“Some ghosts don’t haunt to scare.
They haunt to remember.”

Part I – The App That Shouldn’t Exist

You tell yourself you’re just going to check one more thread.

Your bedroom is a comfortable disaster: laundry chair, half-open closet, textbooks stacked like failed Tetris, a lamp that buzzes when it’s bored. Your laptop is open on an article you’re not reading. Your phone, as usual, is the brightest thing in the room.

Everyone you know goes to you when they’re falling apart. Tonight, no one needs you. Which is great. And awful.

You’re scrolling through a paranormal subreddit you pretend to read ironically, when a post makes you stop.

“Did anyone else get this weird AR thing? ‘Haunted XR.’
Says it lets your camera see the dead. I’m kinda freaked.”

The attached image is just a home screen. One icon is wrong: a black square, a thin white ring, and a faint outline of a door. No branding. No “™”. Just… a suggestion.

There’s a link to a janky little site. The kind that looks like it was built by someone with more feelings than design skills.

Plain white page. Black text:

Haunted XR – closed beta
"Experimental augmented reality interface.
 Use at your own risk."

At the bottom, in small type:

“If you’re still carrying someone, this might let them answer back.

Your thumb hovers.

You don’t believe in ghosts. You believe in the way your chest hurts when you smell your grandmother’s perfume in a crowd. In the way you always sit up when a stranger cries on the bus. In the way you feel other people’s moods like weather.

“Fine,” you tell the room. “Jump-scare me, mysterious malware.”

You install it.

Your phone complains about unknown developers and untrusted sources. You override all of them, because clearly your attachment to living is conditional at best.

The icon appears between your notes and your calendar: Haunted XR, pale ring and door, like an eye trying not to be one.

You tap it.

Your screen goes black. Then:

[Haunted XR: camera calibration initialized]
[Haunted XR: point at a window, door, or mirror]

You glance at your bedroom window. The blinds are cracked open just enough to let in a slice of orange streetlight.

“Of course it wants the creepy places,” you mutter.

You raise your phone.

The lamp on your desk flickers. Once. Twice. Then dies with a sad click.

Your laptop screen goes dark.

Your room exhales into silence.

You stare into your phone. In the camera feed, you see the window, the sliver of streetlight, your own little reflection layered on top.

At the far edge of the screen, that strip of orange thickens into a small, pulsing ember, like someone lighting a match in slow motion.

[Haunted XR: residual energy detected]
[Stability: poor]

The ember swells into a ball of fire, bobbing just outside the glass.

Very funny, you think. Very indie-horror-title-sequence.

The fire stretches, contorts, and knits itself into a flaming skull. It hangs there, jaw clacking open and shut, shrieking with laughter that somehow feels like it’s drilling straight into your molars.

“Absolutely not,” you tell it, because your therapist says naming your boundaries is healthy.

You slam the blinds down with your free hand.

Your phone jolts like somebody just bashed their head into the window from the other side. The laughter cuts off mid-screech.

A high, indignant voice squeals through your speaker:

“Too fast—!”

Then nothing.

Your lamp hums back to life. Your laptop reboots, like a dog pretending it did not just pee on the rug. The room looks exactly the same as it always does.

You lower the phone. The window is just a window. No fire. No skull. Just the faint outline of your own startled face.

You raise the phone again.

On-screen, a thread of glowing orange smoke oozes from the window frame and curls along the sill like fog that missed its cue. It drips lazily down the wall toward your closet.

You drop the phone; the smoke is gone.

You pick it up; it’s back.

You swallow.

“Okay,” you say softly. “That’s… not in the IKEA manual.”

The orange smoke pools in front of your closet door, curling around the edges like steam from a bathroom no one’s in.

[Haunted XR: connection forming…]
[Name: “Kitty” (unverified)]
[Status: unresolved]

You stare at the screen.

“Kitty?” you whisper.

Your closet door gives two firm knocks.

You nearly throw the phone.

“Ha ha,” you say to the empty room. “Nope. No. We’re not doing the possessed-closet thing.”

The door knocks again. Polite. Impatient.

You tighten your grip on your phone, heartbeat in your teeth, and force yourself to ask the dumbest question in human history.

“…Who’s there?”

There’s a pause.

Then, through your speaker—a girl’s voice, about your age when you thought eyeliner could fix your whole life:

“Who d’you think? Santa? Open up, princess.”

The orange smoke around the door flares.

You stare at the knob.

You stare at the phone.

You breathe.

Part of you wants to delete the app, throw your phone under the bed, and go back to being quietly, safely haunted by nothing you can prove.

The rest of you is so lonely, so tired of holding everyone else’s ghosts, that the idea of one knocking back is… impossible to ignore.

You inch toward the closet and wrap your fingers around the knob.

On your screen, the orange smoke writhes like it’s holding its breath.

You turn the handle.

You pull.

And your bedroom fills with fire.

(To be continued…)