I worked for a company that rented photo booths for events for about eight months. Weddings mostly, some birthday parties, company dinners, things where people wanted those little strips of pictures they could take home.
The job itself was pretty boring. The worst part was packing everything back into the van at the end because somebody always left a cup somewhere and then we’d have to figure out whose it was.
This happened after a company party downtown.
I was going through the pictures at home because there were a lot of them and we had to upload everything the next morning. I usually did this on the couch with the TV on even if I wasn’t really watching anything.
There was a man in one of the pictures.
I didn’t remember him being there.
He had a dark suit on, nothing unusual, except he was looking directly at the camera. Not smiling. Just looking.
I went back to the previous picture because I thought maybe it was the same guy walking behind them.
It was him again.
Then I found another one.
Same guy.
I actually thought this was kind of funny at first. People crash weddings and parties all the time. Maybe he was somebody’s boss or someone’s husband or whatever. I made a joke to myself about it being one of those horror story with pictures things and kept going.
I had been reading stories to tell at night around then too, which I probably shouldn’t mention because it makes the whole thing sound more dramatic than it felt.
Anyway, I didn’t think about him again until work the next day.
I showed one of the girls there the pictures and asked if she knew him.
She didn’t.
She asked me if he was supposed to be there.
I said I didn’t know.
Then she looked at the guest list and couldn’t find anyone matching him. We asked the guy who had actually booked the booth and he didn’t know either.
That was it.
Nobody made a big deal out of it.
I didn’t either.
There were hundreds of pictures and people move around. Maybe he had been there and I just hadn’t noticed him. Honestly, that’s still the explanation I’d rather have.
The next event was in another part of town.
I noticed him again while checking the files.
This time I got annoyed.
Not scared. Annoyed.
Because I knew I had seen the same guy before and now I was going to have to ask people about him again, and there was already enough stupid paperwork with those events.
He was in four pictures.
In one of them he was standing behind a woman who was holding a drink. In another he was near the edge of the frame. I remember zooming in because I thought maybe I could see his face better.
I couldn’t.
He was looking at the camera in all four.
I asked the woman in the first picture about him later.
She said nobody had been standing there.
She actually thought I was asking because somebody looked strange in the photo.
I didn’t tell her why.
After that I started noticing other things, although I don’t know if they were related.
Sometimes when we tested the booth before an event, there would be an extra person in the background of the little screen for a second and then it would be gone. But that could have been one of us walking past.
There were always people around.
That’s the problem with working at events. You can explain almost anything because there are too many people.
One night I was leaving after a wedding and saw a man standing near the parking lot.
Dark suit.
I didn’t even think about the photos at first.
Then he turned his head.
I got into the van.
I don’t remember if it was him.
I think it was.
I also think I may have decided it was him because I’d already been thinking about him, which makes the memory pretty useless.
I didn’t tell anyone.
I drove home.
A few days later I went through the old files again for no real reason. I wasn’t looking for him exactly. I was looking for a picture somebody had asked us to resend, and the file names were terrible.
I found him in one of the old pictures.
This time he wasn’t in the background.
He was standing right beside the booth.
You could only see part of him because the picture was cropped.
I remember staring at it for a while.
Then I noticed the date.
It was from before I started working there.
I asked my manager about it.
She said the booth had been rented to a different company that night.
I asked if she remembered anything unusual.
She said no.
Then she asked why I was asking.
I didn’t really know what to say, so I told her I thought someone might have been messing with the equipment.
She told me not to worry about it.
I stopped looking.
I quit that job a few months later for completely normal reasons. Better hours somewhere else. More money. Nothing dramatic.
I still have some of the pictures on an old hard drive.
I don’t look at them much.
There was one I kept, though.
I don’t know why.
It’s just a normal group picture. Ten or twelve people smiling at the camera.
The man isn’t in it.
I checked.
Then I noticed something in the window behind them.
It’s probably a reflection.
I think it is.
You can see a person standing outside, even though the event was on the third floor.
I’ve tried telling myself it’s just somebody in another room reflected in the glass.
That’s probably what it is.
I haven’t checked the picture again in a long time.
I don’t really want to.
