A New Apartment with a Mirror That Reflects the Dead American Horror Story
The apartment was surprisingly affordable for its prime location in the heart of the city, nestled between aged, stone-faced buildings that had long surrendered to time. Unlike the rest of the street, this particular building carried an unnatural stillness. The trees nearby leaned away from it, their twisted branches never brushing its walls. The people walking past rarely looked up. It stood like a forgotten relic, untouched and avoided.
From the moment the new tenant entered, something felt wrong. The hallway leading to the unit was cloaked in a shadowy chill, despite the sweltering summer outside. The air was dense, and every step echoed too loud in the narrow corridor, as if the walls were listening. Upon entering the apartment, the tenant was met with near-perfect cleanliness. The floor was polished, the windows spotless, and the smell of bleach hung in the air. It didn’t feel lived in—it felt erased.
The only object in the otherwise empty bedroom was a massive antique mirror, roughly seven feet tall and bolted to the wall as though it were part of the foundation itself. Its frame was ornate, carved with spirals and thorny vines that curled around the edges like they were still growing. The glass itself was strange—it shimmered faintly even in darkness and seemed to pull at the light around it. Looking into it felt like staring into a still pond at midnight; the reflection was perfect but somehow not quite right.
Even when the room was still, the mirror appeared to breathe. The temperature around it dropped significantly, enough to cause goosebumps. The tenant touched the surface only once—it was ice cold, like touching the inside of a freezer door. That night, as the city buzzed outside, the apartment remained unnaturally quiet. No creaks, no hum of pipes, no distant traffic. Only silence.
Lying in bed, the tenant glanced at the mirror, expecting to see their reflection. Instead, for a brief second, they thought they saw something else move inside it—something slow, human-shaped, and deeply wrong. When they sat up to look again, the mirror simply showed the empty room. But the cold hadn’t left.
The following days grew increasingly unsettling. The tenant couldn’t shake the sensation of being watched, not from the windows or the door, but from within the apartment itself—specifically, from the mirror. During the day, the mirror appeared ordinary, if still unnerving. But as night fell, it began to shift subtly. The air in the room would cool drastically, and the lighting, no matter how bright, would grow dimmer in the mirror’s reflection. Even the tenant’s own image looked pale and strange under its surface.
Soon, things began to change. The mirror’s reflection was no longer synchronized with reality. On several occasions, the tenant walked past it only to see their reflection pause, then continue a moment later. At first, it seemed like exhaustion or paranoia. But then came the unmistakable distortions—figures standing behind the tenant’s image that were not present in the room. One night, a gaunt woman in a funeral dress lingered silently behind the tenant’s shoulder in the mirror, only to vanish when they turned around.
Photography revealed more. Curious and increasingly disturbed, the tenant began taking pictures of the mirror at different times of day. In broad daylight, faint handprints would appear pressed against the inside of the glass. At night, the photos showed even more. Pale faces, stretched in agony, floated just beneath the surface. Some wore expressions of silent screams; others stared blankly as though drained of all thought. None of them were ever visible to the naked eye—only through the lens.
Even worse were the noises. At around 3 a.m., a low tapping sound began to echo from the mirror. Not from the wall it was bolted to, but from within the glass itself. It came in threes, rhythmic and patient. Sometimes it was tapping. Other times, scratching. It sounded like fingernails dragging across the other side of a barrier. The tenant tried sleeping in the living room, but the sound somehow followed them, as if the mirror’s reach extended far beyond its frame.
Each morning, fog crept across the mirror’s surface, like breath from something exhaling inside. The glass would always be cold to the touch, but lately, it had begun to feel faintly wet. Something was behind it. Watching. Waiting.
Driven by sleepless nights and a growing sense of dread, the tenant began to research the building’s history. What began as a casual internet search turned into an all-consuming obsession. The apartment had changed hands numerous times, but most tenants had one thing in common—they either broke their leases suddenly or vanished without a trace. Police reports were scarce, often ending abruptly with no clear explanations. Even more disturbing, several names from past tenant lists couldn’t be found in public records at all, as if they had been erased.
One article stood out—a yellowed newspaper scan from 1983. A woman named Marla Deen had reportedly gone missing inside the very same apartment. Her sister had filed the report, claiming Marla had complained about the mirror days before disappearing. The article included a grainy black-and-white photo: Marla, standing in front of the mirror, half-turned with a forced smile. Behind her, barely visible in the reflection, was a shape—tall, undefined, but unmistakably human. The photo haunted the tenant for days.
Further digging revealed a far older origin. Before the apartment building existed, the land had been home to a mortuary that burned to the ground in 1914. The mirror, as it turned out, had been salvaged from the ruins. It had hung above the viewing caskets, reflecting the dead one final time before burial. According to a forgotten journal archived in a local library, the mirror had been the subject of quiet rumors, even back then. Workers had refused to clean near it. One entry described the sensation of being watched through the glass and seeing people who weren’t there. Another mentioned a worker who claimed to see his own corpse in the reflection—two days before he was found dead in the embalming room.
The realization struck like ice. The mirror hadn’t followed the tenant—they had followed it. The object wasn’t cursed by chance. It was a gateway, a vessel, something ancient that trapped not just reflections but souls. And now, it was awake again, fed by attention, growing stronger through the tenant’s fear.
That night, for the first time, the mirror didn’t reflect the apartment. It showed something else entirely—a long, narrow corridor of stone, wet and dark, lined with open coffins. The tenant stood frozen, unable to look away, heart pounding with the realization: the mirror was no longer showing reflections. It was showing where they would end up.
Sleep was no longer possible. Even when exhaustion dragged the tenant into unconsciousness, dreams became corridors of torment. The mirror now lingered in every dreamscape, always visible, always watching. It stood in impossible places—at the foot of stairwells that didn’t exist, in forests the tenant had never seen, at the end of endless hospital corridors lit only by flickering bulbs. Wherever the tenant went in dreams, the mirror followed, and behind its glass, the same faces stared back: hollow-eyed, whispering without sound.
In the waking world, time began to warp. Minutes bled into hours. Days passed without memory. The reflection in the mirror no longer matched the tenant’s current state. It looked sleep-deprived, bruised, almost decayed. Sometimes, the reflection didn’t move at all—just stared. The room surrounding the mirror grew colder, and soon, other rooms in the apartment began to change. Doors creaked open slowly on their own, even when locked. Cabinet handles rattled as though tugged by unseen hands. The lightbulbs dimmed every evening at exactly 11:11 p.m.—the same time the mirror first began tapping.
One night, the tenant decided to sleep on the couch, wrapped in a thick blanket, the bedroom door locked tight. But at exactly 3:00 a.m., the tapping began again—not from behind the mirror this time, but from inside the walls. Then came the knocking—slow, deliberate, and traveling across the apartment walls as though circling the tenant. The air pressure shifted. The temperature dropped. The mirrors in the hallway—once clear—now reflected scenes of decayed rooms, old coffins, and pale figures pacing behind glass.
That same night, the tenant’s own reflection walked away.
Not turned. Not shifted. Walked.
The reflection stepped out of sync, paused, and began pacing behind the mirror, observing the room as if preparing for something. It would occasionally stop to look directly at the real tenant, mimicking gestures seconds too late, like a puppeteer playing with a marionette. The tenant was no longer sure which version of them was real.
The apartment wasn’t haunted by a ghost. It was being devoured by a presence that had lived inside the mirror for generations. It didn’t just haunt—it replaced.
By now, the apartment barely resembled a place to live. It had become a vessel—an extension of whatever presence lurked behind the mirror. The furniture warped in the corners of vision, floorboards groaned beneath footsteps that didn’t belong to the tenant, and time no longer moved in a straight line. The tenant had stopped leaving entirely. Outside the windows, the world looked strange—too bright during the day, too silent at night. Phone calls dropped before connecting. Voices on the other end always sounded distant, distorted, like they were underwater or coming from behind glass.
The mirror had begun showing new things. Not just corridors or coffins, but events. Moments that hadn’t happened yet. It showed the tenant sitting on the bed, unmoving, mouth open in a silent scream. It showed them lying on the floor, staring blankly upward while their reflection stood tall, grinning. These weren’t dreams—they were warnings. Or perhaps promises.
One evening, the mirror fogged without cause. Letters slowly appeared on the glass, written from inside. The tenant wiped at the surface, but the message wouldn’t fade. It read only one thing: “You were always here.” That night, the mirror became a doorway. The reflection reached forward. Fingers extended from the glass, long and colorless, curling against the frame. Then a full figure emerged—identical in every way, except for its eyes. Empty. Knowing. Cold.
The tenant couldn’t move. Paralysis set in—not from fear, but as if their body no longer belonged to them. They watched as the reflection knelt beside them, studying them with fascination. Then, in complete silence, it crawled inside their body. Not physically—but deeply. Internally. Like smoke seeping through cracks. The lights went out.
When morning came, the mirror was spotless. No fingerprints. No messages. Just one reflection—smiling faintly, standing in perfect stillness. But the apartment was silent now. There were no more sounds, no more flickering. Peaceful.
The landlord, weeks later, entered with a new key. The tenant had stopped responding. But the apartment was empty. No belongings. No trace. Only the mirror remained, bolted to the wall as always. And when the landlord glanced into it, he paused. For just a moment, he thought he saw someone standing behind him—someone with his exact face.