Coffman funeral home obituaries staunton va

My father has recently passed away last December due to cancer. Despite everything that my family and I are going through to grieve and try to continue our lives. His ex mistress is harassing and stalking my mom, my little sister (who is 15 years old btw), my brother, my boyfriend, and me. Not only is she harassing us but she got my uncle’s girlfriend who lives in the front of our house (we live in a duplex, where we live in the back and my uncle and his gf lives in the front) to become best friends with her and is now harassing us too. We have known about my father’s affair for some years now and despite my mom trying to leave each other multiple times, they never did. He finally ended it once and for all, a couple of months ago when his health got worse. When he was still alive she would just call my mom and dad from a blocked number constantly (we knew it was her though because they got an app that shows the caller ids and it shows her full name) and passed by our house from time to time. But now since he passed away, it has gotten much worse. Not only is she still calling and passing by, she is delivering unsolicited packages with dumb things like badly photoshopped pictures of us or objects (she has sent my mom a dildo for some odd reason), she has stalked and followed my sister from school to our house and followed my family and I when we’re driving out of the house (we have video proof btw), she has been cyber bullying using accounts with her actual name, she even has used her actual name to post comments on my father’s online obituary (where all our family members saw and used to post photos or comments to honor my father) and just being a bully and commenting things like that “we are not his true family”, she has access to our security cameras that my uncles gf gave to her which she admitted to (we have screenshots of photos she took of us which she had sent us through a random #) she has convinced my uncles gf to grab all our mail and give it to us either days or weeks later or sometimes has ripped or thrown our mail to the trash when we have asked for them multiple times and even confronted her about it (we have the USPS app where you can track your packages/mail), she has tried to come across as my mom when she would go to try to visit my father at the hospital (even though we alerted the security, nurses, and doctors about her), had tried to pass off as my mom and go to the bank to take out money under my father’s account (I’m pretty sure she had my father’s credit card on file) and she even showed up to my father’s funeral services. We told security about her but they didn’t do much help when she showed up with her 5 kids. They were able to get a hold of her but my uncle’s gf helped the kids sneak their way into the funeral and caused a whole scene in front of my whole family and loved ones. Trust me, we have tried everything to try to get her to leave us alone. We have gotten new cameras, we have gotten a new mailbox and even let our mailman know (but he keeps putting our mail in their mailbox), we have changed our numbers multiple times (my mom has asked her multiple times she has called what she wants from us but the mistress will either hang up or just simply bully us or call us names), we have alerted the bank about her, we have reported her twice to the police and have 2 incident reports on her and called the police when those packages arrived. My sister has talked to the counselors at her school to get some help. But no one is helping us. The police keep saying that unless there is any physical harm or she enters our property without permission there is not much we can do. We have even tried to get advice to file a restraining order but they told us we need “more proof”. We’re just so sick and tired of all this going on. And I know what you might think that we should just leave and move out of our house, but we cannot financially afford a new house or apartment right now especially since we are now paying more bills and trying to stay afloat after all the expenses we used to pay for my father’s funeral services. We simply feel so exhausted and unsafe in our own home since we are being constantly harassed and watched. We have confronted my uncle about this too and told him to stop his gf but he doesn’t do anything. It’s almost like he’s scared of her. We desperately need some advice on how to stop this once and for all, before it actually resorts to physical harm or not to sound dramatic but death. Which we believe is when the police will finally care. Please, is there any advice on what else we can do?

My best friend died in November. We are both in our early 20's and have been very close since we were 14/15. We trauma bonded due to having difficult family lives so we considered each other like family. We both have dealt with many mental health issues and I spent a good portion of my years worrying about him. A few months before he passed, he seemed to really be okay. He was in a new relationship, a new job, moved back to his home town after being tossed around the country doing military work, got a new pet and was prepping to renovate a fixer upper house. For the first time in my life, I felt relieved for him. All of those hours late at night when he cried to me that he would never be happy had finally been worth it. I finally got to he him truly live.
One day I woke up and my blood went cold. Something felt wrong. I texted my friend good morning. Got no response. Tried calling which usually always works. Nothing, but that shouldn't of been a big deal. I messaged his new partner and they had told me that they had gotten into a terrible car crash. He was ejected from his car and was in critical condition. His injuries... I'll spare the details but they were so horrific that it was crueler than death. He seemed to be getting better while in his coma but something happened out of nowhere and he lost all brain activity. His parents ultimately had to make the decision to pull the plug because he was already gone. He passed away in a city hundreds of miles away. I have a young child so I could not travel for the funeral. I never got to say goodbye. I remember the last text he ever sent me was him casually mentioning that his back hurt. The last words he said to me verbally was "I'll talk to ya soon." But we never did. I message him every day as a coping mechanism. I can't explain why. Something I tell him about my day or I rant about how angry I am that he's gone. Sometimes I'll tell him about my child but then it turns into be being so sad that my child is too young to remember him. The man I had him call uncle when he was 2. The person who stayed with me all night to takk when i had my first break up when i was 14. The first person I told I was pregnant at 18, the first person I called when I gave birth at 19. He was also the first person I've ever lost at 22. He was my best friend. I miss him so much. I read his obituary each day. I just wish I could talk to him one last time.
I mostly just want to vent but I'm open to any advice or comments.

Dr Daniel Vance was a smart man. Too smart for his own good, maybe. Forty years old, a lecturer in fluid dynamics with a mind made of shapes and numbers. No one knows why but one day, on a whim, he crunched the numbers on the apocalypse and came to a troubling conclusion. He didn’t share exactly what it was he’d deduced, but given that he immediately quit his job and liquidated his many assets, it’s fair to say it wasn’t positive. Swept up in the wake of this tremendous upheaval was his wife, a twenty-four year old PhD student who had grown infatuated with Daniel some time before. She loved the strange bear of a man who could just as easily build a log cabin as he could explain the idiosyncrasies of an asteroid’s orbit. Speaking to Daniel always left you with the profound impression he was right, so when he told her what he wanted to do, she agreed.
Fifteen years and five children later, the Vances were living in the distant woods just beyond my hometown. They were enigmatic, richer than the Pope, and extremely serious about their prepper lifestyle. But they were also funny, easygoing, and incredibly compelling to speak to. Larger than life survivalists who swept into town with bizarre requests that thrilled local businesses. Vast quantities of cement, iron, lead, and steel were all shipped through the remote mountains so that the Vances could build their shelter. The advanced methods they used to keep it secret were legendary. Daniel had once spent six months earning the licence necessary to drive HGVs up to his compound so that no one else would lay eyes on it. And on one occasion when a company had refused his request for GPS tracker-free vehicles, he bought them out wholesale so that they had no choice.
So when they stopped appearing in town during the pandemic, when requests for food and goods stopped and all contact was dropped, most attributed it to lockdown. They had a bunker and had spent their entire lives training to be self-sufficient in the face of civilisation’s collapse. Even Alexander, the youngest at just three, was already collecting firewood as a chore, and learning what local plants were edible. Most of us just assumed that if anyone could ride out Covid without breaking a sweat, it would be the Vances.
The reality turned out to be something else.
When the worst came to light, we discovered that Daniel had used the pandemic as an excuse for a dry-run. The family intended to spend six months in lockdown and essentially beta test their fallout bunker. Three months in and the Sheriff received a distress call on the radio. Coordinates were provided by the hushed voice of a sobbing child that most assume was Alexander, even though that’s never been proven.
The police arrived and found the bunker still sealed. It took hours for emergency responders to cut into the door, all the while efforts were made to contact the family within but to no avail. Once inside, police were left dumbfounded. There was no one to be rescued. No bodies. No survivors. There was evidence the door’s locking mechanism had failed and trapped the Vances inside with no way out, but if so where had they gone?
Beds and cots lay everywhere with mouldering yellow sheets, buckets close to hand with stains all around them. Some doors were barred, others smashed to pieces. There was even evidence of makeshift quarantines and, in places, what looked like violence. The police, usually a fantastic source of gossip, were not forthcoming until the town demanded answers and the Sheriff was forced to offer only the barest of outlines.
An outbreak of a waterborne illness had struck the Vances down not long after they were locked inside and unable to seek help. Rumours of contagion were overstated, fuelled by the unrelated rise of Covid. Whatever contaminant had killed the Vances, it was non-organic in nature. No need to panic. The Vances loved-ones had been notified. The bunker was going to be demolished, and we could all put this terrible tragedy behind us.
Of course we still had questions. A thousand of them. Why hadn’t the family called for help? They had radios, computers, smartphones too. They were survivalists, not Amish. And where were they? What had happened to their bodies? Why hadn’t they simply left? We shouted these and more at the town meeting but the police simply refused to comment. For most of us the excitement lasted another week or two until we realised we weren’t getting answers any time soon. Besides, the pandemic was in full swing and most of us had other things to worry about. The tragic story eventually faded until it was just one of those awful things in the town’s history that we didn’t talk about. I was as guilty as anyone else of just forgetting about it.
I certainly never expected to find the bunker out there in the woods, faded police tape still on the open door that hung wide open with scorch marks around the lock. It stood out in the woods like someone had cut a hole right in the fabric of reality, the darkness so deep and black it almost ached to look at. The sight of it made my heart drop into my stomach. It radiated pain. Does that make sense? I think some part of my lizard brain picked out details that wouldn’t become apparent to me until I got closer, like the bloody finger streaks that stained the handle from where someone had scrabbled furiously at the lock without success. And the tiny viewing window had been smashed with a hammer that still lay nearby. I needed only to glimpse it to imagine the family taking turns to stand there and scream into the woods desperate for rescue.
Under any other circumstances, I would have run.
But I’d gone there looking for my dog, and my light revealed a few wet paw prints making their way down the dusty concrete tunnel. Half Bernese and half collie, Ripley is the sort of dog who trembles in my arms when a storm buffets the windows and needs his paws held when we brush him. I love him. I do not have much of a family, or a wife, or even many friends. But I have Ripley, and I could no more have turned around and gone home to an empty apartment where I would have to sob my grief away than I could flap my arms and fly. He was my dog and I’d raised him since he was a puppy, and I wasn’t going to leave him out in those woods.
I went in after him.
I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. Whatever the police had found, they’d not only kept most of the morbid details to themselves, they had also lied. The bunker was not demolished, or even sealed off. In fact, looking at the occasional blue latex glove tossed aside and the one or two broken police-issue flashlights, it seemed like the last people inside had been in a hurry to get out. Given this was where seven people had presumably died, I assumed it was someone’s job to clean it all up. But the corridor looked largely untouched. Just a few metres in and manic writing started to cover the walls, the desperate scrawls of a lone survivor left there to be rediscovered like cave paintings. Most were deliberations on how to get out. Diagrams. Blueprints. Equations and formulae. All focused on the door and the circuits responsible for its faulty lock. I instinctively assumed they belonged to Daniel and that he’d been the last to die. What a God awful fate for a man to outlive his children. And yet it got worse. Slowly the writing changed from equations and plans to a desperate scrawl. The same few phrases repeated over and over.
Five doors. Five. Not six. Six. Didn’t make it. Didn’t make it. Six doors. Six.
It seemed like the kind of thing you’d find in an asylum. A psychotic rambling punctuated only by six paragraphs right at the end. Each letter was impeccably neat, and each small paragraph was topped with a beautifully drawn Christian cross.
Elliott Vance aged fifteen. A gifted guitarist. He liked boys even though he thought I did not know. I loved him with everything I had. He would have made a great man.
Alicia Vance aged fourteen. She liked to paint and to shoot. She had her mother’s mean streak. It would have served her well in the future.
Elijah Vance aged eight. The smartest of us all…
These were Daniel’s memorials to his family, and seeing the words lit up by my torch was a haunting insight into the overwhelming despair he’d endured. He must have realised he wouldn’t get the chance to speak at his family’s funerals or to write their obituaries. This was his last desperate way of making sure the world might one day know them as he did - as real people.
The words marked the end of the tunnel, standing adjacent to a trapdoor in the ground. It was not open but the tunnel came to a dead end immediately afterwards and Ripley’s prints disappeared at the hatch. I feared he might be in danger, but still I stopped and looked at the bunker door twenty metres behind me. The once gloomy forest looked so bright, even on this cloudy day, the air dotted with rain. A part of me felt like I was leaving the whole world behind as I began to climb the ladder down.
I entered a large circular living space that was packed with furniture and little nooks and crannies. The walls were covered with folding beds and tables and every inch was multifunctional. A dining space could become a sitting space, which in turn might be where someone slept, or even exercised. It all depended on what particular bit of furniture you unfolded or unclipped or unfurled. Seven people in close quarters, nowhere near enough privacy, it made sense they went with this cluttered overlapping use of space. But it was still a large room, bigger than most studio apartments. And there were a few corridors that led deeper into the Earth telling me the bunker had unseen depths.
I looked for some sign of my dog and soon found his trail, but this far from the rainy copse Ripley’s prints were starting to fade. After barely a few metres they petered out vaguely in the direction of a nearby door. I wanted to follow but stopped myself from rushing onwards. It was unlikely Ripley was getting out any other way, and I’d do us no good getting hurt myself. I decided to take a look around and quickly spotted a dinner table.
If I needed proof the police had not bothered with a clean up, this was it. The plates were still out, the food rotten to a strange blackened husk. A child’s hat lay across one place-setting, the once-creamy fleece turned a sickly green and yellow. The chairs had their backs reinforced with wooden beams fitted with long grooves so that something the width of a nail could slide into them. And on each of the cushions were foul smelling stains that looked oddly like an ass print. I touched one with gloved hands and the material crackled audibly. Whatever it was, similar stains were on the cutlery and plates, and there were even handprints of it placed firmly on the tablecloth. At first I thought it was blood, but that wasn’t quite right. It was too contained to be from leaking blood. On the back of one of the chairs a stain tapered exactly where a woman’s waist would be like a near perfect silhouette. I shivered as I remembered that Miranda Vance had always been a slim woman and wondered how she had left her imprint on the grey fabric.
Using my torch, I saw that these stains repeated in the oddest of places. Yes, there were some on beds and blankets and even patches of plain floor exactly like you might expect in a room full of sick people. But why did one stain on the floor bear such a strong resemblance to a child huddled in the foetal position? And why was the same stuff all over the tv remote, and on books on shelves, and board games too. Everything from sofa cushions to DVD boxes to piles of dirty laundry were covered in the same dried brownish material that gave off a foul coppery miasma.
I found the jigsaw particularly baffling. Someone had set up another table with four chairs, all modified with the same back support as those by the dinner table. And a jigsaw had been lain out with four separate piles, but only one was depleted. The rest looked largely untouched, almost like someone had portioned out pieces for three other people who had absolutely no interest in going along with it. Maybe Daniel had tried to keep up morale while the family were sick? God help me, if that were true I couldn’t help but imagine the poor man sat there with his loved ones close to death, desperately trying to encourage them to click their own pieces into place while they faded in and out of consciousness.
Something about that room emanated madness, and the longer I stayed down there flicking the bright disk of light of my torch from one detail to another, the more I wanted to leave. One door had wooden beams nailed across it. One sofa had been partially disassembled. Multiple beds had been burned. And all the light bulbs had been removed and put in a box on the kitchen counter top. Looking up at the ceiling, I finally had some insight into why the police were so confident the Vances had not survived despite never finding their bodies. Someone had jammed a human finger into one of the empty sockets, almost like they’d expected it to glow with the flick of a switch.
What was it about this place that had caused the police to leave and never return? Not to even take that finger and test it for signs of illness, or even just to confirm who it belonged to?
I decided it was time to hurry up and find my dog. People had died in that place, and while I’m not superstitious, I can’t be the only sceptic who has done the calculations in his head and realised it costs nothing to be respectful of ghosts. That bunker was cramped, terrifying, and the air stank so bad I started to worry I’d get sick myself. It served no one any good to linger. But I’d be damned if I’d just walk away and leave Ripley to rot down there. It’s not like he could climb a ladder and get out on his own (even if I wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten down there in the first place).
Summoning what little bravery I had left I called out and broke the silence, something which felt like a terrible taboo in that God awful place, like screaming in a graveyard.
“Ripley!”
I waited and hoped to hell I’d hear the pitter patter of his paws, but for the longest of moments there was only the kind of silence that makes you wonder if someone or something in the darkness is holding its breath trying to look like just another patch of nothing. Biding its time until you finally turn around and show it your back…
The TV came on with a blurt of white noise that was so loud and so sudden I cried, threw my arms up, and nearly fell backwards onto a rolled-out sleeping bag that looked like it had spent a week in the sewer. By the time I realised what had caused the noise, I could already hear a tinny rendition of Daniel Vance’s voice.
…I realise the issue here. I need to emphasise just how little I understand anything that’s…
I frowned at the screen as I approached. It showed a greenish infrared view of the bunker with Daniel upfront, and the dinner table behind him. It was grainy and hard to see, but I could clearly tell that his family were sitting in those chairs.
…Miranda was first to fall ill. Looking back it makes perfect sense. Miranda often went into storage to fetch food for cooking and we found it behind one of the refrigerators. So that’s–ah shit..
One of the figures in the background slumped onto the table with a loud clank and sent a plate spinning off onto the ground.
Shit shit shit, Daniel muttered as he got up and grabbed the woman by the shoulders and sat her upright. Miranda never did like my cooking! He snorted a laugh as he fussed with something at the back of the chair. The rods are much better than tape. All those hours spent taping them upright to the chairs. Never worked. But the rods… they fit right into the spine and with a little modification I can just slot them into the chairs. That way everyone is able to join in for dinner. I’m working on something similar for family game night.
Daniel wandered over to the camera and with a grin he lifted it from the tripod and scanned the dinner table. What I saw nearly made me drop my torch.
His family were long dead. Gaunt faces. Missing noses. Lips that had receded to reveal awful grins. These were corpses, plain as day, even when viewed through such a low resolution image. The only thing that made them seem remotely alive was the way their eyes still reflected the infrared back so that they glowed in the dark. And yet Daniel seemed oblivious to it all. He tousled Elliot’s hair. Kissed his wife on the cheek. Run a hand across one young girl’s shoulder. He even picked the young Alexander up from his high chair and I assume he coddled him. I don’t know for sure because I looked away, unwilling to see the poor boy up close.
Eyes averted from the screen, I couldn’t help but pan my torch across to that same dinner table and shiver as I finally realised what all those stains were. Not quite blood. But close. Liquefying flesh. Left alone for months, Daniel had not put his family’s bodies to rest. Instead he had moved them around from place to place and puppeted them, living life as if nothing had really changed. Looking at where those stains had settled I saw a clear pattern emerge. He had put them to bed. He had set them dinner. He had propped them up to watch TV, or gave them their favourite books. They even sat there as lifeless husks while Daniel waited for them complete a fucking jigsaw. The idea horrified me to my core.
…back to work. It’s obviously not part of the original designs. No room on the other side, not on the blueprints. Elliot didn’t believe me and why would he? I made every inch of this place, but I did not install that door in storage on the bottom level. I checked the cameras and some of the photos I took during the build and the wall is just blank. But the door is there now and it must lead somewhere. I don’t know when or why it opens, but it does and the next time I’ll be ready. Because I have to know what’s on the other side, and why it did this to us. Alone down here, often all asleep at once. Anything could have slit our throats and been done with it. But it didn’t. It took its time and I have to know why!
It took our radios and computers and phones. One by one. None of us noticing until it was far too late. I kept telling the kids they needed to take better care of their things, and even as they complained I just assumed the phones were lying behind some shelf. Where else could they go in a locked bunker? But it wasn’t the children at all. Looking back there are so many signs… who kept taking away the lights? Who kept draining the batteries in our torches? How long did we live with it before we finally realised we weren’t alone? Was it here every step of the way?
A door out of nothing that leads to nowhere, at least most of the time. Because I know for a fact it does not always open onto a blank wall. There is something behind it. I can hear it shuffling around in there, wet breath rattling in its lungs, a horrible sound I hear roaming these halls when it thinks I’m asleep…
I listened to Daniel, fascinated by this strangely compelling rant, when movement caught my eye. An infrared camera running in the dark, its image a roiling mess of uniform noise. What was it I’d seen? I paused the tape and rewound. Squinting, I saw two pinpricks of light in the darkness just over Daniel’s shoulder. Slowly, the image resolved itself in my mind. I knew what I was seeing and it turned my blood to ice.
Miranda Vance had turned her head, and her lifeless eyes glowed as she fixed them on the back of Daniel’s head.
…not even any point leaving at this stage. I’m no doctor, but that door is giving off enough radiation to… well, to kill a family of seven. If none of us had touched it… Being in the same room is risky, but not lethal. But given how sick we’ve become, it’s pretty obvious our curiosity got the better of us, one by one, and we all got too close. Or maybe not. Maybe that thing on the other side came through and did this. I don’t even kn… wait… what was that?
Daniel turned and the camera stopped recording. The image it froze on was of a lone man, bright as a star in the camera’s lens, facing off against unknowable darkness broken only by six pairs of white, glowing eyes.
I became painfully aware of my position relative to the table and I had the painful premonition that if I turned, those chairs would not be empty. I would see the Vances, all of them, Daniel as well, waiting for me. Heads turned. Bodies left to rot for years in the dark. Behind me something shifted. It breathed. Loud. Quick. I knew what it was. I knew. It came at me so fast that when I felt something hot and wet touch my hand I screamed, only for the presence to suddenly recoil. But then, without hesitation, it leapt at me and bore me to the ground.
I wept as Ripley licked my face. He was shivering and, worst of all, silent which was not normal. He was not a quiet dog, not when greeting me and not when excited like he was now. But whatever he’d seen down here, he clung to me and dug his paws into my shoulders like he wanted to be cradled over the shoulder, something he has been too big to do for years.
“Oh you fucking idiot,” I cooed in a soft whisper and even in the dark I could feel his tail wagging. Joking aside, I felt nothing but relief at finding him. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I picked him up, straining a little under the weight but refusing to give into tired muscles, and made for the ladder. It wasn’t easy climbing the three or four rungs to the hatch, but I managed it and gave the hatch a shove. First one hand, then two. Again and again, with everything I had, but still that hatch refused to budge.
“Shit!” I cried while pounding at it with my fists, but all I achieved was a sore wrist. The hatch had jammed when, somehow, the handle had been snapped clean off. Now I’d need a pair of pliers or something to cut through the metal bar locking it shut. My fingers couldn’t move it, nor could I brute force the hatch open. The metal bar was an inch thick and, at the very least, I’d need some tools to get at it from this side.
At least it’s fixable, I thought as I climbed back down and caught my breath. On one wall I noticed a simple diagram of the bunker made in chalk. It had three floors. The bottom was storage–Daniel had mentioned that before, and I noticed that he had drawn through it with a large red X–and the top floor was labelled Quarters, where I stood now. But the middle floor was labelled workshops and it was there I realised that I’d find what I needed.
There was one door that opened onto a concrete stairwell and, standing at the top, I shone my light down the spiralling guard rails unsure of what it was I hoped to see. There were only harsh shadows and the sense of something foul rising up on the air. A smell that tickled my throat and burned a little in my lungs. Had the police even gone down this far? Had they seen what I’d seen on that TV and just left? Somehow I thought it was unlikely that had been enough to send the entire Sheriff’s department running, so was it something else that had done it. Something that had been enough to terrify dozens of armed men. Something that was almost definitely down there.
The door…
I went down quietly. At first I considered leaving Ripley behind, but after losing him the first time I decided I’d rather risk it just to know that he was right next to me. Besides, he was being quieter than I was, and I didn’t feel much like going down those stairs on my own. He accompanied me with only the quiet click clack of his paws on concrete, a sound I found deeply comforting as I barely managed to keep my torch from shaking in my hand and my breathing steady.
Down one floor and I found the workshop exactly as you might expect. A large space filled with generators and fuel and water tanks and boilers and heaters and pretty much anything and everything that you’d need to survive but which you couldn’t put outside due to fallout. Wires pipes and tubes ran from one end of the room to the other and even years later, most of the machinery still hummed in the pitch black emptiness, an idea I found deeply unsettling. Taking one look at that strange tangle of harsh shapes and industrial figures looming out of the walls and floor, I shivered and looked around, quickly finding a small area Daniel had cordoned off for his own use. About a fifth of the total floor space, there was a large workbench and some seriously high end machining equipment, all very well used. Lathes. Buzzsaws. Drills. Belt sanders. Welding torches. Everything a man needed to do-it-himself.
And Daniel had been busy.
I’m not sure exactly what it was he’d been working, but there was an arm on the bench. It sat atop a pile of papers that had slowly turned brown over the years until the whole thing looked like it had been soaked in tobacco spit. On the whiteboard was a faded but still visible diagram of what looked to me like a ball-and-socket joint. I thought of the tape, of Daniel’s little mechanism to keep his family upright, and then looked at the arm and suppressed a momentary gag reflex. I don’t know if Dan had been working on posable limbs, or just a way to put the decomposing remains back together after they’d started to fall apart, but the size of the arm suggested a pre-teen child, and he’d left it out on the surface like it was a disassembled clock. It was also missing a finger. Just how fucking crazy was he? I wondered as I pinched my nose with one hand and began overturning boxes looking for a hefty pair of pliers, or maybe a hacksaw. Ripley backed away from the noise, but once I made sure he wasn’t going anywhere I carried on grabbing and pulling at box after box hoping I’d find what I was looking for. Anything to break that fucking metal bar.
In the end I managed to get a pair of bolt cutters, a crowbar, and a heavy duty pair of pliers. One went in my pocket, one went down the back of my jeans, and the other was clutched in my fist, too large to be tucked away in my clothes. The bolt cutters felt hefty in my hand which was a bit of comfort, but that feeling didn’t last long.
Something moved in the darkness, out there in the twisted jungle of shadows cast by all those pipes and wires that ran from one machine to the next. A figure moved. Thin, but unmistakably human in its outline. I couldn’t help but remember what I’d seen on that tape. Surely it couldn’t have been real? Maybe Daniel had rigged something up. Some fishing wire and a motor, maybe? The idea that those bodies had been moving on their own… I couldn’t be sure of that, could I? It was a frightening idea, one my mind had latched onto out of sheer panic. That was all…
And then I saw them. A pair of white pin-pricks reflecting back at me from the depths of that cluttered room. Ripley, already behind me, head nuzzled into my leg, pushed even closer against me and let out a barely audible whine under his breath. The behaviour of a dog who was terrified, close to pissing himself with fear.
Just a bit of metal, I told myself as the light shook so violently in my hand I struggled to see straight. Just two shiny bits of metal…
They blinked and began to come towards me. If I had any doubts left, they were dispersed by the sight of a pale white hand emerging into the light.
I ran straight to the stairs and went to climb them, but only one or two steps in and I saw something gripping the handrail on the top floor. A mouldy clump of flesh only just recognisable as a fist, the flesh withered until the fingers were basically bone. Without meaning to, I brought my light up out of habit and I saw the bloated face of a hairless corpse glaring down at me. I couldn’t even tell you if it had been a teenage girl or the sixty-year-old Daniel, either way I instinctively turned and found another body shambling towards me out of the workshop. I was trapped. Nowhere to go. By the feel of warm fluid on the back of my leg I could tell Ripley had finally pissed himself. An adult dog, tail between his legs, shivering like a puppy and desperate to be picked up. God I needed him to just stay together for a little longer. I couldn’t take him in my arms, but I couldn’t leave him behind either…
With nowhere to go I ran down and entered storage. There was the temptation to stop once I hit the bottom. Down here the air was thicker and the sounds of my breathing were muted, somehow distant. But I only had to look back up to see three pairs of eyes glaring down at me, so without giving any of it much further thought I barreled down the corridor and stumbled onto a door at random. Opening it, I saw what looked like your standard storage room, only most of the shelves had been overturned and the food left to rot on the floor. One or two shelving units were still upright though, and their shelves were covered in tall opaque boxes that made them a fantastic hiding spot. That, I decided, would have to be where I crouched down and turned off my light.
I was already inside when I realised that wasn’t all that was in there…
The door almost looked normal. I could see why Daniel must have been confused by it because it looked a little bit like all the other doors down there, but it was different too. It was too tall and too wide, about a foot and a half off the ground, and the metal rusted in its entirety like it had aged out of sync with everything else down there. All around the jamb was a profusion of wet soppy moss like the kind you find hanging off trees in a swamp, and every few seconds the door would leak something strange and oily, like the kind of thing you find in a parking lot on a rainy day. Of course that wasn’t too strange in itself, but the leak was horizontal, defying gravity so that every few seconds a large glob of the stuff would whip across the room and slap into the wall opposite creating a puddle about the size of a man that defied all reason.
Remembering Daniel’s words about radiation, I instinctively inched away from this puddle and the door on the opposite wall, backing myself into the darkest quietest corner I could while I pulled Ripley behind me and hoped to hell he wouldn’t give me away. Once I was in there I turned off my light and waited.
I must have taken longer than I’d thought to hide spot because it was barely two seconds later when a few figures entered the room. It was pitch black after I’d turned off my torch, but they made enough noise to let me know that at least two of them had stumbled in after me. I stayed there, unable to see anything, not sure if they were heading straight for me or just getting ready to leave, forced to hold out and let luck decide my fate. When I finally heard something scrape against the wall barely two feet from where I stood, I gave up and switched my light on, desperate to know what was coming for me.
The sound had been terribly misleading.
Daniel Vance was no more than six inches from my face.
“Get out,” he hissed from a toothless and cracked mouth. A living corpse just like the others, somehow a flash of intelligence remained in those wide, terrified eyes.
And then I heard it. The creaking of a door. And without even thinking I turned the light and saw it on the wall. I saw it open, and behind the strange steel there was more than just plain old concrete. Much more. I saw a raging gullet of flesh. A ringed tube of pulsing muscle lined with teeth the size of hands. A spiralling descent into madness. Hot foetid air washed into the room, buffeting me and the rotting corpses, all of us paralysed by what we were seeing, even if for most of the figures beside Daniel and myself, they didn’t have eyes to see with.
“What the fuck…?” I muttered, unable to take my eyes from the flesh tube beyond that doorway.
“It’s coming,” Daniel whispered as he grabbed me with one fist and hurled me out of the room. I hit the floor and skidded along a slick fluid left by the Vance’s footprints, the smell of which turned my stomach. Perhaps the worst detail was that it was cold. I don’t know why, I’d just expected whatever oozed them off them to be feverishly hot. But it wasn’t. It soaked my shirt like I’d fallen into a muddy puddle.
“It’s coming.”
This voice wasn’t Daniel’s. I couldn’t say for sure, but it sounded like a child’s whisper. One by one the bodies shuffled over to the open door and knelt before it. I don’t know why but I got the impression the others had lost pretty much everything left of their minds, but Daniel remained aware. He looked back at me once more and spoke before he pressed his head to the floor in supplication with the others.
“The only thing we did wrong was being here for it to torture. It didn’t need a reason, just an opportunity. Leave. It won’t let us go. It won’t even let us die. And if it catches you, it won’t let you go either.”
His forehead kissed the dirt.
And then something reached through the door and gripped his head in its palm the way you or I might pick up an apple.
In full panic, I ran over and grabbed my dog and the bolt cutters and I ran like my legs were pistons, machines whose signals of exhaustion and fatigue could not slow me down, or cause me to fall. I had to move. I had to leave. The hand that had grabbed Daniel… the sight of it flushed my mind clean like some kind of enema. It hurt to see the image replay in my mind but there was nothing else in my head echoing around except the sight of fingers with one too many knuckles, and nails as large as a smartphone.
I reached the top floor and nearly collapsed from breathlessness, but I wouldn’t let myself stay down for long. I crawled over to the ladder and climbed up and immediately went to work trying to cut the metal lock. It was hell with just one hand, the other clinging to the torch that I kept frantically pointing at the door behind me, and it wasn’t long before I fumbled one too many times and dropped my only source of light.
“No no no no…” I mewed. But there was no time to look for it. I had to get out and I had to get out fast! I couldn’t see but I was sure I could hear something climbing up those stairs. Not the steady thump thump of human feet. No this was different. This was a rapid pitter patter of a spider, maybe. Something with hundreds of feet or hands, or God knows what, skittering along the floor and walls and ceiling, pulling itself along with a body whose mere shape would offend God.
Using all my strength I leaned hard on the bolt cutters and, at last, the bolt gave. I threw the hatch open and got just enough ambient light to see Ripley hovering at the bottom of the ladder, growling ineffectually at the doorway. I crouched down, scooped him up, and fled up the ladder so quickly that my muscles turned to jelly at the top and I fell over onto hands and knees. But still, I was out. The long corridor covered in writing was ahead of me, and at the very end a doorway capped now by the tired blue light of a full moon.
Ripley needed no encouragement. He whipped down the corridor with canine speed and I followed at a broken and stumbling crawl, eventually shouldering past the open door and collapsing onto the forest floor.
For a few seconds I drifted in and out of consciousness, but when I looked up and saw the canopy overhead moving–the branches backlit by a full moon–I snapped awake and glared down at something gripping my ankle. The hand had reached out of the dark and seized me and was slowly dragging me back into the Earth below. Whatever it was, most of its body lurked out of sight in the shadows behind the doorway, but the hand that crushed my leg was the size of my torso with an arm that looked like it belonged to a mole rat.
I struck it with my own fist. I dug my nails in. I cried and kicked and screamed, but nothing could stop it. From behind the door, something like a face grinned and leered at me with joy. It was taking its time, sure enough, pulling me in so slowly that it gave my mind all the time in the world to appreciate the nightmare that awaited me. I think if, in that moment, you’d given me a gun, I would’ve shot myself because God help me I couldn’t escape the look in Daniel’s eyes, how he’d knelt to worship this thing like a man who knew that hope or pride or joy or anything with even a hint of goodness to it was so far out of reach for him it might as well be a dream. How long was this thing going to keep them down there? How long did it intend to keep me!?
I wept like a child, feeling like my mind was slowly cracking as I tried everything to stop that fucking pulling me into the shadows. I kicked at the earth. I dug into it using my hands looking for a root or a pipe or anything to hold onto. Nothing, nothing, I did would slow it down.
I was no more than a foot from the doorway when Ripley reappeared.
A dog afraid of hoovers and plastic bags and doors that move on their own. A dog who once got stared down by a particularly feisty rabbit who stopped mid chase and turned around, baffling the predator on its tail. A dog you couldn’t even watch scary movies around…
And he lunged at that arm like he was a wolf, like he’d always been one. And while he didn’t quite break the skin, the pressure was enough to make the thing’s grip weaken and I slid my leg out. Unable to stand, I knelt and grabbed the dog and pulled as hard as I could and now that fucking thing bled at last as the pressure of the jaws and the sliding teeth ripped into its flesh. Together, at last, Ripley and I were let go and sent rolling backwards head over hells.
I wasted no time waiting or looking or processing. I heaved the dog to my chest and crawled until I passed out, making it maybe half a kilometre away. Only when I could no longer see the door did I let myself fall to the ground face first and gave up consciousness.
-
The doctors said I had pneumonia, which I suppose made some kind of sense. I might have even believed them were it not for the Sheriff’s visit, asking strange questions of me as I lay in bed about what I may or may not have seen. I dismissed them to the best of my ability. I wasn’t interested in chasing that particular nightmare down, figuring out if it had been real or not, at least not while I lay there half-drowning in my own infection. To be fair, I had at least some sympathy for why the police had done so little to seal that place off. I have, on occasion, thought about going and doing the job myself, but to this day I still have nightmares about being pulled into the dark beyond that door. Not just the bunker door, the one I narrowly avoided at the end, but the one below. What I saw was a kind of madness, I’m sure of it, and I often think of Daniel’s words.
It didn’t need a reason, just an opportunity.
Somehow, the Vances were that opportunity. Maybe they built their bunker on a leyline, or a weak spot between dimensions, or the site of former Satanic rituals. I’m not sure it even matters. They went into the dark thinking it’d be a safe place to wait out the world’s troubles, but something had been down there waiting for them, waiting for a chance to get at a family of seven people, to lock them in and deprive them of escape and slowly take from them everything it could.
I’ve moved since then. Couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just the memories you see. It was the short-wave radio I kept in my basement. Something my father passed onto me when I was just a boy. God I’d forgotten about it… at least until I woke up one day to the sound of it blaring white noise down in the dark.
And buried in that sound was the faint whispering of a man, his voice barely recognisable, but unmistakably his.
…let them go let them go let them go let them go let them go let them go…

Dr Daniel Vance was a smart man. Too smart for his own good, maybe. Forty years old, a lecturer in fluid dynamics with a mind made of shapes and numbers. No one knows why but one day, on a whim, he crunched the numbers on the apocalypse and came to a troubling conclusion. He didn’t share exactly what it was he’d deduced, but given that he immediately quit his job and liquidated his many assets, it’s fair to say it wasn’t positive. Swept up in the wake of this tremendous upheaval was his wife, a twenty-four year old PhD student who had grown infatuated with Daniel some time before. She loved the strange bear of a man who could just as easily build a log cabin as he could explain the idiosyncrasies of an asteroid’s orbit. Speaking to Daniel always left you with the profound impression he was right, so when he told her what he wanted to do, she agreed.
Fifteen years and five children later, the Vances were living in the distant woods just beyond my hometown. They were enigmatic, richer than the Pope, and extremely serious about their prepper lifestyle. But they were also funny, easygoing, and incredibly compelling to speak to. Larger than life survivalists who swept into town with bizarre requests that thrilled local businesses. Vast quantities of cement, iron, lead, and steel were all shipped through the remote mountains so that the Vances could build their shelter. The advanced methods they used to keep it secret were legendary. Daniel had once spent six months earning the licence necessary to drive HGVs up to his compound so that no one else would lay eyes on it. And on one occasion when a company had refused his request for GPS tracker-free vehicles, he bought them out wholesale so that they had no choice.
So when they stopped appearing in town during the pandemic, when requests for food and goods stopped and all contact was dropped, most attributed it to lockdown. They had a bunker and had spent their entire lives training to be self-sufficient in the face of civilisation’s collapse. Even Alexander, the youngest at just three, was already collecting firewood as a chore, and learning what local plants were edible. Most of us just assumed that if anyone could ride out Covid without breaking a sweat, it would be the Vances.
The reality turned out to be something else.
When the worst came to light, we discovered that Daniel had used the pandemic as an excuse for a dry-run. The family intended to spend six months in lockdown and essentially beta test their fallout bunker. Three months in and the Sheriff received a distress call on the radio. Coordinates were provided by the hushed voice of a sobbing child that most assume was Alexander, even though that’s never been proven.
The police arrived and found the bunker still sealed. It took hours for emergency responders to cut into the door, all the while efforts were made to contact the family within but to no avail. Once inside, police were left dumbfounded. There was no one to be rescued. No bodies. No survivors. There was evidence the door’s locking mechanism had failed and trapped the Vances inside with no way out, but if so where had they gone?
Beds and cots lay everywhere with mouldering yellow sheets, buckets close to hand with stains all around them. Some doors were barred, others smashed to pieces. There was even evidence of makeshift quarantines and, in places, what looked like violence. The police, usually a fantastic source of gossip, were not forthcoming until the town demanded answers and the Sheriff was forced to offer only the barest of outlines.
An outbreak of a waterborne illness had struck the Vances down not long after they were locked inside and unable to seek help. Rumours of contagion were overstated, fuelled by the unrelated rise of Covid. Whatever contaminant had killed the Vances, it was non-organic in nature. No need to panic. The Vances loved-ones had been notified. The bunker was going to be demolished, and we could all put this terrible tragedy behind us.
Of course we still had questions. A thousand of them. Why hadn’t the family called for help? They had radios, computers, smartphones too. They were survivalists, not Amish. And where were they? What had happened to their bodies? Why hadn’t they simply left? We shouted these and more at the town meeting but the police simply refused to comment. For most of us the excitement lasted another week or two until we realised we weren’t getting answers any time soon. Besides, the pandemic was in full swing and most of us had other things to worry about. The tragic story eventually faded until it was just one of those awful things in the town’s history that we didn’t talk about. I was as guilty as anyone else of just forgetting about it.
I certainly never expected to find the bunker out there in the woods, faded police tape still on the open door that hung wide open with scorch marks around the lock. It stood out in the woods like someone had cut a hole right in the fabric of reality, the darkness so deep and black it almost ached to look at. The sight of it made my heart drop into my stomach. It radiated pain. Does that make sense? I think some part of my lizard brain picked out details that wouldn’t become apparent to me until I got closer, like the bloody finger streaks that stained the handle from where someone had scrabbled furiously at the lock without success. And the tiny viewing window had been smashed with a hammer that still lay nearby. I needed only to glimpse it to imagine the family taking turns to stand there and scream into the woods desperate for rescue.
Under any other circumstances, I would have run.
But I’d gone there looking for my dog, and my light revealed a few wet paw prints making their way down the dusty concrete tunnel. Half Bernese and half collie, Ripley is the sort of dog who trembles in my arms when a storm buffets the windows and needs his paws held when we brush him. I love him. I do not have much of a family, or a wife, or even many friends. But I have Ripley, and I could no more have turned around and gone home to an empty apartment where I would have to sob my grief away than I could flap my arms and fly. He was my dog and I’d raised him since he was a puppy, and I wasn’t going to leave him out in those woods.
I went in after him.
I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. Whatever the police had found, they’d not only kept most of the morbid details to themselves, they had also lied. The bunker was not demolished, or even sealed off. In fact, looking at the occasional blue latex glove tossed aside and the one or two broken police-issue flashlights, it seemed like the last people inside had been in a hurry to get out. Given this was where seven people had presumably died, I assumed it was someone’s job to clean it all up. But the corridor looked largely untouched. Just a few metres in and manic writing started to cover the walls, the desperate scrawls of a lone survivor left there to be rediscovered like cave paintings. Most were deliberations on how to get out. Diagrams. Blueprints. Equations and formulae. All focused on the door and the circuits responsible for its faulty lock. I instinctively assumed they belonged to Daniel and that he’d been the last to die. What a God awful fate for a man to outlive his children. And yet it got worse. Slowly the writing changed from equations and plans to a desperate scrawl. The same few phrases repeated over and over.
Five doors. Five. Not six. Six. Didn’t make it. Didn’t make it. Six doors. Six.
It seemed like the kind of thing you’d find in an asylum. A psychotic rambling punctuated only by six paragraphs right at the end. Each letter was impeccably neat, and each small paragraph was topped with a beautifully drawn Christian cross.
Elliott Vance aged fifteen. A gifted guitarist. He liked boys even though he thought I did not know. I loved him with everything I had. He would have made a great man.
Alicia Vance aged fourteen. She liked to paint and to shoot. She had her mother’s mean streak. It would have served her well in the future.
Elijah Vance aged eight. The smartest of us all…
These were Daniel’s memorials to his family, and seeing the words lit up by my torch was a haunting insight into the overwhelming despair he’d endured. He must have realised he wouldn’t get the chance to speak at his family’s funerals or to write their obituaries. This was his last desperate way of making sure the world might one day know them as he did - as real people.
The words marked the end of the tunnel, standing adjacent to a trapdoor in the ground. It was not open but the tunnel came to a dead end immediately afterwards and Ripley’s prints disappeared at the hatch. I feared he might be in danger, but still I stopped and looked at the bunker door twenty metres behind me. The once gloomy forest looked so bright, even on this cloudy day, the air dotted with rain. A part of me felt like I was leaving the whole world behind as I began to climb the ladder down.
I entered a large circular living space that was packed with furniture and little nooks and crannies. The walls were covered with folding beds and tables and every inch was multifunctional. A dining space could become a sitting space, which in turn might be where someone slept, or even exercised. It all depended on what particular bit of furniture you unfolded or unclipped or unfurled. Seven people in close quarters, nowhere near enough privacy, it made sense they went with this cluttered overlapping use of space. But it was still a large room, bigger than most studio apartments. And there were a few corridors that led deeper into the Earth telling me the bunker had unseen depths.
I looked for some sign of my dog and soon found his trail, but this far from the rainy copse Ripley’s prints were starting to fade. After barely a few metres they petered out vaguely in the direction of a nearby door. I wanted to follow but stopped myself from rushing onwards. It was unlikely Ripley was getting out any other way, and I’d do us no good getting hurt myself. I decided to take a look around and quickly spotted a dinner table.
If I needed proof the police had not bothered with a clean up, this was it. The plates were still out, the food rotten to a strange blackened husk. A child’s hat lay across one place-setting, the once-creamy fleece turned a sickly green and yellow. The chairs had their backs reinforced with wooden beams fitted with long grooves so that something the width of a nail could slide into them. And on each of the cushions were foul smelling stains that looked oddly like an ass print. I touched one with gloved hands and the material crackled audibly. Whatever it was, similar stains were on the cutlery and plates, and there were even handprints of it placed firmly on the tablecloth. At first I thought it was blood, but that wasn’t quite right. It was too contained to be from leaking blood. On the back of one of the chairs a stain tapered exactly where a woman’s waist would be like a near perfect silhouette. I shivered as I remembered that Miranda Vance had always been a slim woman and wondered how she had left her imprint on the grey fabric.
Using my torch, I saw that these stains repeated in the oddest of places. Yes, there were some on beds and blankets and even patches of plain floor exactly like you might expect in a room full of sick people. But why did one stain on the floor bear such a strong resemblance to a child huddled in the foetal position? And why was the same stuff all over the tv remote, and on books on shelves, and board games too. Everything from sofa cushions to DVD boxes to piles of dirty laundry were covered in the same dried brownish material that gave off a foul coppery miasma.
I found the jigsaw particularly baffling. Someone had set up another table with four chairs, all modified with the same back support as those by the dinner table. And a jigsaw had been lain out with four separate piles, but only one was depleted. The rest looked largely untouched, almost like someone had portioned out pieces for three other people who had absolutely no interest in going along with it. Maybe Daniel had tried to keep up morale while the family were sick? God help me, if that were true I couldn’t help but imagine the poor man sat there with his loved ones close to death, desperately trying to encourage them to click their own pieces into place while they faded in and out of consciousness.
Something about that room emanated madness, and the longer I stayed down there flicking the bright disk of light of my torch from one detail to another, the more I wanted to leave. One door had wooden beams nailed across it. One sofa had been partially disassembled. Multiple beds had been burned. And all the light bulbs had been removed and put in a box on the kitchen counter top. Looking up at the ceiling, I finally had some insight into why the police were so confident the Vances had not survived despite never finding their bodies. Someone had jammed a human finger into one of the empty sockets, almost like they’d expected it to glow with the flick of a switch.
What was it about this place that had caused the police to leave and never return? Not to even take that finger and test it for signs of illness, or even just to confirm who it belonged to?
I decided it was time to hurry up and find my dog. People had died in that place, and while I’m not superstitious, I can’t be the only sceptic who has done the calculations in his head and realised it costs nothing to be respectful of ghosts. That bunker was cramped, terrifying, and the air stank so bad I started to worry I’d get sick myself. It served no one any good to linger. But I’d be damned if I’d just walk away and leave Ripley to rot down there. It’s not like he could climb a ladder and get out on his own (even if I wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten down there in the first place).
Summoning what little bravery I had left I called out and broke the silence, something which felt like a terrible taboo in that God awful place, like screaming in a graveyard.
“Ripley!”
I waited and hoped to hell I’d hear the pitter patter of his paws, but for the longest of moments there was only the kind of silence that makes you wonder if someone or something in the darkness is holding its breath trying to look like just another patch of nothing. Biding its time until you finally turn around and show it your back…
The TV came on with a blurt of white noise that was so loud and so sudden I cried, threw my arms up, and nearly fell backwards onto a rolled-out sleeping bag that looked like it had spent a week in the sewer. By the time I realised what had caused the noise, I could already hear a tinny rendition of Daniel Vance’s voice.
…I realise the issue here. I need to emphasise just how little I understand anything that’s…
I frowned at the screen as I approached. It showed a greenish infrared view of the bunker with Daniel upfront, and the dinner table behind him. It was grainy and hard to see, but I could clearly tell that his family were sitting in those chairs.
…Miranda was first to fall ill. Looking back it makes perfect sense. Miranda often went into storage to fetch food for cooking and we found it behind one of the refrigerators. So that’s–ah shit..
One of the figures in the background slumped onto the table with a loud clank and sent a plate spinning off onto the ground.
Shit shit shit, Daniel muttered as he got up and grabbed the woman by the shoulders and sat her upright. Miranda never did like my cooking! He snorted a laugh as he fussed with something at the back of the chair. The rods are much better than tape. All those hours spent taping them upright to the chairs. Never worked. But the rods… they fit right into the spine and with a little modification I can just slot them into the chairs. That way everyone is able to join in for dinner. I’m working on something similar for family game night.
Daniel wandered over to the camera and with a grin he lifted it from the tripod and scanned the dinner table. What I saw nearly made me drop my torch.
His family were long dead. Gaunt faces. Missing noses. Lips that had receded to reveal awful grins. These were corpses, plain as day, even when viewed through such a low resolution image. The only thing that made them seem remotely alive was the way their eyes still reflected the infrared back so that they glowed in the dark. And yet Daniel seemed oblivious to it all. He tousled Elliot’s hair. Kissed his wife on the cheek. Run a hand across one young girl’s shoulder. He even picked the young Alexander up from his high chair and I assume he coddled him. I don’t know for sure because I looked away, unwilling to see the poor boy up close.
Eyes averted from the screen, I couldn’t help but pan my torch across to that same dinner table and shiver as I finally realised what all those stains were. Not quite blood. But close. Liquefying flesh. Left alone for months, Daniel had not put his family’s bodies to rest. Instead he had moved them around from place to place and puppeted them, living life as if nothing had really changed. Looking at where those stains had settled I saw a clear pattern emerge. He had put them to bed. He had set them dinner. He had propped them up to watch TV, or gave them their favourite books. They even sat there as lifeless husks while Daniel waited for them complete a fucking jigsaw. The idea horrified me to my core.
…back to work. It’s obviously not part of the original designs. No room on the other side, not on the blueprints. Elliot didn’t believe me and why would he? I made every inch of this place, but I did not install that door in storage on the bottom level. I checked the cameras and some of the photos I took during the build and the wall is just blank. But the door is there now and it must lead somewhere. I don’t know when or why it opens, but it does and the next time I’ll be ready. Because I have to know what’s on the other side, and why it did this to us. Alone down here, often all asleep at once. Anything could have slit our throats and been done with it. But it didn’t. It took its time and I have to know why!
It took our radios and computers and phones. One by one. None of us noticing until it was far too late. I kept telling the kids they needed to take better care of their things, and even as they complained I just assumed the phones were lying behind some shelf. Where else could they go in a locked bunker? But it wasn’t the children at all. Looking back there are so many signs… who kept taking away the lights? Who kept draining the batteries in our torches? How long did we live with it before we finally realised we weren’t alone? Was it here every step of the way?
A door out of nothing that leads to nowhere, at least most of the time. Because I know for a fact it does not always open onto a blank wall. There is something behind it. I can hear it shuffling around in there, wet breath rattling in its lungs, a horrible sound I hear roaming these halls when it thinks I’m asleep…
I listened to Daniel, fascinated by this strangely compelling rant, when movement caught my eye. An infrared camera running in the dark, its image a roiling mess of uniform noise. What was it I’d seen? I paused the tape and rewound. Squinting, I saw two pinpricks of light in the darkness just over Daniel’s shoulder. Slowly, the image resolved itself in my mind. I knew what I was seeing and it turned my blood to ice.
Miranda Vance had turned her head, and her lifeless eyes glowed as she fixed them on the back of Daniel’s head.
…not even any point leaving at this stage. I’m no doctor, but that door is giving off enough radiation to… well, to kill a family of seven. If none of us had touched it… Being in the same room is risky, but not lethal. But given how sick we’ve become, it’s pretty obvious our curiosity got the better of us, one by one, and we all got too close. Or maybe not. Maybe that thing on the other side came through and did this. I don’t even kn… wait… what was that?
Daniel turned and the camera stopped recording. The image it froze on was of a lone man, bright as a star in the camera’s lens, facing off against unknowable darkness broken only by six pairs of white, glowing eyes.
I became painfully aware of my position relative to the table and I had the painful premonition that if I turned, those chairs would not be empty. I would see the Vances, all of them, Daniel as well, waiting for me. Heads turned. Bodies left to rot for years in the dark. Behind me something shifted. It breathed. Loud. Quick. I knew what it was. I knew. It came at me so fast that when I felt something hot and wet touch my hand I screamed, only for the presence to suddenly recoil. But then, without hesitation, it leapt at me and bore me to the ground.
I wept as Ripley licked my face. He was shivering and, worst of all, silent which was not normal. He was not a quiet dog, not when greeting me and not when excited like he was now. But whatever he’d seen down here, he clung to me and dug his paws into my shoulders like he wanted to be cradled over the shoulder, something he has been too big to do for years.
“Oh you fucking idiot,” I cooed in a soft whisper and even in the dark I could feel his tail wagging. Joking aside, I felt nothing but relief at finding him. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I picked him up, straining a little under the weight but refusing to give into tired muscles, and made for the ladder. It wasn’t easy climbing the three or four rungs to the hatch, but I managed it and gave the hatch a shove. First one hand, then two. Again and again, with everything I had, but still that hatch refused to budge.
“Shit!” I cried while pounding at it with my fists, but all I achieved was a sore wrist. The hatch had jammed when, somehow, the handle had been snapped clean off. Now I’d need a pair of pliers or something to cut through the metal bar locking it shut. My fingers couldn’t move it, nor could I brute force the hatch open. The metal bar was an inch thick and, at the very least, I’d need some tools to get at it from this side.
At least it’s fixable, I thought as I climbed back down and caught my breath. On one wall I noticed a simple diagram of the bunker made in chalk. It had three floors. The bottom was storage–Daniel had mentioned that before, and I noticed that he had drawn through it with a large red X–and the top floor was labelled Quarters, where I stood now. But the middle floor was labelled workshops and it was there I realised that I’d find what I needed.
There was one door that opened onto a concrete stairwell and, standing at the top, I shone my light down the spiralling guard rails unsure of what it was I hoped to see. There were only harsh shadows and the sense of something foul rising up on the air. A smell that tickled my throat and burned a little in my lungs. Had the police even gone down this far? Had they seen what I’d seen on that TV and just left? Somehow I thought it was unlikely that had been enough to send the entire Sheriff’s department running, so was it something else that had done it. Something that had been enough to terrify dozens of armed men. Something that was almost definitely down there.
The door…
I went down quietly. At first I considered leaving Ripley behind, but after losing him the first time I decided I’d rather risk it just to know that he was right next to me. Besides, he was being quieter than I was, and I didn’t feel much like going down those stairs on my own. He accompanied me with only the quiet click clack of his paws on concrete, a sound I found deeply comforting as I barely managed to keep my torch from shaking in my hand and my breathing steady.
Down one floor and I found the workshop exactly as you might expect. A large space filled with generators and fuel and water tanks and boilers and heaters and pretty much anything and everything that you’d need to survive but which you couldn’t put outside due to fallout. Wires pipes and tubes ran from one end of the room to the other and even years later, most of the machinery still hummed in the pitch black emptiness, an idea I found deeply unsettling. Taking one look at that strange tangle of harsh shapes and industrial figures looming out of the walls and floor, I shivered and looked around, quickly finding a small area Daniel had cordoned off for his own use. About a fifth of the total floor space, there was a large workbench and some seriously high end machining equipment, all very well used. Lathes. Buzzsaws. Drills. Belt sanders. Welding torches. Everything a man needed to do-it-himself.
And Daniel had been busy.
I’m not sure exactly what it was he’d been working, but there was an arm on the bench. It sat atop a pile of papers that had slowly turned brown over the years until the whole thing looked like it had been soaked in tobacco spit. On the whiteboard was a faded but still visible diagram of what looked to me like a ball-and-socket joint. I thought of the tape, of Daniel’s little mechanism to keep his family upright, and then looked at the arm and suppressed a momentary gag reflex. I don’t know if Dan had been working on posable limbs, or just a way to put the decomposing remains back together after they’d started to fall apart, but the size of the arm suggested a pre-teen child, and he’d left it out on the surface like it was a disassembled clock. It was also missing a finger. Just how fucking crazy was he? I wondered as I pinched my nose with one hand and began overturning boxes looking for a hefty pair of pliers, or maybe a hacksaw. Ripley backed away from the noise, but once I made sure he wasn’t going anywhere I carried on grabbing and pulling at box after box hoping I’d find what I was looking for. Anything to break that fucking metal bar.
In the end I managed to get a pair of bolt cutters, a crowbar, and a heavy duty pair of pliers. One went in my pocket, one went down the back of my jeans, and the other was clutched in my fist, too large to be tucked away in my clothes. The bolt cutters felt hefty in my hand which was a bit of comfort, but that feeling didn’t last long.
Something moved in the darkness, out there in the twisted jungle of shadows cast by all those pipes and wires that ran from one machine to the next. A figure moved. Thin, but unmistakably human in its outline. I couldn’t help but remember what I’d seen on that tape. Surely it couldn’t have been real? Maybe Daniel had rigged something up. Some fishing wire and a motor, maybe? The idea that those bodies had been moving on their own… I couldn’t be sure of that, could I? It was a frightening idea, one my mind had latched onto out of sheer panic. That was all…
And then I saw them. A pair of white pin-pricks reflecting back at me from the depths of that cluttered room. Ripley, already behind me, head nuzzled into my leg, pushed even closer against me and let out a barely audible whine under his breath. The behaviour of a dog who was terrified, close to pissing himself with fear.
Just a bit of metal, I told myself as the light shook so violently in my hand I struggled to see straight. Just two shiny bits of metal…
They blinked and began to come towards me. If I had any doubts left, they were dispersed by the sight of a pale white hand emerging into the light.
I ran straight to the stairs and went to climb them, but only one or two steps in and I saw something gripping the handrail on the top floor. A mouldy clump of flesh only just recognisable as a fist, the flesh withered until the fingers were basically bone. Without meaning to, I brought my light up out of habit and I saw the bloated face of a hairless corpse glaring down at me. I couldn’t even tell you if it had been a teenage girl or the sixty-year-old Daniel, either way I instinctively turned and found another body shambling towards me out of the workshop. I was trapped. Nowhere to go. By the feel of warm fluid on the back of my leg I could tell Ripley had finally pissed himself. An adult dog, tail between his legs, shivering like a puppy and desperate to be picked up. God I needed him to just stay together for a little longer. I couldn’t take him in my arms, but I couldn’t leave him behind either…
With nowhere to go I ran down and entered storage. There was the temptation to stop once I hit the bottom. Down here the air was thicker and the sounds of my breathing were muted, somehow distant. But I only had to look back up to see three pairs of eyes glaring down at me, so without giving any of it much further thought I barreled down the corridor and stumbled onto a door at random. Opening it, I saw what looked like your standard storage room, only most of the shelves had been overturned and the food left to rot on the floor. One or two shelving units were still upright though, and their shelves were covered in tall opaque boxes that made them a fantastic hiding spot. That, I decided, would have to be where I crouched down and turned off my light.
I was already inside when I realised that wasn’t all that was in there…
The door almost looked normal. I could see why Daniel must have been confused by it because it looked a little bit like all the other doors down there, but it was different too. It was too tall and too wide, about a foot and a half off the ground, and the metal rusted in its entirety like it had aged out of sync with everything else down there. All around the jamb was a profusion of wet soppy moss like the kind you find hanging off trees in a swamp, and every few seconds the door would leak something strange and oily, like the kind of thing you find in a parking lot on a rainy day. Of course that wasn’t too strange in itself, but the leak was horizontal, defying gravity so that every few seconds a large glob of the stuff would whip across the room and slap into the wall opposite creating a puddle about the size of a man that defied all reason.
Remembering Daniel’s words about radiation, I instinctively inched away from this puddle and the door on the opposite wall, backing myself into the darkest quietest corner I could while I pulled Ripley behind me and hoped to hell he wouldn’t give me away. Once I was in there I turned off my light and waited.
I must have taken longer than I’d thought to hide spot because it was barely two seconds later when a few figures entered the room. It was pitch black after I’d turned off my torch, but they made enough noise to let me know that at least two of them had stumbled in after me. I stayed there, unable to see anything, not sure if they were heading straight for me or just getting ready to leave, forced to hold out and let luck decide my fate. When I finally heard something scrape against the wall barely two feet from where I stood, I gave up and switched my light on, desperate to know what was coming for me.
The sound had been terribly misleading.
Daniel Vance was no more than six inches from my face.
“Get out,” he hissed from a toothless and cracked mouth. A living corpse just like the others, somehow a flash of intelligence remained in those wide, terrified eyes.
And then I heard it. The creaking of a door. And without even thinking I turned the light and saw it on the wall. I saw it open, and behind the strange steel there was more than just plain old concrete. Much more. I saw a raging gullet of flesh. A ringed tube of pulsing muscle lined with teeth the size of hands. A spiralling descent into madness. Hot foetid air washed into the room, buffeting me and the rotting corpses, all of us paralysed by what we were seeing, even if for most of the figures beside Daniel and myself, they didn’t have eyes to see with.
“What the fuck…?” I muttered, unable to take my eyes from the flesh tube beyond that doorway.
“It’s coming,” Daniel whispered as he grabbed me with one fist and hurled me out of the room. I hit the floor and skidded along a slick fluid left by the Vance’s footprints, the smell of which turned my stomach. Perhaps the worst detail was that it was cold. I don’t know why, I’d just expected whatever oozed them off them to be feverishly hot. But it wasn’t. It soaked my shirt like I’d fallen into a muddy puddle.
“It’s coming.”
This voice wasn’t Daniel’s. I couldn’t say for sure, but it sounded like a child’s whisper. One by one the bodies shuffled over to the open door and knelt before it. I don’t know why but I got the impression the others had lost pretty much everything left of their minds, but Daniel remained aware. He looked back at me once more and spoke before he pressed his head to the floor in supplication with the others.
“The only thing we did wrong was being here for it to torture. It didn’t need a reason, just an opportunity. Leave. It won’t let us go. It won’t even let us die. And if it catches you, it won’t let you go either.”
His forehead kissed the dirt.
And then something reached through the door and gripped his head in its palm the way you or I might pick up an apple.
In full panic, I ran over and grabbed my dog and the bolt cutters and I ran like my legs were pistons, machines whose signals of exhaustion and fatigue could not slow me down, or cause me to fall. I had to move. I had to leave. The hand that had grabbed Daniel… the sight of it flushed my mind clean like some kind of enema. It hurt to see the image replay in my mind but there was nothing else in my head echoing around except the sight of fingers with one too many knuckles, and nails as large as a smartphone.
I reached the top floor and nearly collapsed from breathlessness, but I wouldn’t let myself stay down for long. I crawled over to the ladder and climbed up and immediately went to work trying to cut the metal lock. It was hell with just one hand, the other clinging to the torch that I kept frantically pointing at the door behind me, and it wasn’t long before I fumbled one too many times and dropped my only source of light.
“No no no no…” I mewed. But there was no time to look for it. I had to get out and I had to get out fast! I couldn’t see but I was sure I could hear something climbing up those stairs. Not the steady thump thump of human feet. No this was different. This was a rapid pitter patter of a spider, maybe. Something with hundreds of feet or hands, or God knows what, skittering along the floor and walls and ceiling, pulling itself along with a body whose mere shape would offend God.
Using all my strength I leaned hard on the bolt cutters and, at last, the bolt gave. I threw the hatch open and got just enough ambient light to see Ripley hovering at the bottom of the ladder, growling ineffectually at the doorway. I crouched down, scooped him up, and fled up the ladder so quickly that my muscles turned to jelly at the top and I fell over onto hands and knees. But still, I was out. The long corridor covered in writing was ahead of me, and at the very end a doorway capped now by the tired blue light of a full moon.
Ripley needed no encouragement. He whipped down the corridor with canine speed and I followed at a broken and stumbling crawl, eventually shouldering past the open door and collapsing onto the forest floor.
For a few seconds I drifted in and out of consciousness, but when I looked up and saw the canopy overhead moving–the branches backlit by a full moon–I snapped awake and glared down at something gripping my ankle. The hand had reached out of the dark and seized me and was slowly dragging me back into the Earth below. Whatever it was, most of its body lurked out of sight in the shadows behind the doorway, but the hand that crushed my leg was the size of my torso with an arm that looked like it belonged to a mole rat.
I struck it with my own fist. I dug my nails in. I cried and kicked and screamed, but nothing could stop it. From behind the door, something like a face grinned and leered at me with joy. It was taking its time, sure enough, pulling me in so slowly that it gave my mind all the time in the world to appreciate the nightmare that awaited me. I think if, in that moment, you’d given me a gun, I would’ve shot myself because God help me I couldn’t escape the look in Daniel’s eyes, how he’d knelt to worship this thing like a man who knew that hope or pride or joy or anything with even a hint of goodness to it was so far out of reach for him it might as well be a dream. How long was this thing going to keep them down there? How long did it intend to keep me!?
I wept like a child, feeling like my mind was slowly cracking as I tried everything to stop that fucking pulling me into the shadows. I kicked at the earth. I dug into it using my hands looking for a root or a pipe or anything to hold onto. Nothing, nothing, I did would slow it down.
I was no more than a foot from the doorway when Ripley reappeared.
A dog afraid of hoovers and plastic bags and doors that move on their own. A dog who once got stared down by a particularly feisty rabbit who stopped mid chase and turned around, baffling the predator on its tail. A dog you couldn’t even watch scary movies around…
And he lunged at that arm like he was a wolf, like he’d always been one. And while he didn’t quite break the skin, the pressure was enough to make the thing’s grip weaken and I slid my leg out. Unable to stand, I knelt and grabbed the dog and pulled as hard as I could and now that fucking thing bled at last as the pressure of the jaws and the sliding teeth ripped into its flesh. Together, at last, Ripley and I were let go and sent rolling backwards head over hells.
I wasted no time waiting or looking or processing. I heaved the dog to my chest and crawled until I passed out, making it maybe half a kilometre away. Only when I could no longer see the door did I let myself fall to the ground face first and gave up consciousness.
-
The doctors said I had pneumonia, which I suppose made some kind of sense. I might have even believed them were it not for the Sheriff’s visit, asking strange questions of me as I lay in bed about what I may or may not have seen. I dismissed them to the best of my ability. I wasn’t interested in chasing that particular nightmare down, figuring out if it had been real or not, at least not while I lay there half-drowning in my own infection. To be fair, I had at least some sympathy for why the police had done so little to seal that place off. I have, on occasion, thought about going and doing the job myself, but to this day I still have nightmares about being pulled into the dark beyond that door. Not just the bunker door, the one I narrowly avoided at the end, but the one below. What I saw was a kind of madness, I’m sure of it, and I often think of Daniel’s words.
It didn’t need a reason, just an opportunity.
Somehow, the Vances were that opportunity. Maybe they built their bunker on a leyline, or a weak spot between dimensions, or the site of former Satanic rituals. I’m not sure it even matters. They went into the dark thinking it’d be a safe place to wait out the world’s troubles, but something had been down there waiting for them, waiting for a chance to get at a family of seven people, to lock them in and deprive them of escape and slowly take from them everything it could.
I’ve moved since then. Couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just the memories you see. It was the short-wave radio I kept in my basement. Something my father passed onto me when I was just a boy. God I’d forgotten about it… at least until I woke up one day to the sound of it blaring white noise down in the dark.
And buried in that sound was the faint whispering of a man, his voice barely recognisable, but unmistakably his.
…let them go let them go let them go let them go let them go let them go…

1. Pink Floyd - Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) A [4 listens A-/A/A+/A] This is not your parent's Pink Floyd, this is your grandparents Pink Floyd... and it turns out your grandparents were into some weird shit. There's no better album to properly explain why the genre was called "psychedelic" rock in the first place, as it feels mandatory that you're on LSD or some type of drugs to fully appreciate parts of it. Psychedelia isn't a style; it's an aesthetic. No wailing or highly distorted guitars, but the variation in musical instruments or unique sounds inserted to add atmosphere. Lucifer Sam, Flaming, Bike, and Scarecrow are my favorites from the album as well as See Emily Play; which is probably the most "normal" song so it makes sense why they chose it to be the single. A lot of the album is really "out there" with what it's doing, so much of it is very abstract. I like it, but it's really crazy so it's hard to love it. This is what Sgt. Pepper's would sound like it if it went fully into psychedelia, which can understandably be a bit much.
   
2. Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band - Trout Mask Replica (1969) F [2 listens F/F] it's dogshit, but it's intentionally dogshit... Which I'm not sure if that's really a difficult thing to create from scratch. The only honest critique is that the instruments don't vary at all, which adds into the monotonous of the record... which again could be what they were going for. I could intellectually grade this album on its place in the experimental genre, or how influential it is, or the surprisingly large level of difficulty of creating something truly random that breaks the human urge of musical patterns, but I'm giving this an F because it wants to be an F. Not a single album I've listened to wanted to be "great" or a "masterpiece", they just tried their best and hopefully people would enjoy what they put out; the reason why music is so subjective. This on the other hand is the only objective piece of art, where we all can agree is bad because it was deliberately created that way. There's no underlying beauty beneath it, there's no deeper understanding, it's just horrible. THAT'S where people's admiration comes from, not so such on the music but what it is as a statement. I'm glad there's people who can find enjoyment out of this, because I'm definitely not one of them.
   
3. Santana - Abraxas (1970) A- [3 listens B+/A-/A-] I know him as a supposedly legendary guitar player and he's Latin musician, that's about it. Also I know the song Oye Como Va, which I didn't realize he made. I saw that he actually isn't the one singing, similar to a band like Van Halen. While he didn't quite live up to the hype of being a goat guitarist for me personally, I can see why for most people. He's really great on songs like Black Magic Woman and Hope You're Feeling Better. Oye Como Va is still a fun song and is still my favorite from the project. Abraxas has only two moods: fun and seductive. Half of the album is filled with fantastic Latin beats with various drum rhythms and the other half is Santana soloing on the guitar with the singer seductively dancing on top. It's nice listen, even if there's nothing super substantial about it. Wonderful listen
   
4. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Cosmo's Factory (1970) A+ [5 listens A/A/A+/A+/A+] Bittersweet listen, as this will be the final CCR album I'll listen to and they have grown to become one of my all time favorite bands. It sucks that they didn't stay together longer, but thankfully they put out a ton of music before they feel apart. This album is of course great, but it falls just short of topping Willie and the Poor Boys as my favorite. Songs like Run Through the Jungle, Long As I Can See The Light, and Up Around the Bend that are those standard excellence you expect from Creedence. Ramble Tamble is a Southern-Heavy Metal-Progressive Rock mix that blew my expectations for what their ceiling was. The problem I have with it is that most of this feels like they phoned it in. A lot of covers with different styles that they aren't known for, which is okay, but they could've done better. Ooby Dooby, My Baby Left Me and Before You Accuse Me are good songs, but for CCR's standards, they're let downs. If they took their time, maybe we would've gotten something much better as they are certainly capable of it. I don't know if it was a studio thing or they knew they were close to breaking up, but this feels like half of this was a project that was quickly thrown together. With that said, a half assed album from CCR is still 5x better than most; I just wanted more. John Fogerty is up there among the great songwriters of Rock and Roll imo. The only band that can rival Nirvana as "the greatest American band".
   
5. John Lennon - Imagine (1971) A+ [5 listens A-/A+/A/A++/A+] this is an album I actually listened to along with the original 100 list, but I cut it as i already included one John Lennon album and made room for another band. I ended up completely forgetting about it until I randomly check back to the original list. So technically this isn't a "first listen" as I've listened to this plenty of times, however it was nearly a full year ago so it's not as fresh on my mind as possible. This is what I expected a true John Lennon album to be, not what Plastic Ono Band was. That one was a personal project, whereas this stuff from the musical genius who made hit after hit after hit from the Beatles. Looking at the tracklist, you could easily slot any of these songs into the White Album and it wouldn't feel out of place. The songs are great, every single one of them. Imagine is a beautiful song with it's piano and John Lennon (of all people) Ether'd Paul McCartney in How Do You Sleep? with a very direct diss track lmao. The only reason this isn't an A++, is that it only feels like a collection of songs rather than a cohesive project. Where Plastic Ono album lacks in great standout singles, it makes up for it with a shared theme. This does feel like a bunch of carry over songs from his time with the Beatles; this isn't groundbreaking stuff for him. But it is the quintessential John Lennon album, with not a single weak song.
   
6. Linda Ronstadt - Heart Like a Wheel (1974) A- [4 listens A-/A-/B++/A-] A genre I noticed that doesn't get mentioned at all is Soft Rock. I don't know how much of it is considered Rock or just slow Pop music, but it includes Fleetwood Mac and the Carpenters. It's entirely filled with soft ballads, with the piano being featured more at times than the guitar. Ronstadt is all if that; she has such a great, versatile voice, where her timbre can fit in with Pop to Rock to country. Not super strong, but she still has a great vocal presence as her voice never gets lost amongst the music. And about the music, it's great, but it's hard to pick out anything I love about it. Rock is very expressive and in your face, where this is more calmed or at most an above average high tempo. She has a great voice and songwriting is admittedly pretty great, it's just the backing music is just either just a step above being average; hard to rave about. The Dark End of the Street, I Can't Help, You Can Close Your Eyes, and When I Will Be Loved are my favorites as well as the intro song, the rest are just okay. Solid album, mostly raised by her voice.
   
7. Blue Oyster Cult - Agents of Fortune (1976) A- [4 listens A+/A/B++/A-] I listened to this in my car full volume on the first listen, and this blew me away. The guitarist was so incredible on nearly every song and all of his solos were on point. That great 70s Hard Rock sound, with a beautiful lead singer and kick ass riffs. Then, the following listens were on my headphones and that power I liked seemed to disappear instantly. The songs were particularly catchy, but nothing super impactful that made me want to listen to it again. The guitar playing and the lead singer on ET, Fear the Reaper, Sinful Love and Tenderloin make me. This is good music...disposable? Ehh maybe, but it's hard to deny how good so many of these songs are. Seriously though, worth the listen just for the guitarist.
   
8. Suicide - Self-Titled (1977) C- [3 listens C+/C+/C-] this album was built up as one of the most underrated punk albums ever and as very influential with its synth implementations. Man... this album is a prime example of my biggest gripe with Punk Rock as a whole, too repetitive! The music is cool, but it's just is repeated over and over and over again. Every song is great for the first 20 seconds and then it's just the same style with no change at all. The music is pretty awesome, I love the synth beats and riffs on nearly every song. But it's just played to death beneath monotoned vocals. The only reason it isn't a D is the uniqueness of synths and the lyrics are somewhat interesting to hear (at least once). I'm sure it's influential, but that doesn't make it a good album.
   
9. Dire Straits - Self-Titled (1978) A [4 listens B/A-/B++/A] I'll be honest and say out of all the original 100 albums, Brothers in Arms probably got shafted the most from me. I think I'd only have it one listen and didn't care afterwards to really get into it. I've since relistened to it and my opinion hasn't really changed, but now I'm at least confident in how I feel on it. This one was partially a sympathy pick in that regard. As far as sympathy picks, it's not half bad. I'll take that back and say this is actually Half Great. The first half was pretty good with a low key roots rock puckling style that... takes awhile to grow on you. When it does, the second half is straight fire! Outside of Water of Love, I'd prefer the entire second half on it's own as it has all the best songs. Last most I heard Losing My Religion from R.E.M and this week I was once again blessed with Sultans of Swing. One of the few bands where the rhythm guitar and the bass are just as great and important to the songs to than the lead guitar, the call-and-responses from the singer, the lead guitar and the rest of the band makes it special. A good chunk of these songs are okay, as they aren't really flashy, but when you listen to them and fall into the groove they set, you'll be lying if you don't nod your head to this. I gotta respect it.
   
10. X - Los Angeles (1980) A [3 listens A/A/A] just when I give up on Punk Rock, there goes an album to reel me back in. I just want some Punk Rock with creativity and a vocalist with personality. X gives you two great lead vocalists, who both are the highlight of the project. Their singing reminds me of Post Punk more than late 70s punk, as they are actually SINGING rather than speaking very fast. The music here is still your rudimentary punk music, but it's nowhere near as basic as the stuff that came before it. Also, this was produced by Ray Manzarek from the Doors and he kinda steals every song he's on with his organ playing. An instrument you don't see (hear) on your average Punk record. Nausea, The Unheard Music, World's a Mess, and Sex and Dying are the standouts among the songs, as they have the more fun choruses or guitar riffs. Really fun listen, kinda wish it was longer, but that's just a nitpick.
    
11. Descendants - Milo Goes to College (1982) A- [4 listens B++/B++/A-/A-] I love short albums. 22 minutes and not a single second is wasted here, even with 15 songs. This is Hardcore Punk, but isn't as brutal as Black Flag; which is a plus. I can see how this album would be a bridge to future pop punk of the 90s. Short, brief and brash riffs with some cool guitar solos sprinkled in, and a great lead singer. He is still very monotone in his singing, but he uses his yelling and inflections to not sound one note. I would most likely hate songs like Suburban Home and Parents with any other Punk lead singer, but the way he screams in certain moments make them special. He's not yelling all the time and explodes when the song needs it. Again, it helps that so many songs are short, as the riffs come and they quickly move on to the next one. Really good album, it's quick pacing from track to track actually makes it feel substantial given it's short runtime, so don't feel turned away by that.
    
12. The Smiths - Self-Titled (1984) A [5 listens B/B++/A/A/A], I spent so much time trying to decide if I wanted to listen to another Smiths album, let alone which one as they're all seem to be on the same level; decided to just listen to them all. This is probably the best one (still behind TQID), as the songs here are the best written, both the lyrics and the melodies from Morrissey and Marr. Also, Rourke is really great too. Comparing the entire tracklist, pound for pound, this is imo better than the Queen is Dead...There is a Light gives it a slight edge. Every song is great, with What Difference being my 2nd favorite Smiths song. Loved it. ii. Hatful of Hallow (1984) A [2 listens A-/A], if I never heard of Self-Titled, this could be my 2nd favorite, but it's hard for this to step out of it's shadow for me. Outside of the songs Heaven Knows and The Night has Opened, the "original" songs aren't great enough to put it over the debut. Still... half of the tracklist is the Self-Titled plus pretty good new songs as well, so it's floor is pretty high. iii. Meat Is Murder (1985) B+ [3 listens B++/A-/B+], Morrissey is probably at his most messiest here and it doesn't help that the riffs are at their weakest as well. I Want and Nowhere Fast are my favs, don't really care that much about the rest. I do enjoy the title track (and the intro), but outside the lyrics, it's nothing special with regards to their overall discography. iv. Strangeways, Here We Are (1987) A- [3 listens A/A/A-] interesting direction they chose to go in, it actually worked out well. Paint a Vulgar Picture and the intro are the best, but the new style can only do so much with the overall experience. The more it goes on, the less catchier the songs are getting. Still a solid listen, definitely better than Meat is Murder. The Smiths on their whole, really keeps their style close to the chest in there music, that they never really tried to reinvent themselves. Nice discography, but on the whole, it's pretty much more and more of the same stuff; with varying levels of quality.
    
13. Def Leppard - Hysteria (1987) B [3 listens B++/B++/B] Along with Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast, I listened to Pyromania instead of their so called "best" album. I ended up loving Powerslave, so I wanted to give Def Leppard a similar 2nd chance to try to redeem 80s heavy metal. It's... aight. Hair Metal is very hit or miss for me, either it's a bland, overly passionate, drawn out, bore of a song or it's the grand, arena filling, sonic anthem that can move you to tears with it's raw power. It's a mix of the two, and no in between lol. Animal, Run Riot and Excitable are solid songs, but everything else is just not good. I don't want to hear ballads with a distorted electric guitar; literally antithetical to each other at that point. Pour Some Sugar on Me (a song I of course knew before) should be THE benchmark for Hair Metal as it was waaay better than I remembered it being. If this was filled with a bunch of Pour Some Sugars, it'll be a genre defining classic. Instead, I'd rather take Slippery When Wet over this one tbh.
    
14. Bonnie Raitt - Nick of Time (1989) B- [4 listens B/B+/B/B-] Saw this album kinda high on RS Top 500 list and gave it a shot since I don't really have a lot of Americana albums I've listened to. Listening to this, I still don't understand the difference between Americana and Country, maybe it's just more electric guitar. Other than having a strong percussion section, it does feel like a country album with added instruments. Slide Guitar, harmonica, piano, steel drums, etc. are all here. Love Letter and Real Man are the only good songs I kinda like but most of it is just average for my taste. I saw that this was a highly successful album, so I might be wrong in assuming that this is was accessible for the average person. I'm fine with a country album, or even an album that leans into it, but this is just using it as a base and nothing more on top of it. There's nothing super unique or special about this album in particular and it honestly easy to forget. Not bad by any means, but it doesn't do anything daring.
    
15. Autopsy - Mental Funeral (1991) B [5 listens A/A-/A-/B+/B] Better than most death metal albums as this one actually has PACING! The guitar playing is still too much out of control for my taste, but it's a much easier listen than most. I can actually differentiate between one track and the following one. While I'm still not sold on how they guitar is used, I'm won over with how the drums are used in this genre. They use the drum petal more than some bands use the crash symbols, and why not, as it's such an under utilized part of the drum. It's not a couple of "1, 2s" but they are attempting to blow out their Achilles while playing. Even though there's no special sections that really stick out, the run from Tomb of the Womb to Hole in the Head is the highest point. I'll give it a listen as there's some good moments here and there, but I don't think there's much more you'll get from it with multiple listens.
    
16. Alice in Chains - Jar of Flies (1994) A++ [4 listens A-/A-/A+/A++] someone commented very recently on Alice in Chains, specifically their MTV Unplugged performance of Dirt by saying that they're closer to a blues rock band than the standard sound of a grunge band. It was one hell of a coincidence that this album was on this month's list because they lean heavily into that side of their sound. Outside of Layne Stanley's S Tier vocals, there's not much that you could call "grunge" here. The acoustic guitar is more prominent, these slow ballads are more prominent, even the majority of the album is calm and there's little loud sections. I wouldn't say this is a complete change in direction for them, but it's definitely a brave choice with switching up considering how great Dirt was. Their strength was always the gorgeous harmonies the leads are able to create. They could've pulled a Pearl Jam with their follow up with a Vs. by refining their unique style, but they decide to take a risk by stepping down their sound. Dirt has grown on me as I love revisiting the songs from it (I would probably change the rating to a A+ or possibly an A++ since reviewing it), but they did a spectacular job on this one. Also, the shorter length helps as it emphasizes just how every track is truly top notch on its own.
    
17. Sublime - Self-Titled (1996) A++ [4 listens A++/A+/A+/A++] I gave 40oz. to Freedom a shot and I found it okay, carried by it's messy energy but not much beyond that. Holy hell did they evolve on this one! The energy is still there, but the songwriting is on that next level now. No more flirting with Ska Punk and hip-hop samples, but they're fully integrated into a specific song. Every track is concise with it's identity and isn't all over the place. Oh and the music is phenomenal as well. The Ballad Of Johnny Butt, Doin' Time and April 29 are my standouts, mostly due to the lyrical content (which has also been a large step up), but you really can't miss with any song on here. Ska Punk has previously been a weak genre for me personally, so it's hard for me to say I'm blown away from it so far but this was a big exception. From a standpoint of how much they've improved from their debut, I was greatly surprised; it sucks that Bradley Nowell died not long before it was released, because he was really coming into his own as a songwriter. Awesome album, completely 180° on my opinion of Sublime.
    
18. Massive Attack - Mezzanine (1998) A+ [3 listens A++/A+/A+] the 2nd Massive Attack album I'm listening to and off the bat, it's the better of the two. If they are a Trip-Hop group, then Blue Lines was more of the Hip Hop side whereas now they go fully into the "Trip" part of the genre. Mezzanine has a more darker, somber tone; I just want to listen to this in a dark, silent room. Which I immediately take it more serious, as it takes itself serious as well. This doesn't feel like a "next step", as I feel like they were absolutely capable of creating this type of music. It doesn't feel awkward or "try hard", but completely natural. Also, the heart dropping moment when I realized that the song I was listening to was Teardrop from the TV show House, is the reason I try to go into every album as blind as possible. The deeper into the album, some of the songs drag on for too long for my taste. Trim a few songs short and it'll be a much better listen. Great album!
    
19. Electric Wizard - Dopethrone (2000) A [3 listens A-/A/A] this is like if we got Black Sabbath, turned them into a black hole and made them even more heavier. With only a few listens from the genre, Doom Metal is slowly growing on me and becoming one of my favorites. It's so hypnotic, with super long songs that are just pure metal. No speedy solos or technical prowest, just a massive wall of sound that drags you in and locks you into place like a thick sludge hardening into concrete. It doesn't change a lot in sounds as it just flows, so it's not dense in that sense. Both Death Metal and this album have no direction in how is plays out, but I prefer this more as here it's slow enough to fall into a rhythm to. It's like a massive thunderstorm, random lightning flashing and distant thunder rolling with increasing intensity. Great album, I also love the little interludes they have. I'll love to hear other albums similar to this
    
20. Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American (2001) A++ [4 listens A++/A+/A+/A++] from what I see, this album helped launch Emo into the mainstream. Jimmy Eats World did a great job at setting the bar as this project, along with the singles they chose, are/were a great representation for the genre. The album kicks into high gear with Bleed American and rides the wave all the way to the end, where the section of Get it Faster to the final track is flawless. Hear You Me and The Middle are also noteworthy songs, with the latter being my favorite tied with Bleed American. Incredible album! I assume a lot of imitators followed this and brought down the genre, which gave Emo its bad rep. But along with My Chemical Romance, they are slowly changing my lifelong perception of the genre.
    
21. The Strokes - Room on Fire (2003) A++ [4 listens A+/A+/A+/A++] it's actually better than Is This It, yes I said it. The entire album on this one is far more consistent. Meet Me in the Bathroom was the only song that stopped it from being a Masterpiece, as literally every other song is awesome. I just relistened to Is This It and it got sightly weaker the deeper into the album (Take It or Leave It is a great closer, which saves the album). Whereas this one gets literally stronger and stronger the more it goes on! Man, just remove that one song and it's literally perfect! This is one of those "You love it all or you hate it all" bands and you can figure which camp I'm in. For some reason, that "singing through a walkie talkie" style really gets to me lol. I'm very curious to see how The New Abnormal compares, being 18 years later and taking nearly 7 years to make.
    
22. Porcupine Tree - In Absentia (2003) A- [2 listens A/A-] finally some 00's Progressive Rock that isn't drenched in Metal. I don't know how offensive this is, but this band is like Tool minus the "grandioso" musical concepts they have. It's a good listen, but kinda drops off on the second half. Blackest Eyes, Train and The Sound of Muzak are the best songs. ii. Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) A [4 listens A/A+/A/A] every song starts out strong, and develops into something more entertaining in every song (with the end of Sleep Together with the string ensemble being my favorite). This one has a faster pace throughout, with a chugging guitar leading the way. Also, no weak songs at all. I prefer this one more, as it's easier to get through with it's length. Songs are still long and complex, but the reducing the amount does wonders.
    
23. TV on the Radio - Dear Science (2008) A [4 listens A/A/A/A] awesome style! 00's indie rock adding alternative rock. The choruses can be hit or miss, as well as the beat with how much they mix genres together. However, it's never a boring listen to get through. Sometimes it's really epic and grand, then it'll be low key and small, which changes up the flow of the album. The singer is awesome btw. Red Dress, DLZ, Love Dog, and Shout Me Out are my favorites.
    
24. Cage the Elephant - Melaphobia (2013) A++ [4 listens A-/A/A+/A++] Never heard of this band, I honestly can't even remember how they ended up on my list actually, but fortunately they did. A hodge podge of new age genres, tied together by a horrible, yet passionate singer and loudly blairing guitar. The second half dips in quality, as from the start to Halo is flawless. The hooks on every song is PERFECT, incredible songwriting with the lyrics and the music. Not the strongest A++, as it's closer to an A+ than a Masterpiece. The consistency even when stylistically the sound is all over the place is what gives it that extra bump. Seriously, the first 6 songs are all fantastic, they alone carry the whole project. Great album and great band too!
    
25. Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked at Me (2017) A+ [2 listens A-/A+] This is an album from someone who lost someone who lost their wife to cancer and created music from that experience and it's a very tough listen. It's really hard to judge anything from this, because it's so incredibly personal and he's very vulnerable with what he chooses to be open about, which aren't the more notable aspects of the grieving process. Getting mail written in their name, places that were once filled with memories now cold and saddening, not throwing away mundane things like trash as to not completely lose any remaining part of them. I personally haven't lost anyone in my life for me to feel such a strong connection, but I don't think this was even the intended point of making this. This isn't a "romanized" take on losing someone, this is the raw feelings of a hurt person. In order to grieve, sometimes you need to fully vent and let all your thoughts out, no matter how small the aspects were or random it may seem. It's a farewell letter to his wife and at times, it feels like I'm intruding on a personal relationship of two people and it just adds to the uncomfortableness. I don't wish to listen to this again, unless I'm at a point where I could relate to the immense amount of loss in my personal life (of course I hope it's never the case). I greatly respect him for doing this though, as I think this is the greatest way to keep the memory of Geneviève Castrée alive for generations; long after even he and his daughter are gone. With this album, she "regains" a new life, which I find symbolically beautiful.
    

He has no friends, and the only member of the Armstrong clan that has anything to do with him is is terminally ill mother.
If he were to die at home, it would likely be a matter of days before his corpse is discovered by his probation officers. He would be likely considered a coroner’s case and his autopsy would likely confirm the cause of death as cardiac failure attributed to decades of tobacco and alcohol abuse.
Because his family want nothing to do with him, his remains would be disposed of as a pauper with no funeral or obituary - buried in an unmarked grave.
He is an organ donor, so some poor bastard may end up with whatever pieces might still be viable after years of unhealthy living. Some parts may still be eligible for donation - like an eye or a testicle.
So, how would we find out when he does die? Or perhaps he’s dead right now and we don’t know it?

Anyone know a good funeral home that helps take care of cremation services as well? I wanted to see who could cremate a body and provide the urn. Thank you.

Originally posted by u/ibelieveinigloos in TrueOffMyChest on Dec 10, '22, updated Dec 16th and March 6, '23.
Cat Fact to cover spoilers: Sailors have been taking cats to sea for thousands of years. "Ship's Cats" were used to control rodents, which could cause damage to ropes, woodwork, and more recently, electrical wiring. They are also a source of disease, which is dangerous for the sailors, and cats naturally attack and kill rodents. In addition, they offer companionship and a sense of home, security and camaraderie to sailors away from home.
Trigger Warning: sexual abuse, rape resulting in pregnancy of a minor, child abuse/neglect
1st Post Dec 10
I'm angry I wasn't in time to off my kids stepdad
Forgive me, but I literally have only had the facts for an hour.
I have a bad custody agreement with my ex. I broke the law a few years ago and was given 5 years of probation. During this duration, our custody agreement gives me alternative weekends with my two daughters 14 and 10. Almost two years ago, my oldest stopped coming for her weekend visits I tried to force the issue, but allowed her the concession as I thought it was a phase that would pass. Flash forward to this past Wednesday when I confirmed that I'd be picking up my 10yo at least. My ex confirmed and just casually dropped the knowledge that her husband had "died". I sent my condolences and told her if there was anything she needed to let me know.
So you can imagine my shock when my 10yo proceeded to explain the circumstances that led to her stepfather's death. It's as bad as you can imagine. My 14yo apparently told her 8th grade boyfriend about the sexual abuse that had been going on from her stepfather. God bless the young man for telling his parents, who in turn called the police. After being questioned by the police, my daughter told them everything and they went to arrest the stepfather. He then took his own life rather than face the authorities. I knew none of these events until it was relayed to me from my not quite 11 year old. I'm so angry that my ex did not let me know what was happening. But I'm more angry that the piece of trash killed himself before I got the chance to do it to him.
I don't know what to do now. I'm a very good father to my 10yo and now I feel like my older daughter has been manipulated into seeing me as evil the last couple of years. I just have so much anger right now.
2nd Post Dec 16
Ex Wife is having a funeral for our daughter's assaulter
I'm beyond pissed off today. My ex-wife is having a funeral for her husband today. A man that sexually assaulted my daughter all of 2022 after having groomed her for the last 2 years.
The guy was guilty, my daughter (14) finally found the strength to confide in a friend who called the cops. CPS and the sheriff's department both did forensic interviews and believed her to be credible. Prior to arrest, the guy killed himself rather than face judgement. I'm glad he's dead but wanted to see his face on the news and in court.
So to skip over a lot of the aftermath, my ex-wife, who, as a Stepford wife, cares more about appearances that everything is cookie cutter and normal, is going through with a funeral for the POS. She refuses to acknowledge that anything is wrong and has legitimately told me that I'm making it more than it was.
Every part of me wants to show up at the funeral yell in front of all his clueless friends and family about how he was a child rapist and kick over the casket. I even looked for groups that could protest outside the thing. I'm just so lost and angry.
3rd Post March 6
Hello all. I want to thank everyone for reaching out and the encouragement. I wanted to give you a small update on the events since my last post. So my ex wife did end up having the funeral for her husband. My girls were in attendance as their mother demanded even though it had been explained to me that they were going to have the option of attending. Despite my every desire to appear and ruin everything, I chose not too. I did however alert several advocacy groups and they in turn blew up the funeral home's website obituaries to the point that they stopped allowing posts for the assaulter.
In the months since however, I have fortunately had some positive happenings in my life. Despite what was seemingly overwhelming evidence, my attempt at emergency custody was denied by the family court. (There are still so many judges that are very anti-father.) Even with this setback however, my oldest daughter has returned to my life. I've gotten to spend time with her every other weekend since at her choice. She has shared her last 3 years with me and it has been heartbreaking. On top of the sexual abuse, there was a pregnancy that was terminated, 2 suicide attempts and hospitalizations, and a police investigation of the circulation of her photos amongst "collectors". All of these circumstances were hidden from me and not disclosed or acknowleged by my ex. (Despite all of this, the judge still supports keeping the girls in her custody.) My daughters are both getting therapy and counseling, the oldest because of the events and the younger due to her neglect although my ex swears that she's fine and doesn;'t really need it. But she is delusional.
Karma has a way of turning out though as my EX is being sued by her late husband's children and former employer over theft and forgery. I have decided and will maintain the mantra that I don't care what my ex is doing in her personal life, but will only get involved when it directly concerns the well being of my daughters. So in that regard, it has been a struggle, yet I'm rebuilding a fragile relationship and we've actually bonded over shared trauma. I have a small suspicion and self doubt right now about her, but I'm going to try and remain hopeful. Thanks again and I will update again in the future as my fight is not over.

In March 2022 a Kentucky State Trooper was spending a leisurely day fishing on Dewey Lake in Floyd County, Kentucky, when his depth finder picked up something unusual in the lake; a submerged car. When the car, a 1988 Ford Tempo, was pulled from the lake, authorities also found human remains inside the car. The vehicle's description and license plate matched that of a vehicle that had been stolen on July 3,1990 from a restaurant in Paintsville which was near a nursing home called the Paintsville Healthcare Center. A patient at that nursing home, a 43 year old man named Ruvil Hale, had also disappeared from the nursing home that same day and hadn't been seen or heard from since. Investigators at the time surmised that Ruvil had stolen the car to make his escape, but could find no trace of him or the car. Nobody could even guess where he had planned to go. He likely had no more than $2 of cash on him and the stolen car had only a half tank of gas, according to the owner. Aerial and ground searches in a 20 mile radius, including searches of ponds and lakes, (including Dewey Lake) and back roadways turned up nothing.
For 32 years Ruvil Hale's family wondered what became of him. Ruvil, a divorced father of two and a former coal miner, had a long history of medical problems, including a stroke, severe headaches, seizures, memory loss and double vision. He had recently had surgery for a brain aneurysm , which is why he had been moved to the nursing home in Paintsville because of the round the clock nursing care he required due to his extensive medical issues. He had been housed in other healthcare facilities in the past, according to his family, and had tried to escape from those places as well. Ruvil hadn't driven in years, according to his son, Keith, due to his poor vision. They couldn't imagine he would have gotten far.
Ruvil's family hired a private investigator at one point as well, but no trace of Ruvil could be found and eventually he was declared legally dead in 1996. Now, 32 years later, some of the questions could finally be answered. In October of 2022 a DNA match confirmed that the remains in the submerged car were those of Ruvil Hale. The lake in which the car was found, Dewey Lake, was only about fifteen minutes away from the healthcare center.
On January 29,2023 Ruvil's family held a funeral and burial at the family cemetery in Pilgrim, KY.
Links:
https://www.jpinews.com/2023/01/10/father-of-former-glasgow-superintendent-found-after-32-years/
https://charleyproject.org/case/ruvil-hale
https://mountaincitizen.com/2022/03/23/remains-believed-to-be-hale-missing-32-years/
https://www.callahamfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Ruvil-Hale/#!/Obituary
https://mountaincitizen.com/2023/01/25/medical-examiner-confirms-remains-are-ruvil-hale/

"Hypocrisy is the hangover of an addiction to attention." - Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) ripping right-wing grifter Matt Taibbi a new one

In District Confidence

Oops! Democrats did it again (sided with Republicans on a bad vote out of fear).

• The Senate voted Wednesday to block changes to the Washington, DC, criminal code that the DC City Council voted into law earlier this year. This marks the first time in more than 30 years that Congress voted to approve a measure reversing the city’s governing decisions. The shockingly-bipartisan vote was a huge blow to the District’s autonomy and seems to have only emboldened the majority of DC residents who support statehood. (And emboldened Republicans to keep using “fucking with DC” as a wedge issue.)
  
• Senators representing DC’s two closest neighbors, Maryland and Virginia, were split, with Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) siding with the District, and Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) siding with Republicans. But unfortunately, that’s not all. Some 33 Democrats sided with the GOP, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Not exactly sure why, but we expected more from you, Chuck!
  
• The reformed criminal code, which passed last year, rocketed to national prominence and interference from the White House thanks in part to an increase in carjackings and gun violence in the nation’s capital. However, some of the loudest Republicans agitating to block the bill, like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, have more violence in their own districts than Washington does, as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) pointed out on the House floor recently. Bakersfield, CA, which McCarthy represents, was recently listed as one of the top 10 deadliest cities in America and the nation’s carjacking capital—so we suspect GOP concern about DC crime may not be entirely on the level!
  

Ughhhhhh!!!!

• The Home Rule Act of 1973 gave DC some control over its local affairs, but Congress retains the veto authority over the district’s laws in certain circumstances. This most recent issue has only underscored the need for statehood, because citizens who live in the nation’s capital should not have fewer rights and less representation than any other Americans. It’s also important to reiterate that the crime bill was not particularly ideological. It was crafted as a series of technocratic fixes to streamline criminal justice in the district. It would have increased sentences for many violent crimes, and was meant to correct some of the more egregious sentencing equivalencies in the city’s old criminal code, under which wrongful possession of pepper spray carries the same maximum penalty (!) as wrongful possession of a fully automatic weapon.
  
• Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) called the congressional intervention “a referendum: on violent crime in America, while Senate Minority Whip John Thune said, “The Dems, ideologically, got locked into a position and realized as a political matter they couldn’t sustain it.” These are the kind of maddening lies that plague the political discourse on crime. When Thune implies that Democrats backed themselves into a corner, he’s trying to invoke activist ideas like “Defund the Police,” which has not actually resulted in any police departments being defunded. Basically every Democratic-controlled major city has a police budget that is higher now than it was before 2020.
  

As on so many issues, Democrats have bowed to Republicans on crime for decades and let them frame the debate over it—by not pushing back on their falsehoods or the needless cruelty of their policy ideas. And to no avail! Whether Democrats voted for DC autonomy or not, Republicans would still accuse them of being “soft on crime.” But now Republicans can add “Even President Biden opposed this bill!!” to their attacks on the Democrats’ best representatives.

Look No Further Than Crooked Media

History of the World Part II- the hysterical 4-part sequel to Mel Brooks' 1981 film is now streaming only on Hulu.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Jon Lovett’s conversation with Ike Barinholtz and other stars of the limited series and listen to them rant about the hottest, most timely headlines of 50 to 2000 years ago.
Click here to listen to Jon Lovett, Ike Barinholtz and other members of the History of the World Part II cast talk about The Making of History: History in the Making.

Under The Radar

Florida, Florida, Florida. In the past few years, the Sunshine State has become a laboratory for far-right laws, most of which seek to exert more control over Florida’s women and children. The hope of Florida remaining a purple state has slipped through our fingers, not necessarily because there are more Republicans than Democrats there, but because the state, like so many others, has been gerrymandered to hell. Along with its now-infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law, the state also imposed a 15-week abortion ban after the fall of Roe, with no exceptions for rape and incest. A new bill making its way through the legislature seeks to tighten that restriction to six weeks, when most people wouldn’t even know that they are pregnant. Florida’s transgender minors are now prohibited under law from receiving gender-affirming care. The list goes on. Faced with this new slate of restrictive laws that span nearly every stage of parenting—from reproductive health care to book bans in elementary schools to what legal adults can learn in college—many Florida families are rightly considering whether this is the time to stay and fight, or move if they have the resources to do so. But many of the families forced to stay are already part of marginalized communities, and don’t have the resources they need to fight. Would be cool if we had some strong federal policy that could fight for them!!

What Else?

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has offered disgraced former president Donald Trump a chance to testify before the grand jury investigating his hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which almost always indicates that an indictment is around the corner!!
Disgraced former president Trump’s legal advisor during his attempted coup has been censured by a Colorado judge who oversees lawyer-discipline cases. As part of the agreement, Ellis admits that multiple statements she made in 2020 about the “stolen election” were “misrepresentations” aka patent fucking lies.
Both the FBI and the U.S. Capitol Police have launched investigations after a major data breach of DC-area health records affected hundreds of members of Congress and their staffs this week.
Former Goldman Sachs banker Roger Ng was hit with a 10-year prison sentence today after he was convicted of a multibillion-dollar international corruption scheme. You’re telling me a Goldman Sachs banker did something unconscionably unethical??? More seriously: You’re telling me a Goldman Sachs banker got held accountable for something???
Russia launched a huge missile strike across Ukraine in the early hours of Thursday morning, killing at least six Ukrainian civilians and causing widespread power outages in Kyiv.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suffered a concussion after falling at a DC hotel and is currently being hospitalized “for a few days of observation and treatment.”
Lt. Gov. of Tennessee Randy McNally (R-TN), 79, has been popping the hell off in the Instagram comments of a 20-year-old gay man’s nude thirst traps with gems like, “Finn, you can turn a rainy day into rainbows and sunshine,” followed by heart and fire emojis. In the past year, Republican officials in Tennessee have passed more anti-LGBT legislation than any other state. 🚨🚨🚨

Be Smarter

In a new book, Disgraced former president Trump plans to reveal 150 private letters sent to him from celebrities and public figures. The book will be titled, hilariously, Letters to Trump and seems to be both a retrospective on the days of yore, when famous people wrote letters to one another, and also a bizarre reminiscence of bygone days when decent people used to sort of like him. The book includes letters from presidents, celebrities, members of various royal families, and business leaders, all which he saved over four decades in a box probably labeled “Love letters 2 me.” The retail price of the book? $99. Yes, ninety-nine American Dollars! For this terrible little book! Anyhow, let’s hope one or more of the senders sues him for copyright infringement.

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Light At The End Of The Email

The Michigan House of Representatives approved legislation to repeal the state’s anti-union “right to work” law.
President Biden is proposing a series of new tax increases for the wealthy and corporations including closing loopholes for “passthrough businesses” that allow the wealthy to hide their money from the IRS and a minimum 25 percent minimum tax on the richest 0.01 percent of Americans.

Enjoy

caleb hearon on Twitter: "we’re like a week away from dog people bringing their dogs to funerals"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a man who contained multitudes. He was famous for his mystery stories and iconic detective/sidekick duo, though one who wished that he would actually be known for his historical fiction. He was a lapsed ophthalmologist, a man of science whose books stood practically at the forefront of the newly developing field of forensics and always had rational-sounding explanations for the seemingly impossible. He was a real-life solver of cases who successfully led campaigns to exonerate two marginalized men of crimes they did not commit.
And yet he was also an ardent spiritualist, who by the time of his death was likely spiritualism's most famous and public proponent, making clear his belief in mediums, fairies, spirits, and the ability to communicate with the deceased. He was taken in by a clear hoax perpetrated by two young girls and insisted that Harry Houdini must have had spiritual powers, despite Houdini's own insistence that he did not, ruining his friendship with Houdini in the process.
This very good post by u/EquivalentInflation, while really about the disappearance of Agatha Christie, mentioned Conan Doyle's spiritualism relatively in passing, and it was a factoid that many commenters seemed fascinated by- and definitely something worth going into more detail about. Because to Conan Doyle, it wasn't a mere factoid at all- he was known to have said that he would sacrifice his literary reputation (which was substantial) for the sake of promoting spiritualism.
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“Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.”
Arthur Conan Doyle was a Scottish ophthalmologist without enough patients to keep him occupied (or financially solvent) when he wrote his first Sherlock Holmes story in a fit of boredom bordering on despair in the mid-1880s. After A Study in Scarlet was rejected by multiple publishers, it was printed in Beeton's Annual in 1887. The next Holmes story, The Sign of Four, was published by Lippincott's in 1890. Both were published as serials, but Conan Doyle soon realized that the wave of the future would be connected but self contained short stories rather than serials, which could be read in any order. His first set of short stories about Sherlock Holmes was therefore published soon after in the Strand magazine, and they set the world on fire far beyond what Conan Doyle had ever dreamed.
Though he was far from the first fictional private detective (he was preceded by Poe's Dupin and Gaboriau's Lecoq, both of whom the character of Holmes skewers in A Study in Scarlet), Sherlock Holmes represented something different and interesting in the genre. The crimes which he solves (a surprisingly small number of which deal with murder, particularly early on) are placed before him like puzzles, which he has to explain in a rational way. Watson- whose function in the narrative was new in crime fiction, and soon to be copied endlessly- is there throughout to not just describe the scene but to describe Holmes, so that readers have an inimitable and vivid quirky detective to latch on to.
Another Conan Doyle innovation was to make sure that the process of solving the crime was laid out so that the reader could see how it was done. Obviously here, Watson plays a key role- through him, the readers can see all the clues that Holmes does, but because Watson is not quite as intelligent as Holmes, we don't see how they all come together to form the solution until Holmes chooses to reveal the truth. In addition to the logic that Holmes emphasizes as the most important thing, Watson tells us that Holmes also has a wide array of (and absence of) skills and knowledge- to quote his assessment in A Study in Scarlet,

Knowledge of Literature – nil.
Knowledge of Philosophy – nil.
Knowledge of Astronomy – nil.
Knowledge of Politics – Feeble.
Knowledge of Botany – Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
Knowledge of Geology – Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks, has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.
Knowledge of Chemistry – Profound.
Knowledge of Anatomy – Accurate, but unsystematic.
Knowledge of Sensational Literature – Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
Plays the violin well.
Is an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman.
Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

Holmes, therefore, has a sizable base of knowledge- largely scientific and historical- to base his crime-solving on, and is not just interested in logical deduction but in systematic forensics (like fingerprinting and document analysis) in a way that even the police forces of his time were only starting to embark on. Like his mentor and model for Sherlock Holmes, Dr Joseph Bell, Conan Doyle emphasized the need to rely on observation to solve crimes, and thus to explain things which seem inexplicable and read the evidence of your own eyes (and other senses as well). There is no supernatural activity in Sherlock Holmes- except for the purpose of being explained and debunked as cold solid rational fact.
Conan Doyle himself was no intellectual slouch- in addition to his fiction writing career (in addition to mysteries he wrote many highly regarded novels and short stories on themes ranging from horror to historical fiction), he took the time to get the convictions of two wrongly imprisoned men, George Edalji and Oscar Slater, overturned by the British courts. He was clearly able, to whatever degree, to apply the principles of rationality and observation in his own personal life.
And that's what makes it so surprising when one realizes that while he was starting to create the first scientific detective, Conan Doyle was also taking his first steps into the world of spiritualism.
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“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent."
It's something of a truism to people who know something about Conan Doyle and spiritualism that he got into it after the death of his son Kingsley during WWI. This, however, is not true. Conan Doyle is known to have expressed an interest in spiritualism and attending seances at least as far back as 1887, the year that his first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was published.
This was, for the record, not at all unusual. Spiritualism had become very popular in the 1840s (with the seances of the Fox sisters being particularly influential), and figures like Queen Victoria and Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln are known to have participated in seances in the hopes of communicating with deceased loved ones. That said, as popular as spiritualism was before WWI, during and after the war it skyrocketed in popularity. Millions of people all around the world now had relatives whom they had suddenly and violently lost- whether in the war itself or in the ensuing flu pandemic- and the idea that someone could bring messages from those departed was an appealing one.
Conan Doyle's personal full conversion to spiritualism after years of interest (including joining psychic research societies, which did investigations to verify supernatural phenomena) seems to have come in 1916, when a family friend and medium, Lily Loder Symonds, apparently fully convinced him of its validity through a seance. In 1917, Conan Doyle was already passionate about spiritualism, and in 1918, following Kingsley's death, Conan Doyle and his second wife, Jean, participated in a seance to communicate with him. This only left him even more enthusiastic and evangelical.
When I say evangelical, I mean it. Conan Doyle participated in debates, wrote books, and went on lecture tours throughout Europe, North America, and Australia and New Zealand. He would go to seances and make his judgments as to whether they were genuine or fraudulent- and, in a twist that foreshadowed his relationship with Houdini, in some cases he might decide that real psychic power was demonstrated at a seance which the medium themselves would admit was fraudulent!
He also, very famously, was taken in by a hoax by two girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who claimed to take five photographs showing themselves with fairies. After the photos had been promoted by various spiritualist societies, they had come to Conan Doyle's attention when he used them to illustrate an article about fairies that he had been commissioned to write for the Strand magazine- the same magazine which published the Holmes stories. He fervently believed that they were real, as he believed that two working class Yorkshire girls couldn't have been sophisticated enough to create them. The Cottingley fairies, as they came to be known, were a huge story in 1920-21 which was fervently promoted by Conan Doyle, mostly to journalistic scorn at his gullibility. In the 1980s, the two girls, now grown women, admitted that they had faked the photos- which, with all due respect to Conan Doyle, seems obvious in hindsight.
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“No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.”
Just a quick note here- as we all sit here judging Conan Doyle for his credulity, let's put him back in context. (And then we'll go back to judging him, don't worry.)
As noted above, spiritualism was very popular at this time. Conan Doyle was far from the only high-profile person to believe in it- one of the most famous scientific men in England, Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the inventors of the technology behind the radio, was a fellow spiritualism enthusiast. He, like Conan Doyle, had lost a son during WWI and saw spiritualism and seances as a way to get him back. (Conan Doyle, incidentally, hadn't just lost his son- his beloved brother Innes*, two of his brothers in law and two of his nephews had died during this period. One of these brothers in law was EW Hornung, the creator of the Raffles charactestories.)
^\EDITED: Thank you to) u/PM_ME_YOUR_DALEKS ^{for pointing out that this was missing!}
At this time in history, science and technology were moving rapidly and new frontiers were being discovered constantly. This was, after all, the era of Einstein, in which a whole new kind of physics was essentially being opened up that demonstrated how little we understood the universe- and even the old one was producing inventions as miraculous-seeming as the telephone and the radio. Lodge's own spiritualist research often took scientific principles that he was using for his physics research and applied them to spiritualism with experiments intending to prove whether, for example, telekinesis was possible and if so under what circumstances. To many, spiritualism was only another way in which humanity was continuing to discover how their world worked.
This was expressed by all of the experimentation and investigative research that many spiritualists, Conan Doyle leading among them, would do in order to verify or debunk supernatural phenomena. To Conan Doyle, his belief in spiritualism could very easily fit in with his belief in evidence- because he looked for evidence. Was he blinkered by preconceived notions about what could be possible? Sure. But he didn't believe everything, and as we'll see below he even pulled tricks that fooled more twisty thinkers. He was fully aware that things were being faked and could be faked. He just believed that he had managed to understand what was and wasn't faked.
And, as mentioned, this was really popular. It wasn't at all unusual, as alluded to above, for newspapers to uncritically print articles about seances, supernatural phenomena, etc. While it wasn't the dominant way of looking at the world, and while over the course of the 1920s the general outlook turned more toward skepticism (so that by the time that Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, for example, were writing their mystery fiction, a seance was more likely to have been used cynically in a plot as a way to manipulate a gullible character), it was still absolutely a force that did not by any means dismiss Conan Doyle as a total crackpot in the eyes of his contemporaries. (Just as something of a crackpot.)
But at the end of the day, yes, Conan Doyle was credulous- and also swept up in a movement much bigger than he was. And it wasn't just him- his second wife, the former Jean Leckie, was a medium herself. So when he met someone who could do some of the most amazing feats he had ever seen, Conan Doyle was perfectly ready to believe that they had been accomplished through supernatural means. To Harry Houdini, who would come to know him quite well, if briefly, it seemed that "it wasn't as though he was deceived, but merely a case of a religious mania."
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“The more outré and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined.”
Harry Houdini had come at this whole thing from basically the opposite way.
Houdini, previously Ehrich Weiss, had actually started off doing some seances in his early career alongside his wife Bess- it's unclear to me the extent to which he believed that the phenomena that he experienced on these seances could have actually been genuine (though it is clear that he was very well versed in how to fake them). But over time, as he became more and more familiar with the ways in which he and other performers were able to use physical, technical, and psychological trickery to fool people into believing that the supernatural (or, in his case, the physically impossible) had taken place, as much as he wanted to believe that spiritualism could possibly be a real force, he was coming to the conclusion that it was unlikely, and that, more importantly, many people were being taken advantage of by fraudsters. And as someone with the kinds of skills to be able to unmask those fraudsters, Houdini took it upon himself to serve as a kind of proto-James Randi, going to seances and other spiritualist entertainments and debunking them by explaining how the trickery took place.
However, Houdini was still interested in the occult, and so when he went to the UK in 1920 on a tour, he was interested in meeting with this man of science and reason who was such a fervent believer in spiritualism. Maybe Conan Doyle really had managed to unearth authentic spiritualism, sifting with his logical mind through all of the trickery? Eager to meet him, by way of introduction Houdini sent him a copy of his recent book The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, in which Houdini had explained the ways in which the great magician Robert-Houdin (from whom Houdini had borrowed his name) had managed to fool his audiences.
Conan Doyle was, in turn, eager to meet Houdini, for whom he had a great admiration that probably well exceeded what Houdini was expecting (as would soon become clear), and they soon became friendly. Conan Doyle gave him a tour of spiritualism in the United Kingdom, telling him that he'd managed to sort out the honest and truly spiritual ones from the fakes. Houdini in turn followed Conan Doyle's recommendations, visiting over 100 seances- and concluding that all of them, even the ones which had been recommended by Conan Doyle as genuine, were in fact fraudulent.
This gave him pause, but didn't stop him from continuing a friendly correspondence with Conan Doyle over the next two years, and from taking time off from his magic career to research spiritualism and spiritualists. Houdini even paid tribute to him in one of his movies, in which he played a character who was shown to be reading one of Conan Doyle's works on spiritualism, A New Revelation (a book which Houdini had himself read and enjoyed).
The friendship was doomed to end in famously bad temper, never to recover, in 1922- but maybe a potent hint that all would soon be lost could already be seen from the start of their acquaintanceship, doomed before it began. It was a theme that Conan Doyle would include in his letters to Houdini, which Houdini would then ignore or contradict- which could not dissuade him.
According to Conan Doyle, Houdini was using supernatural powers.
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“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done.”
The relationship would all come crashing down in one massively disastrous visit by Conan Doyle to New York in 1922, though that didn't become evident til after it was over.
Conan Doyle was in the US for a lecture tour on spiritualism, and one evening, Houdini hosted a dinner party at the Society of American Magicians in his honor. It seems to have been a largely successful evening- and in fact it made the front page of the New York Times. Conan Doyle, this time, would be the trickster rather than the gullible mark.
Conan Doyle had, as we've noted, previously expressed a fascination with photographs that would seem to represent supernatural things. After watching a show made up of such renowned magicians as Max Malini and Horace Goldin (as well as, of course, Houdini himself), he set up a projector at the dinner and showed a film to the magicians' society- a scene of dinosaurs rampaging through the wilderness. According to later reports, the magicians were stunned. Dinosaurs, of course, could not exist; what then could Conan Doyle have done?
What he had done, of course, was present stop motion animation. It was of a kind and quality as yet unseen in American cinema, which explains why his display of the clip soon prompted a lawsuit by the man who claimed to have invented the brand-new process, which he said had been stolen from him by an unscrupulous former assistant for use in Conan Doyle's new movie, The Lost World, based on one of his novels. But it was something that the magicians had never before seen and thus could not explain.
Conan Doyle had, according to a letter he wrote to Houdini and had published in the newspaper a few days later, claimed that it was "not occult and only psychic... preternatural in the sense that it was not nature as we know it." He said this to justify any misrepresentations he may have made in front of the crowd, but to be honest I think the fact that he could claim this with a straight face says a lot about how he saw the supernatural as a rational man.
So Conan Doyle had flipped the script- he'd managed to be the one to fool the skeptic and the skeptic's friends, all of whom were well versed in trickery. One would think that things would be great with Houdini afterward, and in fact they were.
But things were still complicated, and would only get more complicated. Houdini was bristling at Conan Doyle's repeated mentions of detecting psychic powers in him as expressed through his tricks- when, of course, Houdini knew EXACTLY how he'd pulled the tricks off and worked hard at them, and knew full well that no psychic power was in play there. This theme recurred in Conan Doyle's letters to Houdini, as he believed that when he saw Houdini perform tricks like the milk can disappearance, he could sense a disappearing psychic energy, akin to one he experienced at seances. Conan Doyle even said to Houdini, "My dear chap, why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time?"
And, in a cab on the way from Houdini's home to Conan Doyle's hotel, Houdini performed a trick- he made his thumb disappear. If this sounds like the kind of trick you learned how to do when you were a kid, that's because that's exactly what it was- and for Houdini, probably the simplest and most transparent trick in his repertoire. And yet, Conan Doyle seems to have been honestly amazed by it, and to have considered the possibility- or even probability- that it had been accomplished through spiritual powers! Houdini was starting to be very disconcerted.
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"Well?" said he."Do you not find it interesting?""To a collector of fairy-tales.”
Throughout this visit, Houdini continued to try to debunk phony spiritualists (many of whom Conan Doyle believed to be completely genuine) and to demonstrate to Conan Doyle that it was, in fact, possible to do the seeming impossible without the use of psychic power. It was frustrating to have to explain this to the man who created a detective whose entire gimmick is to explain the impossible rationally, and yet that came to be his role again and again. He debunked seances, he explained to Conan Doyle (using step by step photo illustrations) how a popular stunt involving "ghosts" leaving paraffin casts of their hands in water was done, and he even performed tricks- more impressive than the disappearing thumb.
When he'd do these tricks, he swore up and down that they had been done solely through trickery and completely rational means. And yet, still, Conan Doyle found this impossible to believe. When Houdini demonstrated a trick in which Conan Doyle hung a chalkboard in the middle of a room, wrote on a piece of paper outside the room, and then upon re-entering saw a ball of ink-covered cork writing those same words on the chalkboard, Houdini continued to avow that this was all done through sleight of hand (and indeed it had been- a trick which he had bought from a retired vaudeville magician) and Conan Doyle refused to believe him. It was a pattern which Houdini had grown used to.
After all, he liked Conan Doyle personally. He and his wife got along with Sir Arthur (as Houdini invariably referred to him) and his wife, and Houdini enjoyed playing with Conan Doyle's young children. So when the Conan Doyles invited the Houdinis to Atlantic City, NJ, for a beachside vacation, it at first seemed like a wonderful idea. Houdini swam with the Conan Doyle kids and showed them his trick for staying underwater (inhaling and exhaling 6-8 times before going under), and then they went back to their discussion of spiritualism.
On a subsequent day of the trip, Conan Doyle asked Houdini if he would like to sit for an automatic writing session with his wife, Jean, who claimed to have mediumistic powers. He agreed, and from the description that he wrote the same day (which he changed later), he seems to have gone into it with a reasonably open mind. It soon transpired that, according to Jean, Houdini's mother was in the room with them and wanted to communicate with her son.
Houdini had been very close with his mother, Cecilia Weiss, and so having her appear to him would- if real- be a massive deal; indeed, Jean had already told Houdini that his mother had been in the room with them the day before, after doing table rapping. Houdini did, however, remember his wife Bess mentioning to him that Jean had been peppering her with questions about his mother the day before.
The whole thing didn't get off to a great start when, after Jean asked the spirit if she was religious and apparently got an answer in the affirmative, she indicated this by writing a cross on the paper- after all, Houdini's mother was Jewish. Then she produced a long paragraph of writing said to be by Houdini's mother, about how it was wonderful to be speaking with him and she was in a better place and preparing to have him be with her there. Upon concentrating on the question "can my mother read my mind," Houdini was somewhat, but not totally, shocked to see a new paragraph be written answering this question in the affirmative, as Conan Doyle had been the one to suggest the question to him. According to this writing allegedly by his mother, Houdini had been brought together with Conan Doyle through her own spiritual agency.
After the seance, Houdini decided to try some automatic writing of his own- and after getting some pointers from the Conan Doyles, he sat down, opened his mind, and wrote the word "Powell." This absolutely freaked Conan Doyle out- he'd had a friend named Powell who had died the previous week, and was convinced that this was some kind of a spiritual communication from the beyond. Houdini, though, after a certain amount of thought, came to the conclusion that the name Powell had come to mind because he and Bess had recently been discussing the situation of a magician named Powell whose wife was too ill to assist him on stage and had therefore hired a young girl to assist- they had been arguing over whether this was suitable.
And, of course, Conan Doyle refused to believe him.
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"Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.”
Conan Doyle and Houdini parted on good terms soon after- for the last time.
They corresponded in the usual vein of skeptic debunker vs ardent spiritualist, with Conan Doyle even writing to Houdini with additional information that had come through from his mother in the beyond. Houdini took it all in good humor until after Conan Doyle's return to London, when he crossed a line:
He declared, publicly, that Houdini had been converted to spiritualism through the seance with his mother.
Houdini could not allow this to stand. He wrote, also publicly, that not only had he not been converted to spiritualism, he was more skeptical than ever. Not only had there been a cross on the automatic writing paper, but it had been written in perfect and idiomatic English of a kind that Houdini's mother, an immigrant, had never spoken- and the alleged spirit of Houdini's mother had never mentioned that the previous day had been her birthday.
The impact of the public eye on their disagreements was grievous. Previously, they'd each been writing things which were contentious, but for each other's eyes only- and therefore the inconvenient could be ignored for the sake of their friendship. But now, journalists were asking Houdini whether he believed that the Conan Doyles were frauds- and he didn't know how to answer them. The Conan Doyles, in turn, expressed their anger and frustration that Houdini seemed to be badmouthing them publicly.
In 1924, it was Houdini whose action put the final nail in the coffin of their relationship- he started a lecture series that Conan Doyle saw as a direct counteraction of his own, demonstrating the ways in which fraudulent mediums (including some of the very ones in whom Conan Doyle placed his faith) were fooling the public. Conan Doyle took it as a personal affront. Effectively, the relationship was over, though it had been on its last legs for some time.
Houdini took the opportunity of no longer needing to account for Conan Doyle's feelings to become even more open about his skepticism- which ended up boosting his career as it meant a slight rebrand. He even testified before Congress in favor of a bill that would have outlawed fraudulent fortune-tellers. He also felt no hesitation about directly calling out Conan Doyle's gullibility in the Cottingley Fairies case and announced from stage at a performance that he'd be suing Conan Doyle for libel. After Houdini had debunked a famous medium, Margery, Conan Doyle had criticized his methods and Houdini understood him to be accusing him of accepting bribes.
Conan Doyle, in turn, remained as resolute not just about spiritualism, but about his conviction that Houdini himself had psychic powers. As he continued to publicly feud with Houdini, particularly in an era in which spiritualism was slowly waning and Houdini's debunking was very popular, Conan Doyle couldn't escape a certain amount of public backlash, which left him entirely unmoved.
This feud would, in the end, not last much longer, as Houdini died in 1926 as the result of a ruptured appendix. But though Conan Doyle and Bess Houdini seem to have reconciled afterward, it still wasn't quite over.
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“It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light."
I first learned that Conan Doyle and Houdini feuded because of my interest in Jewish history.
I used to run the Tuesday Trivia weekly thread on AskHistorians (now it's done by a much more capable and punctual bot), and one day I read something that led me to make the next Tuesday's theme magic. I wanted to talk about something I had read in the fascinating autobiography of Rabbi Bernard Drachman. You can see the full post here, but suffice it to say that he was a leading traditionalist rabbi in New York at the turn of the 20th century who claimed, among other things, to have been Houdini's rabbi. I discuss that particular claim and its veracity in the above link, but there's one particular thing he mentions that I'll quote in full because I find it to be fascinating:

It was my sad privilege to officiate at the funeral. His passing became the occasion for the widespread discussion of his personality and the extraordinary powers which he unquestionably possessed.... What these powers were I, of course, know as little as anyone else, but they certainly were far above the vulgar sleight-of-hand and tricks of ordinary so-called magicians. The Spiritualists claimed Houdini as one of their own and asserted that his escape from apparently unsuperable means of confinement was due to his ability to dematerialize his body and thus pass through all physical restraints. Houdini himself denied that he was a Spiritualist medium- he was, indeed, an outspoken opponent of spiritualism- and stated that his performances were strictly in accordance with natural law.
This statement, of course, left the matter as much of a mystery as before. The Spiritualists refused to accept Houdini's denial that he was a medium. They insisted that he was. They even tried to drag me into the controversy as upholding their contention. In my funeral address I had used the words, "Houdini possessed a wondrous power that he never understood and which he never revealed to anyone in life." These words are meant to be taken in their narrowest and most literal significance. All I meant was that Houdini possessed an extraordinary and mysterious power- and by that statement I am still willing to stand- the precise nature and quality of which was not clear even to him and that he had never taken anyone into his confidence nor revealed what his concept of his extraordinary gift was.
But the Spiritualists seized upon these words to draw from them the utterly unjustified inference that I considered Houdini a Spiritualist medium and that his powers were derived from a super-mundane, non-material source. Arthur Conan Doyle, the well-known author and Spiritualist leader, interprets them to this effect in his book, The Edge of the Unknown. Of course, I meant nothing of the kind. My statement was merely a recognition of his undeniably extraordinary power, concerning the nature of which I admit that I am just as ignorant as everybody else, including A. C. Doyle, neither more nor less.

Conan Doyle had, indeed, quoted Drachman in his book, saying that

At that burial some curious and suggestive words were used by the presiding rabbi, Barnard Drachman. He said: "Houdini possessed a wondrous power that he never Understood, and which he never revealed to anyone in life." Such an expression coming at so solemn a moment from one who may have been in a special position to know must show that my speculations are not extravagant or fantastic when I deal with the real source of those powers. The rabbi's speech is to be taken with Houdini's own remark, when he said to my wife: "There are some of my feats which my own wife does not know the secret of."

So, bottom line is- in an action entirely characteristic of Conan Doyle, who believed that death was no barrier, he saw no reason not to continue this particular feud after his sparring partner had passed. And in fact, he showed no signs of having changed his mind right up until his own death in 1930.
And as for Houdini? Despite, or perhaps because of, his skepticism, he'd arranged before his death that every year on its anniversary his wife Bess would hold a seance, and they prearranged a signal to indicate that any alleged supernatural visitor was indeed him. Bess held a yearly seance every year on the anniversary for ten years, at which point she gave it up as a bad job.
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“The most important thing in the world”
So what was the bottom line?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle still has the reputation that he deservedly holds for his literature. He was truly a groundbreaking writer of detective fiction and very talented in the other genres in which he chose to write, and he is also rightly remembered for his commitment to justice and his efforts in obtaining the freedom of unjustly imprisoned men.
And yet- his whole-souled embrace of spiritualism absolutely came to affect his legacy. While the average reader of a Sherlock Holmes story may never know about it (he left no trace of spiritualism in his mystery fiction), no discussion of him as a writer of these books can really leave it out. There always seems to be a need to try to reconcile- how can such an erudite, intelligent, and logical man have been so credulous?
This isn't only a retroactive discussion- in his time, the very same dichotomy was a massive topic of discussion. Even in a time in which spiritualism was commonplace, it was still mocked, and this was only more so for Conan Doyle given his previous reputation. And while it didn't necessarily affect Sherlock Holmes's popularity, it's unquestionable that spiritualism cast a shadow over the popular conception of Conan Doyle himself.
In the end, when Conan Doyle died, the headline of his New York Times obituary read "CONAN DOYLE DEAD FROM HEART ATTACK; Spiritist [emphasis mine], Novelist and Creator of Famous Fiction Detective Ill Two Months--Was 71." The next headline read "FAMILY AWAITS 'MESSAGE' Son Is Confident Father Will Confirm Spirit Existence, in Which He Believed. Told of Spirit Talks. Family Awaits a Message." Only in the third subject heading is Conan Doyle's literary career discussed.
That said- it seems like Conan Doyle himself didn't much mind. He was known to have said that he would, to quote his estate's official website, "gladly sacrifice whatever literary reputation he enjoyed if it would bring about a greater acceptance of his psychic message."
In that case, he got away relatively lightly in the long term.

Hello all. I want to thank everyone for reaching out and the encouragement. I wanted to give you a small update on the events since my last post. So my ex wife did end up having the funeral for her husband. My girls were in attendance as their mother demanded even though it had been explained to me that they were going to have the option of attending. Despite my every desire to appear and ruin everything, I chose not too. I did however alert several advocacy groups and they in turn blew up the funeral home's website obituaries to the point that they stopped allowing posts for the assaulter.
In the months since however, I have fortunately had some positive happenings in my life. Despite what was seemingly overwhelming evidence, my attempt at emergency custody was denied by the family court. (There are still so many judges that are very anti-father.) Even with this setback however, my oldest daughter has returned to my life. I've gotten to spend time with her every other weekend since at her choice. She has shared her last 3 years with me and it has been heartbreaking. On top of the sexual abuse, there was a pregnancy that was terminated, 2 suicide attempts and hospitalizations, and a police investigation of the circulation of her photos amongst "collectors". All of these circumstances were hidden from me and not disclosed or acknowleged by my ex. (Despite all of this, the judge still supports keeping the girls in her custody.) My daughters are both getting therapy and counseling, the oldest because of the events and the younger due to her neglect although my ex swears that she's fine and doesn;'t really need it. But she is delusional.
Karma has a way of turning out though as my EX is being sued by her late husband's children and former employer over theft and forgery. I have decided and will maintain the mantra that I don't care what my ex is doing in her personal life, but will only get involved when it directly concerns the well being of my daughters. So in that regard, it has been a struggle, yet I'm rebuilding a fragile relationship and we've actually bonded over shared trauma. I have a small suspicion and self doubt right now about her, but I'm going to try and remain hopeful. Thanks again and I will update again in the future as my fight is not over.

I have waited the 6 months to be able to post this case to my favorite sub and I understand why that particular rule is in place. But quite honestly I think the main ones still investigating this are the distraught family, and I had believed they would have had answers by now. Hopefully it's not removed.
This case hits closest to home for me over any of the other's I covered with this account. I watched it play out on social media as alot of my local community in Virginia did. I am only vaguely connected to the family of Alyssa through her aunt being a former coworker of mine. She was a friend on a social media site and began recording their journey for answers to find her niece. It was so heartbreaking to watch.
I am gonna give as much information as I can and of course provide links. But I'd love to create some kind of discussion about Alyssa here if that's the least I can do.
This basically begins around about September 13th, 2022. Alyssa Taylor was 25 years old and the mother of 2 young children. Alyssa's own mother, Krista Taylor was out of town, out of the state of Virginia on a little vacation in another state, if I remember correctly. They both resided in Accomack County Virginia. Krista was having a text conversation with Alyssa on September 13th who stated she was going to ride on a tractor trailer with her friend, Danny McNeil aged 51, out of state for a couple days to get out of town, simply for the ride. Later on that day Danny McNeil was approached by a police officer in Exmore Virginia, a town the next County over from Accomack. The officer was giving McNeil a warning about parking the tractor trailer where he had, this tractor trailer was hauling hundreds of frozen chickens.This interaction was caught on body cam footage. No ticket or anything came of the incident but the woman heard on that body cam with Danny McNeil was identified as Alyssa. It would be a few hours later that Alyssa's family would retrace over and over again.
At around 2 a.m. on September 14th 2022 Danny McNeil lost control of his truck on I-85 around the Hillsborough North Carolina area. The truck struck a guardrail, then a highway sign where the trailer flipped and burst into flames. Slamming into the bank of a bridge. Danny was driving 65 miles an hour before impact. It came out later that he was intoxicated and his blood alcohol was 4 times the legal state limit at 0.32.
Fire units respond and have most of the flames pushed back by 2:34 a.m. but the truck remained engulfed until about 3 a.m. The crash shut down most of the traffic flow on the bridge the following day. As units responded and the fire was contained the remains of Danny and his dog were recovered relatively quickly. Then after apparently a quick assessment at the scene dump trucks and bulldozers begin scooping up the burn debris from the crash. As well as the hundreds of now burned frozen chickens, putting them in dumptrucks, and hauling to a landfill, also possibly more than one landfill.
After the scene is cleaned up in the dark in the wee morning hours of September 14th, Krista Taylor gets wind of Danny McNeil being killed in a crash a few days later and instantly her nightmare begins.
She starts contacting everyone she can think of to inform them that she strongly believed Alyssa was in the crash.
Minutes after this accident Alyssa's cell phone turns off for good and never comes back on. Accomack County VA police pinged her phone within a half an hour of the crash site. (7 hours from home).
In the following days a missing person report is filed on September 20th. The family goes to view the wreckage at the yard of the wrecking company where the truck was hauled and amongst the burnt twisted remains they found Alyssa's bright pink camo blanket that she carried with her everywhere and a flip flop. Sadly they find not a single trace of Alyssa herself amongst these belongings.
In the most immediate days that followed the accident Alyssa's mother and 2 of her aunts fought for answers. They searched fields and woods and directly under the bridge (where before they went home they also found one of Alyssa's earrings )missed along the wreckage that was scooped up and hauled away. When asking the NC Highway Patrol what landfill they should search they were told to "figure it out". At one point it was told to the family cadaver dogs had searched the appropriate landfill and found no evidence of human remains. The stance of North Carolina Highway Patrol is that she was not in that truck when it crashed. So then where is she?
Her family strongly believes she perished in that crash.
Other theories are Danny dropped her off somewhere else before the crash...but where? Her family hasn't had any communication with her since a few hours before that crash and none since that day. Speculation stirred between the two families Especially finding out that Danny was drunk when he crashed. But anyone that knew the truck driver believes he had his faults but did not purposefully harm Alyssa before the crash. Yet here we are today.
A family is still looking for Alyssa so they can have a funeral. They strongly do not believe she's wandering around out there and not contacting them after all this time has passed. NC Highway stands by their statements that Alyssa Taylor was not in the I-85 crash with Danny McNeil. But was she? If you have any answers that may help solve this case please contact the Accomack County Sherrifs Department at 757-787-1131
https://www.wral.com/Alyssa-Taylor-I85-crash/20511978/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wavy.com/news/local-news/accomack-county/after-months-with-no-answers-eastern-shore-family-still-pleads-for-answers-to-one-question-where-is-alyssa/amp/
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wboc.com/news/family-of-missing-accomack-county-mother-want-case-turned-over-to-fbi/article_1914be5e-75b5-11ed-b894-87d5c3fe7ba9.html&ved=2ahUKEwiN68iVw8f9AhVsFlkFHQkJBwcQFnoECCEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw26eSIxRxr0RgeB862bP5mi

My mom and step father have fought through many hardships, including cancer. His passing wasn't abrupt but it was an eye opener. In the past two years his health took a decline. They didn't feel the need to put health insurance on hims since they had the understand that the Veterans affair would take care of my mom after his passing, but there was some misunderstandings. She doesn't get even half of the income they were getting, more like a 1/4 of it. He always believed that the VA would pay off the house in the case of his death, which they don't do. We were rudely informed of this by a rep of their home loan service. It's left her with a lot of debt and limited income, which hasn't even been approved by the VA or Social Security. Despite our efforts of trying to cut it down she is still short a couple thousand a month. We live with her so we've scrapped our incomes together, and drawing out of savings, so far but I don't see in end to it without some help. Old medical bills, credit card debt from previous funerals, misc charges, and a car payment after she traded in her smaller car for a larger SUV to fit his then needed electric wheel chair.
My mom won't ask for help and my younger brother refuses too, so me and my fiance are asking for her. We've set up a go fund me for them. We didn't know what best describes the situation so we set it for her monthly bill cost. We are hopeful for any kind of help, including advice, prayers, sharing, and of course donations. I know I shared more information in this post then what they wanted me to, but I feel that it's best to be genuine. Thanks so much for taking the time to read my ramblings.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-linda-fletcher?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1
​
Just kind of a footnote: This ordeal has really shown me the importance of making clear your plans for when you go. We all have life insurance besides my step dad, because they thought he didn't need it. So please make sure you and your family have some kind of plan. Seriously thank you for taking the time to even read any of the above.

I started writing on Medium a couple of months ago to try to earn more to afford better treatment for my CPTSD symptoms and to move out of this town with my partner. This town is unhealthy for us both but due to our combined disabilities it has been excruciating to earn more to get out of here. We continue to do the best we can but we're running on fumes.
My biological father was once a basketball scholarship student and the first in his family to go to college, but then was incarcerated for a murder he didn't commit, I found an article that discussed that event a while back.
He wasn't compensated, he wasn't given rehabilitative services, just a bus ticket and barely enough funds to make it back to his home town. He turned to crack cocaine and this became a lifelong struggle.
On February 3rd I googled my biological father for an article I wanted to write, I finally healed enough to tell his story, but this time his obituary was the first result. He died over a year and half ago and this is how I found out. He was only 57.
I spent my childhood hoping he'd get clean and spend time with me, and I researched ways to heal trauma with my partner to not only heal myself but to someday give him the tools, knowledge, and resources to heal. But it is too late for that now.
On the obituary page they listed my name as his daughter, spelled wrong but there all the same, like he was always in my life. This was a head fuck because he mostly avoided me. There was a 2 hour funeral video and I watched it, there were dozens of people talking about how amazing he was, even the mayor had something to say during it, and I have no idea what any of them were talking about.
I never got to meet that version of him, I barely got to see him, and here were all of these people who talked about fond memories of him and all the time they shared. And they listed me there like I was part of all of that.
I've been estranged from my mother's and adoptive father's (it's confusing but I have a biological and adoptive father, two different people) sides with no contact for over 8 years because of the toll they've taken on my mental health.
I fled overseas to get away from my mother and her relative's pathology and build a new life with my partner. Now I'm isolated in a different country and I only have my partner, who is too ill most days to support me.
I'm my partner's caregiver and I've barely had time or space to grieve everything. I've done over 40 things to improve my CPTSD symptoms and progress was made but chronic fatigue is still debilitating. If these symptoms don't heal enough, fast enough, I fear I'm not going to make it to 57 at this rate.
Mental health services here are not trained to treat CPTSD and going that route is not only expensive but has more risks than benefits.
I'm feeling so much pain with all of this, and I barely have the strength to do basic self care, to earn us more money, and to support my partner. I've been trying to power through my chronic fatigue with Modafinil but I am running out and I can't afford more. I'm prescribed medical marijuana and that would help with this but I can't afford that either.
There were multiple rough patches this week with my partner's mental health where we were up at 4 am and she was having heavy flashbacks for several hours, the longest being 13 hours straight. CBD helped us regroup luckily but even getting more of this is a struggle.
I'm not planning suicide, mostly because the success rate is low, the odds of ending up more disabled are high, and I don't want to leave my partner alone in this place, but some parts of me are begging for euthanasia. This has gotten a little better but I am still struggling with this.
Other parts are fighting with everything I've got left and to somehow find the strength to push through writing, push through finding ways to earn more to move out of here to realize our dream of making content to help other people heal from multigenerational pathology and trauma.
I'm still trying to fight for this dream, I'm fighting every moment of every day to keep this dream alive.
I am open to feedback or advice on how to move forward from here. Social support in this town isn't an option and online sex work was a bust, I can't sustain it without getting sicker and I've gotten conned from it before.
The psychwards make things worse, I can't afford psychiatry or therapy, I do self guided therapy.
Thank you for reading.

I started writing on Medium a couple of months ago to try to earn more to afford better treatment for my CPTSD symptoms and to move out of this town with my partner. This town is unhealthy for us both but due to our combined disabilities it has been excruciating to earn more to get out of here. We continue to do the best we can but we're running on fumes.
My biological father was once a basketball scholarship student and the first in his family to go to college, but then was incarcerated for a murder he didn't commit, I found an article that discussed that event a while back.
He wasn't compensated, he wasn't given rehabilitative services, just a bus ticket and barely enough funds to make it back to his home town. He turned to crack cocaine and this became a lifelong struggle.
On February 3rd I googled my biological father for an article I wanted to write, I finally healed enough to tell his story, but this time his obituary was the first result. He died over a year and half ago and this is how I found out. He was only 57.
I spent my childhood hoping he'd get clean and spend time with me, and I researched ways to heal trauma with my partner to not only heal myself but to someday give him the tools, knowledge, and resources to heal. But it is too late for that now.
On the obituary page they listed my name as his daughter, spelled wrong but there all the same, like he was always in my life. This was a head fuck because he mostly avoided me. There was a 2 hour funeral video and I watched it, there were dozens of people talking about how amazing he was, even the mayor had something to say during it, and I have no idea what any of them were talking about.
I never got to meet that version of him, I barely got to see him, and here were all of these people who talked about fond memories of him and all the time they shared. And they listed me there like I was part of all of that.
I've been estranged from my mother's and adoptive father's (it's confusing but I have a biological and adoptive father, two different people) sides with no contact for over 8 years because of the toll they've taken on my mental health.
I fled overseas to get away from my mother and her relative's pathology and build a new life with my partner. Now I'm isolated in a different country and I only have my partner, who is too ill most days to support me.
I'm my partner's caregiver and I've barely had time or space to grieve everything. I've done over 40 things to improve my CPTSD symptoms and progress was made but chronic fatigue is still debilitating. If these symptoms don't heal enough, fast enough, I fear I'm not going to make it to 57 at this rate.
Mental health services here are not trained to treat CPTSD and going that route is not only expensive but has more risks than benefits.
I'm feeling so much pain with all of this, and I barely have the strength to do basic self care, to earn us more money, and to support my partner. I've been trying to power through my chronic fatigue with Modafinil but I am running out and I can't afford more. I'm prescribed medical marijuana and that would help with this but I can't afford that either.
There were multiple rough patches this week with my partner's mental health where we were up at 4 am and she was having heavy flashbacks for several hours, the longest being 13 hours straight. CBD helped us regroup luckily but even getting more of this is a struggle.
I'm not planning suicide, mostly because the success rate is low, the odds of ending up more disabled are high, and I don't want to leave my partner alone in this place, but some parts of me are begging for euthanasia. This has gotten a little better but I am still struggling with this.
Other parts are fighting with everything I've got left and to somehow find the strength to push through writing, push through finding ways to earn more to move out of here to realize our dream of making content to help other people heal from multigenerational pathology and trauma.
I'm still trying to fight for this dream, I'm fighting every moment of every day to keep this dream alive.
I am open to feedback or advice on how to move forward from here. Social support in this town isn't an option and online sex work was a bust, I can't sustain it without getting sicker and I've gotten conned from it before.
The psychwards make things worse, I can't afford psychiatry or therapy, I do self guided therapy.
Thank you for reading.

I started writing on Medium a couple of months ago to try to earn more to afford better treatment for my CPTSD symptoms and to move out of this town with my partner. This town is unhealthy for us both but due to our combined disabilities it has been excruciating to earn more to get out of here. We continue to do the best we can but we're running on fumes.
My biological father was once a basketball scholarship student and the first in his family to go to college, but then was incarcerated for a murder he didn't commit, I found an article that discussed that event a while back.
He wasn't compensated, he wasn't given rehabilitative services, just a bus ticket and barely enough funds to make it back to his home town. He turned to crack cocaine and this became a lifelong struggle.
On February 3rd I googled my biological father for an article I wanted to write, I finally healed enough to tell his story, but this time his obituary was the first result. He died over a year and half ago and this is how I found out. He was only 57.
I spent my childhood hoping he'd get clean and spend time with me, and I researched ways to heal trauma with my partner to not only heal myself but to someday give him the tools, knowledge, and resources to heal. But it is too late for that now.
On the obituary page they listed my name as his daughter, spelled wrong but there all the same, like he was always in my life. This was a head fuck because he mostly avoided me. There was a 2 hour funeral video and I watched it, there were dozens of people talking about how amazing he was, even the mayor had something to say during it, and I have no idea what any of them were talking about.
I never got to meet that version of him, I barely got to see him, and here were all of these people who talked about fond memories of him and all the time they shared. And they listed me there like I was part of all of that.
I've been estranged from my mother's and adoptive father's (it's confusing but I have a biological and adoptive father, two different people) sides with no contact for over 8 years because of the toll they've taken on my mental health.
I fled overseas to get away from my mother and her relative's pathology and build a new life with my partner. Now I'm isolated in a different country and I only have my partner, who is too ill most days to support me.
I'm my partner's caregiver and I've barely had time or space to grieve everything. I've done over 40 things to improve my CPTSD symptoms and progress was made but chronic fatigue is still debilitating. If these symptoms don't heal enough, fast enough, I fear I'm not going to make it to 57 at this rate.
Mental health services here are not trained to treat CPTSD and going that route is not only expensive but has more risks than benefits.
I'm feeling so much pain with all of this, and I barely have the strength to do basic self care, to earn us more money, and to support my partner. I've been trying to power through my chronic fatigue with Modafinil but I am running out and I can't afford more. I'm prescribed medical marijuana and that would help with this but I can't afford that either.
There were multiple rough patches this week with my partner's mental health where we were up at 4 am and she was having heavy flashbacks for several hours, the longest being 13 hours straight. CBD helped us regroup luckily but even getting more of this is a struggle.
I'm not planning suicide, mostly because the success rate is low, the odds of ending up more disabled are high, and I don't want to leave my partner alone in this place, but some parts of me are begging for euthanasia. This has gotten a little better but I am still struggling with this.
Other parts are fighting with everything I've got left and to somehow find the strength to push through writing, push through finding ways to earn more to move out of here to realize our dream of making content to help other people heal from multigenerational pathology and trauma.
I'm still trying to fight for this dream, I'm fighting every moment of every day to keep this dream alive.
I am open to feedback or advice on how to move forward from here. Social support in this town isn't an option and online sex work was a bust, I can't sustain it without getting sicker and I've gotten conned from it before.
The psychwards make things worse, I can't afford psychiatry or therapy, I do self guided therapy.
Thank you for reading.

I started writing on Medium a couple of months ago to try to earn more to afford better treatment for my CPTSD symptoms and to move out of this town with my partner. This town is unhealthy for us both but due to our combined disabilities it has been excruciating to earn more to get out of here. We continue to do the best we can but we're running on fumes.
My biological father was once a basketball scholarship student and the first in his family to go to college, but then was incarcerated for a murder he didn't commit, I found an article that discussed that event a while back.
He wasn't compensated, he wasn't given rehabilitative services, just a bus ticket and barely enough funds to make it back to his home town. He turned to crack cocaine and this became a lifelong struggle.
On February 3rd I googled my biological father for an article I wanted to write, I finally healed enough to tell his story, but this time his obituary was the first result. He died over a year and half ago and this is how I found out. He was only 57.
I spent my childhood hoping he'd get clean and spend time with me, and I researched ways to heal trauma with my partner to not only heal myself but to someday give him the tools, knowledge, and resources to heal. But it is too late for that now.
On the obituary page they listed my name as his daughter, spelled wrong but there all the same, like he was always in my life. This was a head fuck because he mostly avoided me. There was a 2 hour funeral video and I watched it, there were dozens of people talking about how amazing he was, even the mayor had something to say during it, and I have no idea what any of them were talking about.
I never got to meet that version of him, I barely got to see him, and here were all of these people who talked about fond memories of him and all the time they shared. And they listed me there like I was part of all of that.
I've been estranged from my mother's and adoptive father's (it's confusing but I have a biological and adoptive father, two different people) sides with no contact for over 8 years because of the toll they've taken on my mental health.
I fled overseas to get away from my mother and her relative's pathology and build a new life with my partner. Now I'm isolated in a different country and I only have my partner, who is too ill most days to support me.
I'm my partner's caregiver and I've barely had time or space to grieve everything. I've done over 40 things to improve my CPTSD symptoms and progress was made but chronic fatigue is still debilitating. If these symptoms don't heal enough, fast enough, I fear I'm not going to make it to 57 at this rate.
Mental health services here are not trained to treat CPTSD and going that route is not only expensive but has more risks than benefits.
I'm feeling so much pain with all of this, and I barely have the strength to do basic self care, to earn us more money, and to support my partner. I've been trying to power through my chronic fatigue with Modafinil but I am running out and I can't afford more. I'm prescribed medical marijuana and that would help with this but I can't afford that either.
There were multiple rough patches this week with my partner's mental health where we were up at 4 am and she was having heavy flashbacks for several hours, the longest being 13 hours straight. CBD helped us regroup luckily but even getting more of this is a struggle.
I'm not planning suicide, mostly because the success rate is low, the odds of ending up more disabled are high, and I don't want to leave my partner alone in this place, but some parts of me are begging for euthanasia. This has gotten a little better but I am still struggling with this.
Other parts are fighting with everything I've got left and to somehow find the strength to push through writing, push through finding ways to earn more to move out of here to realize our dream of making content to help other people heal from multigenerational pathology and trauma.
I'm still trying to fight for this dream, I'm fighting every moment of every day to keep this dream alive.
I am open to feedback or advice on how to move forward from here. Social support in this town isn't an option and online sex work was a bust, I can't sustain it without getting sicker and I've gotten conned from it before.
The psychwards make things worse, I can't afford psychiatry or therapy, I do self guided therapy.
Thank you for reading.

I started writing on Medium a couple of months ago to try to earn more to afford better treatment for my CPTSD symptoms and to move out of this town with my partner. This town is unhealthy for us both but due to our combined disabilities it has been excruciating to earn more to get out of here. We continue to do the best we can but we're running on fumes.
My biological father was once a basketball scholarship student and the first in his family to go to college, but then was incarcerated for a murder he didn't commit, I found an article that discussed that event a while back.
He wasn't compensated, he wasn't given rehabilitative services, just a bus ticket and barely enough funds to make it back to his home town. He turned to crack cocaine and this became a lifelong struggle.
On February 3rd I googled my biological father for an article I wanted to write, I finally healed enough to tell his story, but this time his obituary was the first result. He died over a year and half ago and this is how I found out. He was only 57.
I spent my childhood hoping he'd get clean and spend time with me, and I researched ways to heal trauma with my partner to not only heal myself but to someday give him the tools, knowledge, and resources to heal. But it is too late for that now.
On the obituary page they listed my name as his daughter, spelled wrong but there all the same, like he was always in my life. This was a head fuck because he mostly avoided me. There was a 2 hour funeral video and I watched it, there were dozens of people talking about how amazing he was, even the mayor had something to say during it, and I have no idea what any of them were talking about.
I never got to meet that version of him, I barely got to see him, and here were all of these people who talked about fond memories of him and all the time they shared. And they listed me there like I was part of all of that.
I've been estranged from my mother's and adoptive father's (it's confusing but I have a biological and adoptive father, two different people) sides with no contact for over 8 years because of the toll they've taken on my mental health.
I fled overseas to get away from my mother and her relative's pathology and build a new life with my partner. Now I'm isolated in a different country and I only have my partner, who is too ill most days to support me.
I'm my partner's caregiver and I've barely had time or space to grieve everything. I've done over 40 things to improve my CPTSD symptoms and progress was made but chronic fatigue is still debilitating. If these symptoms don't heal enough, fast enough, I fear I'm not going to make it to 57 at this rate.
Mental health services here are not trained to treat CPTSD and going that route is not only expensive but has more risks than benefits.
I'm feeling so much pain with all of this, and I barely have the strength to do basic self care, to earn us more money, and to support my partner. I've been trying to power through my chronic fatigue with Modafinil but I am running out and I can't afford more. I'm prescribed medical marijuana and that would help with this but I can't afford that either.
There were multiple rough patches this week with my partner's mental health where we were up at 4 am and she was having heavy flashbacks for several hours, the longest being 13 hours straight. CBD helped us regroup luckily but even getting more of this is a struggle.
I'm not planning suicide, mostly because the success rate is low, the odds of ending up more disabled are high, and I don't want to leave my partner alone in this place, but some parts of me are begging for euthanasia. This has gotten a little better but I am still struggling with this.
Other parts are fighting with everything I've got left and to somehow find the strength to push through writing, push through finding ways to earn more to move out of here to realize our dream of making content to help other people heal from multigenerational pathology and trauma.
I'm still trying to fight for this dream, I'm fighting every moment of every day to keep this dream alive.
I am open to feedback or advice on how to move forward from here. Social support in this town isn't an option and online sex work was a bust, I can't sustain it without getting sicker and I've gotten conned from it before.
The psychwards make things worse, I can't afford psychiatry or therapy, I do self guided therapy.
Thank you for reading.