In 2017, a certain video appeared on Youtube.
The phone recording presented a busy intersection in a rather large city, probably in the United States. The circumstances indicated the situation took place during rush hours on March or April, as people were wearing light coats and some snow was still visible along with blooming trees and grass.
The recording starts with screaming.
You can hear distant cries. Few people are seen running and even from a distance, it is clearly a panic rush, with lots of scuffling and pushing aside. There is a sense of confusion and uncertainty in the air. Among the obscured noises, one clear “What’s going on?” can be heard. The video is good quality, but shaky, as the person holding the phone is trying to get closer to the commotion.
Around the tenth second the chaos starts spreading. Pedestrians are now moving faster and more people are running. If it wasn’t for the crowd on the crossing, some would definitely got hit by a car as they are reckless and focused on getting as far as they can. The faint sound of police sirens can be heard at the moment. The phone user is now more or less 40 feet away from the center of the ruckus, getting a nice panorama shot. Two seconds later there is a scream somewhere very close. Mass hysteria ensues.
When the timer hits nineteen seconds, a girl in a green hoodie emerges from the right corner of the screen.
She is unnoticed by the camera person. The crowd is thinner where she appeared and she easily navigates among the pedestrians. You can see she is somewhere around her early twenties, has long black hair that covers half her face and seems less distracted than anybody else, holding her hands in her pockets and hunching as if having back problems. People are now running around her. When she gets closer to the center, a fifty-something man in a wool jumper turns in her direction. He says something muffled and the subtitles below read “Do you know what’s going on?” Before any of the viewers start wondering why this random voice is subtitled, as nothing else is, the girl says something in response, then releases her hand from her pocket and touches the man on the shoulder.
The camera notices the sudden movement in the corner and zooms at the scene, where the man starts twitching frantically as if having a seizure. Something happens to his face as it starts getting red and blistering. Three seconds later and the phone’s owner cries (it’s a guy) “Oh my f*****g god! Oh f**k! Oh f**k!” as the man falls to the ground, with an unnaturally swollen chest. The nearby passers-by watch this in fear, only to start screaming and running away.
The crowd, now knowing the source of the panic, began spreading, a vast wave of bodies that flooded the street, stopping vehicles. Some people run past the camera person, the phone catches glimpses of their horrified faces. We can also start noticing other phones recording the commotion. The police arrives, their flickering lights appear somewhere in the corner. The girl is now in focus, she walks toward another person and touches them. It’s a teenage boy, who makes choking gestures and starts bleeding from his mouth as his chest bloats to giant proportions. Two other boys, probably his friends, scream and try to run away, but one is snatched by the girl. He stumbles onto the ground, red and choking blood; the other one cries so loud it can be heard above the noise. Someone, a young woman, in the general confusion, bumps into the girl. She falls to the ground, not moving. The girl then proceeds to leap towards every person she is able to. She touches them and each one ends up the same way. After touching about four more people, for a brief second, she looks in the direction of the camera, grinning widely.
