Creepypasta (Collections)

Reflections

REFLECTIONS

A few years ago I lived in a small college town in the mountains. Me and a few friends had this nice set up where we all lived in the same house, not like a rental or anything, but a house one of us had in our family. It was a new house, built around 2004 or so, but I think I remember hearing that there were some tenants renting out the place before we moved in, a fraternity or something. In random places throughout the house, you could still find their Greek letters drawn into the rafters or in some small obscure place under the sink. In a way I appreciated that they had left those small letters around. A kind of a way to mark that they had been there, that the house held importance to them as well as it would to us.

When we moved in in the summer of 2009, it was barren. No furniture to speak of, no food or shampoo bottles, the little things that over time make a house a home. We were able to wrangle together a small couch, beds for each of us, and stocked the place with some summer provisions to hold us over until our financial aid refund dispersed in the fall.

As we explored the house, we found that one of the previous tenants had left a light bulb in one of the upstairs bedrooms. We flicked the light switch and the room was flooded with this red light. My friend, I’ll call her Olivia, made a grimace at the light and I followed in suit, then we both started to laugh. It was creepy and unsettling, but nothing horrifying. It was kind of funny, actually, that the only thing left there for us was this red light bulb in the bedroom. We joked, and for a few months we called it the Murder Room.

My room was directly next to the Murder Room. After some time, the other roommates, I’ll call them Elaina and Lewis, came in to help set things up. However, Lewis and Olivia both had summer jobs back home, so Elaina and I settled in for the next three months of relative isolation. She had the room directly down the hall from me, with the bathroom between us in the hall.

One weekend, Elaina went down to see Lewis and left me to the house by myself. If you’ve ever stayed in a new house or apartment by yourself for a few days, you can understand how creepy it is on your own. But I made it work. I turned on all the lights, and watched some Monty Python, Shin Chan, any sort of ridiculous comedy I could think of to lighten the mood.

As I sat on the couch downstairs, I figured that I was up for a little scare. I mean, sometimes scaring yourself is a ton of fun, and hey, I didn’t need to be up in the morning for anything. So I gathered my courage and popped in a copy of Paranormal Activity. After maybe the second act, I decided that, no, I was in fact not up for a little scare. I switched it off and went back to Monty Python.

About halfway through the second episode of the night, a piercing noise began to screech though the empty house. I jumped up from my seat and looked around in a mild panic. For no reason whatsoever, all of the fire alarms in the house started going off at once. They were in perfect sync, alarms in stereo, and I ran into the kitchen to see if I had forgotten some food I had started cooking earlier that night. The stove was bare.

I looked around, trying to find the source of the alarm, but there was no smoke anywhere in the house. Then, just as they had started, they stopped. Jarred, but with apparently nothing else to investigate, I went back to the living room, and resumed watching my shows.

About a half hour later, the alarms rounded again, this time not quite as in sync as before. Fueled by paranoia and thoroughly impressed by what I had seen in Paranormal Activity, I ran over and grabbed a pool stick from the corner of the room. You know. To fight demons. Then, the alarms stopped again.

Deciding that I was done with the nonsense, I switched off the TV and went upstairs to bed. I brought the pool stick with me. You know. To fight demons. I slept with it in my bed that night. The alarms never went off again.