The Brooklyn Subway: Nine Years Gone
Summer 2014, Brooklyn, New York
It was a typical summer morning in Brooklyn. The Atlantic Avenue subway station buzzed with the energy of commuters hurrying to work, their voices blending with the screeching trains. Among them, Emily Carter, 16, stood near the yellow safety line, glancing at her phone. Her message to her best friend, Jake, was brief: “See you at school.” The crowded platform was loud, but the noise faded into the background as she put her headphones in, waiting for the train.
And then, just like that, Emily vanished.
Her backpack, neatly zipped, her water bottle still half-full—everything was left behind, as though she had simply stepped away for a moment. The crowd shifted, oblivious, as the train arrived with its usual screech. No one noticed the empty space beside her, or the strange stillness that followed.
Security cameras caught her for a few seconds as she was looking at her phone, and then… nothing. The footage was grainy, indistinct, showing only a fleeting glimpse of her moving to the edge of the platform before the screen cut to static. The train passed, the crowd dispersed, and Emily was gone.
The disappearance sent shockwaves through the city, and for weeks, investigators combed through the station, but no trace of Emily was found. The surveillance footage, reviewed endlessly, showed nothing beyond the ordinary chaos of a subway morning.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. Despite relentless media coverage and public searches, Emily’s case went cold. The police had nothing to go on, no leads, no witnesses. She was just… gone.
Fast forward to 2023. Nine years after Emily’s disappearance, Brooklyn’s subway system was undergoing a routine inspection of its older service tunnels, some of which had been sealed off for decades due to structural issues. Workers in hard hats and fluorescent vests pried open a rusted maintenance door, their tools scraping against the ancient metal. As they entered the tunnel, one of the workers, a young man named Greg, noticed something strange.
A dusty old GoPro camera sat wedged between two concrete blocks, its lens coated in grime and cobwebs. Remarkably, the camera’s battery still had life. The worker’s curiosity piqued, and he powered it up. The footage on the small screen flickered to life.
At first, it seemed mundane: scenes of everyday subway life. Commuters rushing past the turnstiles, trains arriving and departing, the steady hum of the station. But then, the camera zoomed in on something—or rather, someone—familiar.
Emily.
The footage showed her, walking toward a darkened corner of the platform with a man who appeared friendly enough—at least from the way she smiled at him. He was tall, wearing a faded jacket, his face obscured in the dim light. There was an odd intimacy in the way he spoke to her, though his words were muffled and unintelligible.
She laughed at something he said, then turned and walked toward a service door hidden from the main platform. The camera followed her, the footage shaky as she moved deeper into the station’s forgotten corridors. The stranger was still in tow, though his face never fully came into focus.
Then, the camera captured something that made the hairs on the back of Greg’s neck stand up:
A whisper.
Faint at first, but unmistakable: “Voices outside…”
The screen went black. Static buzzed for a moment, and then the video cut off completely. The camera had stopped recording.
Greg stared at the screen, his heart pounding. He rewound the footage, watching it over and over. There was no mistaking it. That was Emily. She had been at the station again—months after her disappearance—walking with someone who shouldn’t have been there.
The discovery of the GoPro sent shockwaves through the police department. Jake Carter, now 25, had moved on with his life, but the video resurfaced memories he had long buried. Emily’s disappearance had haunted him for years. He hadn’t stepped foot near the subway since that fateful day, but when the video resurfaced, something in him stirred.
He watched the footage in silence, his pulse racing as Emily’s face appeared on screen. There was something chilling about her laugh, something unnatural about the way she walked with the stranger, as though she were being led somewhere—down paths she shouldn’t have known.
And then there was the whisper. “Voices outside…”
Jake felt a strange pull, an undeniable need to know more. Who was that man? Why had she disappeared? And why was she walking toward a part of the station no one was supposed to know about?
He began his own investigation, combing through old police reports, speaking to former station workers, and visiting the subway station again. Most people remembered Emily as a quiet, curious teenager—someone who asked questions about the station’s history, about places that had been sealed off for years. Some of the workers claimed she had been seen near the service doors, peering into the dark corridors behind the tracks, asking about tunnels no one used anymore.
Jake’s gut told him something was wrong, something more than just an ordinary disappearance. There was a pattern, an eerie connection between the old tunnels, the strange man in the video, and Emily’s interest in the forbidden places of the station.
It wasn’t until Jake stumbled upon an old newspaper article from the 1970s that the truth began to unfold. The article described a tunnel collapse near Atlantic Avenue, killing several workers who had been repairing the aging subway system. Among the dead was a man named Thomas Reed, a station employee who had mysteriously disappeared months before the accident. His body was never found.
The article included a black-and-white photograph of Thomas Reed—a face that sent chills down Jake’s spine. It was the same man in the GoPro footage.
Jake’s breath caught in his throat. How was it possible? This man had died in the 1970s. And yet, there he was, walking alongside Emily, leading her deeper into the shadows of the subway.
A sinking feeling gripped Jake’s chest. The tunnels weren’t just abandoned—they were haunted by something, someone, who shouldn’t have been there. The stranger in the footage wasn’t just any man. He was a ghost, or worse—a remnant of something that refused to die.
But there was more. As Jake continued to dig through old records, he discovered something even more unsettling. Emily wasn’t the first to vanish near the station. Over the years, there had been several disappearances—people who had walked into the station and never been seen again. Some had been found, their bodies strangely disfigured, but others—like Emily—had simply vanished, leaving no trace behind.
Jake’s search led him to an abandoned part of the station, a sealed maintenance room that had been locked off for years. He managed to find a way in, using an old map he’d acquired from a former employee. Inside, the walls were covered with cryptic drawings and symbols.
One of the drawings showed a subway map—strangely distorted, with multiple exits that didn’t exist on the official maps. But there, in the center of the diagram, was a series of tunnels marked with the same symbols he’d seen in the notebook from the GoPro footage. The same strange drawings that Emily had sketched months before her disappearance.
The deeper Jake went, the more he felt the air growing thicker, the temperature dropping. It was as if the tunnels themselves were alive, pulsing with a strange, foreboding energy. In the distance, he could hear whispers again—voices calling out in the dark, but this time, they were not coming from the GoPro footage. They were real.
Jake’s heart pounded as he descended into the dark, until he reached a small alcove. There, on the ground, was a photograph—a picture of Emily, smiling, holding a note. The note read: “I found it. Do you see it?”
And then, the whispers grew louder.
Jake turned, his breath catching in his throat. At the far end of the tunnel stood a figure, barely visible in the dim light. It was Emily—her silhouette outlined against the shadowed walls.
“Come closer. Don’t be afraid,” she whispered.
Before Jake could take another step, the tunnel seemed to shift, the walls groaning as if the space itself was alive. The figure of Emily vanished into the dark.
Jake’s last memory is of his phone buzzing—an anonymous text message: “I see you.”
