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Bedroom CamsCase file #0004

Standing Shadow on the Wardrobe as the Bedroom Camera Clock Runs Backwards

Same night, same minute as case #0003, in a house across town. A figure-shaped shadow stands against the wardrobe, and the clock goes back two seconds.

Location
Carrick Hollow, Vermont, USA
Date recorded
October 24, 2023 · 02:14 AM
Camera
Battery Wi-Fi cam (fisheye lens, IR)
Clip length
0:10
Reading time
4 min
Share
Extremely disturbing
Still frame from Standing Shadow on the Wardrobe as the Bedroom Camera Clock Runs Backwards
Standing Shadow on the Wardrobe as the Bedroom Camera Clock Runs Backwards

Original clip: 0:10 · Full case file: 4 min read below ↓

Case summary

Case summary

A battery-powered fisheye camera on a shelf at the foot of the bed recorded a woman asleep on her back beside a built-in wardrobe. At four seconds her leg lifts and bends in the same way as in case #0003. At six seconds a tall shadow with a head, shoulders and one arm appears on the wardrobe doors to the left of the bed and holds for two seconds. The feed then breaks into static, and when it returns the on-screen clock reads two seconds earlier than the frame before the break.

Timeline of events

  1. Subject asleep on her back. Wardrobe doors to the left evenly lit by IR. Battery icon full.

  2. No movement in the room.

  3. Left knee lifts and bends, foot sliding toward the edge of the bed.

  4. Leg held bent and outward. Subject does not stir.

  5. A tall shadow forms on the wardrobe doors: rounded head, shoulders, one arm hanging. It is not cast by anything in the room.

  6. Shadow holds. Its edges are sharper than the headboard's own shadow beside it.

  7. Feed tears into horizontal static across the whole frame.

  8. Picture returns. The wardrobe is clear. The clock now reads 02:14:04, then 02:14:05, two seconds behind where it was.

Tap a timestamp to open the clip at that moment.

Witness statement

The camera runs on a battery and only records when it sees motion, so most of what it has is me getting up for water. I would never have looked at this one if a woman I had never met had not posted her clip in the town group asking if anyone else's camera did something at quarter past two.

Mine did. Mine did the same thing. My leg goes up, and I do not do that, I sleep like a plank. And then there is someone standing on my wardrobe. Not in front of it, on it, a shadow of someone standing there with their arm down. There is nothing in my room that could make that. The wardrobe is the whole wall. There is nothing between it and the camera except the end of my bed.

Then it goes to that static and when it comes back the time is wrong. It goes backwards. I have had that camera three years and it has never done that.

What I keep coming back to is that hers and mine happened in the same minute. Two houses that do not share anything, not a street, not a Wi-Fi, not a family. The same minute.

- D. ██████, homeowner

What investigators found

The camera is a battery unit with a fisheye lens and an infrared array, sitting on a shelf at the foot of the bed. The wide lens bends the room's straight edges, which is why the wardrobe doors curve, and it also means anything close to the lens is magnified: an insect a few centimetres from the glass would fill a quarter of the frame as a bright blur. The shadow on the wardrobe is neither bright nor blurred. It is dark, it has a hard edge, and it sits on a surface about two metres from the camera.

For a shadow to appear there, something would have to stand between the IR source on the camera and the wardrobe, which is to say at the foot of the bed, inside the frame. Nothing is there. The subject's own shadow falls on the mattress and does not change during the event. We checked the two-second window frame by frame; the shape does not drift, flicker or grow, which is not how IR reflections behave.

The clock is a separate problem. After the static the overlay reads 02:14:04 and 02:14:05, two seconds earlier than the frame before the break. Cheap cameras do drift, but they drift forward or lose a second on resync; a clean step backwards after a signal break is something we have not seen on this model. Taken with case #0003, recorded at the same minute in another house, we can offer no explanation for either clip that covers both.

What happened next

Reveal what happened after the recording

The two households compared their clips in person at a cafe in town and confirmed with their routers that the cameras were on different networks with different time servers. Neither camera had a clock error before or since. The homeowner replaced the battery unit with a wired one aimed at the door, and has recorded nothing unusual in the two years between the recording and her decision to send both clips to the archive. She asked us to file them together. Neither woman has been able to find a third camera in town with anything at 02:14 that night, though both admit they stopped asking after the first few weeks.

Verdict poll

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Evidence gallery

Still frames pulled from the original clip.

  • Still frame 1 from case 0004: Standing Shadow on the Wardrobe as the Bedroom Camera Clock Runs BackwardsFrame 01
  • Standing shadow on the wardrobe doors, head and one arm (frame 2)Frame 02

    Standing shadow on the wardrobe doors, head and one arm

  • Static across the frame; the clock reads two seconds earlier when it clears (frame 3)Frame 03

    Static across the frame; the clock reads two seconds earlier when it clears

Community reports

Reports are read by a person before they appear. No links.

    Before you decide

    Two guides that explain what cameras like this one get wrong at night.

    Related cases

    All Bedroom Cams →

    Tags: bedroom, fisheye, shadow-figure, clock, static, unexplained. This case file is a fictional dramatisation created for entertainment. Disclaimer.