115 West Esplanade Street was an old-fashioned house.

  The facade, once coated in a layer of dark gray paint, had now faded, mottled with patches of moss and crumbling plaster. The windows had been shut firm from within, and a few glass panes had shattered, revealing the gloomy darkness behind the decaying curtains. Several tiles had fallen off the roof, exposing the rotting wooden frame underneath.

  All of these details made the house appear even more gloomy and frightening in the dead of midnight.

  To the left stood an old oak tree with thick, tangled branches. To the right lay a driveway, its outline almost lost beneath the overgrown weeds. Straight ahead stretched a yard so choked with wild grass that the narrow path leading to the front door was almost impossible to see.

  Standing in front of the house was a young man with long blond hair and bright, gleaming eyes. He was smiling and talking to the video camera in his hand:

  “Hi everyone, welcome back to the Midnight Billy channel! Tonight, my friends and I will be livestreaming an exploration of the infamous Gray House, located on West Esplanade Street in the Jackson Heights area of Queens County, New York. I heard that ever since the previous owner of this house passed away, the neighbors have experienced all kinds of strange, unexplainable things …”

  This guy was Billy Watson, a popular YouTuber from Alabama, known for exploring locations rumored to be haunted or places with paranormal activity. In other words, he was a ghost-hunting content creator.

  “That’s why, to test these rumors, we’ll be setting up monitoring devices all around the house tonight and even staying here until morning. Let’s see if we can manage to capture any ghosts on camera or if all of this is just an urban legend! Don’t forget to subscribe for more creepy content!”

  Billy looked young, only in his twenties, and standing beside him were three companions.

  One of them was holding the livestream camera for him, while the other two carried equipment such as thermal cameras, EVP devices (Electronic Voice Phenomenon recorders), EMF meters (Electromagnetic Field Meters), and several other specialized “ghost-hunting” gadgets.

  None of them noticed that, a short distance away, someone was watching them in silence.

  Acher chuckled to himself.

  “Heh heh heh, how interesting. Humans these days are quite bold, I must say. Perhaps it’s because real ghosts and monsters have become so rare that they’ve lost their sense of fear.”

  Billy’s group began looking for a way to get inside the house while Luther and Acher followed right behind them.

  They pushed their way through the path in the overgrown front yard and approached the main entrance. Billy grasped the doorknob, gave it a try, and it let out a series of creaking sounds as he turned it.

  “It’s not locked, but it’s so rusted,” he assessed aloud.

  It took him a moment of effort before the door opened. A damp, moldy odor wafted straight into their faces, making everyone grimace.

  “As you can see, this house is pretty big. It even has two full floors. Over there is the staircase leading up to the second floor,” Billy said. “To be honest, even though this place has been abandoned for a while, it’s not in complete ruins. It’s just quite dusty. You can see there’s still a lot of furniture left inside.”

  He began walking through the house, narrating as he went:

  “This is the kitchen, the place where Mrs. Anna Dixon’s body was discovered by her daughter. She died from a sudden heart attack. People say that some neighbors passing by at night have seen a shadowy figure standing with its back turned over there by the sink, as if Mrs. Anna was still looking after the kitchen the way she did when she was alive.”

  Viewers watching the livestream began commenting more and more.

  “I’m getting chills! Can you ask if the old lady is still there? Use the EVP device!”

  “So the legend says her ghost is still cooking at midnight? Who wants to try a haunted dinner? What do you think she makes? Worms sautéed with weeds?”

  “Kind of sad to think she died alone like that.”

  Billy continued to wander through other corners of the house, recounting the various strange incidents that were rumored to have occurred there. The first floor of the house consisted of two bedrooms, a kitchen, a laundry room, and a living room. Both the living room and the bedrooms were quite spacious.

  He then walked up the creaking wooden staircase to the second floor and inspected each room.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Inside the bedroom, to the left of the stairs, he stood by the window facing West Esplanade Street and said:

  “Many neighbors who pass by this house at night have claimed that they saw a shadowy figure standing right here, staring out as if waiting for someone to arrive.”

  While Billy continued to introduce the house and pan the camera to capture every detail, his team members were also busy with their tasks. They set up electronic devices such as cameras, thermal cameras, and EVP recorders in the locations where the ghost was said to have appeared.

  In addition, they carried out other actions, such as sticking a black paper cutout shaped like a person onto a windowpane and tying ultra-thin, almost invisible fishing lines to various objects in the house, including a knife on the kitchen counter, a few books on a shelf, and more. They even hid a small speaker inside a flower vase on the dining table.

  Acher watched and laughed, his amusement plain to see.

  “Heh heh heh. Humans are still as deceitful and crafty as ever.”

  Then everything started to play out according to their “script.” When Billy began trying to contact the spirit of Mrs. Anna Dixon, objects inside the house suddenly began to “move.” A shadow darted across the camera’s field of view, and a cold, whispering voice said, “Get out of here!” from somewhere unseen.

  Billy “jumped in shock.” His teammates also began “panicking” and speaking over one another:

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Did you all hear that? What did it just say?”

  “Let’s get out of here now!”

  Billy gritted his teeth and said:

  “No, we can’t. We promised to stay overnight, and we can’t just give up halfway.”

  More viewers began flooding into Midnight Billy’s livestream:

  “Oh my god, did everyone see that shadow?! Rewind it!”

  “That ‘get out of here’ line gave me real goosebumps. I wouldn’t stay there another second!”

  “Imagine being a ghost and the only thing you can do is scare YouTubers hahahaha.”

  However, some viewers were skeptical about the authenticity of what they were seeing:

  “Nice special effects, Billy. When did you hire a movie crew?”

  “Shadow and whispering voices? Those tricks are too old already. It’s going to take more than that to convince me.”

  “Is it just me, or do all these paranormal events feel a little too well-timed … almost like they know the exact moment to occur …”

  Acher spoke up:

  “That’s enough, Luther. You need to figure out a way to get them out of this house. That one seems to be getting angrier. If those kids keep this up, it might lose control and actually harm them.”

  He turned his gaze toward a small cupboard in the kitchen that was used to store food and spices.

  The wooden door was opened a small crack, and through that gap, Luther and Acher could see a frail old woman in a tattered nightgown standing inside the darkness. She stared directly at Billy’s group with her hollow, empty black eye sockets.

  “Alright,” Luther responded.

  After a moment of thought, he began to act. First, he slipped into the bathroom and flushed the toilet.

  Then, when Billy’s group went to investigate the noise, Luther took the opportunity to pick up the knife from the floor and stab it straight into the dining table, leaving it stuck upright in the wood. After that, he tore the paper cutout figure off the window.

  …

  A few minutes earlier.

  “Again! Did everyone see that?” Billy exclaimed in “shock,” pointing at a book that had just fallen from the shelf.

  A small curve lifted at the corner of his lips as he noticed the flood of comments coming in, but his smile didn’t last long.

  “Gurgle … gurgle …”

  All of them could hear the sudden sound of running water echoing from the bathroom. Billy glanced at his friends with a confused expression; this wasn’t part of their script. His friends returned the look, shaking their heads in silence to signal that they hadn’t done anything.

  The viewers also heard the sound and urged them on:

  “Was that a toilet flushing? Is the bathroom haunted, too? Dude, go check it out, and I’ll donate.”

  “Maybe the ghost just wants to take a dump. Go in there, Billy, and make sure the camera doesn’t slip from your hands!”

  Some sharp-eyed viewers noticed something else unusual:

  “Is it just me, or did Billy just look actually scared? It doesn’t feel like his normal ‘I’m pretending to be shocked’ face at all.”

  “Ah ha, our hero isn’t as brave as we thought. That face looked like he was about to pee his pants #BillyLosesHisNerve.”

  “From ghost hunter to being haunted in a live stream. Now this is entertaining!”

  Billy clenched his teeth as he read the mocking comments flashing on the screen.

  “Excellent! This is what we came here for. Let’s go check it out,” Billy said, trying to force an excited smile.

  He then led the group into the bathroom.

  The water in the toilet bowl was still rippling in soft waves, and a little was still trickling down, creating a soft gurgling sound. Billy swallowed hard and said in a slightly trembling voice:

  “As you all can see, it seems like someone just used this bathroom. This, along with the other events we’ve experienced so far, allows us to conclude that Mrs. Anna’s spirit is still lingering in this house.”

  They rushed out of the bathroom and returned to the kitchen.

  Despite being rattled, Billy’s group pushed forward. They stood next to the EVP device and asked:

  “Anna, are you here? Can you hear us? Were you the one trying to communicate with us just now?”

  According to their plan, at this moment, they were supposed to use the hidden speaker in the vase to play several pre-recorded lines.

  But just then, someone in the group noticed something strange.

  “Uh … guys …”

  “What is it?” Billy asked.

  The young man pointed at the knife now embedded in the center of the dining table.

  “That thing was on the floor earlier, wasn’t it? Did one of you do this?” he asked.

  Everyone shook their heads; their face started losing color.

  “The paper cutout on the window is gone too …” another person added.

  Sweat began to form on Billy’s forehead, and his legs started to shake.

  Right at that moment, the thermal camera tipped to the side and crashed to the floor with a loud bang. The knife then jerked from the table, floated in the air for a split second, and slammed back down into the wooden surface with another sharp thunk.

  “Damn it! Get out of here! NOW!” Billy shouted at the top of his lungs.

  The entire group scrambled, grabbing their electronic equipment as they bolted out of the house, completely abandoning their plan to stay overnight.

  At last, everything returned to a heavy silence.

  “Now, we can have a proper conversation with this one,” Acher said.

  The old woman's spirit was still standing by the window, staring out into the front yard.