Thread by @thejenna

It’s not that there’s a normal number of photos to take - it depends on the house. How many rooms, the best angles to sell a space. Basically, whatever’s going to lure in buyers. It's just that I don't remember taking so many. 1/?

The first 20 images track through the entry and living room, shots from every corner of the methodically staged rooms. Then a photo looking down the basement stairs, the last steps disappearing into the darkness. I don’t remember taking this picture, or walking down those stairs.

Then there’s 250 images I can't account for.

And then photos of the master bedroom, master bathroom, spare bedroom, spare bathroom, and the kitchen. Enough photos to set up the online listing. Two stories, postage stamp yard, no garage. A small footprint, in terms of space.

I don't normally take pictures of the basement. But the 250 surplus images do look like I had taken them; I'm short, as nobody ever lets me forget, so I always take pictures at a slight upwards angle. I've always thought it gives a sense of awe to mundane spaces.

The photos of the basement do have a sense of awe, but soured, like bile lingering in your throat. There's a picture from each corner of each room. I'd estimate there were around 50 rooms, but I can't bear to count them all. Just thinking about trying again made me feel sick.

All of the rooms had doors, but there were no pictures of the hallways that must have connected them. A few had windows - the high-cut kind you got in basements, just above the ground, that only let in a little light.

Some of the rooms were nonsense. One had walls made of card catalogs, like you used to see in libraries. Another, padded walls and an outdoor trampoline, but a ceiling that was far too low and spackled with some dark grime. Another, a nursery. Who puts a nursery in a basement?

Weirder were the ones that looked like they belonged with the house. Concrete-walled rec rooms. Three had ping-pong tables. Five had large TVs and elaborate speaker systems. One had a fishtank.

All were staged to my standards; blankets draped on the back of chairs to suggest comfort, a ping pong paddle resting on a white plastic ball. The sense of being lived in, but only slightly.

I didn't upload the images of the basement to the listing on the real estate site. I couldn't answer where they came from or why. It didn’t seem like they could really be part of the house. I wasn’t sure where they could exist under that small footprint.

I considered for a moment that the nearby houses might all connected together through the basements, like some underground commune. But they were still staged for photos, when I’d gone to the house to do that days beforehand. Had I stage the basement and not remembered?

And how long would they remain staged, if people were using them? It was a regular neighborhood, full of normal, messy people living their lives and using their basements. I couldn’t see how they could all connect.

But a week later, when I checked the listing, I saw that more pictures had been uploaded. I hadn’t returned to the house, but there they were. Photos that weren’t on my camera card. Photos I didn’t remember taking.

The activity tracker on the real estate site said the images were posted days after the listing went up, but I'm not sure when I could have returned to the house, or why. I thought the listing must have been hacked.

I hadn't studied the original photos too deeply - I couldn’t stand to - but I didn't recognize the rooms in the new set of photos. One had a series of church pews that lead to a vast pool of water that looked like it had been hacked out of stone with pickaxes.

In another, a dozen claw-foot bathtubs circled together, some piled on top of each other, like some kind of nest. One had a floor of deep sand with a trail of hard red spots the size of dinner plates, like something giant and bleeding had walked through long ago.

I deleted them. Three days later, more photos appeared on the listing.

They were new rooms; they could have come from anywhere, been uploaded by anyone. But as I was flipping through, I saw a room set up for photography; there were grey backdrops, and an expensive looking camera on a tripod with a small monitor attached.

Although it was dark and distorted, I could see myself reflected in the monitor. My face was blocked by my camera, but I could tell it was me. I was wearing jeans and my favorite pink sweater, hair in a ponytail. The same outfit I was wearing while running errands the day before.

I didn’t seem to have my purse or any kind of backpack with me. For a quick stop, I would have just left them in my car. I didn’t remember stopping by the house, but here was the proof. Me, and my camera.

I deleted these as well. I changed my password, added two factor authentication. I hid my lens in the microwave, the battery under my bed, the camera card in a baggie taped behind the toilet tank. I put my keys in a bowl of water and put it in the freezer to harden into ice.

I’m not sure what I wanted to do - slow it down? Slow me down? I just needed to create any amount of obstacles between myself and this house as I could.

The next day twenty images were uploaded to the site, taken from a single location; more a cave than a room, every surface of the uneven walls mosaiced with mirrors, great solid planes and shards alike, some so fine they were like glitter pressed into the mortar.

I was in every image dozens of times, maybe hundreds in some, refracted from every angle above and below. I was barefoot, wearing the oversized shirt I always wore to bed, hair still half-tangled from sleep, face still hidden by the camera.

It felt like a message.

When I checked the piece of my camera, they were where I had left them - microwave, under my bed, behind the toilet. My keys were still trapped in a bowl of ice in my freezer.

The images continued to arrive. I deleted them as quickly as I could. I was terrified that somebody would see them, would ask me to explain. I started keeping the site open on my home computer, my laptop, and my phone.

Every few minutes I would refresh, to see if more rooms had been added. For brief moments, while washing dishes or checking the mail box, I managed to forget - but the longer those moments of relief lasted, the worse the panic was when I remembered.

One day I left the shower, dripping wet, to hover over my work laptop and refreshed the page. I refreshed it until I started shivering, a puddle of soapy water at my feet. I decided it had to stop.

Whenever I connected my camera to my computer, it automatically uploaded the images to a folder on my desktop and deleted them off the card. I sorted the images into subfolders and left them there until the house was sold. Then I retired them to my archives, in case of emergency.

The folder for this house only contained the images I had posted on purpose, the ones I remembered taking; the entryway, the living room, the master bedroom, the master bedroom, the spare bedroom, the spare bathroom, and the kitchen.

But if the images were appearing on the posting, they had to have passed through my camera and onto a computer at some point. So I turned off the setting on my computer that deleted them off the card automatically. And I waited.

After two days, new images appeared on the listing. A room full of clothing racks, each crammed with cloaks covered in exotic feathers. A room with long troughs full of water and grain. A frilly girl’s bedroom that looked straight from the 1950s. I deleted them.

Then I checked the camera itself; the photos were there, all the ones that had been posted, plus several outtakes, the ones slightly off-angle, or out of focus. The ones I wouldn’t have posted, if I were choosing the images.

Scrolling backwards, I came to the last image in the gallery - the first photo taken in this most recent session.

I took me a moment to recognize the photo, but when I stood in front of the door in my own house, it was undeniable.

The picture looked down my own basement stairs. The last few steps disappeared into the darkness.

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