The Frozen Specter in the Walk-In Freezer: Decatur, 2010

In the early hours of December 14, 2010, the morning shift at Hoyt Street Diner in Decatur found a perfectly preserved handprint-long fingers, palm pressed flat-frozen on the wall inside the restaurant’s locked walk-in freezer. The door was secured from the outside, and the alarms hadn’t budged all night, but the print was still slick with frost when they opened up. Kitchen staff said the freezer’s motion detector had tripped at 2:09 a.m., but when the manager checked the security feed, every frame between 2:07 and 2:14 was blacked out, only a static hum on the audio. No one claimed the handprint. The shape was too slender to be anyone on payroll, and the local police found no pry marks, no footprints in the frost, and no sign that the freezer had ever been opened. By the next morning, the print was gone-melted and seeping down the chrome wall in five thin, colorless streaks.