She says she is on her way to a steakhouse to sit on the patio and drink wine. She is mid-thirties, attractive, and dressed like this might be a date or a business meeting.
She asks how my day is, and I tell her it’s been uneventful and lacking in crazy people. She asks about crazy passengers and I tell her a few stories, including the one about the alien abductee, which gets us on the topic of aliens. She says she doesn’t believe most people’s stories, but she definitely thinks there’s other life out there.
“I’m the same,” I say. “A lot of people are clearly just lying for attention, and with a few people, you can tell they believe it, but it’s hard to believe it yourself. But, once in a while, there’s a story that’s simple enough to be believable but weird enough that you can’t explain it, and you just sit there going, ‘Wow, I wonder what the hell it was you saw?’”
She is silent for a long moment, then says, almost shamefully, “I had a thing like that.”
“What happened?”
“Eh, I don’t know. You said it was a ‘no crazy passenger’ day.”
“Well now I’ve gotta know.”
She shifts in her seat. Takes a deep breath. Leans forward.
“Okay… So, when I was in high school, I was asleep because I had class in the morning, and all of a sudden I woke up in the middle of the night to a bright flash. I looked over toward my closet, and I saw a silhouette that looked like somebody standing there with one arm raised up over their head. But I was half-asleep, so I didn’t fully process it. I lived with my mom and my sister, so I guess I just thought it was one of them, and I knew I had to wake up soon, so I just turned over and fell right back asleep. Then, when I woke up the next morning, there was a Polaroid photo sitting right in the middle of my closet of a girl I’d never seen before.”
“Whoa. That’s creepy. How old was the girl?”
“About my age. I still have the photo. It’s basically a selfie. I think the flash from the camera was what woke me up, then I saw that silhouette with the outstretched arm, and that’s how she was standing when she took the photo. But this was like 1995. Selfies weren’t really a thing yet, and you didn’t see many Polaroids anymore either. I showed the photo to my mom and my sister and asked who the girl was, but they didn’t know either.”
“Wow,” I say. “That story is scary even if it’s not supernatural. Like, yeah, you could go the ghost route, but it could also just be some girl sneaking into your house and taking a picture of herself in the middle of the night. And that’s kind of equally unsettling.”
“Yeah. Like, why would someone do that?”
I hesitate. “It makes me think of something, but it might be overly dark.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“I told you my crazy passenger story,” she says, and I guess it’s a fair point.
“Okay. I read a book about Charles Manson once, and his cult used to do these things they called creepy crawls. Basically, they would go into a house at night and sneak through it, but not to steal or to hurt anybody. They would just go in while the family was asleep, and maybe rearrange furniture or take some minor items, just so the people in the house would be able to tell that somebody had been in their home during the night. They just wanted to make people uneasy, and let them know the sanctity of their home had been invaded. Taking a photo of yourself and leaving it behind feels right along those lines.”
There is a pause, then she says, “You’re right, that doesn’t make me feel much better about it.”
“Well,” I tell her, “You said it was in the nineties. That’s long after Manson, at least.”
“True. I’m just gonna go with it being a ghost.”
“That’s a good choice too.”
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a weekly series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.