When Jack first moved into this old house, he found a photo album in an old wooden box in the attic. The album’s cover was worn, and inside were black-and-white photos documenting the daily life of a family in the 1970s.
Out of curiosity, Jack began flipping through the pages one by one. The photos showed a young couple and their two children, all beaming with joy. When he reached the last page, Jack’s hand suddenly froze.
It was a family portrait, but something was off.
The photo still showed the couple and their two children, but standing behind them was a blurry, distorted shadow. It didn’t look like a person; it resembled more a shadow that had been forcibly squeezed onto the photo paper. Even more eerie was that the shadow’s hand was resting gently on the shoulder of one of the children.
Jack’s heart skipped a beat, but he reassured himself that it was merely a flaw caused by the old photo getting damp or a development error. He closed the album, tossed it into a drawer, and decided not to think about it anymore.
The next evening, Jack was watching TV in the living room when he suddenly heard a faint “clatter” coming from the attic, as if something had fallen to the floor. He grabbed a flashlight and, steeled with courage, went upstairs to investigate.
The attic door was ajar. He pushed it open, and the beam of his flashlight swept over the old wooden box—it had been opened, and the photo album lay quietly on the floor, open to the last page.
Jack walked over and picked up the album. His breath caught in his throat.
The photo had changed.
The blurry black shadow was no longer standing behind the children; instead, it stood clearly in the very foreground of the frame. It now had distinct features—a face with no eyes, just a mouth stretched wide to the ears. And its hand was no longer resting on a child’s shoulder; it was pointing straight toward the space outside the frame, as if staring directly at the person looking at the photo.
What sent chills down Jack’s spine most of all was that the background of the photo was no longer a 1970s living room, but his current attic.
Just then, the beam of his flashlight accidentally swept across the full-length mirror beside him. In the mirror, behind him, stood a eyeless, grinning shadow, gently resting one hand on his shoulder.
“Click.”
A soft sound came from his phone. He looked down and saw that a group photo had just automatically appeared in his phone’s photo album.
