A woman from Washington, D.C. has gone viral after recording a mysterious figure she saw at night lurking in an alleyway.
Janet, who goes by @jannit28 on TikTok, reportedly captured the eerie encounter near her home.
As she filmed the unidentified figure, the “creature” appeared to move.
“I’ve been wearing these contacts all day. My eyes and my brain are tired. This scared the cr*p out of me,” Janet captioned the clip. “You see the face, right?!”
Image credits: jannit28
Image credits: jannit28
Soon, the comment section was flooded with theories about the mysterious figure. While some quickly concluded that it was a supernatural appearance, others suggested that it was a person wearing a costume.
“It moved😭😭 i would’ve LOST ittt omg,” wrote one user on TikTok.
“I don’t trust it,” stated someone else.
“That is a freaking person,” a concerned viewer claimed.
The figure appeared to move, convincing some it was supernatural, while others insisted it was a person in disguise
Many jokingly referenced the people dressed up as trees during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.
Others said Janet’s video reminded them of Tiffany Gomas, the woman who went viral for pointing toward the back of a plane aboard an American Airlines flight and declaring, “That motherf***er back there is not real!”
Image credits: jannit28
In a follow-up video, the woman returned to the creepy alley during the day for a “reveal” and discovered that the mysterious figure—the “monster from the other night,” as she called it— was nothing more than a tree swaying in the wind.
In the caption, Janet explained that the tree belongs to her neighbor and, therefore, she cannot move it.
The position of the branches and leaves, combined with her tired state at night, had turned an ordinary sight into something straight out of a horror film.
Even after the reveal, many viewers urged the woman to keep her distance
“The way this all lined up at that moment, the other night, had me screaming and running,” she shared. “How embarrassing because there are cameras all over back here.”
But that wasn’t all. Janet posted a third video in which she returned to the alley, this time at night, to get a closer look as her dogs barked at the now-infamous tree. Many commenters still weren’t convinced, advising the woman to “stay away from it.”
Image credits: jannit28
As one person noted in the comments of Janet’s video, the human brain is wired to look for faces and human shapes in objects.
This phenomenon, called facial pareidolia, likely evolved from the need to quickly judge whether a person is a friend or foe for survival, researchers at the University of Sydney explained.
According to their 2021 study, not only do people see faces in everyday objects, but our brains even process objects for emotional expression, just as we do with real faces.
Image credits: jannit28
“The brain seems to do this using a kind of template-matching procedure,” the study’s lead author, David Alais, told The Guardian.
“So if it sees an object that appears to have two eyes above a nose above a mouth, then it goes, ‘Oh I’m seeing a face.’ It’s a bit fast and loose, and sometimes it makes mistakes.”
Alias and the research team found that pareidolia images (“faces” in objects) are processed by the same mechanism that would normally process emotion in a real face.
“You are somehow unable to totally turn off that face response and emotion response and see it as an object. It remains simultaneously an object and a face,” the expert noted.
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