Lately I've been looking up a lot of stuff about paranormal experiences and things people can't explain.
Mostly because something really weird happened to me a few years ago, and I've never been able to make sense of it.
I came across this website the other day while reading about similar experiences. I noticed people were sharing their own stories here, and after reading a few, I figured I might as well share mine.
Maybe someone here has experienced something like this.
This happened back when I was in college.
One summer, two of my friends and I rented a lake house for the weekend. We'd known each other for years and went on little trips together pretty often.
The day before we left, one of my friends told us she'd invited another girl.
Her name was Megan.
I'd never met her before. My friend just said they knew each other from high school.
So the four of us got to the house that afternoon. We made dinner, had some drinks, hung out by the lake, and took a bunch of pictures.
Nothing seemed weird at all.
Megan was pretty quiet, but she was nice. I remember she wore a green dress and had this old-looking silver bracelet on her wrist.
The next morning, Megan was gone.
Her bag was still sitting by the couch, but her phone was missing.
At first, we figured she'd gone for a walk. The place was right on the lake, and there were trails nearby.
But by noon, she still wasn't back.
We walked around looking for her. My friend tried calling her, but nobody answered.
Eventually, we called the police.
When the officers got there, they asked us what Megan looked like and when we'd last seen her.
We told them she'd arrived with us the afternoon before.
The woman who managed the rental property said that wasn't possible.
She said she'd only seen three of us check in.
We thought she was just remembering wrong, so she pulled up the security camera footage from the front of the house.
I swear we watched it at least five times.
There were three people walking up to the front door with their bags.
Me and my two friends.
No Megan.
I kept saying maybe she'd walked in before us, or maybe the camera had missed her somehow.
But they checked the footage from other times too.
Nothing.
Then my friend tried looking up Megan's number again.
She was sure she'd saved it. She remembered talking to Megan about the trip.
But there was no contact under her name. No recent calls. Nothing.
At that point, all three of us were freaking out.
We packed up and left that evening.
When I got home, I started going through the pictures we'd taken.
Most of them were just the three of us.
But there was one group photo by the lake.
Megan was standing right next to me.
Green dress, silver bracelet, one hand resting on my shoulder.
I sent it to our group chat.
My friends saw it too.
And the thing is, we all remembered her.
We remembered having dinner with her. We remembered talking to her. We remembered taking that picture.
But other than that one photo, there was basically no proof she'd ever been there.
A few days later, the friend who'd invited Megan called me.
She sounded really shaken up.
She said she'd remembered something.
There actually had been a girl named Megan at her high school. They'd been really close.
When Megan was seventeen, she'd gone missing during a camping trip by a lake.
They never found her.
I asked my friend how she hadn't recognized her.
She said she honestly didn't know.
She hadn't thought about Megan in years. But before our trip, she'd somehow just assumed she'd invited an old friend, like they'd been keeping in touch the whole time.
And the lake where Megan disappeared?
It was near the house we'd rented.
I pulled up our group photo again.
That's when I started thinking about the bracelet.
I asked my friend if Megan used to wear a silver bracelet.
She went quiet for a while.
Then she told me she'd given Megan that bracelet for her seventeenth birthday.
I didn't even know what to say.
Because I remembered Megan so clearly.
I remembered her sitting across from me at dinner.
I remembered all four of us hanging out by the water that night.
I even remembered her saying how much she liked the house because you could see the lake from the bedroom window.
Then my friend found an old picture of Megan from shortly before she disappeared.
She sent it to me.
Megan was wearing a green dress.
The exact same dress she'd been wearing that weekend.
I put the two pictures side by side and stared at them for a long time.
I barely slept that night.
The next morning, I opened the group photo on my phone again.
Megan was still there.
Same green dress. Same bracelet. Her hand on my shoulder.
But something about that picture was bothering me.
And then I remembered something.
When I first got home from the lake house, I'd gone through all the photos on my phone.
I remember stopping on that exact group photo.
I'm sure of it.
There were only three of us in it.
