Welcome to “App-arition” a collection of spine-tingling ghost stories revolving around apps on electronic devices. We hope you enjoy them! So gather around your phone, laptop, or electronic device.
Written below is the script for the Radio Play:
Narrator
I don’t like taking selfies. I know what you’re probably thinking, “Ryan, are you like those aborigines who believe that their soul will be taken away from a single snap?” If you had asked me that question after what happened that night; I would’ve said no. After what I experienced that night, I’m not so sure what I believe anymore.
Anyway, the other night I was with my friends Ginger, Rachel, and Jacob. We were just hanging out down in the basement, watching a scary movie. It was very dark in the basement. The only lights that illuminated the room was the monitor of the TV in front of us, and our phones almost glued to our faces.
After the movie, we played with some of the app filters on our phones. We made our faces into animals, fantasy creatures. We even had accessories like glasses, hats, monocles, and even changed our genders for a good laugh.(“Look I’m a girl. Hehe”) The girls laughed uncontrollably as they stroked their imaginary ponder beards. (“I’m the bearded lady.”)
When our laughs and chuckles subsided, Ginger suggested using this new app that also changed the filters on your phone but with better quality. She told us that she heard that it looks more real.
So we decided to up the ante by projecting the screens of our phone onto the TV screen. We wanted to see how real it looked.
We each took turns trying the various filters from the app.
Ginger was the first to go. She placed her phone in front of her, and soon we all saw her face on the flat screen. Nothing happened. We just saw her face making faces at us. Then suddenly skinny legs from a spider began to crawl on the right side of her face. We immediately jumped at the sight of the arachnid, especially when we saw a red spot on its back.
Ginger assured us that it was fake by standing and twirling in front of the TV. She explained that it was the new app filter. My fears later went away. However, I thought I saw something go up her jacket, but it was too dark to tell, so I brushed it off. Thinking nothing of it.
Ginger suggested that we try a different filter. I saw no harm in volunteering, so I went next. I wanted to use the monster face filter. As the phone began to scan for my face, I couldn’t help but notice that it was scanning another face just above my shoulder. I looked back, and saw nothing, just a wall that the couch was pressed against. I was about to ask if anybody saw what I saw, but I didn’t want to ruin the fun. I decided to pass my turn to Jacob, while I gathered my senses.
As I sat down, I couldn’t explain it, but I felt something was a little off about that app. My stomach turned inside. I had a static feeling. Even though my skin felt cold, I could feel an extra presence lightly stroke the small hairs on the back of my neck. A cool breeze from an unknown entity brushing the hairs on my neck. As I looked back. Again, there was nothing there. I tried to shrug it off. Maybe I was overthinking it.
Anyway, Jacob chose the filter that made it look like you were puking rainbows. The filter made Jacob’s eyes glaze over, his nose and cheeks glowed a hot pink hue, and as he opened his mouth, pillars of the colors of the rainbow poured out of his mouth like a waterfall.
Jacob quickly exclaimed that he was tasting crayons. At first I didn’t think much of it, but curiosity got the better of me. When I turned to Jacob I saw different colors of the rainbow stained on his chin and the collar of his shirt. Jacob gagged, and more rainbow colored puke spewed from his mouth, which later splashed onto the carpet.
I stepped away from the rainbow puddle. Soon the rest of my friends pulled away from Jacob as he continued to vomit colorful chunks on the carpet.
Between each colorful hurl he chucked, Jacob struggled to make words, until he finally squeezed out words that could only describe his current pain.
“It burns!”
We soon learned that he wasn’t wrong. The rainbow acted like some type of acidic puddle. It ate everything in its path and slowly spread to the corners of the basement. The couch, the carpet, even the cement underneath. Jacob spewed more rainbow chunks that shot at the TV and wall in front of him. We made our way to the next room as the rainbow puddle expanded like wildfire. Jacob’s skin began to melt off his face. Nothing but a rainbow coated skull sat on Jacob’s shoulders. The jawbone fell into his lap, and the skull followed after.
We all darted to the door that led to the upstairs. Ginger reached for the doorknob, when suddenly a black widow the size of a dinner plate crawled from the sleeve of her jacket and rested on the knob. We each jumped back as we witnessed the spider grow rapidly. The body of the spider pulsated like a human heart as its size expanded to half the size of the door. Hairs became more evident on its long legs. The spider now filled the frame of the door, but the growth didn’t stop there. It kept growing.
I could tell it didn’t help the situation, especially with the floor becoming lava and the growing spider now the size of the wall.
It then dawned on me. Those weren’t the only things that came out of the app. The face recognition! It recognized an unknown face that was behind me when I tried the app.
I urged everybody to pull out their phones and turn the camera away from them in hope’s to spot the unknown entity.
Rachel panicked as she frantically pulled up the app and changed the filter to a dog face. She didn’t change the position of the camera.
As she looked at her image in the camera, out of her temples, a pair of giant, cartoonish dog ears grew and drooped over her eyes covering her face. The skin around her nose turned a spectral white, and jowls hung like damp sacks of wet, soiled dish rags around her chin. A pair of black, dripping nostrils flared in and out where her nose once was, and whiskers shot out like tendrils feeling their way in the musky air. She tried to call for help, but her words got choked out by a pinkish, bulbous tongue that fell and hung like phlegm between her jagged canines. She dropped her phone, and tried to run, but three of the brisley legs from the spider caught hold of her, and wrapped her, spun her, spooled her into a tight cocoon of thin, translucent, sticky threads. Between the roaring flames now surrounding the basement, Rachel’s muffled voice faded away and grew fainter into the angry, pulsing atmosphere of the cabin.
Ginger screamed uncontrollably as she held me tightly. I turned to her and asked if there was a window that we could use for an escape. She gestured to her room, and we ran to the door.
As we closed the door, the rainbow lava began to seep through the bottom crack of the door. We heard scratching and thudding from the top of the door.
We both had to stand on Ginger’s bed as the lava filled the floor beneath us. I remember joking about how the floor is literally lava, just to defuse the situation, but I could tell that Ginger wasn’t in the mood. We started to move towards the window, and tried to pry it open. Nothing. The frame wouldn’t budge. I banged my elbow on the window in hopes that the glass would break, but nothing. I needed something big.
In the corner of my eye, I saw a lamp on a nightstand. It looked like it had a heavy base that could shatter the glass.
As I reached for it, Ginger asked what I was doing. I didn’t bother explaining, so I grabbed the lamp, yanking the cord from the wall, and began bashing the glass in.
After a few tries, I managed to break the glass. I had to take my jacket off and wrap it around my hand to clear out the shards of glass around the frame. I punched the remaining glass that hung above, and placed my jacket over the base of the frame for a safe exit.
I gestured to Ginger to have her go first, when suddenly she was pulled away from the window, and pinned to the ceiling.
She didn’t scream. She mumbled. I saw imprints of what appeared to be a human hand firmly pressed over her mouth. She struggled to open her lips. Nothing. Three invisible fingers rest on her left cheek, and a thumb on the other.
She tried prying the invisible fingers from her mouth, but her efforts proved fruitless as her head began to slowly turn until I suddenly heard a loud snap.
Her arms and legs swung lifelessly like a broken lightbulb dangling from a single cord attached to the ceiling.
Her body fell from the ceiling and into the rainbow lava below. The door began to split in two, inch by inch as the hairy giant spider legs merged in.
I didn’t want to wait any longer, so I continued my escape through the window. When suddenly something was tugging at my leg. It was the invisible man who somehow came out of my phone.
I kicked at the being only hitting air at first, until I finally felt something. I kicked as hard as I could until the grip on my leg was loose.
I squeezed out the window as I used my elbows to pull me into the backyard of Ginger’s house.
It was a small drop from the window to the ground, so I took it.
I landed on my side, knocking the wind out of me for a few seconds. It felt like my hip hit a flat rock hidden in the grass.
I crawled on the flat of my back, inching away from the window with my elbows.
I wanted to keep my eyes open for whatever was pulling at my leg. I knew that whatever that was, it wasn’t finished with me yet.
I reached for my phone, in hopes of contacting the police, but the screen of my phone was cracked.
Suddenly I saw an outline of a humanoid figure approaching me. The figure looked like someone in a morph suit that was designed to look like static noise on a TV screen,
I noticed cracks appearing on the torso of the figure. The cracks matched the ones on the screen of my phone. A shard fell from my phone, and sure enough a shard fell from the entity.
I bashed my phone to the ground multiple times. Each collision made the figure flicker on and off like a light bulb short circuiting. The figure buckled to its knees. Shards breaking everywhere. The splitting man finally fell forward, face planted and shattered to the ground into a pile of broken glass.
The glass then turned into smoke and blew away into nothing.
When I gathered myself, I looked into the window of Ginger’s room, and found nothing. It was like the room was completely replaced. No rainbow lava, and no giant spider. But more importantly, I couldn’t find the bodies of Ginger, Rachel, or even Jacob. It was like they didn’t exist.
The only proof I had was my shattered phone, of which lied on the ground like a husk in a graveyard.
What was once a house, was now an abandoned cabin in the woods.
And that’s why I don’t like taking selfies, at least not with that app…
