The last post

The letter

"im waiiitng"

Hi guys.

Graham has made it pretty clear again that he wants to meet. His exact phrasing was: "im waiiitng"

I don't know what to make of that, as he didn't actually tell me where he was waiting.

April's getting worse again, so this whole thing is starting to hurry! I wish he would just be straightforward for once.

It

Hi guys!

I thought that it was time we tried to figure out exactly what we are up against.

The only real information we have beyond what’s been going on is the books we were given, and they were not very descriptive.

As far as I understand from Marcusson’s comments, this thing is supposedly a specific aspect of a set of beings, along the lines of divine avatars in Huindu mythology. This reasoning is in line with some of the creatures referenced, such as the Naga. It seems plausible that something like what we are dealing with was once confused and interpreted as a creature of the wet underworld. The water and the tunnels seem to have been a prerequisite for summoning it.

Because while the Naga seem to sometimes have had benevolent intentions, the thing we’re dealing with clearly has little in the way of sympathy for people.

As for the idea of the Cyhyraeth, its scream could supposedly be heard before someone died. It therefore wasn’t seen as a danger in and of itself, but rather as an omen. Here too, it is easy to imagine someone coming up with the myth following an encounter with this thing. After all, we have seen nothing of it directly, but rather just the thing acting through people.

At least none of us have heard screaming yet, but that doesn’t comfort much.

April's current status

Hi guys!

A few of you have been asking how April’s been doing after she got back, and the answer is difficult.

For the most part she seems fine, but then she will suddenly snap at something insignificant, or throw worried looks over her shoulder. She spends most of the day sleeping, or at least lying still on her bed. Earlier today I thought she was sleeping with her eyes open, because she was staring at a chair for half an hour without moving a muscle. Then she just said “Poor tree,” and turned around.

We’ve been talking about what we can do, as it seems like she might have gotten worse from her excursion, rather than better, but that’s all I can say for now.

Thanks for worrying.

About April

Hi guys!

We got April back last night! I think she’s still sleeping, which is a good sign. At least I hope it is.

The only shame is that I missed meeting with Graham, not once but twice, and now he’s back to not responding to me at all. Marcusson also seems difficult to contact now. He seems to have the idea that he has given us everything he can, but if he can answer anything about what is going on with the culvert and whatever is affecting April, he will have to.

Note

Hi guys

I didn’t sleep at all last night, (we’ve been out looking) so I didn’t even notice this when I got home.

Right there, lying on a table. I don’t know whether this is more helpful than terrifying.

Meeting with Graham

Hi guys!

I was supposed to meet with Graham yesterday. He didn’t show. I don’t know why I am surprised. He has said, however, that he wants to meet up later. I’m not too sure about what’s going on, but with April missing it’s more important than ever to find out.

Why can’t Graham just give us what we need for once? And where is April?

Is it my fault she’s gone?

An interesting email

Hi guys!

This is an unexpected turn of events, but Graham suddenly emailed me.

He has avoided responding to anything I’ve written him, but now he doesn’t only respond, he wants to meet. I’ll be honest, I am pretty excited. He has given me a place to be this evening, so I’m wondering if any of you have anything you would like me to ask him?

I have my own questions, of course, but maybe there’s something I’ve overlooked.

Thanks for the help, guys!

The Books - Part V

Hi guys!

Final one! This was a tough one, because it had so many pages. Still, there wasn't really any writing at all, just marked letters. I'll be looking for some way to make sense of them all.

Download link to more book scans

The Books - Part IV

Hi guys!

This is probably the most interesting one yet, since I nearly overlooked something. It's called "The Supernatural Highlands".

Download link to the scans

What's interesting is that there was a row of numbers on the very first page. You can see for yourself. There's also the words "You wanted answers." I don't get what the numbers are supposed to answer, however.

The Books - Part III

Hi guys!

Got another one up. This is one from the 30s, “Asiatic Mythology.” For such a massive volume (several hundred pages in a large format,) there were barely any notes. Oh well. Almost through.

Download link to the scans

The Books - Part II

Hi guys!

It’s taking a surprising amount of time to get through these books, some of them are pretty massive, and I need to check every page.

This one is called “Ur of the Chaldees,” and is about the excavation of some ancient city.

Download link to the scans

The Books - Part I

Okay guys,
So, I've read through two of the books that were in the bag so far. I've decided to scan the pages which had notes on them, so that you could have a look at them.
I'll elaborate once I've gone through all of the books.

Download link to the scans

The first one is "Ecclesiastical Oddities," and seems to be a collection of essays about various aspects of... religious architecture. yeah. A lot of them seem either religiously or mythologically orientated.

Marcusson's notes were specifically found in a chapter on sacrifices used to support constructions, both houses and churches. I still don't know what to make of this.

EDIT: I expected 'Mysticism - True and False' to be a little easier to understand what Marcusson tried to say, but I am still at a loss.
That said, he was working off what seems to be the writings of a madman. Sure, a madman with the Pope's apostolic blessing, but this has to have been for people of extremely special interests, even in 1918.

Another email from Marcusson

Hi guys!

I received an email from Marcusson. It seems that he’s somehow suddenly willing to help, which at the very least brings us closer to Graham. At last. He indicated he was going to give me something, but then he went completely silent.

Of course, that’s not entirely true, as he literally sent me some sound. If it’s Marcusson in the clip, he’s addressing Graham, but I don’t know what to make of it. You guys have proven yourselves pretty good with this sort of thing, though. So here it is. I am hoping you can help me finally find Graham.  He has a lot to answer for.

Download link to the mp3 file

Marcusson's email

Hi guys!

It didn’t take long for you guys to find Marcusson’s email address, that’s for sure! And it didn’t take him long to tell me how he felt about it. I kept insisting, however, and in the end he said that he wanted to help, but couldn’t. He seems to both acknowledge he knows a lot about Graham, and deny he knows anything at all.

However, this morning I received something from him. I replied, but haven’t heard anything else since.

Finding Marcusson

Hi guys!

I would have been comfortable with waiting for Graham to make himself known, but now that he’s started messing with our archive and stalking the girls, I think we need to find him as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the only trace we have is the fact that he at some point worked for DevDor Waste. Wastewater South (as it is now known) owns the culvert, but I have been unable to find any other activity whatsoever from them. I even planned to order a new water pipe installed just to get a hold of someone from the company, but I’ve had no responses.

I really need to find this Mark Marcusson guy, but his email address is seems defunct… So, if any of you have had any dealings with Wastewater South or Mark Marcusson in the past, could you please get in touch? Even if you only have a contact number or a personal email address, I would be eternally grateful.

We need to find Graham.

Help

Hi guys!
So, yesterday I received an email from someone anonymous. They said they could help me, and that they knew about the culverts. Unfortunately, they haven’t replied to any of my questions. I haven’t really given up on finding someone who knows what happened at the culverts, so it would be great if this person turned out to know something, and considering they probably read my blog, I am hoping they will see this and reach out again. That said, they also told me that I should stay away from Graham. That makes me a bit suspicious, to be honest. There is the chance that this is Graham finally communicating intelligibly, pretending he can help so he can trick me into getting off his back. So, if you are someone who actually knows something, I would love to hear more from you. If you are Graham, I would like us to talk like reasonable people. If this is someone who is doing it for fun, it’s not funny.
Thanks!

A message to "uncoveredgraham" Part II

A message to "uncoveredgraham"

Hi guys.
Yesterday, a few of you have brought something to my attention that can’t just be ignored.
It seems that ever since I started this blog, there’s another blog that has been copying my posts. I was first made aware of it a few days ago, but it has been going on for months.

I have tried to contact the owner, but I’ve had no reply, so I thought it might be a bot. Going back though, it’s clear that my posts have been edited or rewritten in strange ways, to a varying degree each time, so if this is a bot it’s a strange one.

If you are a real person, I am sure you read my blog. I want to talk to you. You have been stealing the material I have been creating, and often spent hours researching, and that is not okay. I would appreciate it if you came forward and apologised for your theft, both in writing to me and on your own blog. If you do not do this, I will report you and request that your blog is taken down.

To the rest of you, thanks for pointing it out and showing your support, it’s greatly appreciated!

The Culverts - Part III

In my search for what I have been assured was a paganistic cult, I’ve had to dig into some weird stuff. My main contact has been the priest I mentioned in the previous update, but I’ve also had to consult some books at the local library. Yeah, when was the last time you looked something up in a book?

I had it on good authority that there had been a trend going around the region with vague shamanistic at the time of the culvert-cult, but I had no idea that anyone had taken it to such a literal idea. A magazine article I found referenced a group of bohemians living by “Four Branches.” At first I thought it might be a place, but some more digging made me think it might have referred to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. That’s a collection of written Welsh mythology, by the way.

I didn’t make the connection at first, as the only thing to guide me was the fact that the area around here was used for druidic worship in the time before the Anglo-Saxons. It is a “well-known fact” that druidic cults operated until the 1600s, even if I haven’t found any confirmation of this. However, once I looked up cult activity in newspaper reports from the 1920s, I found something. A group of people that moved from all over Britain to the region following the first world war gathered in a group of worshippers that referred to itself as “nifer o cyhyraeth”. I haven’t quite managed to figure out what it’s supposed to mean, but apparently Cyhyraeth is a being from Welsh mythology. It’s a large but thin, skeletal, wraith-like spirit that stalks people who are about to suffer a horrible fate.

Why anyone would want to associate with such a being is beyond me. Maybe they saw some form of divinatory power in its ability to predict death, or maybe there is some other ability that I didn’t read about that is appealing. Or maybe it’s just a misspelling of a completely different word. Unfortunately, I doubt any of the members from 1923 are alive today. However there are no later stories about that group of worshippers, which means that it is not impossible that some sort of religious tradition survived for some 65 years, manifesting in the culvert-cult.

So that’s my theory on who the people causing disturbances around the culvert were. I would have liked to be able to say something more definitive, especially as I’ve spent weeks researching this, but until I manage to get a hold of someone close to the cult, or even a member of it, this will have to do.

I hope you guys have enjoyed the culvert-mystery half as much as I have!

The Culverts - Part II

Hi everyone. As most of you know, this past month I’ve been working like crazy trying to figure out the mystery surrounding the culverts. The greatest challenge has by far been trying to find out what happened afterwards. There’s just no trace I can follow about anything. Who got arrested, why did it take so long before the police got involved, why didn’t DevDor Waste (the company that built the culvert) do anything themselves. Indeed, I can’t even get a hold of anyone who worked at the company back then, partially because it is defunct now.

I spoke to a police officer who was active back in the early eighties, but although he can recall the case, he doesn’t remember anything about who were in charge of it, or involved at all. The journalist who wrote both of the reports I am working off of is dead. I was just about ready to give up on the whole thing.

But then someone sent me the name of a local priest! I would like to take this opportunity to thank my anonymous benefactor. (I am sure you read the site!) Of course, with the involvement of stories of Satanic worship and rituals, it was natural to involve a man of God in the investigation. As it turns out, the priest (who also wishes to remain anonymous, but whom I am pretty sure does not read my blog) was the one who determined beyond a shadow of doubt that what was going on was not anything Satanic, but better described as pagan. Oh, and there was supposedly no human sacrifice. Best to get that out of the way.

I was surprised by how big the difference between labelling something Satanic and Pagan is. You see, Satanism is effectively a religion, a set of beliefs derived from Christianity, if somewhat twisted and perverted from its original message. Satanism is a faith, a pattern that every Satanist can follow. Paganism, on the other hand, is by its very definition unstructured. The way the priest explained it was that Paganism covers every faith that doesn’t have any centralised tenets. There are thousands of variations on Pagan religions, across the world and across history, but apart from similar gods or similar mythological creatures, there isn’t any correct way to view the faith (or a number of correct ways, as is the case with most religions). It is uncentralised and unorganised, by its very definition.

So the question then is what the culvert cult believed they were doing with their rituals or nightly activities. It turned out that that would be an even more difficult question to answer.

The Culverts

Whew, this thing has taken up a lot more time and effort than I thought it would! What started out as a short fact-checked suddenly evolved into a full-blown investigation, and I’m still not at the bottom of it.

It actually started literally underground. There is a local culvert complex not too far from where I live, a large mass of really old, tunnels and pipes carrying water out under a hill, preventing the nearby town from being constantly flooded. Ever since I was a child, I’ve heard stories about how “Satanists” (the most evil people children know) lived there, and how going there at night or day (it’s always pitch black) was a death sentence that would see you become the sacrifice in a horrible ritual.

The complex was never the home of devil worshippers, but I recently discovered that there was some truth to the stories. The culvert actually used to be the gathering place of some sort of cult, but it was broken up in the 80s. Of course, stories like that take a long time to fade.

With the only thing to go on being a newspaper clipping I recently found, I recently went to have a look with my girlfriend, April. No-one ever goes to the complex nowadays, but we were surprised to actually find things there. It’s difficult to explain what sort of things we found, but suffice to say, I thought it was some sort of prank, just stuff left around by someone who had heard the stories.

As it turns out, the stuff we found actually seems to be legitimate, and has taken a lot of looking into. The more I keep digging, the more I feel like an archaeologist or cult historian specialising in the late 80s, but there is so much interesting stuff here I can’t turn the opportunity down.

There will be some very exciting updates coming over the next few weeks, I’ll tell you guys that much! Thanks for being patient.

The Hairy Hands Follow-up

The Hairy Hands. Woosh, has this been a tough one! I have been looking around and contacting people in an attempt to find a satisfactory explanation, but in the end there was preciously little, apart from a woodcut of the hands from a former folklore recorder for the Devonshire Association.

In the end, I had to track down a copy of a 1972-book by Leger-Gordon on the folklore of Dartmoor. She clearly pinpoints the stories as beginning at the turn of the 1910s, and stopped already in the 30s. However, there are some curious variations.

In 1921, the hands became a national sensation by way of a number of headlines in The Daily Mail (of course). An investigation was carried out, and officials said the camber on the road past Postbridge was at fault, having a subtle curve that could force vehicles off the road, especially when wet.

Of course, that would not account for horses throwing their riders, ponytraps becoming completely overturned etc., which continued for another decade after the road was fixed. However, it is worth noting that a lot of people undoubtedly wanted to jump on the sensationalist bandwagon. Before the headlines, reports varied from “hands appearing out of nowhere,” hands springing from the reins or steering wheel to grip something else, or even a tall figure watching drivers, compelling them to twist their vehicles off the road. After the headlines however, almost every accident was described as being a result of “the Hairy Hands, appearing out of nowhere.”

It is worth noting that inexplicable accidents have kept on happening up until our day, but without much interest. Over the years, there have also been a number of reports from caravan-campers who have claimed the hands appeared out of nowhere to claw at their windows in the middle of the night, scaring them witless. All these are from after the national publicity, however, making them far less believable.

Nowadays, “Hairy Hands” appearing out of nowhere sounds quite silly, but back in the early 1900s things were very different. The fact that they were hairy represented something wild and uncontrollable in a world humanity felt it had more and more mastery over. Hairy hands striking with complete surprise clearly preyed on fears that we no longer share today, but which at the time must have been… terrifying. So who knows, maybe the Hairy Hands were just a particularly good ghost story of its era, which by way of coincidence and publicity has survived to this day.

Apologies

Hi guys!

I’m going to have to apologise for no case this week, but I’ve been really busy looking into something strange that happened around where I live not too long ago. Being a local, I want to do it justice, so I’m planning to make sure I have enough of a story and enough of an explanation before I give it to you.

Stay alert. If this turns out to be anything like it sounds…

It’s going to be a good one!

P.S. I’ll have a follow-up on the hairy hands up soon. Don’t worry, they might just be more innocent than they sound!

A short one today, folks!

Dartmoor is a unique region in Southern England, unlike anywhere you’ve seen, and its eerie nature lends itself perfectly to stories of ghosts and monsters, as evident by the hundreds and hundreds of folk tales from the area. Some of them feature the ghosts of lords, a great cat-like beast, or the devil himself.

However, one of the most curious stories on Dartmoor is also one of the most modern. It is the story of the Hairy Hands. This is a very special ghost story, because it has been reported several times by separate individuals over the course of the early 20^th century, and it all takes place on one, very specific road. The B3212 past Postbridge.

Drivers would come along in their cars or motorcycles, speeding across the moor, before they would be forced off the road, sometimes with fatal results. Surviving victims reported that it seemed as though some strange force had taken hold and twisted their steering wheels, trying to force them into their doom! The first reports appeared in 1909, and already then some were describing the mysterious force as a pair of disembodied hands, appearing out of nowhere.

The story gradually garnered more and more attention, especially after the hands supposedly caused the death of the medical officer of Dartmoor Prison in 1921. Two girls who had been riding in his motorcycle sidecar described how the hands had gripped the handlebars and twisted the vehicle out of control. Later, a Captain in charge of one of the Dartmoor military training areas barely got away with his life in a similar situation, writing an official report on the event.

Occasional sightings continued up through the first half of the century, and with the occasional fatal accident, but since the 1940s, no-one has suffered the wrath of the hairy hands. Today the legend lives on as yet another scary tale among the children growing up around the moor. The hands have migrated to the marshes around Postbridge, and it is said that if you walk among at night, the Hairy Hands will burst up from the bog, grab your legs and pull you under. I guess they found that to be a more effective way of haunting.

A Follow-up on the Southampton Tunnel Cannibals

The other day I finally got a hold of someone from the Southampton Local Heritage group (http://southamptonheritage.org.uk/) who seemed to know something about the story. She had spoken to several people who had grown up in the post-war years, and while they were familiar with the story, they never knew where exactly in the city it was supposed to have taken place. The victims in it had varied greatly too, with some telling the story as involving a group of children becoming trapped, others saying it was British soldiers instead of American, and some even placing it in the interwar years, blaming it on a collapse during excavations.

However, she pointed out an interesting link I had completely overlooked myself. Southampton is not the only city with tunnels supposedly haunted by cannibals. There have been several stories across Europe, but the one she thought most relevant was a disturbingly similar story from Rome. Supposedly, way back towards the end of the Italian Unification in 1870, some of the city’s catacombs collapsed under artillery fire while troops inside were waiting to spring an ambush. As you can expect, it was said that the soldiers trapped inside fell to cannibalism, and had to be put down when they finally were unearthed.

Once again, there are no official records of this happening, but the story could easily have been told initially as an illustration of how close Rome was to collapse when it was “saved” by the Italian armies. It is also easy to imagine that these stories had a resurgence against the backdrop of World War 2, and it is there I see our most likely link. It is quite possible that some soldier from Southampton heard the story of the soldiers in the catacombs while stationed in Rome, either before or after the war. It is not difficult to imagine that this soldier, upon returning home to see the destruction of the underground tunnels, was reminded of the cannibals and decided to give the local children a scare at some point in the decade following the war.

Of course, as with any ghost stories the origins are difficult to pin down, but considering the evidence at hand, this explanation seems highly plausible. Therefore, sadly, I must conclude that if you were to dig up the tunnels under Southampton, you would probably not find the remains of a tribe of cannibals. All you would have done would be to dig the foundations of the city out from under it.

Southampton Tunnels

Southampton is a port town in the south of England that is important enough to get away with the occasional nickname “Gateway to the World.” It was the port of departure for the Titanic, and today often welcomes the largest cruise ships in the world. It was founded by the Romans, and has been known as the home of Britons, Saxons and Vikings, with the archaeological digs to prove it. It wasn’t until the fourteenth and fifteenth century, however, that the underground cellars and vaults where built.

They are a famous feature of Southampton, connected to the old walls circling the town centre, and many of them are regular tourist attractions. Some of them are small, while others are large enough to house hundreds of people. This has been tested, because they were often used as  bomb shelters during the many air raids on Southampton during World War II.

Those same air raids ruined even more vaults than had already been lost to the passing of time and reconstructions, but today it is still possible to see several of the remaining ones. I say several, because there are some that are closed off to the public, and as far as I have been able to find out, everyone else. The reasoning is, of course, that they are dangerous, and being down there is considered far too risky.

There is, you see, not only vaults and cellars and small chambers down there. Between many of them run tiny tunnels, often too small for a grown man to crawl through. They criss-cross the network of vaults, and were either designed as a good means of making air flow through them, or as a poor means of travelling between them. Unfortunately, as they are difficult to find, and too risky to discover exactly where leads, the number of tunnels and their extent can only be guessed at. The weight and pressure the modern world has heaped on these structures from above is why they are considered a risk, with many having been filled with cement. Some, however, have proved too deep to fill, and therefore stay open to this day. It is the chambers connected and adjoining to these tunnels that are closed off.

At least unsafe structures is the excuse the city council will give you. There is a different version of this story that the children of Southampton have been telling each other for almost 70 years:

The only recorded use of these tunnels happened in 1944. Two companies of American soldiers that were stationed in Southampton (awaiting the crossing to mainland Europe) had been designated one of the now-closed vaults as their emergency shelter. The day before they were to set off, the companies were preparing in a field just outside the town walls. When the air raid siren went off, the soldiers knew exactly what to do, and within minutes were locked up inside the vault. There was barely enough room for the two companies to stand, but the soldiers waited patiently for the thunder of falling bombs to pass. That was when someone started hammering away at the blast doors.

At first one of the captains tried to deter whoever was outside, but in the end the pleading woman’s voice from outside was too much, and three soldiers pulled the doors open. There stood close to half a hundred children that had been on their way to the train station for relocation. The air raid had been a surprise, and they were now in mortal danger, caught in the open. The woman in charge of them pleaded with the soldiers, who were already discussing what to do. There was no room for any more people inside, but anyone sent outside would be at extreme risk.

That was when one of the captains suggested his company could go further in to a different vault, through one of the tunnels they had discovered. It was quickly settled, and – leaving their equipment behind in order to have room – the company set off, crawling through the rocky tunnel.

Only a few minutes away, they entered a new, darkened vault, and shouted back to the people they had left behind. Everything was all right.

A moment later, the entire vault was a chaos of screams, falling pebbles and dust. A stray bomb had struck right above. The violent shake hadn’t hurt any of the soldiers or children in the first room, but had dislodged something in the tunnel between the two vaults, so the other could no longer be reached. The soldiers on the other side had been buried under countless tons of rock and dirt.

Operations started to dig open the tunnel and reach the men on the other side, but it soon became clear that there was next to no chance there would be anyone alive on the other side. Soldiers were needed on the mainland, and unearthing the dead here was as little of a priority as it was on the battlefields of Europe.

It wasn’t until almost a year later a troop of reserve soldiers, awaiting their orders to transport to Germany, decided to start digging through. It took them four days to dig through all the rocks and rubble, but in all that time they did not find a single body. Then, finally, they reached the other side. The tunnel had been ruined, and so had large parts of the other vault, but there was still a lot of open room. A few soldiers went inside, and the stench of rotting flesh stung in their nostrils as they swiped the light of their lanterns across the dark walls. It wasn’t until they looked down on the ground they saw the missing soldiers. Some were only skeletons, lying in pools of dried blood, while others seemed… fresher, their skin barely loosened from their starved faces. And then, seemingly from nowhere, a pale, screaming figure fell upon one of the soldiers. It fought viciously, arms and legs clawing away at its victim. With a heavy stroke, it bashed his head in with a club, but as it tried to scurry off in the darkness, the three remaining soldiers brought it down, as it screamed and twisted in agony.

It was only later, as they pulled the corpses into the daylight, it became apparent that the pale and malnourished creature had once been a man. Its club had once been a thigh bone. To make matters worse, inspection of the skeletons they found revealed that their flesh had not rotted away, but that their bones had been picked clean by human teeth. And by more sets than one.

The vault was sealed, and in the final hours of the war the event was covered up. Shortly after the peace, the rest of the vaults in that part of town were closed as well. For you see, not every soldier in the old company were accounted for. Since several people had participated in eating their brothers in arms, the assumption was that the other flesheaters had been killed off by the sole remaining soldier, their bodies hidden somewhere in the tunnels.

But they sealed the vaults for a different reason; an explanation fostered by the shrieks and pained howls people heard late at night. There were still were cannibals running mad in the tunnels of Southampton.