Horror story: the daycare CCTV always showed 7 kids. There were only 6.

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

When I was working as a teaching assistant at a small home daycare on the outskirts of Seoul, one of my jobs was playground supervision. The CCTV ran all day, and parents had requested that someone review and archive the footage once a day. That was me.

We had exactly 6 kids enrolled.

One afternoon they were playing hide and seek under the trees. Normal stuff. Next day I'm going through the footage and I stop. Something's off.

I counted.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

SEVEN.

There was a kid in a blue dress. Face not visible. She was hovering near the corner of the playground, in a blind spot, and whenever one of the kids ran she just... followed. Quietly. A few steps behind.

None of our kids owned a blue dress. None.

At first I convinced myself it was a glitch. A neighbor's kid wandered in or something. But it kept happening. Every single day that week the footage showed 7 kids. Sometimes she was running with them. Sometimes she was just sitting alone on the swing.

Then one of the four-year-olds, Minjae, comes up to me and goes:

"Teacher, a new friend came today."

I was like. "New friend? Who?"

"The unni in the blue clothes. She keeps asking me to hide with her."

I felt my whole spine go cold.

That night I pulled up the footage again. And there's this one moment where the kid in the blue dress lifts her head.

She's looking directly into the camera lens.

Directly.

A few days later one of our kids went missing. During tag on the playground. The last person to see her was Minjae.

"She was hiding behind the tree with the blue unni and then... she didn't come out."

They found the missing child's shoes in the corner of the playground. Buried under a pile of dead leaves.

The CCTV caught the last moment.

A child taking someone's hand. Walking behind a tree.

And not coming back.

I quit the daycare after that. I couldn't stay.

But sometimes I still pull up that old CCTV feed.

And someone is still there. On the swing. Swaying.

Blue dress. No face.

The new teacher they hired recently said something to me the other week.

"Isn't it weird? The roster says 6 but every time I count... it looks like 7."