Countdown to Halloween: Creepypasta Edition

Twenty-Nine: Creepy Internet Pictures Come From Somewhere

I drink not because I like alcohol, but because I've recently seen the horrifying underbelly of the world, and I can't go back to blissful ignorance in any other way than through the bottom of a bottle. I can't sleep, either, so I'm writing this out to hopefully get some of the poison out of my head.

It began with a picture.

I'm nobody special, don't get me wrong. Just the opposite. Not a detective, not a cop, nothing like that. I was just a senior in college with an office job lined up, and I only had to coast out until the end of the year. All that free time made me vulnerable to questions. The question—and the picture that came with it—would have just flowed past my mind like every other bit of internet flotsam if not for that peculiar state of aggravated-bored I found myself in that freezing February afternoon.

Two local girls had recently gone missing. That much I knew; my year-older friend worked as an intern at the city news channel, and he told me nobody could make heads or tails of what had happened. "Look," he wrote in an email. "Someone at another news group sent us this. The cops found two pictures uploaded from their phones after the last time anyone saw them. They're hoping somebody can identify this guy."

I remember rolling my eyes. That was not the first time he'd forwarded me email chains full of internet meme bullshit. He was a sucker for clickbait. The pictures were the typical 'scary' type, taken in darkness and limited in scope such that nothing could really be discerned beyond 'look at how weird this is.'

The first image was taken from directly behind the head of a man with short brown hair, close enough that the flash illuminated his intermittent scalp in bright white. He appeared to be somewhere dark and slightly foggy; over his shoulder, a brandished knife could be seen, held forward for some unknown reason.

The second image was of a man lying face down in a hotel bed surrounded by empty liquor bottles and scattered pills. From his disheveled and sweat-matted short brown hair and the shape of the back of his head, it looked to be the same man. Convenient that his face was hidden in both shots, I remember thinking. Behind him was a peeling hotel wall and a mirror that somebody appeared to have spit on; in the mirror it was possible to see the man's left arm held out in such a manner that he was taking the picture himself with a cellphone. Given the context, I guessed the phone belonged to one of the two missing girls.

I tended not to believe things like this, because they never turned out to be anything. The two girls had likely snuck off to Spring Break and this was some sort of prank. Absolute worst case scenario, this was just some drunk frat guy they'd hung out with. "Let me guess," I wrote back to my friend. "An expert thinks this guy was dead when he took the picture of himself. Ooooooh, spooky, right?"

"He's definitely recently dead based on the way his limbs are behaving in that picture, and the discoloration and slight bloating of the skin, but that's not it. It's totally possible to put your camera on a timer to take a picture later, so they thought this was a suicide until they noticed something. Look closer. By his right hand."

I enlarged the image on my monitor and realized that there was actually something in his hand. But it couldn't be—

I printed out the photo to get a better look, and it was what I'd suspected: the exact same photo we were looking at was in the dead man's hand. An aging clock on the wall had the same hand positions in both images. He had, in his hand, a picture of himself dead—apparently the same photo he would later take of himself by using the camera's timer. I emailed back, "What are we looking at here?"

"Nobody knows, man. But they crowd-sourced finding the wallpaper and they figured out which hotel it was taken at."

"Crowd-sourced?"