A Tucson man’s bathroom mirror is running eleven seconds late, and he has chosen to handle this by not looking at it, which is one approach.

TUCSON, AZ — Dennis Farrow, 44, has not looked directly at his bathroom mirror since the third week of March. He shaves by feel now. He combs his hair in the car, using the visor mirror, which he has confirmed works normally and in real time. He knows this because he has tested it. He will not tell you how many times he has tested it. When I asked him directly, he said ‘enough’ and then looked at a point approximately four inches to the left of my face, which, given everything, I found understandable.

The mirror in question is a standard beveled rectangle, 24 by 36 inches, mounted above the sink in the main bathroom of Farrow’s rental house on the east side of Tucson. It has been there since he moved in two years ago. It functioned normally, by his account, until sometime in early March, when Farrow noticed that his reflection was waving goodbye approximately eleven seconds after he had already stopped waving. He thought he was tired. He went to bed. The next morning the reflection buttoned its shirt eleven seconds after Farrow had already walked out the door, which Farrow did not see but his neighbor, Patrice Odum, did, because Farrow’s bathroom window faces the driveway and the blinds were open. Odum is one of eleven witnesses. She described what she saw as ‘a man who really takes his time with buttons,’ and then I showed her the timeline, and she stopped describing it that way.

Community Notice

The Eleven-Second Problem

I am going to be straightforward with you, which is something I am told I do not do often enough: an eleven-second lag is not a mirror malfunction. Mirrors do not buffer. There is no mechanism by which a piece of reflective glass develops latency. What there is, and I am writing this down in my notebook under OUTSTANDING ANSWERS because I want it on record, is a growing body of documented cases — seventeen in the last four years, six of which WTC has covered directly — in which a reflective surface begins displaying a subject’s image on a delay, and in every single one of those cases, something was sharing the living space that should not have been. Three of those cases were eventually attributed to what field researchers classify as a Changeling situation. The rest are still open. I have the notebook.

I thought maybe there was something wrong with the light in there. Like, atmospheric. I Googled ‘can humidity affect mirrors’ for about forty-five minutes before I realized that was not a real question.

— Dennis Farrow, Tucson Resident

What Farrow has not done — and I want to be precise here because precision is the whole thing — is looked at the reflection long enough to determine whether it is doing what he is doing, or doing something else. He averts his eyes at the doorway. He has re-angled the mirror slightly using a piece of folded cardboard wedged behind the lower bracket so that the reflection captures mostly ceiling. He has not told his landlord. He has not called anyone official. When I asked him why not, he said, and I am quoting directly from my recording, ‘Because if I don’t look at it, it doesn’t have to be anything yet.’ I wrote that down. I underlined it. I am going to be thinking about that sentence for a long time, and I do not say that about many sentences.

He brought over a casserole in February and I thought he seemed fine. A little quiet. But February-quiet or something-in-the-house-quiet, I honestly couldn’t have told you the difference until you showed up and started asking about the mirror.

— Patrice Odum, Neighbor, Witness #1

I spent six hours in Tucson. I did not look directly at the mirror either, for what it is worth, though I did set up a camera on a tripod facing the bathroom door and let it run for four hours while Farrow and I talked in the kitchen. I have reviewed the footage. There is forty-three minutes of it I am not going to describe in this article because I want WTC’s research team to see it uncontaminated by my narration first, which is a professional courtesy I extend approximately twice a year. What I will say is that the ceiling, which is what the re-angled mirror is mostly showing, does not appear to be doing anything unusual. What is in the lower left corner of the frame for eleven seconds at the two-hour-and-seventeen-minute mark is a different matter, and if you are on the research team and you are reading this, please call me. I am in Gallup getting Dragon Ice and I have my phone on.