The First Image of Soul
- Luvv A Sanwal
- Aug 23, 2025
- 3 min read
This chilling short story and flash fiction explores the terrifying consequences of a scientific experiment that captures the first photograph of the human soul. Instead of light and purity, the image reveals a many-eyed entity that haunts the researchers, driving them to madness and disappearance. A haunting blend of horror short stories, psychological thriller, and sci-fi horror, it asks the question: what if the soul we’ve romanticized is the very monster waiting to be freed?
A year ago, my team and I achieved what generations only whispered about - an experiment that split belief from fact, folklore from science. We captured the first image of the human soul.
We celebrated that night, wine glasses clinking against the monitor glowing with our impossible proof. History, we thought, had been made. Even when the euphoria faded, I couldn’t shake off what I had seen.
The thing in the image had eyes - too many, far too many scattered like a constellation across its form, each one blinking in its own rhythm, watching us. Its shape bent in ways that defied symmetry, edges curling outward as if it were trying to tear through the confines of the photograph, as though capturing it had trapped something alive… something that hated being held.
At first, I thought it was exhaustion. Then I told myself I was tired. Hallucinating. That the static distortion was a trick of pixels.
Then the voices began. They seeped through dreams, laughter that wasn’t mine, whispers curling around my ears like smoke at night. They laughed at times, high-pitched giggles that weren’t mine, echoing inside my chest.
I wasn’t alone.
One of my colleagues stopped showing up to the lab. Another resigned without notice. The youngest of us, a boy barely out of graduate school, hasn’t spoken a word since. He just sits, eyes fixed on something beyond the walls, lips trembling as if answering questions we can’t hear.
One slit her wrists in her bathtub, though not before scrawling a single word across her mirror: “Eyes.” Another gouged his own vision out with a scalpel, sobbing about “making them blind.” The last one… he simply vanished. But at 3:15 a.m. every night, my phone screen flickers awake. A notification. A picture. Him—standing in the corner of my bedroom, head tilted, smiling.
I deleted the data. Burned the drives. Destroyed the camera.
Still, I see them. Not just the soul we captured in photo but thousands, pressing against the glass of mirrors, puddles, black windows at night. Watching me. In the bathroom mirror, I see my reflection blink a fraction too late, its smile curling when mine does not. In the shimmer of a darkened TV screen, I watch a pale hand press against the inside, leaving behind a smear, straining to get out. And then it looked back at us. Not the way an animal looks. The way a prisoner does.
Now? I don’t dream anymore. I don’t sleep.
Because when I close my eyes, I feel them. Not one. All of them.
They’ve been waiting.
Not to be seen but to be let out.
And last night… the glass cracked.
Intriguing!