My real name appeared over a dark web livestream, followed by my address and a warning. A fictional horror story about Room 19 and a strip of black camera tape.
My real name is Elias Mercer. I was twenty-four when this happened, and I have not opened Tor since.
I need to say that first because whenever I tell this story, people assume I was some kind of hacker. I wasn’t. I worked in a warehouse outside Leeds, shared a flat with a guy named Connor, and spent too much time watching videos about parts of the internet I had never seen.
Dark web livestream: They Used My Real Name
One Friday night, curiosity won.
I installed Tor. I turned on a VPN because I had read that using both was safer. I understood very little about what either tool could protect me from. I covered the webcam on my laptop with a folded piece of black tape. I even switched my phone to airplane mode and put it face down on the desk.
For the first hour, nothing happened that felt supernatural or even particularly interesting. Most links were dead. Some were obvious scams. Others were marketplaces full of things I wanted no part of.
Then I found a plain page with one line of text in the centre:
WANT A SURPRISE?
Under it was a button marked ENTER ROOM 19.
I clicked it.
A video window opened. The image was almost completely black. I could make out a concrete wall, a metal chair, and something reflective hanging from the ceiling. There was no sound at first.
On the right side of the page, a chat scrolled past slowly.
LIGHT.
LEFT HAND.
MAKE HER LOOK UP.
GIFT.
I remember thinking it was staged. Some kind of horror role-play. Then a man entered the frame wearing grey work trousers and a black hood. He pulled a young woman into view by the arm and pushed her into the chair.
I stopped breathing for a second.
She wasn’t acting.
There are expressions people make in movies because they are trying to look frightened. This wasn’t that. She kept looking at the doorway instead of the camera. Her breathing was too fast. One of her shoes was missing. Her wrists were red before the man even touched the straps.
I moved the cursor toward the X.
A message appeared over the video.
Leaving already, Eli?
Nobody called me Eli except my mother and my sister.
I froze.
Then another message appeared.
Close the page and your turn moves forward.
I told myself it was coincidence. Maybe my username somewhere contained my name. Maybe the browser had leaked something. I was trying to think logically when the chat stopped completely.
Every username disappeared.
A single line replaced them:
Rain sounds nice on your window.
It had started raining maybe ten minutes earlier.
I looked at the curtains.
The room on the livestream was silent, but through my headphones I heard three soft knocks.
Not from the video.
From somewhere behind me.
I pulled the headphones off.
Nothing.
Then the page updated again.
Don’t turn around yet.
I turned around immediately.
There was nobody there.
My bedroom door was closed. The hallway light showed beneath it. I stood up so fast the chair rolled backward into the wardrobe.
The next message contained my full address.
Street. Building number. Flat number.
Then one more line:
Connor works late Fridays.
That was when I shut the laptop.
I didn’t close Tor properly. I didn’t disconnect anything. I just held the power button until the machine died.
I slept at my sister’s place that night.
The Laptop I Took With Me
The next morning, Connor called and asked why I had come home around three.
I told him I hadn’t.
He went quiet.
He said he had woken up because the front door clicked shut. He assumed it was me. When he got up to check, my bedroom door was open and my laptop was sitting on the desk.
I had taken the laptop with me.
I made him repeat that three times.
When I returned to the flat, nothing looked disturbed. No broken lock. No missing electronics. No muddy footprints.
But the strip of tape over my old desktop webcam—the one I had not used in months—was gone.
Two days later, my phone battery began dying in a few hours. The green camera indicator flickered on once while the phone was locked. I factory-reset it. Then I got an email from an address made of random numbers.
There was no text.
Just an image attachment.
It was a photograph of me asleep at my sister’s house.
The picture had been taken from the foot of the bed.
I went to the police. I showed them everything I still had. By then the onion address no longer worked. The email account was gone. I replaced my phone, my laptop, and eventually moved out of the flat.
For months, nothing happened.
Then, almost a year later, on my twenty-fifth birthday, a small padded envelope arrived with no return address.
Inside was the black tape I had used to cover my laptop camera.
On the adhesive side, someone had written four words in silver ink:
You looked better asleep.
I don’t know who they were. I don’t know whether the livestream was real, staged, or designed only to terrify whoever entered it.
But I know the tape was mine.
I had torn one corner crooked with my thumbnail.
That corner was still there.
