In 1997, 12-year-old Marcus Delaney was grounded. Typical stuff—bad grades, skipping homework, a little lying.

His mom took away his Game Boy and made him clean out the attic.

That’s when he found the mirror.

Old. Dusty. Nailed into a wooden wardrobe with an etched border of what looked like symbols—Celtic? Nordic? Unclear.

But it wasn’t the symbols that were strange. It was the boy in the mirror.

He looked exactly like Marcus. Same face, same hair, even the same scratch on his cheek from a bike fall the week before.

Except… the boy in the mirror was smiling when Marcus wasn’t.

And he didn’t blink.

For the next week, the reflection started moving out of sync. Sometimes hours after Marcus had already walked away. His parents didn’t believe him.

One night, his dad tried to “prove it was fine.” He walked Marcus to the attic and stood him in front of the mirror. The reflection was normal. Until the dad stepped away.

The mirror didn’t show him leaving. It just kept the father in place, hand on Marcus’s shoulder. Smiling wide. Unnaturally wide.

Then the lights went out.

When they came back, the mirror was empty.

Marcus didn’t talk much after that. Years passed. He moved out, went to college, became a teacher.

But here's where the Why Files twist comes in:
In folklore around “liminal objects”—mirrors, doors, tunnels—there’s a theory that reflections aren’t copies of us, but entities watching from parallel dimensions. Waiting for a crack. A moment of invitation.

And the smile? That’s the tell.

In 2021, Marcus’s wife started noticing something off with their bathroom mirror. Sometimes, she'd catch a flash of a boy behind her. Grinning.

Marcus broke the mirror.

Inside the frame, wedged between wood and glass, they found a note. In Marcus’s childhood handwriting.

"Don’t smile back."