horror story: channel 13 doesn't exist. but it found me.

I wasn't going to post this but here we go.

Winter 2022. I was staying at my aunt's place out in the suburbs of Gyeonggi for about a month, helping take care of her since her health was getting bad. Old lady, old house, old everything.

Including the TV.

This thing was a relic. CRT screen, no remote, you had to physically turn a dial to change channels. My aunt only ever watched channels 9 and 11 for the news. I never touched it.

Until one night when she fell asleep and I got bored.

I started spinning the dial just to see what was on. And then I hit channel 13.

The screen was fuzzy at first. Just static noise, kind of mechanical sounding. But then it slowly got clearer and I saw... a room. Small, grimy. One chair in the middle. Something sitting in it. I couldn't tell if it was a person. The camera wasn't moving. Just locked on this thing in the chair.

Then text appeared at the bottom of the screen.

"You are watching this broadcast."

I turned it off SO fast. Didn't sleep that night.

---

A few days later, the neighbor's son came over to visit. He started messing with the TV too, same as I did. Found channel 13.

"What is this, some kind of horror movie thing?"

He went missing that night.

Police searched everywhere. Eventually found his phone up in the mountain behind the village. Just the phone. No him. There was one last video saved on it. Shaky. Dark. And at the very end, a voice whispered:

"You watched it too."

---

I decided I was going to smash the TV.

Grabbed a hammer. Swung it at the screen. The glass didn't break. Not even a crack.

Instead the screen turned back on by itself.

Different scene this time.

My room.

Me. Asleep.

And in the corner of the screen, something in the dark was watching me.

Then the me on TV and the me sitting in front of it both looked up at the same time.

And the screen went off.

---

I left that house basically running. Never went back.

I still don't know what signal channel 13 was broadcasting on. There's no record of it anywhere online, not on any official channel list, nothing.

But last week I saw this listing on a secondhand site:

"Selling old CRT television. Channel 13 picks up a broadcast. Has anyone else seen it? There's actually a person on screen... and they're looking at me."

don't buy that TV.