I first noticed it last summer, when I was supposed to be working. I do freelance GIS work, map data, aerial imaging, that kind of thing  and I spend a lot of time staring at satellite layers. That’s why it stood out.

My address. My exact house. Updating every thirteen days.

That’s not how Google Earth or Maps works. Not even close. Satellite imagery updates every few months at best, sometimes years. But there it was: every thirteen days on the dot, a fresh image of my house on Pine Hollow Road.

At first it was just weird. Then it became impossible.

Day 1

The first image looked normal. My car in the driveway, mailbox open, my trash bins on the curb. I thought maybe Google was running some kind of beta high-frequency updates, maybe for weather or disaster mapping. I even checked their developer forums, but no one mentioned anything.

Thirteen days later, I checked again.

The lights were on inside.

Middle of the afternoon, but every window glowed yellow, like every bulb in the house was lit. I wasn’t even home that day,  I was in Denver visiting my sister.

I brushed it off. Maybe an old image stitched wrong. Still… thirteen days later, I looked again.

Day 27

The windows were boarded.

Plywood over every one. The same angle, the same late-afternoon lighting, same cloud cover but the windows looked rough, nailed up fast. The front door was slightly open.

You couldn’t see inside.

No one had broken into my house. I checked immediately. Everything was fine in real life.

So why did the satellite showed it wasn’t?

I told myself I was just tired, working too much. I even joked about it in a Discord server. Someone said it was probably AI-generated map filling. Google sometimes uses synthetic imagery to fill gaps. That comforted me for a while.

Until the next update.

Day 40

There was someone in the yard.

A blurry, grayscale silhouette standing in the grass, looking up, directly up, toward the satellite’s point of view.

One arm raised.

Almost like they were waving.

The figure wasn’t me. Too tall. Too thin. The proportions were off somehow, long torso, short arms, but that outstretched hand reached farther than it should have.

I downloaded the image and zoomed in until the pixels fell apart. But even then, there was a suggestion of a face. Pale. Featureless. Like a mannequin.

The metadata said the image was captured “13 days ago.”

I didn’t sleep that night.

Every noise in the house, the hum of the fridge, the settling of wood sounded like breathing. I started keeping the curtains closed. I even turned off my porch light because it threw too many shadows.

I told myself not to look again. But you know how it goes. Curiosity’s a sickness.

Day 53

The yard was empty.

But the blinds on the upstairs window my bedroom window…were open. Someone had been in there. Someone who wanted to see out.

That was when I called the cops.

They sent a deputy out to “check the premises.” He walked around with a flashlight, looked at me like I was wasting his time, and told me there were no signs of forced entry.

I showed him the screenshots. He said, “Sir, these could be from anywhere.”

I couldn’t blame him. They did look faked. Even I couldn’t explain why the lighting never changed between updates, always that flat, dull overcast, like the sun was behind gauze.

Thirteen days later, I didn’t check. I couldn’t. But the next morning I woke up to an email from myself.

From: *[my own Gmail address]*Subject: *You should see this.*Attachment: “PineHollow_Updated.jpg”

I swear to God I didn’t send it.

The image showed the house again, same angle, same light  but this time there was a figure inside, visible through the upstairs window. A silhouette looking down at the yard.

Looking down at whoever had been waving.

I checked the metadata. The date said Tomorrow.

I called Google support that day. Spent two hours climbing through automated systems until a human answered. I tried explaining it: daily updates, impossible images, metadata timestamps. The guy on the line said, “Sir, those satellite images are not live. We can’t alter them, and they’re certainly not predictive.”

He paused. Then said quietly, “Where did you say you live again?”

I told him. He didn’t answer for a moment. Then the line clicked dead.

Day 79

The next image showed the house with every light on again, but this time the door was wide open. You could see darkness inside, a kind of digital blur where the pixels didn’t render right. A smear of static that looked like a figure halfway through stepping out.

I called my sister. Told her I wanted to stay at her place for a while. She said of course, come anytime.

I packed a bag. But that night, while I was locking up, I looked out my bedroom window and I swear there was someone standing at the far end of the yard.

Not moving. Just there, exactly where the waving figure had been. I moved out the next morning.

For a while, I didn’t look. I stayed offline. I tried to forget. I crashed at my sister’s house, got a temp job doing survey data in her county. I thought maybe the whole thing would just… stop if I wasn’t watching it.

But you know how the mind works. Obsession doesn’t go away. It festers.

Day 118

I looked again.

The boards were gone from the windows. The house looked… lived in. My car was gone from the driveway, but there was another vehicle parked there. A dark SUV I didn’t recognize.

And the blinds upstairs were open again. This time, the silhouette in the window was unmistakably me.

I hadn’t been back since I left. I even checked my sister’s Nest camera to confirm I’d been home with her that day. I had.

So how the hell was I in that picture?

The next morning I tried to log back into Google Earth. My account password didn’t work anymore.

The recovery email wasn’t mine.

It was _pinehollowroad13@_something I didn’t recognize.

I started getting mail forwarded from my old address. Junk, mostly. But one padded envelope showed up a week later. No return address. Inside was a USB drive.

Labelled: “FOR YOU. UPDATED.”

I thought about throwing it out. I really did. But I plugged it into my laptop.

There was only one file. A video.

Aerial footage, panning slowly over Pine Hollow Road. My house in the center.

No audio, just the faint hum of interference. The footage zoomed closer, closer, until you could see through the upstairs window.

There I was again. Standing in the same position, hands on the glass, staring down. Only this time, the reflection on the window…it wasn’t the same face. The reflection was something behind me.

Something taller, darker, leaning close enough that its outline merged with mine.

The frame froze for a few seconds, then flickered. When it resumed, the house was dark, the front door closed, and the timestamp on the corner of the screen read: Captured: Tomorrow 11:46 PM.

I smashed the drive with a hammer and threw it into a storm drain. But that night I dreamed of the satellite’s view, the constant slow spin of the Earth beneath it, every street, every roofline glowing faintly, until it came to rest on my house again.

And inside, a light flicked on.

I started getting headaches. I’d see static in my vision, like the world was buffering. Every reflection seemed slightly delayed. When I turned my head, my reflection turned a fraction of a second later.

My sister said I looked pale. That my pupils didn’t dilate the same anymore.

I stopped sleeping upstairs. I started covering mirrors, even my phone camera.

But every thirteen days, without fail, I’d get a notification:

“Google Maps imagery has been updated in your area.”

Day 183

I made a mistake.

I went back.

Just for a night. I told myself I needed closure. I told myself I could document it, prove something unnatural was happening.

When I got there, the house felt… wrong.

The air inside was stale, heavy. Every surface had a fine layer of dust, except the floor by the stairs, those boards were clean. As if someone had been walking up and down.

I went room by room. Nothing. Until I reached the upstairs hallway.

The blinds were open.

Outside, there was no one in the yard. No figure, no movement. Just my reflection in the glass, staring back.

I lifted my phone to take a picture and the screen showed something else.

Not me.

The live camera feed displayed the same angle, but instead of my reflection, there was a man standing behind me. Pale face, no features, just a smooth blankness where the eyes and mouth should be.

He raised a hand.

I dropped the phone and ran.

When I got outside, I looked back once. The upstairs light flicked on again.

Someone was standing in the window.

I don’t remember getting in my car. I just remember the sound of gravel spraying behind the tires, and the glow of my house shrinking in the rearview mirror.

I didn’t stop driving for hours.

Day 196

I woke up to a push notification.

“Explore the latest update for your saved location: Pine Hollow Road.”

I opened it before I could stop myself.

The new image loaded. My car was in the driveway again. The lights were on. The front door wide open. And in the yard, right where that first figure had stood, there were two silhouettes now.

Both of them waving.

That’s when I realized something. Every image had been taken at exactly 11:46 PM local time. I checked the timestamps again, all of them. 11:46. Thirteen-day intervals.

And the next update was scheduled for tonight.

At 11:46 PM.

Now

It’s 11:12 as I’m typing this. I’m in a motel two towns over, curtains drawn tight. My laptop screen keeps flickering every so often it cuts to static, then back again. I think I see shapes in the noise.

There’s a faint hum outside, like a distant engine. Or maybe something higher, orbital. Part of me wants to go look. Part of me thinks maybe I already did.

Because my phone just buzzed with a message from an unknown number. No text, just an image attachment. It’s my house. Taken from above. Lights on. Door open. Two figures in the yard. And someone standing in the upstairs window, looking out.

The metadata says it was taken tomorrow, 11:46 PM.

The figure in the window looks exactly like me.

Except this time, he’s bleeding from his eyes.