The Physhbowl

MAG 3 - Across the Street

5 min read

Image by Samwise on the Rusty Quill forums

Case Number

0070107

Audio By

Jonathan Sims

Author

Amy Patel

Date of Statement

2007-07-01

Date of Event

2006-04-07

Locations

  • Clapham, London

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Statement

Amy Patel met Graham Folger in September 2005 when they both started a Criminology course at Birkbeck University, which Amy did in her spare time. Graham was a smoker, some 10 years older than Amy with a round open face and deep blue eyes. There were rumours he’d studied at Oxford. His parents, Desmond and Samantha, died in a car crash on the M1 near Sheffield on August 4th 2001, leaving him an inheritance and their flat. He could be found scribbling frantically in notebooks during lectures, even in lectures where there was little content to write.

Towards the end of the year, Amy found herself on the same bus home as Graham; he was staring out of the window, wiping condensation from the glass and intently scanning the street, looking nervous. They both got off at the same stop and walked home.

During the walk Amy fell, or was pushed, into the road, resulting in a concussion. She went to Graham’s flat to recover and found he lived just across the street, opposite her flat.

Graham’s flat was large and lined with bookcases with numerous identical notebooks on them. Seeing window-box hooks on the window, she asked him what he grew in his window box but discovered he didn’t have one and didn’t see the hooks a second time.

She became partially hypnotised by an ornate wooden table with an intricate carving on it, with snaking lines weaving towards the centre, where there was a small square hole. Graham didn’t have or know what was supposed to go in the hole. The table unsettled Amy, so she left after a short while, noting that the pipes outside were making a weird noise.

A few days later she started to watch Graham in his flat from her own regularly, finding it weirdly compelling. He would reorder his journals randomly, write in completed books, and even ate an entire notebook that he’d written in. He was constantly on edge, jumping at any loud noise outside and spent a lot of time staring at the table. While he regularly left the flat, whenever he was home he would spend his time doing nothing.

Amy eventually left the criminology course due to work commitments, but continued to watch Graham. On April 7th 2006, she came home at 10:30pm and went to the window to Graham-watch, noting that the light was on in his flat. She then saw something (mistakenly assuming it to be a water pipe at first) clamber into Graham’s window on multi-jointed limbs. The light in the flat immediately went out. She anonymously phoned the police, who arrived 10 minutes later. The person who answered the door was wearing Graham’s clothes but was not actually Graham: he was short, with long curly blond hair and a square face. He and the police searched the apartment for this ‘intruder’ and one of the officers checked Graham’s passport, seemingly agreeing it was him. After they left, Not|Graham looked out of his window straight at Amy, grinned, then closed the curtain.

Over the next few days, Not-Graham threw out all the notebooks and redecorated. The only time he opened the curtains was to stare out at Amy, who had done some research and found that all available pictures of Graham had been replaced with this Not-Graham.

One morning, whilst going to work, Not-Graham caught up with her and said, “Isn’t it funny, Amy, how you can live so near and never notice? I’ll need to return the visit someday.” She moved out shortly afterwards.

Post-Statement

Tim’s research found Amy’s medical notes, which showed Amy did not suffer from any long term effects following the concussion.

All of the photos that the researchers could find of Graham were of Not-Graham, except a few Polaroids from the late 80s, which do not match the later photos.

Sasha offered Amy a follow-up interview, which she declined even after being informed that one of Graham’s notebooks had apparently been found, though the contents of it were the same phrase repeated over and over again: “Keep Watching.”

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