Eyes in the Photo

This past Fourth of July, the leader of my church small group had a cookout at her house for the girls in our group. There are about ten of us. The woman is about forty-five and lives with her husband in a historic house downtown. It's not very large, but it's an extremely beautiful house. Her two step-sons are grown and have moved out, so it is just the woman and her husband. The house is built on a hill, and it is three stories, having a large loft upstairs and a separate apartment (rented to another youth leader at my church) below. The entire back of the main story is just windows with no shades on them. That's where we usually have our parties, but today we were down by their pool.

Sometime during the afternoon I had to go inside to use the bathroom. I had never been in the house by myself before, and since I've never really loved the idea of old houses (no matter how pretty it was) I was a little creeped out. While I was going to the bathroom, I kept feeling like I wasn't alone. I couldn't hear anyone else in the house, but I couldn't shake the feeling. When I was done, I walked out of the bathroom and back into the room with the windows, and I could have sworn that I heard the boards creak upstairs in the loft. I hurried out the back door and down to the pool.

Later that evening, once it was getting dark, we went back inside to change out of our bathing suits and just hang out. With all of my friends around me I forgot about what had happened earlier. Before we left at about 9:00 we decided to take a group picture. We crowded together in a big clump, and our group leader took picture after picture with all of our own cameras that we had handed her. I put the pictures from my camera on my computer that night and set the group shot as my desktop background. It wasn't until about a week later that I was sitting at my desk with my computer on and happened to notice something odd in the picture. Up in the very top left corner of the picture, almost like a reflection in one of those large windows, is a weird colorful shape that looks like a pair of Barbie eyes. It's larger than a normal pair of eyes. I decided it was a trick of the camera, but when I told one of my friends about it, she looked in her copy of the picture and she had it too! I looked to see if it was a reflection of something in the room, but I couldn't figure anything out. I deleted it from my computer because I was getting creeped out by it, but I found my friend's copy on Facebook and zoomed in to the shape in the background. I've looked at it again and still can't figure it out.