Free Story Friday: The Screen Mirror Ritual

 

Free Story Friday: The Screen Mirror Ritual

A new original tale every week—twisted, terrifying, and inspired by the darkest legends you thought you knew.

Some reflections don't need mirrors.

Inspired by real mirror legends like [Bloody Mary: The Legend, the Ritual, and the Truth Behind the Mirror] and [Verónica: The Deadly Spanish Mirror Ritual].

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 Sophie Chen scrolled through TikTok at 2:47 AM, her phone's blue glow the only light in the cramped dorm room. She should've been sleeping—midterms started Monday—but sleep felt impossible, her thoughts circling back to the conversation with her mother earlier that day. Why can't you just be happy? Her mom had asked, and Sophie hadn't known how to explain that happiness felt like something that happened to other people, in other reflections of reality.

That's when the video appeared on her For You page.

A girl with dark circles under her eyes sat in a bathroom lit by flickering candles. #VeronicaChallenge the caption read. Say her name three times into your screen and you'll see your TRUE SELF. 💀👻

In the video, the girl stared at her front-facing camera—phone held up like a mirror—and whispered "Verónica" three times. The lights flickered. Something moved in the background. The girl screamed and dropped her phone, the video cutting to black.

Sophie scrolled through the comments. Thousands of them, most calling it fake, some swearing they'd tried it and seen things they couldn't explain. One caught her eye: Don't finish it. She hears you.

"Are you seriously watching ghost videos at three in the morning?" Jess mumbled from the other bed, rolling over to squint at Sophie's phone.

Sophie jumped, nearly dropping her phone. "It's not three yet. And I'm just... looking."

Jess sat up, instantly more awake. "Oh my god, is that the Verónica thing? Marie mentioned it yesterday. Something about using your phone camera instead of a mirror." She swung her legs out of bed. "We should try it."

"Are you insane?"

"Come on, when was the last time we did something fun? Besides, it's probably fake." Jess grabbed her phone. "I'll text Ryan and Marie. We can livestream it—if anything happens, we'll have proof."

Twenty minutes later, their dorm room looked like a movie set. Ryan had brought his ring light and a portable speaker, arranging them with the precision of someone who'd taken too many film classes. Marie sat cross-legged on Sophie's bed, her skepticism obvious in the set of her jaw.

"Alright, here are the rules according to Reddit," Ryan announced, reading from his phone. "One: Use your front-facing camera as your mirror. Two: Say 'Verónica' three times at exactly 3:33 AM. Three: Don't look away from the screen. Four: If she answers, don't reply."

"That's it?" Jess asked, disappointed. "No candles? No chanting in Latin?"

"The screen is the mirror now," Ryan said. "Technology's the new occult, or whatever."

Sophie felt a chill run down her spine as she opened TikTok's livestream feature. Viewers began joining immediately: 12... 47... 103... The number climbed steadily as they positioned their phones in a semi-circle, all facing inward, front cameras active. Four faces glowed in the screen-light, their expressions ranging from excitement to anxiety.

"Three minutes," Ryan whispered, watching the clock on his laptop.

The comments section scrolled rapidly. DONT DO IT. fake. my cousin tried this and ended up in the hospital. yall are so dumb lmaooo.

At 3:33 AM exactly, they began.

"Verónica," they chanted in unison, staring at their own reflections on-screen.

"Verónica."

The ring light flickered. Just once, barely noticeable.

"Verónica."

Silence fell over the room like a heavy blanket. Sophie stared at her screen, at her own face looking back at her. For a moment, nothing happened. Then—

Her reflection smiled.

But Sophie wasn't smiling.

"Did you see that?" she whispered, her voice cracking.

Jess wasn't listening. She was staring at her own phone, face pale. "There's someone behind me. In my screen. But when I look..." She spun around. The room behind her was empty.

Ryan's phone began to glitch, the image distorting and pixelating. Faces appeared in the static—dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all screaming silently. He tried to turn it off, but the power button wouldn't respond.

"Guys, we need to stop," Marie said, but her voice sounded distant, muffled. Sophie looked at her and realized Marie's reflection in her phone screen was moving differently than Marie herself—reaching out toward the camera, fingers pressing against the glass from inside.

The ring light exploded with a sharp pop, plunging them into darkness illuminated only by their phones' eerie glow. On every screen, in every front-facing camera, their reflections had changed. Wrong angles. Wrong expressions. Moving independently.

And standing behind all four of them, visible only on-screen, was a fifth figure.

She was pale and thin, dressed in something that might have been white once but looked gray in the phone-light. Her hair hung in dark curtains around a face that seemed too sharp, features exaggerated like a drawing of a person rather than a person themselves. Her eyes were completely black, reflecting nothing.

The figure's mouth opened, and a voice emerged from all four phones simultaneously, speaking in that slightly compressed quality of digital audio: Mírame. Look at me.

The livestream cut out abruptly, the viewer count frozen at 4,729.

Sophie woke to her alarm blaring at 7:00 AM, sunlight streaming through the dorm window. For a moment, she couldn't remember why her heart was racing, why her hands were shaking. Then it came back in a rush—the ritual, the figure on the screens, that voice speaking in unison from four devices.

She looked at her phone on the nightstand. The screen was dark, normal. She picked it up and checked for any record of the livestream. Nothing. The app showed no recent broadcasts.

"Weird dream," she muttered, though she knew it hadn't been a dream.

Jess's bed was empty, already made. A note on Sophie's desk read: Early class. See you at lunch?

Sophie tried to shake off the unease as she got ready for the day. But when she opened her laptop to check her email, the webcam light was on. The green indicator glowed steadily, even though no applications were running.

She covered the camera with tape and tried to focus on her coursework, but notifications kept pulling her attention. TikTok. Three thousand new followers overnight. Her video—their video—had somehow uploaded despite the stream cutting out. The caption she definitely hadn't written read: #VeronicaChallenge - SHE ANSWERED 👻

The video had gone viral. 2.3 million views. Sophie's hands trembled as she clicked on it.

The footage showed all four of them chanting, showed the lights flickering, showed them reacting to things Sophie couldn't quite see on her laptop's small screen. But the comments section told a different story. Users were pausing at specific timestamps, taking screenshots, and enhancing images. And in every frame, if you looked closely enough, there was a fifth person in the room.

0:47 - look behind Sophie, one comment read, with a screenshot attached. Sophie could barely make out a pale figure standing in the corner of the frame, just at the edge of visibility.

1:23 - in the window reflection, another claimed. The enhanced image showed a face pressed against the glass, mouth open in a silent scream.

2:01 - She's RIGHT THERE with an arrow pointing to a shadow that definitely looked human-shaped now that Sophie was looking for it.

Sophie slammed her laptop shut and called Jess. The phone rang once before going straight to voicemail. She tried Marie. Same thing. Ryan didn't even ring—just an automated message saying the number was disconnected.

That's when she noticed her phone screen. Her reflection was blinking. Normal at first, except Sophie hadn't blinked in the last thirty seconds. She'd been holding her breath, staring.

Her reflection blinked again, slowly, deliberately, while Sophie stood frozen.

Then it smiled.

Over the next three days, Sophie tried everything. She deleted the video—it reappeared. She deleted TikTok—it reinstalled itself. She turned off her phone—it powered back on. She smashed it against the wall, watching the screen crack into a spider-web of fractures.

But she could still see it in the broken glass: her reflection, smiling, blinking out of sync, mouth moving as if speaking words Sophie couldn't hear.

Her laptop's webcam turned itself on at random intervals. Her smart TV would suddenly switch to its selfie camera feature—a feature Sophie hadn't even known existed. Every screen became a mirror, and every mirror showed something slightly wrong.

Jess hadn't returned to the dorm. Marie had stopped going to classes. Ryan's Instagram account posted daily—photos of him smiling, captions about feeling great—but his friends swore they hadn't seen him in person since that night.

On the fourth night, Sophie woke to find every device in her room turned on. Phone, laptop, tablet, even her old iPod from high school. All of them displayed the same image: Sophie's face, but wrong. Too pale. Eyes too wide. Smile too sharp.

And behind her reflection on every screen, standing in the background of each image, was Verónica. Closer than she'd been in the livestream. Closer than she'd been in the viral video.

Close enough to touch.

A voice whispered from the speakers, tinny and compressed: Say my name.

Sophie looked toward the window, desperate to see the real world, to confirm that outside still existed. But the window had become another screen, dark glass reflecting the room behind her. And in that reflection, Verónica stood directly behind Sophie's shoulder, close enough that Sophie should have felt her breath.

Sophie spun around. The room was empty.

When she looked back at the window-screen, Verónica was smiling. And Sophie's reflection—the one that had been out of sync for days—raised one hand and pointed directly at Sophie.

The glass began to crack.

---

The campus newspaper ran a small article on page seven:

"Student Found Unconscious in Dorm Room"

Sophie Chen, 20, was discovered by campus security early Thursday morning after reports of a disturbance. Paramedics found her unresponsive in front of a shattered television screen. She was treated for lacerations and remains under psychiatric observation. The incident follows several reports of students participating in a viral social media challenge known as the #VeronicaChallenge, which has since been banned on major platforms. The university urges students to avoid engaging with potentially dangerous online trends.

But the real story continued online.

Three weeks later, a college student in Portland discovered Sophie's deleted livestream while scrolling through archived TikToks at 3:00 AM. The video had been taken down, banned, erased—but somehow it was still there, hiding in the algorithm's cracks, waiting to be found.

The student clicked play.

The video showed Sophie and her friends beginning the ritual. But this time, when the chanting ended and the screen glitched, Sophie's face remained visible in the frame. She stared directly into the camera—directly at the viewer—and her lips moved soundlessly.

The student leaned closer to their screen, trying to read Sophie's lips.

Behind Sophie's frozen image, a figure emerged from the darkness. Pale and sharp and wrong. Verónica moved forward until she filled the frame, until her face was pressed against the inside of the screen, until her black eyes seemed to look through the pixels and into the room beyond.

And then—

Sophie smiled.

Not Sophie's smile. Something else wearing Sophie's face.

The video ended. The student's front-facing camera activated automatically.

In the reflection, standing directly behind them, were five figures now. Sophie, Jess, Ryan, Marie. And Verónica, still smiling that too-sharp smile.

The student's reflection blinked.

They hadn't blinked.

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© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved.
This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog.
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