On July 1st, 2013, a funeral was held in Hallbrooke, a small town in California. Just a couple weeks before, 14-year-old Camelia Linton had fallen into a sewer. By all estimation, she had caught her foot on one of the rungs of the ladder, breaking her leg and, fatally, her neck. “She was so bright and happy. She had so many dreams,” her mother, Deirdre Linton, told us. “Cami” as she was often called, was found a day after the event. How she had fallen, however, remained a mystery to everyone.

Well, not quite.

Earlier that day, Camelia had stood up to the group of popular girls at school, often called the Mean Queens. She was cornered after school and pushed into the sewer in an attempt to embarrass her as much as she had their leader, Sarah Rakes. The death was purely an accident.

“All of us were shocked when we learned what we really had done,” Miranda, another Mean Queen, recalls. “Even Sarah didn’t plan on giving her anything but a few bruises.”

One would imagine that learning you have accidentaly killed someone would make you confess, but they didn’t. This would make anyone want revenge. And Cami got even. Oh, did she get even.

It started with images. They would walk front of a mirror and see not their own reflection, but the girl they had hurt. Usually she would just stand still and glare, which was scary enough. The Rakes familiy quickly had to turn every mirror to face the wall due to what their daughter would see: not just the way Camelia had looked in life, as the other girls were, but in the condition she was found in. Sarah would be tormented by a terrifying image of Cami covered in blood, with her neck tilted at an odd angle and a hideous, almost demonic smile.

Then, the messages. Usually they were admonishing words such as “bad girl” or “liar,” but they could be scary, such as the first message, “I’m back.” Beth Tanner found every single paper of her English essay covered in the words “scared now?” scrawled in red marker. Other times, words were drawn on the mirrors themselves, or pretty much any reflective surface.

Finally, the last straw was crossed. One day, the family of Colette Verdan heard a cracking sound, followed by a scream. They ran upstairs to find that a wall-mounted mirror had shattered. Apparentally, Colette had once again seen the Reflection, but this time it didn’t just stand there – the mirror had been punched out.

“The glass had shattered outwards. You try to explain it. I can’t,” Mr. Verdan says of the event.

The next day, the Mean Queens confessed to pushing Camelia down the sewer. Ella, the last member of the group, clandestinely planted some of the girl’s namesake flower around her headstone and placed a note of apology. Coming home, the girls found one last message: “You get what you deserve.”

One more twist to the story was yet to come, however. As it turns out, a man had been there, watching the event. He had planned to get her out, he said, but, as he happened to be her mother’s ex-husband, he decided to wait a little bit for her to fall. A double humiliation. Apparently, some suggested, Camelia had discovered his presence at the scene in some way, because on the same day the girls confessed, he was involved in a large pile-up, the only casualty who had recieved more damage than a few cuts. That wasn’t what got people’s attention, though; it was the manner in which he had died: eerily, his leg and neck were broken in the exact same places as his daughter’s.

And thus ended nearly six months paranormal events. Camelia Linten’s reflection was never seen again.

“It’s astonishing how much activity happened in such a short time,” an experienced paranormal investigator remarked. “What makes it unique is how it was limited almost exclusively to mirrors. No freestanding apparitions, nothing moved around, nothing going bump in the night – it’s not exactly a typical haunting.”