A man gave me his old family videos. After watching them, I understand why he was so desperate to get rid of them.

My job is trash. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical, “I hate my career” kind of way. I mean it literally. I’m a garbage collector. My alarm goes off at 4 AM, I pull on steel-toed boots, and I spend the next eight hours heaving the things people don’t want anymore into the back of a growling truck. It’s a dirty, smelly, physically demanding job, but it pays the bills for my tiny apartment, and it’s honest work. You also learn a lot about people from what they throw away.

Most of the time, it’s just bags of household garbage. But sometimes you find… treasures. A broken piece of furniture that can be fixed. A box of old books. People get rid of the strangest things. My rule is that if it’s in a box and set out separately, it’s fair game to take a look.

That’s how I ended up with the tapes.

It happened a few weeks ago. I was on my usual route through a quiet, older suburban neighborhood. One of the residents, a man probably in his late 20s, flagged me down. He looked awful. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, with dark, bruised-looking circles under them, like he hadn’t slept in a month. His hands were trembling.

“Hey,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “You’re the garbage guy, right? Can you… can you just take this for me? Just get it out of my house. Please.”

He shoved a heavy cardboard box into my hands. It was sealed with a single, hasty strip of packing tape.

“Sure thing, man,” I said. “Just leave it on the curb next time.”

“No,” he said, his eyes darting around nervously. “I need it gone. Now.”

He didn't wait for a reply. He just turned and practically ran back into his house, slamming the door behind him. I shrugged, tossed the box into the cab of my truck to look through later, and continued my route.

That night, back in my apartment, I finally opened the box. It was heavy. Inside, packed neatly, were at least fifty old home video cassettes. The kind we all used in the 90s. Big, clunky black rectangles. None of them had labels. They were completely anonymous.

I’m not gonna lie, my first thought was a little voyeuristic. Who knew what could be on these? Maybe something weird, something interesting. It was a window into a stranger’s life. Anything was better than the usual mind-numbing cable TV. I had an old VCR/TV combo I’d picked up from a thrift store, so I pulled it out, blew the dust off it, and popped in the first tape.

The screen flickered to life with a burst of static, then resolved into a shaky, oversaturated home video. It was a kid’s birthday party. A backyard, a bunch of screaming children, a cake with cartoon characters on it. The timestamp in the corner said 1998. Watching it, I got a strange sense of secondhand nostalgia. The clothes, the music, the quality of the video itself—it was a time capsule. And I recognized one of the kids. A small, skinny boy with a goofy grin. It was the man who had given me the box.

The next few tapes were more of the same. Christmas mornings, with mountains of discarded wrapping paper. Awkward family vacations to the beach, the camera panning shakily across sunburned faces. I watched him grow up on those tapes, from a little kid to a gawky teenager. It was strangely intimate, watching these moments that were never meant for my eyes. It was all so… normal. Boring, even. I was about to give up and just toss the whole box.

That’s when I put in the tape of the barbecue.

The timestamp said July 2002. The scene was familiar. A sunny backyard, adults drinking beer, kids running through a sprinkler. The man from the tapes, now a teenager, was trying to flip burgers on a grill, clearly failing. It was another slice of mundane life. I was half-watching, half-scrolling on my phone.

And then the video glitched.

The screen dissolved into a brief, violent snowstorm of static, a loud BZZZZT coming through the speakers. It lasted only a second. When the picture returned, the scene was the same. The burgers were still burning, the kids were still screaming. But something was different.

In the background, hanging from the thick branches of a large oak tree, there was a shadow. It wasn't there before the glitch. I rewound the tape, watched it again. Normal scene. BZZZZT. Glitch. And there it was. It was a dark, amorphous shape, like a smudge on the lens, but it had a distinct, unsettling form. It looked… tentacled. Like a squid or an octopus made of pure darkness, just dangling there among the leaves.

I leaned closer to the screen, my heart beating a little faster. It was probably nothing. A film artifact. A bit of the tape degrading in a weird way. That had to be it. I shook my head, dismissing the creepy feeling crawling up my spine, and let the tape play out. The shadow never moved. It was just there, a silent, impossible observer in a happy family memory.

I put in the next tape. A Christmas morning from 2004. The family was in their living room, opening presents. The teenage boy—the man—was showing off a new video game console. It was all laughter and joy. I was watching intently now, waiting.

BZZZZT.

The glitch. The static. The picture returned. And my blood ran cold.

It was there again. The thing. But it wasn't on a tree in the background anymore. It was in the house. For a few frames, just a fraction of a second, I saw it standing in the dark hallway that led out of the living room. It was clearer this time. It had depth, a three-dimensional quality. It wasn’t a flat shadow. It was a thing. A tall, spindly, dark thing with what looked like long, thin limbs that coiled and shifted like they had no bones. It was just standing there, in the shadows of the hallway, watching the family celebrate.

I rewound it, played it in slow motion. Before the glitch, the hallway was empty. After the glitch, the creature was there. It wasn’t part of the original recording. The glitch wasn't revealing something that was already there. The glitch was adding it. It was inserting this… observer… into the memory.

That’s when the obsession began.

I spent the next three days doing nothing but watching those tapes. I called in sick to work. I didn’t eat. I barely slept. I sat in my darkened apartment, the only light coming from the glowing screen of the old TV, and I watched.

Every single tape was the same. A normal family event. A wedding. A graduation. A trip to a theme park. And in every single one, the glitch would happen. And every single time, the thing would be there. And it was getting closer.

On a tape of a trip to the zoo, it was a dark shape behind the glass of the reptile house. On a tape of a school play, it was a tall, thin figure standing in the wings of the stage. With each appearance, it became more defined. The vague, octopus-like shadow resolved into a distinct silhouette. The silhouette grew limbs, a torso, a head. It was impossibly tall and thin, its limbs too long, its joints bending at unnatural angles. It was like a spider and a man had been melted together in the dark. It never moved. It never interacted with the family. It just… watched. A silent, parasitic passenger on their memories.

I felt like I was losing my mind. Was I just seeing things? Was the man who gave me the tapes some kind of weird indie filmmaker who made found-footage horror? But it all felt too real. The family, their lives… it was authentic. The creature was the only thing that felt wrong.

I got to the last tape in the box. It was older than the others, the quality much worse. The timestamp read 1995. The tape began in a sterile, white hospital room. A tired-looking woman in a hospital bed. A man, who I recognized as a younger version of the father from the other tapes, holding a small, swaddled bundle. It was the birth. The birth of the man who had given me the box. His first moments of life, captured on grainy magnetic tape.

I braced myself. I stared at the screen, my knuckles white, waiting for the inevitable glitch. Waiting to see where the creature would appear this time. In the corner of the room? In the reflection of a window?

But the tape played on. The baby cried. The mother smiled, exhausted but happy. The father cooed. The camera zoomed in on the baby’s tiny, wrinkled face. It played perfectly, from start to finish. No glitches. No static. No creature.

The tape ended, the screen dissolving into a blank, blue void.

A wave of immense, shuddering relief washed over me. I laughed, a choked, hysterical sound. It was over. The last tape was clean. It was just a weird, recurring flaw in the other tapes. A magnetic anomaly. My brain had filled in the blanks, created a monster out of nothing. I was an idiot. A sleep-deprived, paranoid idiot.

I leaned forward and turned off the VCR. The TV screen went black.

And I saw it.

It wasn’t in a reflection. It wasn’t a trick of the light. It was in the room with me.

The darkness behind the television, in the corner where the shadows were deepest, was… wrong. It was a patch of absolute black, a void that seemed to drink the faint light from the streetlamp outside. And from that void, two points of light ignited. Two giant, crimson, self-luminous eyes. They weren't looking at the TV. They were looking at me.

I could see its shape now, fully formed, no longer a grainy image on a screen. It was pressed against the wall and the ceiling, its long, spindly limbs splayed out like a monstrous spider. Its body was a shifting mass of shadows, but those eyes… those eyes were solid and real and filled with an ancient, terrifying intelligence.

I don’t think I screamed. I think the sound was trapped in my throat, a solid ball of pure terror. I scrambled backward, falling out of my chair, and crab-walked across the floor until my back hit the opposite wall. I fumbled for the lamp on my end table, my fingers feeling like useless, clumsy sausages. I found the switch and flicked it.

The room was flooded with light. The corner was empty. The TV was just a TV. The shadows were just shadows. It was gone.

But it had been there. I knew it. I spent the rest of the night huddled in my lit kitchen, clutching a butcher knife, jumping at every creak and groan of the old building. Sleep was a country I could no longer visit.

The next morning, driven by a desperate need for answers, I decided to go back to the man’s house. I had to know. I had to ask him what he’d put me through. I gathered up the tapes, put them back in their box, and drove over to his neighborhood.

When I pulled onto his street, I saw the police cars. Yellow tape was cordoning off his house. My heart sank into my stomach. I parked down the street and walked closer, trying to look like a curious neighbor. A small group of actual neighbors were gathered on the sidewalk, speaking in hushed, morbid tones.

“…just found him this morning,” an elderly woman was saying. “Terrible. So young.”

“What happened?” another neighbor asked.

The woman lowered her voice, but I was close enough to hear. “They’re not saying much. But my cousin’s son is one of the officers on scene. He said… he said it was the strangest thing he’s ever seen. The man was just… sitting in his chair. No signs of a struggle. But… his head… well, the top of his skull was gone. And his brain… it was missing.”

I didn’t hear anything else. The words hit me like a physical blow. His brain was missing. The world tilted on its axis. I turned and stumbled back to my car, the box of tapes feeling like it weighed a thousand pounds.

I got home, my mind a blank roar of static. I needed to get rid of them. Burn them. Throw them in a river. I brought the box inside, and as I was about to just dump the contents into a trash bag, my fingers brushed against a piece of paper at the very bottom, hidden beneath the last cassette. I hadn’t noticed it before.

It was a small, folded note. The handwriting was shaky, erratic, the writing of a man on the edge of utter collapse.

I unfolded it. It only had a few words.

I am sorry. It promised me it would leave me alone.

And in that moment, I understood everything. He passed it to me. And now… now I don’t know what to do. Do I live with this thing, this silent observer, waiting for it to get hungry? Or do I find another person, another stranger, and hand them a box of old tapes? Do I save myself by damning someone else, just like he did?

But it hadn't saved him. The creature had lied. It had moved on to me, and then it had gone back to collect its final payment from him. His brain. Maybe that’s what it eats..... Minds.

I don't know. All I know is that I’m so, so tired. But I’m terrified to go to [sleep](https://www.reddit.com/user/gamalfrank/).