The Rotating Stool

My name is Marcus, and I run a modest YouTube channel dedicated to exploring the hidden spectrum of light. My bread and butter was a series of videos titled ‘Lucid Lenses,’ where I demonstrated how to use an ordinary camcorder, modified with an IR filter, to see through thin fabrics. It was a gimmick, sure, but it paid the bills and satisfied a certain curiosity in my audience.

One crisp October evening in 2019, I was reviewing footage from a shoot earlier that day with my partner, Elena. We had been filming a segment in our small apartment’s kitchen, with me directing her to stand by the window in a sheer blouse to showcase the effect. As I scrolled through the timeline, my eye caught something odd in the background. There was a full-length mirror on the wall opposite the stove, and in its reflection, I saw one of our bar stools, the one with the worn leather seat, swivel slowly to the left, then back to center. No one was near it. We have no pets, no drafts strong enough to move it, and the floor is level.

I felt a cold prickle at the back of my neck. Elena was standing right by the stool in the video, facing the mirror, and she showed no reaction. If the stool had moved, she would have seen it clearly in the mirror. I rewound and watched it again. The movement was unmistakable, a deliberate rotation, as if someone had placed a hand on the seat and turned it. Yet, in the next frame, everything was still.

I tried to rationalize it. Maybe the stool had been wobbling, and the vibration from the refrigerator or the traffic outside caused it to turn slowly. But the movement was too smooth, too precise. The stool rotated exactly 180 degrees and then returned, as if following a script. The timestamp showed it happened over three seconds, and Elena was in the middle of a sentence, her lips moving, oblivious.

That night, I couldn’t shake the image. I decided to set up a camera overnight, aimed directly at that stool, to prove to myself that it was just a fluke. I placed my camcorder on a tripod in the corner, covered the lens with a filter to block visible light, and let it record in the dark, with only the faint glow of the streetlight outside the window.

The next morning, I eagerly pulled the footage. The stool remained motionless for hours. I was about to dismiss it entirely when, at 3:17 AM, the air in the room grew visibly colder, a mist forming near the ceiling. The stool then rotated slowly, as if pushed by an invisible hand, and this time, it didn’t stop at 180 degrees. It kept turning, over and over, in lazy circles, for exactly twelve seconds. Then it stopped, and the mist vanished.

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. Something was here, in our apartment, and it was toying with me. I showed the new footage to Elena, who grew pale. She admitted she’d been feeling uneasy lately, as if she were being watched, but she’d brushed it off. Now, we were both awake to the possibility that something was sharing our space.

We tried to ignore it, but the incidents escalated. Cups would slide across the counter, leaving trails in the dust. Doors creaked open on their own. And every night, at 3:17 AM, the stool would spin, and we’d hear a soft humming, like a lullaby sung in a language we didn’t recognize.

I delved into research, looking up the history of our building. It had been converted from a hospital in the 1940s. In the basement, there had been an operating room, and a nurse named Agnes had died there under mysterious circumstances. Some said she was haunted by the ghost of a patient who had died on the table, and that she’d been found spinning in a chair, her eyes vacant, before she collapsed.

Elena and I decided to move. The apartment was suffocating, the air thick with dread. But the moment we started packing, the stool spun so violently that it toppled over, and the mirror in the kitchen cracked. I knew then that this presence was attached to us, not the apartment.

One night, unable to sleep, I sat in the dark living room, watching the stool. At 3:17 AM, it began to spin. I felt a cold hand on my shoulder, and a voice whispered in my ear, ‘You see what others cannot.’ I turned, and for a split second, I saw a figure in the mirror, a woman in a nurse’s uniform, her face twisted in agony, before she faded.

That was when I understood. The IR filter wasn’t just seeing through clothing. It was seeing through the veil of reality. And I had opened a door that should have stayed closed. Now, every time I look through that camera, I see them. They’re everywhere, silent, watching. And they’ve been waiting for someone like me to acknowledge them.

I haven’t uploaded a video since. I’ve destroyed all my equipment. But it doesn’t matter. When I close my eyes, I still see them. And at 3:17 AM, I hear the stool spin, no matter where I am, because they’ve found me, and they will never let go.