The video started like any normal night. Me getting into bed. Turning off the lamp. Rolling onto my side. Nothing strange.<\/p>\n
The clock in the corner of the screen read 1:58 a.m.<\/p>\n
At 2:11, something changed.<\/p>\n
I shifted in my sleep. My arm moved. Then\u2026 I sat up.<\/p>\n
I stared at the screen, my heart pounding. I didn\u2019t remember waking up. I didn\u2019t remember sitting up. But there I was, clear as day.<\/p>\n
At 2:13, I stood up. Slowly. Carefully.<\/p>\n
I watched myself walk out of the bedroom. No rush. No panic. Calm. Too calm.<\/p>\n
The camera kept recording the empty room. Minutes passed. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.<\/p>\n
I felt sick. My hands were sweating.<\/p>\n
At 3:02 a.m., I came back.<\/p>\n
I was holding my phone. I placed it gently on the bed. Then I picked up clothes from the floor and tossed them onto the chair. I opened the closet. I searched through it, quietly, methodically.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when it hit me.<\/p>\n
No stranger.
No break-in.
No footsteps from someone else.<\/p>\n
It was me.<\/p>\n
Or something wearing my body.<\/p>\n
I watched myself stand there for a long moment, staring at the sleeping version of me in the bed. The camera caught my face clearly. My eyes were open. Empty. Focused. Like I wasn\u2019t really there.<\/p>\n
Then I lay back down.
Turned to my side.
And went still.<\/p>\n
The timestamp read 3:47 a.m.<\/p>\n
I shut the laptop hard, like it could crawl out at me. My chest felt tight. My first thought was sleepwalking. People do weird things in their sleep, right? I Googled it. Read story after story. Some of it sounded familiar. Too familiar.<\/p>\n
But something didn\u2019t sit right.<\/p>\n
I live alone in a small apartment in Ohio. No roommates. No pets. Just me, my job, my routine. I\u2019m not the kind of guy who drinks heavily or does drugs. I go to work, pay my bills, watch TV at night, and go to bed tired. Normal.<\/p>\n
Yet the version of me in that video didn\u2019t look tired. He looked alert. Intentional.<\/p>\n
The next night, I didn\u2019t sleep. I stayed on the couch with every light on. Nothing happened. No sounds. No footsteps.<\/p>\n
The night after that, I slept again \u2014 with the camera still running.<\/p>\n
Same thing.<\/p>\n
Different times. Same pattern. I got up. I moved things. Sometimes I stood in the hallway, just out of frame. Once, I walked straight up to the camera and stared into it for almost a full minute.<\/p>\n
That was the moment I broke.<\/p>\n
I took the footage to a doctor. Then another. Stress, anxiety, sleep disorder. Pills. Advice. \u201cTry to relax.\u201d \u201cReduce screen time.\u201d \u201cGet more rest.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the recordings didn\u2019t stop.<\/p>\n
What finally changed everything was a small detail I hadn\u2019t noticed before. In one clip, as I was rearranging items on the floor, my wrist rolled toward the camera.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when I saw it.<\/p>\n
A note. Written in black marker. On my own skin.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m keeping you safe.\u201d<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t remember writing it.<\/p>\n
That morning, I packed a bag and went to my parents\u2019 house in Michigan. I showed them everything. We talked for hours. I cried. I slept \u2014 really slept \u2014 for the first time in weeks.<\/p>\n
Nothing happened there. No walking. No moving. No notes.<\/p>\n
I moved out of that apartment a month later. New city. New place. New routine.<\/p>\n
The camera still sits in my closet. I don\u2019t use it anymore.<\/p>\n
But sometimes, I wake up and find my phone on the bed when I swear I left it on the table.<\/p>\n
And every now and then, I check my wrists.<\/p>\n
Just to make sure nothing new has been written.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The video started like any normal night. Me getting into bed. Turning off the lamp. Rolling onto my side. Nothing strange. The clock in the corner of the screen read 1:58 a.m. At 2:11, something changed. I shifted in my sleep. My arm moved. Then\u2026 I sat up. I stared at the screen, my heart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2766,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3467,"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3466\/revisions\/3467"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappyli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}