Buffering the Dead: A Livestream Haunting

Buffering the Dead: A Livestream Haunting

The midnight stream opened with the familiar ritual: a careful tilt of the webcam, the scent of coffee, and the soft hum of a room that had learned to love the glow of the monitor. I told the audience what I tell myself every night—that technology is just a doorway wearing a digital coat. We would chase rumors of a city that never sleeps, and in return, the city would drink the air through our speakers. The first hour passed with easy banter and the quiet comfort of known glitches—buffer bars that stretched like patient planets, the occasional stutter that made us laugh. Then the screen hiccupped, a single frame snapping to static, and the buffering icon settled into a patient, almost pleading circle in the corner.

At first, I blamed bandwidth and bad luck. The chat buzzed with amused warnings: a friend joked that the dead were tired of waiting for their stream, that we were a portal and the portal kept flickering. But the more I talked to the camera, the more the room felt different—thicker, as if gravity had lowered its voice. The live chat, usually a chorus, began to echo with a single patient murmur: lines of text that seemed to scroll themselves, messages that spelled out a name I hadn’t spoken aloud in years. The name appeared in the corner of the screen, etched in frost across the glass: a memory I had shelved, a person I thought I had laid to rest in a dusty archive of old servers and colder regrets.

The screen whispered in timestamps: 03:14, 04:07, 04:44.
We can hear you breathe, it said. We remember your first login.

Then came the signs that could not be dismissed as a prank or a fault. The room grew colder, breath fogging the edge of the lens despite the air conditioner claiming victory elsewhere. The chat exploded with new details, a chorus of viewers who claimed to see a figure behind me, a pale silhouette that did not belong to the room. The buffering icon stopped circling and began to pulse, syncing with a rhythm that felt almost like a heartbeat. The dead were not content to ghost the stream; they wanted a voice, a presence, a pattern to follow. I watched the frame tighten, every corner of the feed curling inward as if the world behind me was being reclassified into memory.

• Static that sketches a face in the static, then dissolves as if nothing happened.
• Comments arriving with precise timestamps that match the room’s silence between my sentences.
• A whisper threaded through the mic, not loud enough to frighten the raid of followers, but loud enough to press the air from my lungs.
• A final, chilling message that appears in the chat: stay, we’re not done buffering you yet.

I tried to end the stream, to cut to black and pretend it was all a gimmick, a manufactured scare for clicks. But the software refused to die, the cursor hovering at the edge of a window that refused to close. The last thing I saw before the feed went cold was the screen leaking a pale grin from the corner, and a single line that glowed where no line should glow: Buffering the Dead. After that moment, the room did not feel like a room at all, and the viewers did not feel like viewers. They felt like partners in a ritual I hadn’t meant to summon, and I realized that in opening the channel to a sleepier, hungrier audience, I had let the dead into a chat they could not log out of. The stream ended, but the haunting did not. It only refreshed, waiting for us to log back in.