Ghost Stories

"Your posters are AWESOME. I want to take pictures of them." That was my cousin Gabby, standing in my doorway with her hands on her hips.

My stepsister Alyssa slipped past her into the room, laughing. "What, are you going to hang photos of posters on your walls? Lame, Gabby."

It was New Year's Eve, and we were hanging out while the adults sipped champagne and awaited the stroke of midnight. Gabby pulled out her camera and waved it in my face.

"Please?"

I shrugged. "Doesn't bother me," I said.

She started snapping pictures of my room while Alyssa and I gossiped a little. Gabby's last picture was of the posters near the window, and with a grin she plopped onto the bed next to us to flip through them.

Suddenly, she gasped. "Guys...is that a face?"

She showed us the last picture, and sure enough, in the top left hand corner, there was a blob that looked a lot like a person's face, right outside the window. We opened the window and peered outside, but there was no one there, and since my window was on the second floor, a person couldn't have escaped so quickly.

"Let's check for footprint," Alyssa said. "It could have been a neighbor boy or something."

There were certainly enough of those in the houses around mine, so I agreed and we went downstairs. But the light covering of snow revealed nothing, and with confused looks on our faces we headed back up to my room, some of the snacks from the adults' fare in hand.

The camera had moved.

Gabby had left the camera sitting on the bed, precisely in the center of my pillow. Now it was on the foot of the bed, face down.

I ran into the next room to confront my younger twin siblings. "Did you play with Gabby's camera?"

They just looked confused. "No," my brother said. "We weren't even in your room."

I trudged back, fear starting to show in my face. "Go through the pictures," I said in a heavy voice.

We flipped through. There were our smiling faces, there were my posters...and there was a video we hadn't made. I gulped. "Push play," Alyssa said, her whisper hoarse.

The video was a slow sweep of my room: the mirror, the window, the walls with the posters. And then, in the corner, a brown spot that looked like my dresser -- but completely out of place.

Tense with fear, we grasped hands and ran downstairs to get the parents. Reluctant though they were, they joined us upstairs. "What's the problem?" my uncle asked.

"We...there's something on the...where's the camera?" I was frantically digging around my bed, where we'd left it.

Gabby and Alyssa stood, faces white. "We didn't touch it," Gabby said.

We stared at each other for a moment.

The camera had disappeared.

Since then, I have been afraid to sleep in my room.