That’s my cousin Darius.

Construction site in the south end. Long hours, no signal, constant dust in the lungs. He always sends us proof-of-life selfies when he clocks in—yellow hard hat, orange vest, grimace that says “I’d rather be anywhere else.”

This one looked like the others. Until he texted us five minutes later:

“Did one of you edit this? Seriously. Not funny.”

I looked again.

Same netted ceiling, same awkward angle, same unimpressed Darius. But just above his shoulder—barely visible in the shadows near the beam—was… something.

A reflection. Not in glass. Just… hovering.

A face.

Not Darius’s. Older. Worn. Covered in soot. And staring directly into the camera.

We zoomed in, thinking it was maybe a sticker or smudge on the lens.

But Darius never took his eyes off the screen. He was already typing again.

“Who’s messing with me?” he wrote. “I swear this isn’t funny.”

I don’t know why, but I felt a coldness settle in my chest. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could easily explain away. Not a simple camera glitch or prank.

I texted him back. “What’s going on? Is someone else on the site with you?”

He didn’t reply right away. Then came another message, this one punctuated with multiple exclamation marks: “I’m seriously not messing with you guys. This is freaky.”

I thought he was overreacting. The guy’s a big teddy bear, but he has an overactive imagination. He probably got spooked by a shadow or something. I wanted to laugh it off.

But there was something about the face in that selfie. It didn’t belong. It didn’t look like it should be there.

“Darius, just leave the site. Go somewhere with better reception, and maybe get some rest. You sound like you need it,” I wrote. But he didn’t answer for a long while.

I left my phone face up on the table, caught up in whatever project I was working on, trying to shake the odd feeling that had settled over me. Every time I looked at that image, it gnawed at me.

Later, when I picked my phone back up, there was another text from him.

“Can’t leave. I think it’s my boss. He just showed up out of nowhere. He wants me to stay late.”

The guy never mentioned his boss, not before or after a shift. So I asked, “Didn’t you say the boss was on vacation? Who is it?”

Silence.

Then Darius sent me a photo of the empty construction site. No one in sight.

“He just vanished,” he texted. “I can’t explain it, but I looked away for a second, and he was gone. No footsteps, nothing.”

I stared at the photo for a long time. The lighting in the place was dim, but there was a strange emptiness in the frame. The shadows looked deeper than they should have been, as if the light was fighting back against something hidden. The distant corner of the site where Darius had snapped his selfie looked… off. Darker.

It was unsettling, but I pushed the worry aside. It’s just Darius. He’s probably seeing things. The exhaustion from the endless days on the site was getting to him.

But then, hours passed, and he still hadn’t responded to my messages. I tried calling, but he wouldn’t pick up. This wasn’t like him. The Darius I knew was reliable, always checking in, even if he was deep in the middle of nowhere with no service.

That’s when I started to get worried.

I decided to head over to the site myself. Maybe Darius had gotten caught up in something, or maybe the isolation was messing with his head.

When I arrived at the construction zone, everything was eerily quiet. The usual hum of machinery and the chatter of workers were replaced by an unsettling stillness. I found the entrance guarded by a locked gate, which struck me as strange. Darius had never mentioned that.

I pulled out my phone and texted him again. No response. I knocked on the gate, and when that didn’t work, I called out for him. Nothing.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Something wasn’t right. I glanced around, my eyes searching for any sign of him. A sudden wind swept through the area, kicking up dust and debris. That’s when I saw it.

A figure. Standing near one of the scaffolds.

I froze. It wasn’t Darius. This person was dressed in old work clothes—covered in what looked like soot, with a hard hat perched on their head. They were tall, looming. Their face was hidden in shadow, but I could see that their hands were rough, scarred.

I took a cautious step forward, calling out, “Hey! Who are you? What are you doing here?”

The figure didn’t respond. They stood motionless, staring into the depths of the construction site. Then, just as quickly as I had noticed them, they disappeared behind one of the large steel beams.

I rushed over, my heart racing, but when I rounded the corner, there was no sign of anyone. Just empty space.

Panic gripped me. I pulled my phone out again. “Darius?!” I texted. Still no reply. I tried calling. This time, the phone rang.

“Darius, come on, man! Pick up,” I muttered to myself. The ringing continued, but just before I was about to give up, I heard a voice on the other end.

“Who is this?” The voice was low, distant, and unmistakably not Darius’s.

I froze. “Who are you?”

There was a long pause. Then, the voice responded, “You shouldn’t have come.”

A chill ran down my spine. My mouth went dry. “Where’s Darius?”

The voice was quieter now. “He’s not coming back.”

The line went dead.

I stood there in stunned silence. My body felt heavy as I processed what I’d just heard. I knew I had to leave the site. I needed to get help.

I ran to my car, heart pounding in my chest. As I sped down the road, my mind raced. What was going on? Who was that voice on the phone? Why did it sound so familiar?

That’s when it hit me. The voice… the way it sounded… it wasn’t a stranger. It was the same voice from the selfie. The one that had haunted Darius’s picture earlier. The man in the soot-covered clothes.

I immediately called the police and told them everything I knew. After a long investigation, they searched the site and the area surrounding it.

Hours later, they found him.

Darius was alive. He was hiding in a small, forgotten room underneath the construction site. But when they brought him out, he was disoriented, his eyes wide with fear. He couldn’t remember what had happened during those missing hours. His story was fragmented. He said he remembered walking to a tool shed, then hearing someone call his name—only it wasn’t his boss. It was that same voice.

When I asked him what he remembered about the man from the selfie, Darius hesitated, his face turning pale.

“I—I don’t know, man,” he muttered. “I saw him. He was standing there, just watching me. I thought it was a joke or a shadow. But… it wasn’t. It wasn’t.”

The rest of his memory was a blur.

The police concluded it was a case of extreme exhaustion and dehydration. They found no one else on the site, but that still didn’t explain the figure Darius saw, nor the voice that had contacted me.

Over time, the memory faded, but something about that night stayed with me. The thought of Darius, stuck in that room, listening to the voice in the dark, haunted me. It wasn’t just a trick of the mind. Something was off. But I never spoke about it again.

A few months later, Darius called me.

“I’m going back there,” he said. “I have to finish what I started.”

I tried to talk him out of it. But he was set on going. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was left unfinished at the site.

And for some reason, I didn’t stop him.

Sometimes, you can’t escape certain things. Maybe they’re not meant to be understood. But they stay with you, and they change you.

Just like that selfie.

Sometimes, the only way forward is to face the things that haunt you, no matter how frightening or strange.

Because in the end, it’s not the ghosts we see that are the most dangerous. It’s the ones we don’t.

If you’ve ever had something that haunted you, that didn’t make sense but you couldn’t let it go, share this story. Maybe we all have something that pushes us to keep going.