[ WP ] You 're watching some old home movies from when you were a little kid , when you notice something in the background . Something impossible .

I was n't sure why my mother had never mentioned the VHS tapes she had stashed away in the bottom of her bedroom closet. I was only rooting around in there because I'd loaned her some shoes last time I'd come home from college and I wanted them back, but instead I found about a dozen unlabeled tapes stacked neatly in the back corner behind the pile of shoes and mostly hidden by some long dresses. At first I thought they were going to be weird sex tapes or something, but when curiosity compelled me to put one in the VHS player my parents still had lying around, I found that they were of a different nature altogether. 
 
 The first tape started off with a grainy view of our living room. It was Christmastime according to the decorated tree beside the fireplace and the wreath sitting on the mantle, partially obscuring the large mirror behind it. After a few moments a woman came onscreen carrying a small baby. It took me a long moment to recognize her as my mother, and I was only certain of her identity when I heard her voice say `` Look, Ashley, Santa Claus came!'' 
 
 Ashley is my name, so I assumed the baby in her arms must have been me. My birthday is in September, so this must have been my first Christmas. I watched transfixed as a part of my past that I had no chance of remembering played out before me. I got some new pajamas and a few baby toys that year, and most of the tape was just me snuggling in my mother ’ s arms while she tried to get me to play with a stuffed elephant. Eventually I started getting fussy, and my mother got up and took me out of the room. After a few moments the living room scene went staticky, and I fast forwarded a bit to make sure that it wasn ’ t just a blank spot in this homemade tape, but that seemed to be the end of the recording. 
 
 I quickly popped the next tape in. This one started in the same manner: a view of our living room without anyone in it. There was no Christmas tree this time. The scene remained unmoved for longer than the first one, but eventually a toddler came running into the room laughing hysterically. It was me again, and close behind me was my mother. I fell to the floor, still giggling, and my mother immediately scooped me up and spun me around, also laughing. She played with me a bit, tickling me, blowing raspberries at me, and tossing me up in the air, all the while laughing with me amidst my screams of excitement. 
 
 “ Come on, silly girl, we need to get you dressed! ” she said finally. 
 
 “ Noooooooo! ” squealed the still pajama-clad toddler, but I made no moves to resist as my mother carried me back the way we came. 
 
 Again the scene remained still for a time before going staticky, and again I found that that was the end of the video, despite there being hours of recording time left on the tape. 
 
 I was starting to feel like something was a little strange about these tapes, but I kept watching them. Each captured between five to fifteen minute snippets of my childhood, not always in order. There was another Christmas scene, and a birthday party, but most of them were just regular days, always filmed from the same angle in our living room. However, something in the seventh one caught my attention. 
 
 The large mirror above the fireplace was directly opposite a bay window looking out into the front yard. From the angle that the camera was at, I could clearly see the front yard through the window reflected in the mirror. The young me in the video was doing something in the living room as usual, but some movement in the yard drew my eyes up to the mirror. It was just our dog running around, but as I was about to look back to myself in the living room, the realization hit me like a ton of bricks. 
 
 *Where was the camera? * 
 
 From this angle I should have been able to see the camera in the mirror, but there was nothing there. I tried to convince myself that I was wrong, that the camera was shorter than the window and out of view of the mirror, but I couldn ’ t. I had literally just finished my college trigonometry midterms the week prior and passed with flying colors. I had a natural talent for visualizing this stuff, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I should be able to see the recording device in that mirror. 
 
 Fed up of having more questions than answers, I decided to text my mother at work. 
 
 **Hey mom, why did you never show me the video tapes from when I was a kid? ** 
 
 The answer was not what I wanted. 
 
 **What video tapes? ** 
 
 After I explained where I ’ d found them and what the contents were, she called me instead of texting back. 
 
 “ Ash, get out of the house and call your cousin Tiffany to come pick you up. Leave the tapes where they are. I ’ m calling the police now. I ’ ve never done more than take pictures of you with a polaroid or my phone and we certainly never owned a video camera. And I have never been aware of any VHS tapes in my closet. ” 
 
 I spent the rest of the day at Tiffany ’ s house. The police confiscated the tapes, and despite repeated inquiries by my mother, they have never provided any answers. 
 
 Whenever I ’ m home from college now, I don ’ t spend much time in the living room anymore. 

