This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/thirdaccountttt on 2026-05-13 20:53:06+00:00.

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I found the channel because someone accused me of stealing from it. The comment was under my newest upload, buried between the usual stuff about the case, the editing, my voice, the sponsor, the way I apparently looked tired. It said: “You already uploaded this from The Hollow Room. At least credit them.”

At first I thought it was just some idiot. My channel covered strange internet stories, old missing-person cases, abandoned websites, that sort of thing. I had been copied before. People ripped my videos, reuploaded them with worse thumbnails, ran them through AI voices, translated them badly, clipped them into shorts. It was annoying, but it was normal. So I searched the name expecting to find another lazy archive channel using my face for clicks.

The channel was called The Hollow Room. No profile picture. No banner. No description. It had seven videos. Four of them were mine. Same titles, same thumbnails, same runtime, just uploaded weeks before mine. That already annoyed me enough, but the fifth video stopped me from clicking the copyright form.

The title was The Man Under The Stairs.

It had my face in the thumbnail. My room. My lighting. My usual expression, caught between serious and half-dead. I stared at it for a while because I knew I had never made that video. I had never even heard of the case. Still, when I opened it, there I was, sitting at my desk in the navy jumper I wore too often, talking into the camera like it was any other upload.

“On the morning of March 18th, 1996,” I said, “a family in Derbyshire woke up to find every door in their house locked from the inside.”

I paused it immediately. It was my voice. Not just close to my voice. Mine. It had the same small hesitations, the same ugly little throat clear I usually edited out, the same way I looked down and left when reading from my notes. The room was correct too. The shelf behind me, the black sound panels, the cheap lamp, even the cable hanging under the desk that I kept meaning to tidy.

But there were small differences. My hair was shorter. There was a scar on my neck. A thin red line just above the collar. I touched my own neck and found nothing there.

I watched the whole thing, mostly because I was trying to prove to myself that it would break somewhere. A glitch, a wrong detail, an AI slip, anything. It didn’t. It was structured exactly like one of my videos. Slow intro, ordinary facts, then the details getting worse one by one. The writing was even mine, or close enough that I hated it. There were phrases I used too much. Jokes I would make and then cut. A little ending line I knew I would have been proud of.

When it finished, I checked my files. Nothing. I checked my notes app, my scripts folder, my browser history. Nothing about Derbyshire. Nothing about stairs. Nothing about a family locked inside their own house. I reported the channel anyway, but I already knew this wasn’t just theft.

Three days later, The Hollow Room uploaded again.

The new video was called The Lake That Gives Back Bodies.

That one was worse because I had thought of it. I had not recorded it. I had not written it. But two weeks earlier, I had saved three articles about a reservoir where bodies kept surfacing years after drownings. It was only an idea, a half-formed note in my planning folder. The Hollow Room had the finished video before I had even started the script.

In the video, I looked older. Not by years, but by stress. My skin looked grey. My left eye was bloodshot. There were books stacked on the floor behind me that I did not own yet. Halfway through, I stopped speaking and looked at something behind the camera. No music sting. No fake jump scare. Just me looking past the lens for too long, like someone had entered the room and I was trying not to react.

The comments were treating it like a game. “Best ARG on YouTube.” “This is better than his main channel.” “Why does he look scared?” “Is this AI or is he actually involved?” I wanted to write that I was not involved. I wanted to tell them the channel was not mine. But there is something humiliating about sounding frightened online. Even when you have a reason, especially when you have a reason. So I said nothing.

I deleted every note about the lake video. I cleared the bookmarks. I emptied the bin. Then I sat in my office with the webcam unplugged and watched the channel until sunrise.

The third video appeared a week later. The title was Don’t Film Alone.

It started without an intro. I was sitting in my office wearing the same grey hoodie I had on while watching it. The room in the video was darker than mine. Only the desk lamp was on. My hands were folded on the desk, and I looked like I had been awake for days.

“I’m recording this because I need proof,” video-me said. “There are five videos on this channel that I haven’t made yet.”

There were only three.

“I thought it was copying me,” he continued. “It isn’t. It doesn’t steal old videos. It takes the ones I’m going to make. The ones I survive long enough to make.”

I remember the exact feeling in my body then. Not panic. Panic is active. This was heavier. It felt like something had stepped onto my chest and was waiting there. In the video, something creaked behind the camera. I didn’t turn. I just closed my eyes for half a second, like I had heard it before.

“If you’re watching this before you record it,” video-me said, “leave the flat now. Don’t take the laptop. Don’t pack properly. Don’t check the office again.”

Then he leaned forward.

“And don’t make the story good.”

The video cut to black.

I left within ten minutes. I did not take the laptop. I did not check the office. I booked a hotel near the station under a name I rarely used and paid at the desk. The room was ugly, which helped. Brown carpet, weak lamp, a kettle with old limescale inside, television bolted too high on the wall. Nothing there belonged to me. Nothing there looked like it could become part of one of my videos.

At 11:46 that night, The Hollow Room scheduled a premiere.

The title was Last Take.

I watched it on my phone because I couldn’t stop myself. That was the real problem. Not the channel, not the videos, not whatever was behind them. Me. I needed to know. I had built an entire career out of that impulse, dressing it up as research, curiosity, storytelling. But it was the same stupid need that makes people open doors in horror films.

The premiere began with a shot of a hotel corridor. Brown carpet. Faded red pattern. The camera moved slowly until it reached room 214.

My room.

I looked at the door. Then back at the phone. On screen, the camera stopped outside. In real life, the corridor outside my room was silent.

My phone rang.

No caller ID.

I answered because the version of me on the screen answered too.

The voice on the line was mine, but rougher. Closer to whispering.

“Don’t open the door.”

I said nothing.

“You already did one thing right,” the voice said. “You left. Now do the second. Don’t explain this to anyone.”

On the video, the door handle moved.

In real life, mine did too.

I backed into the bathroom with the phone in one hand and the little hotel kettle in the other, as if boiling water and cheap plastic could do anything. The voice kept talking.

“It lives in the finished version. That’s what I got wrong. I kept trying to document it. I kept making it clearer. Every time I explained it better, it got closer.”

The handle stopped.

On screen, the camera passed through the door without opening it. The hotel room in the video was empty. My bag was on the chair. The bed was unmade. The takeaway I hadn’t eaten sat on the desk. Then the camera turned towards the bathroom, and for one second I saw myself hiding there, pale and stupid, watching the phone.

The voice said, “Bad stories die.”

The video ended.

The channel disappeared the next morning. Not deleted. Gone. Links broke. Screenshots corrupted. People who had posted about it started arguing over details they could no longer prove. Some said it had been an AI stunt. Some said it was marketing for my channel. Most forgot about it after a week.

I stopped uploading. That cost me my income first, then my flat, then most of the people who only knew how to talk to me when I was working. I don’t tell them why. When someone asks, I say burnout. Burnout is believable. Burnout doesn’t spread.

Last night, a new channel with no profile picture uploaded a video called The Man Who Stopped Filming.

It has 312 views already