never. I
Speaker 1: turned and looked at my sister's face. She was dead asleep,
Speaker 1: mouth open, sprawled sideways like she always slept. She hadn't
Speaker 1: put it there, she couldn't have. We were at Jenna's
Speaker 1: house when the call came. The police were already in
Speaker 1: the house by the time we got back. No one
Speaker 1: had been allowed upstairs alone. I turned the pillow over.
Speaker 1: It was his navy blue with tiny red checkers. It
Speaker 1: matched his sheets, not the bright pink comforter it was
Speaker 1: sitting on. My Mom sat on the edge of the bed,
Speaker 1: phone in her lap, staring at nothing. Maybe maybe the
Speaker 1: cops missed it, I said, even though I didn't believe it.
Speaker 1: Maybe it got kicked into the hall. She didn't respond.
Speaker 1: Her hand reached out and touched the pillow like she
Speaker 1: was checking to see if it was warm. And then
Speaker 1: the phone buzzed. It vibrated once, screens still black, no light,
Speaker 1: no display, just the buzz, like a dying breath. I
Speaker 1: swear to God, we both jumped. My mom stood up
Speaker 1: so fast the pillow slid to the floor. The charger
Speaker 1: uncoiled and thudded next to it. I picked up the phone,
Speaker 1: pressed the power button. Nothing. I tried again and again.
Speaker 1: It was off, fully dead, but it had just buzzed.
Speaker 1: I know it did. And this is the part I
Speaker 1: can't explain, the one thing that has kept me up
Speaker 1: for the last two years. The light in the hallway,
Speaker 1: the one right outside the door. It flickered right as
Speaker 1: I stepped into the hall to get away from the silence.
Speaker 1: Just once pop, like it blew out, and then Jason's door,
Speaker 1: his room directly across from ours, slowly, slowly creaked open,
Speaker 1: just a few inches we had left it shut. I'm
Speaker 1: going downstairs, my mom said, suddenly, clutching her arms like
Speaker 1: she was freezing.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I didn't argue. We never found out how the phone
Speaker 1: got there. None of the cops had it. They asked
Speaker 1: about it when we returned it later said they checked everywhere,
Speaker 1: asked if we'd had it all along. They were sure
Speaker 1: it hadn't been the room. I asked my sister once
Speaker 1: weeks later. She swore up and down she hadn't touched anything.
Speaker 1: But she said something that still gives me chills. She said,
Speaker 1: I remember having a dream that night. I was asleep
Speaker 1: and Jason came in the room, but he didn't look
Speaker 1: at me. He walked to the end of the bed
Speaker 1: and was just holding his pillow. Then he tucked me in.
Speaker 1: She laughed like it was silly. He said, don't lose
Speaker 1: this and put something under the pillow. She said it
Speaker 1: like it was comforting. I've never told her we found
Speaker 1: the phone exactly where she said he put it. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I wonder if whatever brought it back didn't want to
Speaker 1: scare us, just wanted us to know something that he
Speaker 1: wasn't gone all the way, or maybe that we missed
Speaker 1: something important. But that phone had been gone. It was
Speaker 1: nowhere in that house until it wasn't, and whatever moved it,
Speaker 1: whatever opened that door. I don't go upstairs at night anymore.
Speaker 1: Story four. I live in Tacoma, WA, Washington, and at
Speaker 1: the time this happened, I was renting a studio above
Speaker 1: a Vietnamese bakery on thirty eighth. It smelled like sweet
Speaker 1: dough and old grease every morning, which I didn't mind.
Speaker 1: I was working a temp job at a mid sized
Speaker 1: logistics company's regional office. You wouldn't know the name unless
Speaker 1: you've shipped refrigerated pharmaceuticals. My job was glorified data entry,
Speaker 1: mostly filing scanned contracts and updating spreadsheets. No one checked
Speaker 1: unless something went wrong. Eight to five, badge in, badge out.
Speaker 1: I liked the rhythm. No one really talked to me,
Speaker 1: except for one woman at corporate, Melanie. Melanie worked out
Speaker 1: of the East Coast hub. I'd never seen her, never
Speaker 1: even heard her voice.
Speaker 2: We just I.
Speaker 1: Amed and emailed constantly. She had a biting sense of
Speaker 1: humor and knew the HRIS system better than anyone. We
Speaker 1: were constantly fixing garbage data together and joking around to
Speaker 1: stay sane. She started calling me her West Coast clone,
Speaker 1: and I called her the voice of Compliance. One morning, Tuesday,
Speaker 1: late March, I badge in at seven forty two am.
Speaker 1: I remember, because the wind nearly tore my id off
Speaker 1: its clip. Right after I logged in, a company wide
Speaker 1: alert hit everyone's inboxes. A major piece of federal labor
Speaker 1: law had just passed overnight, and we had twenty four
Speaker 1: hours to submit compliance proof not prepare.
Speaker 2: Submit.
Speaker 1: That meant immediate training modules, rewriting hiring policy, auditing the
Speaker 1: employee database for specific criteria, and documenting it all. My
Speaker 1: supervisor was out that morning for a medical appointment, and
Speaker 1: I knew she'd be blindsided when she got back. So
Speaker 1: I did what made sense. I reached out to Melanie.
Speaker 1: I I amed her first, guess who gets to panic
Speaker 1: on behalf of HR today. A few seconds later, she
Speaker 1: popped up, already read the memo call me, we need
Speaker 1: to move now. I'd never heard her voice before. It
Speaker 1: was calm, a little gravelly, She talked fast but never stumbled.
Speaker 1: For the next five hours, we were locked in me
Speaker 1: and my tiny office, her on speaker, both of us
Speaker 1: drafting and coordinating like maniacs.
Speaker 2: We pulled in two IT guys and someone from legal.
Speaker 2: On our end.
Speaker 1: I was typing, tracking tasks, building an audit report, writing
Speaker 1: a policy draft, and formatting the new employee training module
Speaker 1: all at once. We communicated through IM the whole time,
Speaker 1: like a side channel where we could toss snippets and
Speaker 1: jokes and short links. She'd write things like good phrasing
Speaker 1: or ad to section three while I hammered out paragraphs.
Speaker 1: It was one of the most productive sessions I'd ever
Speaker 1: had in my life. At around twelve to fifty PM,
Speaker 1: I heard the distinctive clack of my supervisor's heels in
Speaker 1: the hallway. She walked fast, and when she opened my door,
Speaker 1: she looked genuinely freaked out.
Speaker 2: Did you see the.
Speaker 1: Memo about the legislative change, she asked, eyes wide. I
Speaker 1: smiled and pointed to my screen. Already taken care of.
Speaker 1: We drafted everything. Just need your final approval before we
Speaker 1: launched the module and send the documentation package. It's all
Speaker 1: in the email I sent around noon. She blinked, what email?
Speaker 1: I opened my Outlook, nothing in sent. Confused, I looked
Speaker 1: in drafts nothing. I checked the im chat with Melanie
Speaker 1: to grab the backup links. The entire conversation was gone,
Speaker 1: not archived.
Speaker 2: Gone.
Speaker 1: Worse, my Outlook calendar showed I hadn't attended any meetings
Speaker 1: that day. My activity log was empty after seven forty
Speaker 1: two am. I hadn't opened the HRIS system, hadn't pulled
Speaker 1: any employee data, hadn't sent a single file.
Speaker 2: It looked like I just.
Speaker 1: Logged in and then done absolutely nothing. I started to sweat. No, no,
Speaker 1: that's not right. I've been working all morning. We had
Speaker 1: five people in here. I was on the phone with
Speaker 1: Melanie for hours. We even printed. I reached for the
Speaker 1: stack of papers I'd printed and organized during the call.
Speaker 1: They weren't there, like they never existed. She looked at
Speaker 1: me like I was either lying or about to cry,
Speaker 1: maybe both. I couldn't even find you earlier, she said,
Speaker 1: I came by like six times before lunch and your
Speaker 1: door was closed, lights off. What are you talking about.
Speaker 1: I've been in here all morning. You didn't knock. She
Speaker 1: didn't argue, just slowly backed out. Saying, okay, just forward
Speaker 1: me whatever you've got. I scrambled, I rewrote what I
Speaker 1: could from memory, less coherent, more rushed, and I ce
Speaker 1: seed Melanie again with an apology in the body, sorry
Speaker 1: about the weirdness earlier. Hope the dental appointment wasn't too bad.
Speaker 1: That's when I got her reply, a single sentence. I
Speaker 1: was out all day, dude, Dennis ran late, no laptop,
Speaker 1: didn't talk to anyone, But thanks for naming me on
Speaker 1: the draft.
Speaker 2: I owe you. I stared at the screen for a
Speaker 2: long time. My heart did that thing.
Speaker 1: Where it feels like it drops three floors and then
Speaker 1: starts running in the wrong direction. I looked at my
Speaker 1: phone log no outgoing calls, nothing to her number, no
Speaker 1: conference software logs either, And yet I could still remember
Speaker 1: the rasp in her voice, the way she laughed when
Speaker 1: I misspelled mandatory as mandraatory, the exact wording of her
Speaker 1: suggested paragraph about termination procedures. I remembered typing fast, furious,
Speaker 1: back and forth, laughing, solving, working, I remembered printing it
Speaker 1: all out. I remembered the paper cuts. But according to
Speaker 1: every system we had, I had been sitting alone in
Speaker 1: a dark office doing nothing for five hours, no ims,
Speaker 1: no emails, no phone calls, just logged in. I didn't
Speaker 1: sleep that night. I just lay in bed thinking where
Speaker 1: the hell did those five hours go? Who did I
Speaker 1: talk to? Who typed with me? Who knew the new
Speaker 1: policy language before it even existed? And most disturbing of all,
Speaker 1: why did that version of the day feel more real
Speaker 1: than the one I was left with. I never told
Speaker 1: Melanie what really happened? What could I say? Hey, I
Speaker 1: had a shared hallucination of us fixing everything while you
Speaker 1: were under anesthesia. I still see the folder I labeled
Speaker 1: Emergency Compliance Update in the share drive. It's empty, created
Speaker 1: at seven forty three am and untouched since I didn't
Speaker 1: make it, but somehow I remember making it.
Speaker 2: Story five.
Speaker 1: I live in Bakersfield, California, about ten minutes from my
Speaker 1: best friend Gabe's house. This happened two years ago, and
Speaker 1: I still haven't made sense of it. I've told maybe
Speaker 1: three people. The ones who believe me don't talk about
Speaker 1: it anymore. It was a Friday night, early October. Gabe
Speaker 1: had just gotten the new FIFA and invited me to
Speaker 1: crash at his place. No school the next day, so
Speaker 1: we figured we'd stay up late. I got there around
Speaker 1: six pm. We ate, junk, laughed, and played for hours.
Speaker 1: Around nine to fifteen, I started feeling off, not sick exactly,
Speaker 1: but dizzy, foggy, like my ears were stuffed with cotton
Speaker 1: and the world was two steps behind me. Dude, you good,
Speaker 1: Gabe asked, when I stood up to pee and almost
Speaker 1: lost my balance.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Just tired, I mumbled, rubbing my eyes. Might head home
Speaker 1: and just sleep in my own bed. He looked surprised.
Speaker 1: I thought you were crashing here. Let's do tomorrow night instead,
Speaker 1: I said. He walked me to the door, gave me
Speaker 1: crap for being an old man, and I left. It
Speaker 1: was cold for October, quiet too. I remember thinking it
Speaker 1: felt more like midnight than nine pin forty. No traffic,
Speaker 1: no wind, just that eerie, heavy silence that makes you
Speaker 1: hyper aware of your own breathing. The walk home is
Speaker 1: usually uneventful. Two turns and I'm on my street. I
Speaker 1: remember passing the same houses, the same dim porch lights.
Speaker 1: I checked my phone once. It was nine forty six
Speaker 1: pm and I was walking up my driveway. I didn't
Speaker 1: register anything weird. At first. I was still foggy, like
Speaker 1: I had a low grade fever. But the porch light
Speaker 1: was on, which was weird because we never left it
Speaker 1: on unless someone was coming late. And the front door
Speaker 1: was wide open. I froze, mom, I called out, stepping inside.
Speaker 2: The living room. Lights were on.
Speaker 1: My mom rushed toward me from the hallway, face pale,
Speaker 1: eyes wide, and she just grabbed me, like full body,
Speaker 1: grabbed me and started sobbing into my shoulder. Where were you,
Speaker 1: she gasped. We thought, Oh my god, what are you
Speaker 1: talking about? I asked, confused, I told you I was
Speaker 1: at Gabes. She pulled back and stared at me like
Speaker 1: I'd just spoken another language. That was yesterday, She said, no,
Speaker 1: it wasn't. I laughed nervously. I just left, like ten
Speaker 1: minutes ago. She blinked. It's Sunday night. I stood there.
Speaker 1: My legs felt wrong. My heart was pounding, but slow,
Speaker 1: like underwater thuds. No, it's Friday, I said. My mom
Speaker 1: turned to the kitchen clock. Ten oh one pm. I
Speaker 1: pulled my phone out of my pocket. Sunday, ten oh
Speaker 1: one pm. I couldn't move. My body was there, but
Speaker 1: something deeper in me broke. You were missing, she whispered.
Speaker 1: We called the police. Gabe's parents said, you left Friday
Speaker 1: night and didn't come back. We thought she couldn't finish.
Speaker 1: I stumbled backward and collapsed on the couch. My backpack
Speaker 1: was still slung over one shoulder. My socks were damp,
Speaker 1: like I had just walked through the cold. My phone
Speaker 1: still had seventy three percent battery, just like when I
Speaker 1: left Gabes. Check the security camera, I mumbled, we have
Speaker 1: a motion camera facing the driveway.
Speaker 2: She pulled it up on her phone and scrolled.
Speaker 1: Her hands were shaking there, She said, Finally, Friday, nine
Speaker 1: thirty eight pm, you leaving. She scrolled nothing, no clips,
Speaker 1: nothing triggered the camera for the next two days. Then Sunday,
Speaker 1: nine fifty eight pm, me walking up the driveway, Where
Speaker 1: were you? She asked again, not angry, terrified. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I said, and I meant it. We went to the
Speaker 1: er that night. They ran everything, talk, screens, CT scan,
Speaker 1: blood work, psychoval nothing, no signs of drugs, no trauma,
Speaker 1: no sleep deprivation, no seizures, no explanation. I saw two
Speaker 1: neurologists after that. One of them actually asked if I
Speaker 1: was pranking him. The other one asked if I had
Speaker 1: any history of dissociation or sleepwalking number nothing. I didn't
Speaker 1: sleep the first two nights after it happened. I just
Speaker 1: lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, heart racing, listening
Speaker 1: for something, anything. There was nothing. But here's what haunts me.
Speaker 1: I didn't pass out. I didn't black out. There was
Speaker 1: no gap. One second I was walking home from Gabes
Speaker 1: on a Friday night, and the next I was home
Speaker 1: on Sunday night.
Speaker 2: It was seamless.
Speaker 1: It was like someone clipped out twenty four hours of
Speaker 1: my life and pasted the ends back together. But my body,
Speaker 1: my body must have been somewhere right. I keep thinking
Speaker 1: about my shoes. They weren't muddy or torn, just cold
Speaker 1: and a little damp, like I'd walked on dewy grass.
Speaker 1: So where the hell was I walking? For two days?
Speaker 1: I asked Gabe if he saw me leave. He said yeah.
Speaker 1: I shut the gate behind me and walked down the street.
Speaker 1: But I never walked into my house. That was the
Speaker 1: part that chilled me the most. How quiet that camera
Speaker 1: feed was, like I had blinked out of existence. I
Speaker 1: still wonder what would have happened if I looked back
Speaker 1: at the street before I opened the door. Sunday night,
Speaker 1: if I had turned around and seen something Story six.
Speaker 1: I wasn't even supposed to be home that night. My
Speaker 1: sister had flown in from Denver for Christmas, and since
Speaker 1: her kids needed the warmer guest room downstairs, I offered
Speaker 1: to take the couch. Our old bedrooms upstairs were two
Speaker 1: cold in winter, and we always just sealed them off
Speaker 1: once it dropped below freezing. That second floor hadn't seen
Speaker 1: anyone in weeks. It was around one thirty AM, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't sleep. Everyone was knocked out, my parents in
Speaker 1: their room down the hall, my sister and her kids
Speaker 1: across from them. I had the living room to myself,
Speaker 1: just me and my phone, flipping through a webcomic with
Speaker 1: the TV on mute for light. That's when I heard it.
Speaker 1: At first, I thought it was the heater kicking on,
Speaker 1: that dull, rattling groan that old pipes make. But then
Speaker 1: it changed sharp thuds, like someone sprinting across the floor
Speaker 1: above me. Then a second set of steps, faster, like
Speaker 1: they were being chased back and forth room to room.
Speaker 1: I froze. It wasn't subtle. It wasn't one creek or
Speaker 1: some settling wood. These were hard, fast footfalls, small light feet.
Speaker 1: They had that distinct weight of children, the way kids
Speaker 1: run with everything they've got. I recognized the pattern. It
Speaker 1: was the zach sound me and my sister used to
Speaker 1: make when we chase each other around up there after school.
Speaker 1: Carpeted floor, but still loud through the ceiling. I sat
Speaker 1: up slowly and muted the TV. The steps didn't stop.
Speaker 1: They looped again, bedroom to hallway, across the other room,
Speaker 1: back again, ten maybe fifteen seconds total, but it felt
Speaker 1: like forever. Nobody was supposed to be up there. I
Speaker 1: didn't move, I just sat there, waiting for it to stop.
Speaker 1: When it finally did, the silence was unbearable. I stared
Speaker 1: at the ceiling like I could see through it. I
Speaker 1: whispered hello, but my voice cracked and it sounded ridiculous.
Speaker 1: Then my sister's door creaked open behind me. She stepped out,
Speaker 1: wrapped in a blanket.
Speaker 2: Did you hear that?
Speaker 1: Her face told me she'd heard it too, that dead
Speaker 1: pale look, no sleep in her eyes. She didn't even
Speaker 1: finish stepping out of the room, just hovered by the door,
Speaker 1: like she was afraid the sound would start again. I said, upstairs,
Speaker 1: it was upstairs right.
Speaker 2: She nodded.
Speaker 1: It sounded like she stopped, like kids. We didn't say
Speaker 1: anything else. We just stood there, listening, waiting. My dad
Speaker 1: came out a few minutes later, groggy, annoyed, what are
Speaker 1: you two doing up? I didn't want to sound crazy.
Speaker 1: I just said we heard something upstairs. He blinked like
Speaker 1: it hadn't processed. No one's up there, I know. He
Speaker 1: stood there staring toward the stairs. You want me to
Speaker 1: check it out, but he didn't move. Neither of us answered.
Speaker 1: That second floor was empty, completely empty and sealed off.
Speaker 1: My mom even packed the vents so we didn't waste
Speaker 1: heat on it. The doors were shut, the windows locked.
Speaker 1: We were the only ones in the house. I never
Speaker 1: went up there to check. I couldn't something about that sound,
Speaker 1: the way it echoed, the familiarity of it. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just footsteps. It felt like a recording, almost like someone
Speaker 1: hit rewind on our childhood and played a loop the
Speaker 1: exact way we used to run, the same rooms, the
Speaker 1: same rhythm.
Speaker 2: It was us.
Speaker 1: It was me and my sister, only we were both
Speaker 1: right there on the ground floor, wide awake and scared
Speaker 1: out of our minds. I didn't sleep that night. My
Speaker 1: sister didn't either. We just sat in the kitchen drinking
Speaker 1: tea until the sun came up. No one brought it
Speaker 1: up again. My dad laughed it off the next day,
Speaker 1: said the cold probably shifted the boards or something. But
Speaker 1: my sister avoids the topic completely. She won't even let
Speaker 1: her kids go near the stairs now, told them it's
Speaker 1: too cold, too dangerous, which it isn't. I don't believe
Speaker 1: in ghosts. I still don't even after that. Nothing ever
Speaker 1: felt evil, just wrong, like time bent in the smallest
Speaker 1: scariest way.
Speaker 2: That night.
Speaker 1: Didn't feel haunted, it felt broken. Story seven. I wasn't sick,
Speaker 1: I didn't feel tired. Some thing about that day hinted
Speaker 1: that something was wrong. It was a Wednesday, March seventeenth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: I remember that.
Speaker 1: Because it was the last normal day I've ever trusted.
Speaker 1: I lived at home in Mission Viejo, California. I was nineteen,
Speaker 1: taking community college classes and staying out of the way.
Speaker 1: Around five point thirty pm, I was in my bedroom,
Speaker 1: sitting cross legged on my carpet, trying to finish a
Speaker 1: stats assignment on my laptop.
Speaker 2: There was nothing unusual, just a stale.
Speaker 1: Bag of tortilla chips, spotify low in the background, sun
Speaker 1: leaking through the blinds, and then everything started bending. At first,
Speaker 1: I thought I was just zoning out, you know when
Speaker 1: you stare at a screen too long and your eyes
Speaker 1: play tricks on you. That but worse. I looked up
Speaker 1: from the screen and realized the corners of my room
Speaker 1: looked smudged, like someone was rubbing the edges of my
Speaker 1: vision with their thumb. I blinked, rubbed my eyes and
Speaker 1: tried to focus. Still there, I turned my head slowly.
Speaker 1: The left and right edges of everything were disappearing, No,
Speaker 1: not disappearing, melting, blurring together like wet paint. My peripheral
Speaker 1: vision was being erased, like someone had taken an eraser
Speaker 1: to the edges of my reality. Mom I called out,
Speaker 1: even though I knew she wasn't home. I stood up.
Speaker 1: My legs felt light. I walked into the hallway, then
Speaker 1: into the kitchen. Every step I took made things worse.
Speaker 1: The walls warped slightly, like they were breathing, expanding, contracting.
Speaker 1: The kitchen table wasn't solid anymore. It rippled like a
Speaker 1: reflection on water. I looked down at my hands. They
Speaker 1: looked distant, like I was seeing them through a warped
Speaker 1: glass bottle. I whispered, what the hell is happening to me?
Speaker 1: I pressed my palms to my eyes and breathed hard.
Speaker 1: I thought, maybe it's a panic attack, Maybe I was dehydrated.
Speaker 1: I grabbed a glass from the cabin and it felt
Speaker 1: wrong in my hand. The shape was off. I couldn't
Speaker 1: explain how. I just knew the glass felt like it
Speaker 1: wasn't real, like it was being simulated poorly. That's when
Speaker 1: I saw something in the corner of the room, not someone,
Speaker 1: something a dark patch in the shape of a person,
Speaker 1: but no features, no face, no movement. It stood just
Speaker 1: beyond the smudged edges of my vision, not quite inside
Speaker 1: the real world, not quite outside of it either.
Speaker 2: I turned to look directly at it. Gone.
Speaker 1: I spun around. No, no, no, I whispered, that didn't
Speaker 1: just happen. I stumbled into the bathroom, splashed cold water
Speaker 1: on my face, and looked at myself in the mirror.
Speaker 1: Except it wasn't me. My face was there, sure, but
Speaker 1: the proportions were off. My right eye was slightly too high,
Speaker 1: my mouth didn't match the way I felt it moving
Speaker 1: The reflection was delayed by half a se just enough
Speaker 1: to register that something was deeply, deeply broken. I backed away,
Speaker 1: heart pounding. I wanted to call someone, but I didn't
Speaker 1: trust my hands to use the phone. I didn't trust
Speaker 1: the phone to be real. I walked back to my room,
Speaker 1: stepping carefully around furniture. I suddenly wasn't sure it was
Speaker 1: even solid, and my vision was collapsing in. I don't
Speaker 1: know how to explain this. It was like a tunnel
Speaker 1: was closing in from all directions. My entire field of
Speaker 1: view narrowed to a small circular hole, like looking through
Speaker 1: the end of a funnel. Everything outside that tiny center
Speaker 1: was gray, static, not blackness, static like a broken television feed.
Speaker 1: I couldn't see the floor under my feet anymore. I
Speaker 1: couldn't see the walls, just that one clear hole of
Speaker 1: vision in the center. Everything else corrupted. I dropped to
Speaker 1: my knees and closed my eyes.
Speaker 2: I was shaking.
Speaker 1: Something felt fundamentally wrong, not just with my body, but
Speaker 1: with the world. Like reality itself had suffered a glitch,
Speaker 1: a real one, not a figure of speech. Now I
Speaker 1: felt weird. I mean, the actual fabric of my world
Speaker 1: had a tear in it, and I was falling through.
Speaker 1: I curled up, my head pounding, and I whispered, please stop,
Speaker 1: please stop a please stop. Then silence, total terrifying silence.
Speaker 1: No sounds from the street, no hum from the fridge,
Speaker 1: no birds, no cars, nothing, just a blank, dead silence
Speaker 1: that made my skin crawl. I opened my eyes again.
Speaker 1: Everything had stopped, literally frozen my room. What I could
Speaker 1: still see looked paused. A strand of my hair was
Speaker 1: suspended in mid air like a screenshot. The light outside
Speaker 1: had halted mid flicker. The dust in the air hung
Speaker 1: like glitter, unmoving, And in that moment, I realized I
Speaker 1: wasn't breathing. I wasn't even sure I had lungs anymore.
Speaker 1: I couldn't feel my chest, rise, couldn't feel my heart.
Speaker 1: I set out loud, though I don't know if I
Speaker 1: really spoke it am I dead? That's when the headache hit.
Speaker 1: It didn't build up. It detonated like a spike through
Speaker 1: the base of my skull, a white hot pressure that
Speaker 1: felt like my brain was trying to push out through
Speaker 1: my eyes. I screamed, or thought I screamed. The sound
Speaker 1: didn't happen. I collapsed onto my side. Everything was flashing,
Speaker 1: like being inside a strobe light behind my eyes. Then
Speaker 1: one more blink and the tunnel vision started to clear.
Speaker 1: It pulled back slowly. My peripheral returned in chunks, like
Speaker 1: loading a glitchy video game. The static faded colors returned wrong,
Speaker 1: at first too bright, then too dull, until they evened out.
Speaker 1: I could breathe again. I could hear the clock ticking
Speaker 1: in the kitchen. A car drove past. The hum of
Speaker 1: life returned slowly, cruelly. I opened my eyes wide. Everything
Speaker 1: was back, and I lay there in the middle of
Speaker 1: my room with blood crusted under one nostril, shaking like
Speaker 1: I'd survived in exorcism. I didn't move for another hour.
Speaker 1: I was terrified that moving would break the world again.
Speaker 1: Later that night, I got the worst headache I've ever
Speaker 1: had in my life, like my skull had been hollowed
Speaker 1: out with a spoon.
Speaker 2: I threw up twice.
Speaker 1: The er doctor said it was a severe migraine with aura,
Speaker 1: gave me anti nause of pills and sent me home.
Speaker 1: But I've had migraines since, and none of them, not
Speaker 1: a single one, felt like that. None of them made
Speaker 1: the world pixelate. None of them froze time. None of
Speaker 1: them felt like the simulation glitched and tried to kick
Speaker 1: me out. I still don't know what happened, but I
Speaker 1: don't think it was medical. I think just for a second,
Speaker 1: something broke and I was awake for it.
Speaker 2: Story eight. I'm Jake.
Speaker 1: I live about an hour outside Helsinki in Finland, in
Speaker 1: this dead, silent area where the forest starts right past
Speaker 1: the backyard. No neighbors close enough to hear of something happens.
Speaker 1: It's quiet out here in a way that messes with
Speaker 1: your head. Sometimes you can hear your own thoughts echo,
Speaker 1: or things you think are your thoughts. It was January, cold, dry,
Speaker 1: dark nights stretch forever that time of year. I'd been
Speaker 1: up late texting my ex Ella. We were still talking
Speaker 1: most nights, just as friends, even though things had ended
Speaker 1: months ago. Nothing heavy, just random memes, occasional dumb arguments
Speaker 1: about movies. That night, we were going back and forth
Speaker 1: about some horror film she liked that I said was garbage,
Speaker 1: pretty normal.
Speaker 2: It was around two thirty am when I heard it.
Speaker 1: Now, I don't know how to describe this in a
Speaker 1: way that doesn't sound ridiculous, but it sounded like an
Speaker 1: ice cream truck. That weird high pitched music box jingle,
Speaker 1: you know, that tiny melody. They all play kind of playful,
Speaker 1: but always just slightly off key, like it's trying to
Speaker 1: sound cheerful but never quite gets there. Except we don't
Speaker 1: have ice cream trucks in Finland, not out here, especially
Speaker 1: not in the middle of the goddamn woods in January.
Speaker 1: There was snow on the ground. Who the hell would
Speaker 1: even be driving one. At first, I thought maybe it
Speaker 1: was some weird ring tone on my phone. I paused
Speaker 1: and looked at it. No calls, no alerts. I asked
Speaker 1: Ella if she heard anything on her end, like if
Speaker 1: maybe she accidentally sent a video or audio or something.
Speaker 1: She texted back, no, what are you talking about. I
Speaker 1: didn't even answer that. I just froze and listened. The
Speaker 1: sound was faint at first, like it was far off,
Speaker 1: but it was definitely outside, not from a screen, not
Speaker 1: from any electronic It was in the air. I moved
Speaker 1: toward the window that faces the back of the house.
Speaker 1: It's just dense woods out there, trees packed tight together,
Speaker 1: no paths, no roads, just forest. But the sound was
Speaker 1: louder now, the melody repeating, slowing down a little like
Speaker 1: it was dragging, almost struggling to play, and it was
Speaker 1: getting closer. I didn't even realize i'd stopped breathing until
Speaker 1: I felt my chest ache.
Speaker 2: I texted Ella again, Just one.
Speaker 1: Word, dude, she replied immediately, what there's something outside?
Speaker 2: Like what? I didn't know how to answer that.
Speaker 1: I was still staring out the window, waiting to see
Speaker 1: something move, but the sound it wasn't moving left or right.
Speaker 1: It was moving forward through the trees, straight toward my house.
Speaker 1: That's when the music just cut off, sharp, instant, no
Speaker 1: fade out, just gone dead silence. I stepped away from
Speaker 1: the window and stood there, not knowing what to do.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to open the door. I didn't want
Speaker 1: to even look again. I felt like whatever it was
Speaker 1: had stopped just at the edge of the trees waiting.
Speaker 1: Ella called me, I answered, whispering, don't talk, just listen.
Speaker 1: She went quiet Immediately. I moved to the front door
Speaker 1: and listened. Still nothing, the sound of my breath and
Speaker 1: a faint hum in my ears. Then there was this soft,
Speaker 1: metallic chime. Not the music again, just a single ding,
Speaker 1: like a tiny bell. It came from the side of
Speaker 1: the house. This time like someone walking past my wall,
Speaker 1: holding a bell and letting it ring once. Ella, Sushiro,
Speaker 1: Jake kiss hiss, so I couldn't answer. I was gripping
Speaker 1: the phone so hard it hurt. I moved slowly to
Speaker 1: the kitchen window, which faces the sideyard. There's a light there,
Speaker 1: one of those motion sensor ones. It was on, but
Speaker 1: nothing was there. No wind, no animals, no person, just
Speaker 1: snow on the ground, totally untouched. Then something knocked once
Speaker 1: from the back of the house. I swear to god,
Speaker 1: I jumped and nearly dropped the phone. Ella heard it too.
Speaker 1: What the hell was that?
Speaker 2: She said? I didn't answer. I couldn't.
Speaker 1: The knock was slow, deliberate, someone who knew I was listening.
Speaker 1: And then this is the part I still can't explain.
Speaker 1: My phone glitched, not froze, glitched. Ella's voice warped mid sentence.
Speaker 1: It stretched out like a tape being pulled too slow, Jock,
Speaker 1: can you hear? Then silence? Phone still on, still connected,
Speaker 1: timer still counting, but no sound. Then my lights flickered,
Speaker 1: all of them once fast. I bolted. I didn't grab anything,
Speaker 1: didn't put on shoes, just ran to the front door,
Speaker 1: yanked it open and sprinted outside into the snow.
Speaker 2: I didn't even feel the cold.
Speaker 1: I made it to the edge of the driveway before
Speaker 1: I turned around just once. Nothing behind me, nothing in
Speaker 1: the windows. House was still. I stood there for what
Speaker 1: felt like forever, shaking. The phone call dropped. I called
Speaker 1: Ella back when straight to voicemail. Tried again, same thing.
Speaker 1: I didn't go back inside for hours. I stayed in
Speaker 1: my car with the engine running and every door locked.
Speaker 1: Ella finally texted around four am. She said her phone
Speaker 1: had shut off by itself and wouldn't turn back on
Speaker 1: for nearly thirty minutes. When it did, she had three
Speaker 1: missed calls from me, even though I only tried twice.
Speaker 1: One of the calls was over an hour long. She
Speaker 1: swears she never picked up. I checked my call log.
Speaker 1: It was there one hour, twelve minutes, and the time
Speaker 1: matched when everything went silent. I've got no explanation. I've
Speaker 1: lived here my whole life. Never heard anything like that
Speaker 1: before or since. Nothing in the local news, no weird reports,
Speaker 1: nothing on the neighborhood Facebook group.
Speaker 2: Just me and that damn music story. Nine.
Speaker 1: I never liked that house, not from the day we
Speaker 1: moved in. It was this towering century old brick place
Speaker 1: on Maple Street in upstate New York, cold even in
Speaker 1: the summer, the kind of house where sound traveled too well.
Speaker 1: My name's Evan, and back then I was sixteen, living
Speaker 1: with my parents and our golden retriever Max. We just
Speaker 1: moved in a few months earlier.
Speaker 2: My parents were.
Speaker 1: Obsessed with the place character they called it. I thought
Speaker 1: it felt like a coffin with too many doors. The
Speaker 1: layout was weird, three floors, each feeling more isolated than
Speaker 1: the last. My room was on the second floor. The
Speaker 1: kitchen was below me, and my parents had taken the
Speaker 1: converted attic as their room. There was a door in
Speaker 1: the kitchen that led directly to the basement, and that
Speaker 1: door had a specific awful sound when it shut, not
Speaker 1: just the slam, but the creak and heavy latch, no
Speaker 1: mistaking it for anything else. It was around midnight when
Speaker 1: it happened. I was just getting into bed, scrolling on
Speaker 1: my phone like every other night. Max was curled up
Speaker 1: on the floor next to my bed, dead asleep. The
Speaker 1: house was completely still, no wind, no movement, no noise
Speaker 1: from outside. Then I heard that door in the kitchen slam.
Speaker 1: Not a creek, not a bump. That door slam shut,
Speaker 1: like someone had yanked it from wide open and thrown
Speaker 1: their whole body into it. I sat bolt upright. Max
Speaker 1: didn't even flinch. That was the first thing that made
Speaker 1: my skin crawl. That dog barked at squirrels in the
Speaker 1: backyard like they were burglars, but he just stayed there asleep,
Speaker 1: like nothing had happened.
Speaker 2: I didn't move, I didn't call out.
Speaker 1: I just stared at my door, trying to listen for
Speaker 1: footsteps or anything else.
Speaker 2: Nothing.
Speaker 1: The air felt heavy, like the house was holding its breath.
Speaker 1: Now here's the thing. There's no way that door could
Speaker 1: have slammed by itself. All the windows were shut, no
Speaker 1: fans on, and like I said, it was heavy. You
Speaker 1: had to pull hard to close it properly. And I
Speaker 1: was the only one on the second floor. My parents
Speaker 1: were upstairs in the attic and they wouldn't have heard
Speaker 1: it even if they were awake. I sat there frozen
Speaker 1: for maybe a full minute before grabbing the pocket knife
Speaker 1: from my nightstand. Stupid, I know, but it felt better
Speaker 1: than going down empty handed. I slipped out of bed,
Speaker 1: careful not to wake Max. He still didn't stir, which
Speaker 1: really unnerved me and started down the stairs. The house
Speaker 1: was silent, too silent. Every step I took creaked louder
Speaker 1: than it should have. I flicked on the hall light,
Speaker 1: then the second floor landing, then the stairs. Every light
Speaker 1: I could reach I turned on. I didn't care about
Speaker 1: waking anyone up. I just wanted that place lit. I
Speaker 1: reached the kitchen, heart pounding, and there it was. The
Speaker 1: basement door was wide open, like completely open. I just
Speaker 1: stood there staring at it. It wasn't creaking, it wasn't swinging,
Speaker 1: it was just open. That door had slammed seconds ago,
Speaker 1: and now it looked like it hadn't moved in hours.
Speaker 1: I don't know what I expected, but that wasn't it.
Speaker 1: I just stared into that black rectangle leading down into nothing.
Speaker 1: The light switch for the basement was inside the stairwell,
Speaker 1: so I wasn't about to go in just to flick
Speaker 1: it on. Then something even worse happened. As I stood there, paralyzed,
Speaker 1: I heard a sound from the basement. Not footsteps, not
Speaker 1: a thud. It was a voice, a whisper coming from
Speaker 1: the darkness. Sh okay okay, software fast, like someone trying
Speaker 1: to calm someone else down. I couldn't tell if it
Speaker 1: was one person or two. It didn't even sound angry.
Speaker 1: It sounded deliberate, like they knew I was there. I
Speaker 1: didn't even scream. I just backed up slowly until I
Speaker 1: hit the hallway wall. Then I turned and ran. I
Speaker 1: left all the lights on and sprinted back to my room.
Speaker 1: Max was still asleep, still in the exact same position.
Speaker 1: I locked my door, not that it would have helped.
Speaker 1: I climbed back into bed, knife clutched in my hand,
Speaker 1: staring at the door until my eyes felt like sandpaper.
Speaker 1: I didn't sleep, but at some point the sun started
Speaker 1: coming through the blinds. When I finally worked up the
Speaker 1: nerve to go back down, I was the first one awake.
Speaker 1: My parents were still out cold upstairs, and Max finally
Speaker 1: yawned and stretched like nothing happened. I went down slowly,
Speaker 1: this time, hearts still pounding. The lights were off, all
Speaker 1: of them. Every light I had turned on was off,
Speaker 1: and the basement door shut, not a jar, not slightly cracked,
Speaker 1: completely closed, latched. I checked the windows, still shut, no
Speaker 1: sign anyone had been up. I asked my parents later
Speaker 1: that morning if either of them had come down. They
Speaker 1: looked at me like I was insane, said they'd both
Speaker 1: slept straight through the night. I even asked if Max
Speaker 1: had gone downstairs. They laughed, he didn't move all night.
Speaker 1: My dad said, I didn't tell them what I heard.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to deal with the whole Maybe you
Speaker 1: were dreaming talk, but I wasn't dreaming.
Speaker 2: I was awake. I heard it. I saw it.
Speaker 1: And I never heard that door slam again, not once,
Speaker 1: never even creaked after that. But I'll never forget those words,
Speaker 1: sh okay, okay, like I had just interrupted something that
Speaker 1: wasn't meant to be seen, something that wasn't supposed to
Speaker 1: be heard.
Speaker 2: I moved out two years later when I went to college.
Speaker 2: Story ten.
Speaker 1: I live alone in a basement apartment in Scarborough, just
Speaker 1: east of Toronto. Nothing fancy, bare concrete walls painted white,
Speaker 1: one small window above the desk that barely lets in
Speaker 1: any light, and my setup a basic PC, second hand chair,
Speaker 1: and an old lamp that flickers sometimes when the heat
Speaker 1: kicks in. I'm not really a spiritual or superstitious guy.
Speaker 1: I work in it. I troubleshoot routers and talk people
Speaker 1: through driver updates all day, so I don't jump to
Speaker 1: ghosts or anything like that, But I swear to you
Speaker 1: what happened one night around two years ago. I don't
Speaker 1: know how to explain it, and it's messed with my
Speaker 1: head ever since. It was late, around one thirty am.
Speaker 1: I had just finished a long discord call with a
Speaker 1: friend from the UK. We'd been talking about simulation theory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the irony, I know. We went off on one of
Speaker 1: those rabbit hole tangents about how we might be living
Speaker 1: in a computer generated reality, typical Internet conspiracy nonsense. I
Speaker 1: remember joking and saying, if the world glitches on me tonight,
Speaker 1: I'm blaming you. He laughed, logged off, and I got
Speaker 1: up to grab some water. Here's where things start to
Speaker 1: get weird. I came back, sat down, and I remember
Speaker 1: clearly I turned on a video about the Matrix, not
Speaker 1: the movie, but one of those deep dive philosophy videos
Speaker 1: on YouTube, analyzing simulation theory in the Nature of consciousness.
Speaker 1: I watched maybe ten minutes. Then my eyes drifted over
Speaker 1: to the little window beside my desk. It was pitch
Speaker 1: black outside. I couldn't see anything, not even street lights,
Speaker 1: and then it was like something just snapped. I was
Speaker 1: suddenly back, same chair, same position, but my monitor was
Speaker 1: completely black. The room was dead silent. I didn't remember
Speaker 1: the video ending or even feeling tired. I thought maybe
Speaker 1: I'd knotted off for a second microsleep or whatever. But
Speaker 1: then I moved the mouse, nothing happened. I pressed the keyboard,
Speaker 1: still nothing. The tower wasn't making any noise either, dead silent.
Speaker 1: That's when I noticed something really off. The led on
Speaker 1: the power button wasn't lit. That didn't make sense. I
Speaker 1: leaned down under the desk and checked the power strip.
Speaker 1: It wasn't plugged in the entire surge bar, power strip, tower, monitor, router, lamp,
Speaker 1: all of it. The plug was sitting on the floor,
Speaker 1: not loose, unplugged, like completely out of the wall. That
Speaker 1: didn't compute. There was no way I could have watched
Speaker 1: a video, browse the web, talk to my friend if
Speaker 1: the strip was never plugged in. I sat there staring
Speaker 1: at the cord for maybe a minute, trying to recall
Speaker 1: unplugging it.
Speaker 2: I hadn't. I hadn't even been near that side of
Speaker 2: the wall all day.
Speaker 1: I actually laughed out loud, like one of those dry,
Speaker 1: confused laughs. Then I thought, okay, maybe the power flicked
Speaker 1: and I pulled it out somehow and forgot number. I'm
Speaker 1: not that careless to double check. I reached over and
Speaker 1: grabbed my phone. It was dead. That made no sense either.
Speaker 1: It had been charging during my call at eighty percent.
Speaker 1: When I checked LASS, Suddenly I got this weird feeling
Speaker 1: in my gut, like when you walk into a room
Speaker 1: and forget why you're there. But worse, it was like
Speaker 1: I wasn't alone anymore, like someone had just been there
Speaker 1: a second ago. Not a presence exactly, but this echo
Speaker 1: of movement, like reality had hiccuped. I stood up, and
Speaker 1: I swear to God, the hairs on my arms lifted,
Speaker 1: my skin went cold. I walked over to the power strip,
Speaker 1: plugged it in, hit the switch. The fan in the
Speaker 1: PC tower spun up. Monitor flickered back to life. Everything
Speaker 1: booted like normal. I checked the history. No record of
Speaker 1: the video I was watching, no trace of the discord call,
Speaker 1: no Internet tabs open, no log of anything I had done.
Speaker 1: Even the system time was off, like the bios had reset.
Speaker 1: It was showing three six am. Then something else hit me.
Speaker 1: The clock on the wall, a cheap analog one with
Speaker 1: a loud tick, was stuck. The second hand had stopped moving.
Speaker 1: It was stuck at exactly two seventeen frozen. That's when
Speaker 1: the real fear started to set in. I stood in
Speaker 1: the center of my room, turning in place, checking everything.
Speaker 1: My microwave clock was also blank. My phone wouldn't power
Speaker 1: on even after I plugged it in. And the worst
Speaker 1: part the window. I looked again outside was still pitch black.
Speaker 1: But this time it wasn't just dark. It was nothing like,
Speaker 1: no sky, no faint outlines of trees or fences or
Speaker 1: street lights, just a flat, absolute void. Imagine a black
Speaker 1: sheet of paper two inches from your face. That kind
Speaker 1: of black. Like the world stopped rendering outside my apartment.
Speaker 1: I stepped back. Something was wrong with the air too.
Speaker 1: The room didn't feel still, it felt paused, like the
Speaker 1: air wasn't moving. No humming from the fridge upstairs, no
Speaker 1: pipes groaning, just this pressure, almost like being underwater. Not
Speaker 1: soundless but muted, artificial. Then I heard it a clicking,
Speaker 1: A slow, deliberate clicking noise coming from behind me, like
Speaker 1: someone tapping plastic. I turned around, fast, heart pounding. Nothing
Speaker 1: was there, but the clicking continued. It was coming from
Speaker 1: the mouse. The mouse on my desk was clicking by itself. Single,
Speaker 1: soft clicks every few seconds, not rapid, not random, patterned,
Speaker 1: almost like morse code.
Speaker 2: I backed up. I couldn't move toward it.
Speaker 1: Something in me refused, every instinct screamed not to touch anything,
Speaker 1: not to interact with it, like I'd break something if
Speaker 1: I did. I picked up my keys, still staring at
Speaker 1: the mouse as it clicked, and I bolted. Didn't even
Speaker 1: put on shoes, just ran up the stairs, out the
Speaker 1: side door, and into the night air. When I got outside,
Speaker 1: it was morning. I swear it was middle of the
Speaker 1: night seconds ago. Now the sun was rising, birds chirping,
Speaker 1: cars moving. I pulled out my phone. It powered on,
Speaker 1: battery at seventy six percent. Everything worked again. I went
Speaker 1: back inside after an hour of standing in the driveway,
Speaker 1: unsure what to do. When I got down to my apartment,
Speaker 1: the clock on the wall was ticking again. Power was on,
Speaker 1: Internet worked, the mouse wasn't clicking. But nothing in the
Speaker 1: browser history had changed. No log of the discord call,
Speaker 1: no matrix video in the watch history, no system of
Speaker 1: time logs, nothing an event viewer. It's like the entire thing,
Speaker 1: everything from the moment I sat down, never happened, but
Speaker 1: I remember all of it. Too clearly, and I don't
Speaker 1: use that computer anymore. I got a new laptop. I
Speaker 1: even moved apartments. I've never told anyone in person about
Speaker 1: this because it sounds insane, but I swear it happened.