It was a lazy Sunday morning when Maya Torres decided to clear her phone storage.

She started scrolling through her camera roll — selfies, food pics, screenshots of recipes she’d never try. Normal stuff.

Then she stopped.

Between a photo of her cat taken at 11:15 PM Saturday night and a blurry screenshot from 6:02 AM Sunday morning, there was an image she had never seen before.

Timestamp: 2:47 AM.

The photo showed a dark room — not her bedroom, not her apartment, not anywhere she recognized. In the center of the frame sat a wooden chair. And in that chair, someone was sitting with their back to the camera.

Maya’s blood ran cold.

She lived alone. She had been asleep by midnight. Her apartment door had been locked — she checked it every night, a habit born from anxiety.

So who took this photo?

And where was it taken?

“At first I thought it was a glitch,” Maya told her friend Aisha later that day. “Like maybe it downloaded from somewhere. But it was in my camera roll. Taken with my phone’s rear camera.”

Aisha suggested checking the metadata. Maya did. The GPS coordinates pointed to a location 14 miles from her apartment — an abandoned warehouse district she had never visited.

Maya’s hands were shaking.

She went to the police. The officer was polite but skeptical. “Could someone have borrowed your phone?” he asked.

No. Maya slept with her phone on her nightstand. It required Face ID to unlock.

The case was filed but not prioritized. So Maya did what any obsessive, terrified person would do — she investigated on her own.

She drove to the GPS coordinates. It was a rundown industrial building — windows shattered, doors rusted shut. But when she peered through a broken window, she saw it.

The chair. The same wooden chair from the photo.

Maya called the police again. This time, they came.

Inside the building, investigators found the chair, along with rope marks on the floor, dried stains that tested positive for blood, and scratches on the walls that appeared to be fingernail marks.

But here’s where the story takes its darkest turn.

Forensic analysis of Maya’s phone revealed something disturbing: the photo wasn’t taken by someone using her phone remotely. It was taken by her phone — while she was holding it.

Sleep specialists were brought in. Maya was diagnosed with a rare and severe form of parasomnia — a sleep disorder where individuals perform complex behaviors, including driving, while completely unconscious.

Maya had sleepwalked 14 miles, entered an abandoned building, taken a photograph, and returned home — with zero memory of any of it.

But the blood in the warehouse wasn’t hers.

The investigation is still open.

Forensic psychologist Dr. James Whitfield explains: “Parasomnia can involve actions that the waking mind would never perform. The sleeping brain has access to motor functions but lacks moral reasoning. In rare cases, individuals have committed acts of violence with no conscious awareness.”

Maya now sleeps with her bedroom door locked from the outside — her roommate (she no longer lives alone) holds the key.

“The scariest monster in my life,” Maya said, “turned out to be me.”