Elias stops walking. The audio picks up a faint, metallic creaking— skree, skree, skree. He zooms in. As the digital grain blurs the image, a shape begins to form. It’s not a person, but a distortion in the air, a ripple like heat rising off asphalt, sitting perfectly centered on the wooden board of the swing.
Suddenly, the swing stops dead in mid-air, defying gravity at its highest point.
The person filming, a college student named Elias, is walking home from a late-night shift. You can hear his heavy breathing and the crunch of frost-covered leaves under his boots. He turns the camera toward himself, his face pale in the phone’s glow, whispering, "Do you see that?"
Because I cannot see the video itself, I’ve imagined a "proper story" based on the metadata of that date—a night of autumn leaves, eerie costumes, and the strange energy of Halloween. The Ghost in the Frame