It was my fifth grade year and I was currently attending Elementary school. My class had been in the library that day, working on the computers for an assignment. The teacher at the time said that after we had finished our assignment, we could all use the computers freely. Naturally, my friends and I all sat together on one row. Now having free time, we decided to look around at random websites. I’m not sure how, but we all ended up on this weird ghost website. The site had pictures, videos, and stories about ghosts. Being kids, we saw interest in what the website had. I mean, it wasn’t blocked or had anything inappropriate, plus we were curious to see what was on there. Nothing was too scary or eye-popping, we were just scrolling around through the pages out of boredom anyway.
All of a sudden, one of my friends had told the rest of us to click on this one video that was in the video streaming area. “The one with the rocking chair,” they said. “Just watch it.” So, we all followed what they said and clicked on the video. My friend to the left scooted closer as we clicked play. It was just a video of a chair rocking back and forth. There wasn’t anything that scary or even paranormal about it. Anyone could rig a chair to do this. That’s when things got interesting. Let’s just say that I wasn’t ready for what came next.
The video played on as the chair slowly rocked. My heartbeat was slow and calm, while my eyes were locked on the screen. Suddenly, there was a pop up. This incredibly frightening ghost woman runs to the screen and screeches. A huge rush of panic hit me as I squeaked loudly and threw my hands to my face. I hunched over in my chair, completely shocked and terrified at the sudden outburst that came from the video. As I hid my face in my hands, I could feel tears prick at my eyes. I blinked them away when I felt a hand be placed on my shoulder as the teacher and my friend tried to comfort me. “It’s okay, it’s not that bad after you look at it for a while. It stops being scary,” my friend on the left told me. I thought she was crazy. No way was I going to look back at the screen. Although, I reluctantly lifted my head at the teacher’s request. Avoiding the stare of the computer, I focused on my peers and other students in the library. People had their eyes focused on me due to the loud squeak and small scene I had caused. I could feel the adrenaline and anxiety course through me, causing my stomach to do a backflip.
My face heated up out of embarrassment as I turned back to my friends and teacher. She told us to stay off of that site and get onto ones that we were familiar with for the remainder of the class. We nodded and closed out of said website. For the remainder of the day, I couldn’t look at my classmates. While they totally forgot about the incident and brushed it off, it was still a big deal to me. Out of embarrassment, I pretended to be reading a book all day to avoid people. From my friends’ coaxing, I stopped trying to hide my face from everyone. The embarrassed and anxious feeling wouldn’t leave me for the rest of the day. I guess you could say that my big mistake was scrolling around on websites that I was unfamiliar with. You should always be wary and cautious when it comes to the internet, especially as a kid. There are just some things on there that people don’t need to see.
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