🕯️ May 19, 2025 — 9:15 PM

I did not begin as a madman.

I was a watchman once — a security officer, sworn to keep safe what mattered. Before that, I walked picket lines with brothers and sisters whose names history will forget. After, I wrote leaflets and stood at folding tables while the world forgot how to care. I believed we were building something. A movement. A country worth haunting.

But the rot came anyway.

It began in the margins. They took the pension fund — vanished it into “consolidation.” The neighborhood grocery shuttered. Two kids froze to death in an apartment with no heat. “Austerity,” they called it, like a polite ghost passing through walls. Then the libraries closed. The union lost its hall. Another tax cut arrived for someone I’d never meet.

I started seeing things then.

At first, I thought it was grief. Or drink. But they were there — shapes in fluorescent light, reflections that didn’t match my body, whispers echoing through industrial corridors long after the machines were dismantled.

One night in March, I caught my own shadow watching me.

I turned — it stood behind me, taller, sharper, wearing my old badge like a medal. It did not mimic my movements. It simply waited.

It waits still.

I began keeping records — dates, times, flickers of frost on warm days, odd behavior from my one remaining clock. Every shift in air pressure. Every neighbor who vanished between paychecks. Every bird that landed and stared. I became a chronicler of the unexplainable, though I now believe it is all quite explainable.

The ghosts are not from death. They are from policy.

You see, hauntings are not born of murder, but of neglect. The ghosts on Union Hill were once tenants. Voters. Patients. Comrades. I feel their eyes from the brickwork. Their hunger seeps from empty mailboxes. I have watched phantom eviction notices slide beneath doors that lead to nowhere.

A specter moved into my guest room three weeks ago. He does not speak. He only hums “Solidarity Forever” through chattering teeth.

Some nights, I walk past the mirror and find myself picketing my own reflection. Other times, I hear typewriters from the graveyard shift beneath the crawlspace. The old union contract rewrites itself in blood.

My final clarity came when I began to see through walls. Not just plaster and wood — but social structures. I see the bones behind the banks. The breath behind the brands. The dying light behind campaign smiles.

And now I see you.

You, dear reader, who thinks this is just a tale. I have left the world behind, yes. But only because I’m ahead of schedule.

The hauntings are real.
The ghosts are restless.
And they are moving outward.

Watch the calendar.
Watch the cracks in your ceiling.
Watch the dead pixels in your phone.

August. September. And the rest of your life.

My haunts are your haunts now.

— The Watcher on Union Hill

P.S. This is only the beginning—more haunts rise in August 2025. What you’ve read is merely a coming attraction — a fair warning.