The Static Broadcast
I found the camcorder in an old military surplus bag my uncle left in the attic. It was a bulky, 2004 Panasonic model, the plastic scratched and smelling faintly of damp earth and zinc. There was only one miniDV tape inside. On the spine, written in faded, aggressive black Sharpie, was a single name: Samuel.
My uncle had been a volunteer search-and-rescue medic in the Pacific Northwest during the early 2010s. He quit abruptly in 2013, moved across the country, and never spoke to our family again. After watching the tape, I finally understand why.
The first six minutes of the footage are just white noise. Not the digital blue screen of modern electronics, but a violent, rhythmic analog static that makes your teeth ache if you look too closely at the pixels.
Then, the audio cuts in. It’s the heavy, panicked breathing of my uncle, running through thick brush. The camera bounces wildly, illuminating patches of damp pine needles and the pale trunks of birch trees under the beam of a high-powered flashlight.
"I found the jacket," my uncle whispers into the microphone, his voice trembling so hard the words almost smear together. "I found Devon's jacket. It’s… it’s not right."
The camera pans down. Laying in a patch of ferns is a charcoal grey hoodie, torn to shreds. But the blood on it isn’t red. It’s an impossible, oxidized black, smeared across the fabric in a very specific, deliberate pattern: a circle with a jagged line carved straight through the center. A signature.
Suddenly, the audio distorts. A low, electronic hum—like a television station losing its broadcast signal—fills the speakers. The camera glitches, lines of static tearing across the screen.
My uncle stops running. He slowly raises the camera.
Standing about twenty feet away, partially obscured by the fog, is a figure. They aren't tall or monstrous like the things in old internet forums; they look like a teenager, wearing a heavy, dark grey trench coat over that dark hoodie, and a stark white porcelain mask. The mask has no features except for two hollow, empty eye sockets and a single, crudely painted black line splitting the face down the middle.
In their right hand, they are dragging a heavy, rusted iron meat cleaver. In their left, they hold a broad paintbrush, dripping with that same black, tar-like fluid.
"Samuel," my uncle breathes, stepping backward. "Sammy, please. Your mom is still looking for you."
The figure doesn't speak. They don't have the manic, screaming energy of a Hollywood slasher. Instead, they tilt their head with a slow, clinical curiosity—exactly the way an animal looks at something it’s about to tear apart.
Then, the hum gets louder. The static on the tape begins to violently warp the image, bending the trees and corrupting the colors into a deep, sickening red. The figure steps forward, moving with a bizarre, jerky cadence, as if their limbs are being pulled by invisible strings, before breaking into a run towards the camera with a meat cleaver.
That was the last thing the camera captured.
I looked up old missing-persons reports from his town, dated around October 2012. Sure enough, a nineteen-year-old art student named Samuel vanished from their dorm room. The only thing left behind was a completely blank canvas on their easel, covered in thick black strokes forming a circle with a line through it.
I thought that was the end of it. I put the tape away in my desk drawer last night.
But when I woke up this morning, my computer monitor was on. The screen was completely black, displaying a single, open Notepad file. Written inside, repeated hundreds of times until it filled the entire page, was one sentence:
THANKS FOR FINDING MY TAPE.
And when I looked out my bedroom window into the foggy tree line behind my house, I swear I saw a flash of a white porcelain mask staring back.
Written by Mollie Morbid
