1274 Riverside Drive: Deliveries to Nowhere
Summer 2023, Portland, Oregon
City parking enforcement wasn’t expecting anything unusual that humid July morning.
Space 347 in the northeast district had been empty—or so it seemed.
But as Officer Marcus Bell rounded the corner, he froze.
There it was: a white Ford Transit delivery van, abandoned and coated in a decade’s worth of dust.
Four tires were completely flat, the windshield opaque with grime.
Eleven years.
Eleven long years since the van’s owner, Emily Carter, 28, had disappeared during her overnight shift on September 24, 2012.
What made the scene impossible to ignore wasn’t the decay—it was the faint, steady green blink of a dashboard camera.
The battery had long died years ago, but somehow, the device still recorded.
Investigators retrieved the dash cam, revealing 6 hours and 23 minutes of footage from Emily’s final night.
At first, the recordings seemed mundane: Emily navigated familiar streets, greeted neighbors, and completed 66 deliveries without incident.
She laughed briefly at a dog barking at her van, hummed along to a radio station playing soft jazz.
The night felt ordinary, almost comforting in its routine.
But then, at 2:03 AM, she drove past Riverside Drive, stopping at 1274 Riverside Drive—an address that shouldn’t exist.
City records confirmed the street ended at number 1206.
The camera’s timestamp showed Emily’s confusion, glancing at her GPS and muttering, “That can’t be right.
” Yet she parked, retrieved a stack of parcels, and approached a house that wasn’t there on any map.
The footage became unnerving.
Each delivery she attempted vanished the moment she placed it on the porch.
She’d look around, knock on the door—locked, silent, impossible—and the packages reappeared inside the house.
Over the next 79 minutes, Emily made seven trips, each time more hesitant, whispering to herself about the “wrong address,” yet continuing the deliveries.
At 3:45 AM, Emily finally entered.
The camera, left in the van, recorded the empty interior for 29 minutes.
Then, she emerged, pale, hair damp, whispering, “I can see my van… through the window.” Her voice trembled, a mixture of awe and fear.
Suddenly, at 4:18 AM, all four doors of the house clicked shut simultaneously.
The camera captured Emily pounding on them, trying to force them open.
Her phone rang—it was her mother.
In a panicked whisper, Emily spoke, but her mother recoiled.
“Emily… is that you?” she asked.
Her own mother couldn’t recognize her voice.
Over the next hour, Emily tried every escape she could think of, shouting at doors, throwing objects, and even smashing a window.
She documented her own confusion and terror on the dash cam, as if the van had become her only witness.
At 5:22 AM, a woman in Emily’s delivery uniform walked out of the house.
Identical in every detail.
The camera’s light flickered one last time before cutting out.
In March 2023, police divers investigated the coordinates of 1274 Riverside Drive, guided by the dash cam footage.
Forty feet underwater, they found a concrete foundation matching the house Emily had entered.
Inside, seven parcels were recovered.
Each bore the same tracking numbers as the packages in her van—but dated 1962, sixty years before Emily ever made her deliveries.
The contents were preserved, untouched by time, a bizarre echo of some alternate reality.
City mapping specialists confirmed something even stranger.
The underwater foundation didn’t align with the riverbed—it had been artificially sunk.
Satellite imagery over the past decades revealed subtle disturbances in the river, as if the house had slowly shifted from somewhere else entirely.
Local historians recalled stories of a “ghost neighborhood” submerged after a flood in the 1960s.
Could Emily have stumbled into a temporal echo, a place where past and present intersected?
Forensic experts examined the van.
The battery was dead.
Its electronics should have been offline for over a decade.
Yet the dash cam was still functioning, recording and timestamping events accurately.
No signs of tampering.
It was as if the device existed in its own time frame, capturing events that reality itself didn’t acknowledge.
Even stranger, the GPS data recorded impossible movements: Emily drove along streets that didn’t exist, through coordinates under water, and at one point, the van appeared inside the house—filmed from its own camera.
Authorities couldn’t reconcile these anomalies.
In the weeks following the dive, a local resident reported seeing a delivery van in her neighborhood.
She described a young woman, pale, wearing an overnight courier uniform, moving deliberately and quietly.
When approached, the woman vanished around a corner—and the van had disappeared too.
Surveillance footage captured no entry or exit.
Authorities chalked it up to mistaken identity—until the resident checked the tracking numbers on the parcels she had seen.
They matched the ones recovered from the underwater house.
Emily’s family remains in limbo.
Her mother avoids the news, afraid to relive the events captured on dash cam.
Colleagues speak of her disappearance as a cautionary tale—an impossible case that haunts the city.
Some speculate she is trapped in a temporal loop, reliving that night indefinitely.
Others suggest the house beneath the river is a gateway, a distortion of space and time intersecting reality.
And yet, the dash cam, blinking green, suggests she—or someone like her—might still be trying to reach out.
No one knows how she entered the house, why the packages vanished and reappeared, or who—or what—emerged in her place at dawn.
Only the dash cam survives, a silent witness to a mystery that continues to defy explanation.
As the city sleeps, empty streets hum with quiet possibility.
Somewhere, beneath water, beneath streets, or perhaps just beyond perception, Emily Carter’s final night continues—captured, frozen, and unfinished.
Emily Carter had vanished, yet the city still whispered her name.
After the underwater house was discovered in March, dive teams reported that the structure wasn’t just a foundation—it had walls, rooms, furniture frozen in time.
Seven parcels, dated 1962, sat exactly where the dash cam had captured them.
But something new began to emerge.
Authorities were puzzled when a new series of deliveries appeared in the city, all addressed to Emily, all from the same courier company she had worked for.
Each package contained handwritten notes, fragments of her own handwriting, but dated decades before her disappearance.
Investigators speculated about forgery, but forensic analysis confirmed the ink and paper were consistent with mid-20th century materials—materials Emily could not have accessed.
Late September, ten months after her van was recovered, the dash cam blinked again.
The blinking green light was faint but unmistakable.
This time, the footage was different: Emily appeared inside the house underwater, alone—or so it seemed.
The interior was shifting subtly.
Walls stretched, doors twisted, the rooms elongating as though the house itself was alive.
Mirrors reflected spaces that did not exist.
And in one corner, Emily noticed… herself.
At first, she thought it was a trick of light.
But the figure moved independently, mimicking her hesitations, her breaths, but then smiling when she did not.
It whispered, in a voice identical to hers: “You’re late.”
Emily froze.
Could she be seeing a duplicate of herself? The figure gestured toward the packages, now rearranged.
Some had opened themselves; their contents—old letters, photographs of people she did not know, locations she had never visited—lay scattered across the floor.
One photograph was of her as a child, standing in front of the very white van she had driven at 28.
But in the background was a house she had never seen before, identical to the underwater house.
She reached for the dash cam, and the duplicate lunged—not violently, but in a way that pressed Emily back against the wall.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” it said.
Emily realized she couldn’t touch it.
It was real yet unreal, existing in a layer of space the human body could not interact with.
Emily moved through the rooms cautiously, noticing strange inconsistencies.
Clocks spun backward; windows showed streets from decades ago.
When she stepped outside the front door, she was not in the van—but in 1962 Portland, standing on Riverside Drive with the van parked behind her, brand new.
Children played on the sidewalks; cars passed, oblivious.
A man in a suit approached, handed her a parcel identical to one she had already delivered in her vanished timeline.
“Don’t be late,” he said, exactly like the duplicate Emily.
Returning to the underwater house—or her perception of it—Emily discovered that each door she opened led to a different time.
One room placed her in 1987, a teenage girl writing in a diary.
Another room was 2045, with packages floating in the air, suspended by technology she could not comprehend.
It was as though the house wasn’t anchored to reality—it anchored reality itself.
Emily inspected one of the 1962 packages carefully.
Inside, instead of the expected parcel, she found a small mechanical device.
Buttons, dials, and a screen flashed faintly.
When activated, the screen displayed images of herself delivering packages—but in locations she had never driven to, across multiple decades, some under water, some in cities that did not exist.
The van, the dash cam, the packages—it was all part of something much larger, some experiment or anomaly she could not understand.
She realized that the house and the parcels were a trap, a loop designed to feed on her actions.
The more she delivered, the more the timeline distorted.
Each package was a breadcrumb, guiding her deeper into the house, into her own past, and into possible futures.
Emily found a photograph hidden beneath the floorboards—a family portrait, dated 1962.
The resemblance was uncanny.
Among the people in the photo was a young woman with her own face.
Her parents were there too, but younger.
She traced the lines of the face, realizing it was a relative she had never met… herself, decades before she was born.
Then she noticed faint writing on the back of the photo: “Do not interfere. The delivery must continue.” A chill ran through her.
Every action she had taken since 2012—every route, every package, every decision—was already expected, predestined, written in a reality that existed before she was born.
Desperate to escape, Emily tried to retrace her steps.
Doors that once led outside now looped back inside.
Walls that had been solid dissolved into voids.
She screamed, “I want out!” The duplicate Emily appeared again, calmer this time.
“There is no out,” it said softly.
“Only continuation.”
The dash cam, still blinking green, showed an exterior shot of the van… but the van was moving.
Driving itself.
The city streets streamed past, unrecognizable, morphing between decades, landscapes, and rivers.
Emily realized she was both inside the house and outside it, unable to differentiate between the two.
Her eyes fixed on the river outside the house.
Water flowed backward, shimmering with reflections of multiple times: 1962, 2012, 2045.
The concrete foundation underwater wasn’t just a house—it was a node, a hub anchoring these timelines.
Every package delivered anchored reality in some subtle way.
If she failed, reality itself might… unravel.
A sound startled her: footsteps behind her.
Not the duplicate this time—someone else.
A man, older, uniformed like a courier, appeared and handed her a single package.
She opened it.
Inside was her own dash cam from 2012.
It blinked green.
A recording played: “Emily, you must deliver, or nothing remains. Time is hungry.”
The man vanished as suddenly as he appeared.
The duplicate Emily smiled faintly, gesturing toward the next delivery.
Emily knew then that the cycle would never end unless she understood the rules—and surviving meant continuing the deliveries she had started eleven years ago.
Emily Carter remains inside the house-node beneath the river, or perhaps moving through time itself.
Each night, the dash cam continues to blink, capturing deliveries that may have already happened or have yet to occur.
The parcels, the van, the duplications—everything is a test, a loop, and a trap in one.
She whispers to herself, as she always does when a new package appears:
“Where is the real me?”
And the house seems to answer in silence.
