The Ghost Story That Unfolded in Real Time

Every night around midnight, Adam Ellis’s two cats walked over to his apartment door and stared into the hallway. Sometimes they meowed as though someone were standing outside, but Adam couldn’t see anything.

One night, he looked through the peephole and thought he saw something moving. He opened the door and switched on the hallway light, but nobody was there. His cats still seemed scared.

The Boy in the Green Rocking Chair

Ellis was a cartoonist living in New York City. On August 7, 2017, he told his Twitter followers about a series of frightening dreams he’d been having.

The first happened while he was experiencing sleep paralysis. He woke up unable to move and saw a little boy sitting in a green rocking chair at the foot of his bed.

The boy had dark hair and a large head with a deep dent on one side. He sat staring at Ellis for a while before getting out of the chair and walking toward him.

Ellis tried desperately to move but couldn’t. Just as the boy reached his bed, he woke up screaming.

He later drew a picture of the child and shared it online. He had no idea who the boy was, but another dream would give him a name.

He Was Warned Never to Ask Three Questions

A few nights later, Ellis dreamed he was sitting in a library when a young girl approached him. She seemed to recognize the boy he’d been seeing and called him Dear David.

The girl explained that David was dead and appeared at midnight. She told Ellis that if he addressed the boy by name, he could ask him two questions. But there was one rule he absolutely had to follow: he must never ask a third question.

A couple of weeks passed before David appeared again in the green rocking chair. This time, Ellis decided to speak to him.

He asked how David had died, and the boy told him about an accident in a store. When Ellis asked what happened, David said someone had pushed a shelf onto his head.

Ellis immediately wanted to know who had pushed it, so he asked a third question. David stopped answering and stared at him. Only then did Ellis remember the warning, and he woke up terrified.

Moving Upstairs Didn’t Help

Not long afterward, Ellis moved into a larger apartment upstairs in the same building. For a while, he thought he’d finally escaped whatever had been frightening him.

The dreams stopped, and he began settling into his new home. But eventually, his cats started gathering at the front door every night.

Ellis also began hearing noises while he slept. He downloaded an app that recorded sounds during the night and began listening to the recordings in the morning.

Most contained nothing unusual. Others included strange bursts of static and sounds that reminded him of footsteps.

Some followers suggested putting salt near the entrance or burning sage around the apartment. Ellis tried both, but the odd experiences continued.

His Camera Couldn’t Photograph the Hallway

In August, Ellis bought an instant camera and started taking pictures around his apartment. The photographs of his living room and bedroom came out normally. But when he pointed the camera toward the hallway outside his front door, the picture came out almost completely black.

Ellis switched on the hallway light and tried again. The photograph was still dark, even though the camera worked perfectly well everywhere else.

He shared the pictures with his followers and recorded himself taking more photographs. People began enlarging the images, trying to work out what was happening.

Some thought they could see the outline of a face in the darkness. Others believed there was a figure standing near the door.

Ellis continued posting updates as more people began following his story. Before long, thousands were watching his account to see what happened next.

The Rocking Chair Moved on Camera

Ellis eventually bought a home monitoring camera so he could keep an eye on his cats while he was away. It sent alerts to his phone whenever it detected movement. One day, he received a recording that made him stop and watch it several times.

The green rocking chair was moving on its own. It was the same chair where he’d first seen David sitting during his frightening dream. Ellis had moved it out of the bedroom weeks earlier.

Another recording showed a turtle shell falling from the wall. He shared both clips online, and his followers began examining them. They watched the chair rocking back and forth, looking for anything that might explain why it was moving.

He Found a Child’s Shoe Above His Ceiling

In November, Ellis began hearing heavy noises coming from above his ceiling. He had always assumed there was nothing up there, but eventually he noticed a hatch in the hallway.

He couldn’t reach it without a ladder, so he bought a long pole and tried pushing it open. Something fell out. It was a small leather child’s shoe.

Ellis contacted his landlord, who brought a ladder and climbed into the space above the ceiling. He searched around but couldn’t find anyone hiding there. He did, however, discover a marble.

Ellis wondered whether the shoe and marble might have belonged to a child who once lived in the building. He kept both objects. A few weeks later, he posted the photographs that would become the most frightening part of the entire story.

Someone Appeared Beside His Bed

Ellis had been waking up at night with the feeling that someone was watching him. He decided to leave his phone running while he slept, using an app that automatically took photographs at regular intervals.

Most of the pictures showed an ordinary dark bedroom. Ellis was asleep in bed, and nothing appeared to be happening. But several photographs taken in December 2017 showed something different.

A small figure appeared to be sitting on a chair across the room. In later pictures, it seemed to change position, first slumping forward and then sitting upright again.

Ellis kept scrolling. The figure was no longer in the chair. In another photograph, it appeared to be standing on his bed, close to where he was sleeping.

The final image showed the figure much closer to the camera. Ellis uploaded the pictures, and thousands of people began studying them. Followers adjusted the brightness, enlarged the figure and compared its appearance with the drawing he’d made months earlier.

By now, his Twitter account had attracted an enormous audience. People were waiting for every new photograph and video, wondering what he might discover next.

Something Was Wrong With His Instagram Photo

In January 2018, Ellis announced that things had finally started calming down. He was sleeping better, and the frightening dreams had stopped. He still described occasionally losing track of time, but he felt much better than he had during the previous months.

One weekend, he went out for brunch with a friend and posted several pictures to Instagram. There was nothing unusual about the outing, and he didn’t give the photographs another thought.

The following day, his Twitter account was flooded with messages asking about one of the pictures. Ellis couldn’t understand what everyone was talking about until people started sending him screenshots.

The first two pictures were perfectly normal. But in the third, the colours looked strange, and Ellis’s face appeared to have another face mixed into it.

He said the photograph had looked normal when he uploaded it.