07/10/2025
NEW STORY ALERT ⚠️ 📢 👀
Title: The Photographer’s Curse 📷
Liam Carter had always seen the world differently.
While others noticed color or beauty, he noticed moments the way light curved around a stranger’s smile, or how a shadow stretched across a dying street.
Photography wasn’t just his passion; it was his obsession.
He lived alone in a cramped studio apartment downtown one room full of film canisters, negatives, and old cameras. He loved analog photos, the kind that captured life exactly as it was raw, unfiltered, imperfect.
That’s where it started.
One Sunday morning, Liam took his camera to the old botanical garden on the edge of the city a place abandoned years ago, where vines swallowed walls and silence hung heavy in the air.
He spent hours there, snapping pictures of broken benches, cracked statues, wilted roses.
When he developed the film that night, his fingers went still.
In one of the photos the one of the statue there was a woman.
She stood behind it. Barefoot. Her dress pale and thin. Her face half-turned, like she’d noticed him.
Liam frowned. He hadn’t seen anyone that day. The garden had been empty.
He looked closer. Her eyes seemed fixed on the camera on him.
The next morning, he showed the photo to his friend, Marissa, another photographer.
“Creepy,” she said, squinting at it. “Probably some random person wandering around.”
“Yeah,” he muttered, but his gut told him otherwise.
He went back to the garden same time, same weather.
No one was there.
Still, he took more pictures.
When he developed them that night, she was there again.
Closer this time.
Behind the gate.
Watching.
Days passed, and the woman appeared in every roll of film he took no matter where he shot.
A wedding.
A street fair.
Even a child’s birthday party.
Always the same woman. Always standing in the background.
Each time, a few steps closer.
Liam tried digital cameras, but the images came out corrupted lines, glitches, distortions biexcept for one clear detail: her face, sharper each time.
He stopped sleeping. He covered the mirrors in his apartment, but the photos kept coming.
He even tried burning them once threw a stack of prints into the sink and lit a match. The fire caught, curled the edges but when the smoke cleared, her image was still there. Untouched.
One night, desperate, he searched her face online.
No matches. No identity. Nothing.
But then he found a newspaper clipping from 1982. A headline read:
“Local Photographer Found Dead in Darkroom Cause Unknown.”
The article mentioned a strange detail a final photo of a woman found beside the body.
No one could explain how she appeared on the negatives.
Liam’s blood ran cold. The photo in the newspaper it was her.
That night, he dreamt of her for the first time.
He was standing in a foggy field, camera in hand. She was across from him close enough that he could see the water dripping from her hair.
Written by Joan Nnenna Page 🖊
