Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

The Old Polaroid Camera

This apparently happened to my dad.

He told me a couple years ago about this one event that freaked him out. It was around 2002 when we had just moved into a new house, my dad was unpacking while my step-mom was at work and I was at school. My little brother was home sick and sleeping in his bedroom.

So my father is unpacking and found his old polaroid camera and starts playing with it, he decides to sneak into my brothers room to get a cute picture of him sleeping (he was about six at this time and really adorable). He opens the door and sees my brother curled up on the ledge right beside the window, his face turned away from my dad and against the glass. My dad is standing by the door and snaps a picture, quietly closing the door.

As the picture develops my brother suddenly comes out of the bathroom at the other end of the hall, crying because he was sick. My father his astonished and knows there was no way for my little brother to get from the bedroom to the bathroom in mere seconds and without being seen. He opens the door quickly to check inside and nothing is there.

The clincher is the picture, after getting my brother settled and back to sleep, my dad takes a look at the photograph. What should have been my brother sleeping with his head turned away became a picture of a little boy facing my father, the lower half of his face blurry and red.

My dad doesn't believe in ghosts, but he was pretty freaked. He showed the picture to my step-mother and her sister. They kept it in a box in their bedroom and apparently used it as a nice conversation piece for a few years until we moved out of the house (one of our basement walls collapsed and it was unsafe to live there). It seems to have been lost in the move.

I never had the pleasure of seeing the picture myself, but loads of my family saw it and they all agree it was creepy. We never experienced anything else abnormal in the house.

– ShadowTaker