Project Strange

When I was sixteen, my dad bought an old camcorder at a garage sale. It was one of those bulky models from the early 2000s. The seller said it still worked, but he looked strangely relieved when Dad handed over the money. At the time, I thought nothing of it. The tape inside was already half full. Most of the footage was boring family videos. Birthdays. Christmas. A dog chasing a sprinkler. Then there was the final recording. The timestamp read: **October 14th, 2007 - 2:13 AM** The camera was pointed out of a bedroom window. The person holding it was breathing heavily. Outside was a dark field illuminated only by moonlight. A woman's voice whispered: > "It's back." The camera zoomed toward a distant tree line. At first I couldn't see anything. Then I noticed a figure standing among the trees. It was tall. Far too tall. Even at that distance it appeared nearly as high as the lower branches. The camera shook. The woman whispered again. > "Don't move." The figure stepped forward. The image became grainy. For a moment it vanished in the static. Then it was closer. Not walking. Closer. As if several seconds had simply disappeared from the recording. The woman gasped. The figure now stood halfway across the field. Its limbs were impossibly long. Its head tilted at an angle no human neck should allow. Then the footage ended. No fade. No explanation. Just black. I became obsessed with the tape. I spent weeks trying to find out where it had been recorded. Eventually I discovered a clue. A road sign briefly appeared in an earlier family video. A small town three hours from where I lived. The next weekend I drove there. I found the house. Or at least what remained of it. The property had burned down years earlier. Only the foundation remained. An elderly man mowing a nearby lawn told me the story. A woman and her daughter had lived there. One night both vanished. No bodies were ever found. The police searched for weeks. Nothing. The man pointed toward the field behind the property. Then he said something that made my skin crawl. > "Funny thing was..." He stopped mowing. > "People kept reporting someone standing out there after they disappeared." I laughed nervously. He didn't. > "Always at night." I left soon after. That should have been the end of it. It wasn't. A month later I digitized the tape. I wanted to preserve it before it degraded further. The software extracted every frame individually. While reviewing them, I noticed something strange. The figure wasn't only in the final recording. It appeared throughout the tape. Hidden. Watching. In a birthday video it stood outside a kitchen window. In another clip it was reflected in a television screen. Always distant. Always partially obscured. No one in the videos ever seemed to notice it. I checked the timestamps. The earliest appearance occurred nearly four years before the final recording. It had been there the entire time. Watching the family. Getting closer. I couldn't sleep after that. Every night I found myself staring through my bedroom window. Partly because I was scared. Partly because I felt ridiculous. Then one night I saw something. A person standing near the edge of the woods behind my house. Too far away to identify. Too dark to see clearly. I convinced myself it was a tree. The next night it was closer. The night after that, closer still. I stopped looking. I closed the curtains. I deleted the footage. I threw the camcorder away. That was six years ago. I haven't seen the figure since. At least I don't think I have. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find my phone unlocked. The camera app is open. And there are new photos in my gallery. Pictures taken while I was asleep. Pictures of my room. Pictures of my bed. Pictures from the corner of the ceiling. As if someone is standing up there. Watching. Getting closer. The worst part? Last week I looked through the latest photo. Zoomed into the reflection in my bedroom window. Outside, standing in the darkness beyond the glass... ...was a figure. And this time it wasn't looking at me. It was looking directly at the camera.