THE MYSTERY SHADOWS- by D. González and S. Barrios

Here's another story in our Halloween series. This story is the result of a creative writing project in which our students were asked to write a horror story set at our school, transforming our safe surroundings into unsettling places where the creepiest, most dangerous things could happen. 

Sometimes, it makes sense to be afraid of shadows. Read this story to find out why...

The mystery shadows

It was Monday morning. I was as tired as everyday, the reason for that was because I had been on a filming camp, where they explained to us how to take shots from good points of view, how to play about with brightness, contrast and lots of other specialized settings. The most important one was that they showed us how to see the thermal image with a special camera.

I got to school at half past nine, in a rush as always, thinking about the comment that my chemistry and maths teacher would come up with today. On Monday, my first three classes were the worst combination that I could have. After the break I had English class, in which we were doing video projects about bullying, drugs and eating disorders. I was the cameraman of my group, we were on the playground filming the video for the advert. We had been recording in the Triangle, the gym and also in the dining room, when we were going to go back in class and Arthur had the idea of filming on the playground next to it. I was filming the scene where Arthur and Jack had to go upstairs talking about bullying and go directly to class. The point of view I was recording was away from them, at the end of the corridor. When we got to class I connected the mobile phone to the computer to download the videos and check if they were correct. While watching all the videos, in the last one, we saw a spectre appearing behind Arthur and Jack. We ran out of the classroom to check who it was, but we couldn’t see anything…

While I was at home I thought about the video and the spectre, I checked the video again to make sure about what I had seen. When I saw the spectre again, a shiver ran down my spine. I was so confused that I created a Whatsapp group with Arthur and Jack to talk about it. The following morning, during the first break we talked about what we were going to do, so we decided to ask the English teacher to let us record that scene again. Our teacher let us do it, so we went outside to the corridor. In that video, no spectres appeared, so I got very disappointed.

In the end, we decided to finish the video and I didn’t insist investigating it. We presented the video and got a very high mark. Things happened as normal, as always, for the next two months. But at one point, after they gave us the final marks I had lot of free time and I was fed up of youtube so I decided to look at my old photos and videos. When I got through the videos of the project, I got very frightened and I started to edit the video and applying the techniques I had learnt at the camp: I tried to discover what the spectre of the video was. I played with the lights, the slow motion, the sharpness, the different layers of the image… When we started the second term our English teacher assigned another group project in which we also had to make a film. First of all we planned the video and the presentation, then we started to record it. I was with Bianca and James, recording the first scene, I managed to get rid of them for some minutes so I could investigate the frightening spectre, I started to record in lots of parts of the school with the intention of recording the spectre and finding a solution. I was so focused that I didn’t realise that English had finished, when the teacher called us to go back to class. I was sharing the videos with my computer when accidentally I opened one video from that day. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The spectre appeared also in this video. I was so surprised that I went running to Jack and Arthur’s group, when I showed them the exact second of the video in which the spectre appeared they couldn’t believe it. We were so shocked that we decided to investigate it. During the break, we went to the library, we knew that in one of the shelves there were a lot of books about the history of the school so we decided to investigate by reading books full of horror stories and paranormal activities in schools. We didn’t find anything, so we talked to the teachers, they didn’t tell us anything but they seemed to know more about it because they got very nervous when we asked them. We got to a point that none of us wanted to continue investigating because it all was so serious and so strange that it could be dangerous. All of us were frightened and they didn’t want to continue investigating. I decided to continue alone, so I planned to go to the administration office and have a look at some strange papers and see if there was any of them with information about all the strange things happening.

The best way to get there was to get into the office at night, so I told my mum that I was going to sleep over at Arthur’s house. I managed to get into the school at night and I went through the corridor up to the office. I looked at lots of papers but nothing interesting appeared. As I was going to leave, I stumbled on a safe and when I broke into  it there was a very old sheet of paper with a list with names.

I started to read it. It was the names of all the children who had disappeared at the school. I was halfway through when I heard some steps behind me. I felt an arm on my shoulder that made me literally die of fear.