“Ghosts in the Wi-Fi”

Ghosts in the Wi-Fi

When the town of Elmridge upgraded to fiber-optic internet, no one expected hauntings to come with the package. But something about the new, ultra-fast connection stirred up things that should have stayed buried. It started small, like all horrors do—little glitches, flickers in the screen, static in calls, buffering at 3 a.m. But soon, it wasn’t just technology acting up. It was the feeling that someone—or something—was watching through the devices themselves.

Seventeen-year-old Maya Chan first noticed it in her bedroom. A gamer and aspiring streamer, she’d been thrilled when the town offered free installation of next-gen routers. Her upload speeds were now astronomical. But ever since the upgrade, she’d started hearing things through her headphones—whispers in a language she couldn’t recognize, even when her game was muted.

At first, she blamed it on background noise or maybe even a hacker. But one night, during a late stream, her webcam flickered. The screen pixelated, distorted, and when it came back… she wasn’t alone.

Thousands of her viewers saw it too. A pale figure—eyes wide and hollow, mouth stretched open in a scream—stood behind her chair for just a fraction of a second. Her chat exploded.

“WHAT WAS THAT?”

“Behind you, Maya!!!”

“Replay it—holy crap—REPLAY!!”

Maya leapt out of her chair, spinning around, heart in her throat. But there was nothing. Just her empty, dimly lit room. She laughed it off awkwardly, blaming a glitch or prank overlay, though she hadn’t installed any.

But that was just the beginning.

Across Elmridge, strange things began happening. Smart TVs turned on by themselves at night, blaring static or old wartime broadcasts. Phones rang from unknown numbers, and when answered, no one spoke—but breathing echoed through the line. Wi-Fi-connected speakers whispered prayers in broken Latin. Video calls dropped, replaced with images of abandoned hospitals or empty streets—places no one recognized.

And everyone started having the same dream.

They dreamt of a woman in black, her face veiled, standing inside a room made entirely of cables. Red lights blinked around her like eyes. She never moved—just stared, her presence both suffocating and magnetic. People woke up gasping, drenched in sweat, their devices powered on beside them, even if they’d turned them off before bed.

Maya became obsessed. She started researching urban legends, ghost frequencies, electromagnetic hauntings—anything that might explain what was happening. She found an old forum called DeadSignal, long abandoned, where a post from 2009 described something eerily similar. A small town in the Philippines had experienced identical phenomena after installing experimental network hardware. The post ended abruptly, the last comment reading, “You can’t unplug what’s already inside.”

That line stuck with her.

She reached out to her friend Theo, a hacker who lived off-grid. He didn’t use a smartphone, refused to touch Bluetooth, and laughed at the concept of “smart” homes. She thought he was paranoid. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

Theo didn’t laugh when she told him what was happening.

“There’s this theory,” he said during a rare in-person meeting, “that the internet’s gotten too big, too fast. We built the infrastructure faster than we understood the consequences. The electromagnetic spectrum—we don’t fully understand what we’re tapping into. Maybe we’ve opened doors we can’t close.”

“Doors to what?”

“Not where. Who.”

He showed her code—long, tangled, and barely readable. It looked like corrupted AI scripts, but deeper inside were signals, repeated patterns like fingerprints. “Something’s piggybacking on the data. Hitchhiking through routers, across servers, through screens.”

“Like… ghosts?”

He nodded. “Digital ones. They don’t need Ouija boards. They just need Wi-Fi.”

Maya went home shaken, more convinced than ever that something ancient had found a new way to travel—a networked haunting, amplified by every smart device.

She decided to test it.

One night, she live-streamed a séance.

Candles lit. Phone off. Laptop camera on. She sat in front of the screen and invited whatever was behind the disturbances to speak.

The feed was normal for about five minutes—then the lights dimmed. Her screen flickered. And the chat exploded again.

The woman was back. This time, closer. Viewers screamed in the comments as Maya’s eyes rolled back, and she began to speak in a voice not her own.

“You gave us doors,” the voice rasped, “and we walked through. The signal is ours now.”

Then the stream went dead.

Maya was never seen again.

Her house was found abandoned, laptop melted from the inside out. The router was still blinking.

But every so often, her channel goes live for a few seconds.

The screen is always black.

The chat is always disabled.

And yet, hundreds of people claim they’ve heard a whisper from her feed:

“Are you still there?”

Since Elmridge, other towns have reported similar anomalies. The theory is no longer just fringe. Researchers whisper of networked spirits, of ghosts that ride signals like parasites, infecting everything we touch.

So the next time your phone rings and no one’s there…

Don’t answer.

Because now…

They’re in the Wi-Fi.