The NoSleep Podcast - S18: NoSleep Podcast New Year 2023 Vol. 2

Episode Date: January 8, 2023

We’re sharing more stories with a 2023 holiday hiatus episode! Enjoy two stories from our Season Pass 18 episodes.“Experimental Design” written by Vince Darcangelo (Story starts around 00:04:20)TRIGGER WARNING!Produced by: Jesse CornettCast: Tyler – Jeff Clement, McKenna Delaporte – Jessica McEvoy, Secretary – Nichole Goodnight, Dr. Stonebridge – Nikolle Doolin, Inspector Gomez – Mick Wingert“Underground” written by Leo Harrison (Story starts around 00:52:25)TRIGGER WARNING!Produced by: Jesse CornettCast: Narrator – Nikolle Doolin, Lucille – Kristen DiMercurio, Melissa – Tanja MilojevicThis episode is sponsored by:Green Chef – Green Chef makes eating well easy with plans to fit every lifestyle. Whether you’re Keto, Paleo, Vegan, Vegetarian, Gluten-Free, or just looking to eat more balanced meals, Green Chef offers a range of recipes to suit your preferences. Go to greenchef.com/nosleep60 and use code nosleep60 to get 60% off plus free shipping!ShipStation – ShipStation makes it super easy to manage and ship all your online orders faster, cheaper and more efficiently. You’ll spend a lot less time on shipping and a lot more time growing your business. Get a 60-day free trial at https://www.shipstation.com/nosleep. Thanks to ShipStation for sponsoring the show!Click here to learn more about The NoSleep Podcast teamClick here to learn more about Vince DarcangeloExecutive Producer & Host: David CummingsMusical score composed by: Brandon Boone“New Year 2023 Vol. 2” illustration courtesy of Alexandra CruzAudio program ©2022 – Creative Reason Media Inc. – All Rights Reserved – No reproduction or use of this content is permitted without the express written consent of Creative Reason Media Inc. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The No Sleep Podcast keeps the New Year's spirit alive. Our New Year's resolution is to keep the horror flowing during our holiday break. And when it comes to New Year's resolutions, one that usually tops people's lists, is the goal to eat healthier. And with Green Chef,

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I've spoken about Hello Fresh in the past. Well, Green Chef is now owned by Hello Fresh, and with a wider array of meal plans to choose from, there's something for everyone. In 2023, help yourself to delicious, convenient recipes that support your healthy lifestyle and taste good too. Eat well in the New Year without sacrificing taste. Bring more flavor to your table in the New Year

with Green Chef's wholesome, elevated recipes. Green Chef's pre-made and pre-measured sauces, dressings, and spices make keeping a healthy lifestyle even easier. Put the time you save on meal prep towards achieving your 2023 goals. So listen, go to greenchef.com slash no sleep 60. That's 6.0 and use code no sleep 60 to get 60% off plus free shipping. That's right. Go to greenchef.com slash no sleep 60.

60 and use code no sleep 60 to get 60% off plus free shipping. Green Chef, the number one meal kit for eating well. And now there are discoveries to be made. I just hope you're fully braced. For the dark hours when you dare not close your eyes. Helms of horror to frighten and disturb. What's that sound you hear from beneath your bed? did. Join us as the sleepless hours tick past. Brace yourself for the No Sleep Podcast.

Welcome to the No Sleep Podcast, 2023 New Year's hiatus episode, Volume 2. I'm your host, David Cummings. As we enjoy or endure the winter winds of January, we continue our holiday offering of hiatus episodes. We have two great stories for you this week, which first appeared on our season 18 season pass episodes. We've given you an extended episode this week because next week we'll have a shorter episode. It'll be a small break before we have our next two volumes of our sleepless decompositions episodes, coming out January 22nd and 29th, respectively. And following that, yes, it's the start of season 19. And speaking of season 19, you'll want to make sure you listen to next week's short episode, there just may be an announcement you'll want to hear.

So, two long stories to keep you company in the dark winter nights. Stories to chill you and give you frights. But you're here for that, so come take the leap into the depths where you'll find no sleep. In our first tale, we meet two grad students loaded with money and looking to spend it. Oh, wait, no, no, that's silly. grad students are broke and always looking to make some cash. So when they see an ad for a research project paying top dollar for participants, they can't help be intrigued. And as we learn in this tale, shared with us by author Vince Darkangelo,

once they learn that the project doesn't involve taking strange medicine or getting probed in dark places, they sign up to test a new app. Now, if only they can figure out what all that data really means. Performing this tale are Jeff Clement, Jessica McAvoy, Nicole Goodnight, Nicole Doolin, and Mick Wingert. So check the app, follow the instructions, and take good notes. But don't forget, this is an experimental design. The bulletin red, in bold black lettering, are you a starving grad student? Are there any other kinds?

I tore a strip of paper with a phone number from the bottom of the flyer. I held it up and asked McKenna, Want me to grab one for you? What century are you living in, Tyler? McKenna snapped a photo with her phone. Though the same age, she was at least a decade ahead of me when it came to technology. The rest of the flyer read, Get paid $2,000 to participate in a multi-phase research project

on the impact of design on human interaction. The first phase is of one month. commitment. Select candidates may qualify for phase two testing and further compensation. There was no university seal, meaning it was an outside research project, not one within the psychology department. Too good to be true. That's almost as much money as my research stipend. I dialed the number. AGR survey and research. How can I help you? Yeah, um, we're a couple of starving grad students. What have you got for us?

Orientation for the study took place in a hangar at the defunct airport on the edge of town. McKenna and I waited in a makeshift lobby until a woman in a lab coat poked her head through a black curtain and called my name. I followed her down a hallway of cubicle panels. I'm Dr. Stonebridge. I trust you completed all the necessary paperwork? Yes, I filled it out online. Excellent. Have a seat.

We were in a brightly lit cubicle with only a narrow desk and an orange plastic chair on either side of it. I sat opposite Dr. Stonebridge. She reached a hand across the table, palm up. Please unlock your phone and hand it over. By consulting to be in the study, we had agreed to allow them to install an app on her phone. It showed up on my home screen. yesterday, a blue tile with the letters A, G, and R in white. I'd opened it, but it was just a blank page with a password box.

I slid my phone over to Dr. Stonebridge. I'm setting it down here, so we can both see what I'm doing. She opened the AGR app, punched in a passcode, and slid the phone back to me. Tyler, please follow the on-screen prompt to reset your password. For the next month, I'd like you to explore the app on a daily basis for at least an hour. I followed the prompts and the screen filled with a map of North America. Multi-colored pins dotted the states and provinces. Every few days, the dataset will change, so the map will look different.

At the end of each of your sessions, you will complete a short questionnaire. Go ahead and click on one of the digital pins in the map. I zoomed in and picked a spot in Ohio near where we were. A pop-up box opened containing the following text. WF2-3-X-Q-A-M-M-P-E. Is there a key to the abbreviations? No, that's for you to decipher. Your task is to pattern match.

if a pattern emerges, perhaps the abbreviations will become apparent. Study the pins on the map and look for themes, trends, anything that might link them together. What about the different colors of the pins? Does that mean anything? Those are merely to help with visual identification. It makes it easier to differentiate between pins that are near each other. Easier on the eyes. finished, she walked me back to the lobby. McKenna returned from her own orientation about a minute later. She waved as she emerged from the curtain and smiled.

McKenna's smile. Off-centered, the right side of her mouth lifted higher than the other, almost like a sneer, while the left side tapered into a swoop. At once nervous and eager. Her teeth neon bright against her soft. peachy flesh. I wondered if she realized how happy it made me whenever she walked into the room. Well, that was... McKenna and I met in our first year of grad school. We were both in the social psychology program,

so we ran in the same circles, and had the same classes and mentors. She was studying the intergenerational effects of acculturation among immigrant families. I was studying the rates of stress and crime during second-stage gentrification in urban centers. I think we parked over here. The day we met in orientation, I knew I would fall in love with McKenna. I've always resisted the idea of having a romantic type. If you were to ask me what my type was, I'd tell you that I just wanted to be with someone kind who makes me laugh.

And yes, that describes McKenna. I truly didn't care if she was talking to. or short, blonde or redhead, white or black. Are you sure you parked here? But I'm also a scientist, and with about a dozen years of dating experience, I can't deny the evidence. Thinking back on all the women I've pursued or dated, they've tended to be short brunettes with goofy smiles and eccentric personalities.

So, I admit it. Consciously or not, I have a type. and Kenna was it. Hey, Tyler. The problem was that throughout the first year of the program, she had a boyfriend. Second year, she was single, but I hadn't worked up the nerve to ask her out.

Grad school is difficult enough without the added humiliation of rejection or a failed romance. But now, in our third year, I felt I had a shot. To Tyler. Oh, sorry. What?

Isn't that your car over there? In the other direction? Oh, right. My bad. Something on your mind? No, yeah, I guess. It's nothing. Hey, uh, you want to go for a beer?

Sure, we can compare notes. Usual place? The usual spot was a bar just off campus that offered starving student drink specials, two-for-one beers and a basket of stale tortilla chips on Thursday nights. We ordered the special and grabbed a table on the rooftop patio. What do you think of these serial numbers on the pins?

I'm not sure about the letters at the end, but I bet the first set of letters and numbers represent gender and age. What makes you say that? Well, this is a little embarrassing, but I recognize some of the shorthand from my dating app. She looked away from me to hide a nervous smile. I raised the pint glass to my mouth to hide a grimace. The first segment of the code is using pretty standard shorthand. For example, WF23 would be white female 23 years old.

AM 45 would be Asian male 45 years old. Do you think there's any meaning to the country? colors of the pins. My doctor said they're randomized, like a jitter effect and meaningless. My guy told me they were randomly coded using M&Ms, this story. Ah, so we're agreed. Classic experimental misdirection. Most stuff. We raised our pints and toasted. To scientific rigor and easy money.

And Eminemm. A couple of rounds later, I casually asked her the name of the dating app she was using. I began studying the map that night. The AGR app had a downloadable spreadsheet that I exported to my school computer. I typed up some code in Python to run a principal component analysis. After that, I created some charts and made a printout of the various code patterns that emerged. The codes were segmented. Each segment started with two.

letters followed by a number. UF23XQ AM, E, D-E-P, AM-E-P, AM-V-V-V-V. I ran the pins through various decrypting programs, but turned up nothing. Perhaps McKenna was right about them signifying race, gender, and age. Could this be some kind of dating app? An actual paper map? You really go all in? I thought we'd just compare notes on our laptops.

To understand the data, I need to be able to see and touch it. I've been cross-referencing a number of open-source maps online to see if there are any matches with the AGR map. But so far, I haven't had to be able to see. any perfect matches. Dead end, huh? I said there were no perfect matches. That means we can rule out the hypothesis, at least temporarily, that everything on the map is

necessarily connected. I don't understand. Well, say each pin on the map is a hospital. Then map overlays of American hospitals should at least return a partial match. But I'm not even getting partial matches of any significant. That suggests that there is too much noise in the data set. Perhaps the red ones are hospitals and the green ones are libraries, for example. That could be throwing off the numbers.

Okay, so what do we do now? We might try isolating the patterns. I think our next step is to filter by pin color. With less noise, we might find a stronger signal with our map overlays. We might get lucky and find out what the different colors mean. But the colors are meaningless. Just random M&Ms, right. She reached her my hand, squeezed it,

and then placed it back on the map to point to something else. I couldn't hear a word, she said. I was dizzy with joy. The next morning, I got up early and checked my phone. There was a text from McKenna. Meet me at the lab. When I arrived at the lab, she had the master. map from the night before spread out on the table where we held our weekly lab meetings.

A number of lab assistants and other grad students gathered around her. On the map, a route was marked in pink. It stretched from the Pacific Northwest down through Utah, Colorado, and eventually ending in Florida. Are you ready for this? I'm not sure you are. It's going to blow your mind. Okay, okay. Hit me. It's a cookbook. What? Wait. Actually, it's something even darker.

This line right here is a match with Ted Bundy's murder route. You're just messing with me again. Seriously, everything matches up with the green colored pins. That's... So, what are our next steps? I'll search for matches on the other routes. Meanwhile, see if you can decipher any of the coded information now that we know what these locations signify. It didn't take me long to accept McKenna's hypothesis.

My initial research confirmed that the first segment of each PIN number represented the ethnicity, gender, and age of Bundy's victims. With each match, I was able to learn more about the victims and cross-reference their personal details with the coded information in the Pins. Eventually, I determined that the X stood for sex worker, and Q was a catch-all for the LGBT community. I couldn't account for everything in the codes, but I wrote up a key with what I had and showed it to McKenna the next day. Great work. She hugged me, and I thought I might melt.

Any headway on the other segments? No, not yet. In some cases, letters are reputed. heated from the first segment, but I'm pretty sure the meaning changes. An A in the first segment means something different than an A in the second segment and so on. I'll keep working, though. She called me later that night. I'm going to believe this.

I've also matched routes for John Wayne Gacy and Henry Lee Lucas, and I'm pretty sure I'll find others. What the fuck kind of study is this? This is pretty dark. I mailed you the PIN data. See what you can find. find out and we'll compare notes. I added the new information to the spreadsheet I'd made for the Bundy route. Then I compiled information on each of the victims and entered them into a separate

data set. I analyzed them against the abbreviations using different models. It took a week of coding and data shaping, but I theorized that the second segment related to the manner of death and other abuses. R stood for rape or sexual assault. B stood for bludgeoned or beaten to death. I thought C stood for choking, but it didn't match up 100%. The following week, we met for lunch in the school cafeteria. We sat on the same side of the table so that we could look at her laptop.

Our legs were nearly touching. Uh, what do you make of the C? Definitely not for choking. She ran a hand through her hair, pulling it back. back from her face. Her eyes had darkened from lack of sleep, and her face paled slightly. But she was all the more beautiful for it. Even Gauntness agreed with her. Is there an S anywhere? Like S for strangling? No. I expected there to be an S for stabbing, but strangling would work too, or maybe even for suffocation.

That's it. Suffocation. But there aren't any S's. Right. Well, what's another way to describe someone running out of breath? I shrugged my shoulders. Then she filtered on just the pins for victims who were strangled to death. They all have an A. Asphyxiation. The A stands for asphyxiation. For all our progress in the first and second parts, we weren't able to decode the third second.

by the end of the month. We went back to the airport hangar to meet with the research group. Once again, we were separated, and I met with Dr. Stonebridge alone in a brightly lit cubicle. Excellent work. You correctly figured out what we were mapping

and decoded much of the first two segments. Can you tell me what the third segment represents? That's an excellent question, and segues us into the next phase of the study. Based on your performance in phase one, you have qualified to participate in the next stage. I hesitated, though I don't know why. The project was fun, and if phase two paid even half as well as the first, it was a no-brainer. And it could mean more detective work with McKenna.

How long does it last? It's another four weeks, same as the first. However, the compensation doubles for this stage. doubles? I recalled McKenna's words when we first saw the flyer for the study more than a month ago. Too good to be true. But as a grad student, I mean, how could I turn down this kind of money? I'm in?

She opened up a folder on the desk and removed some papers. Excellent. Please read these over and sign. As you may have guessed, we are doing research. on a web application. Phase one was very general, but from here forward, you will have access to proprietary information.

This is a nondisclosure agreement, stating that you won't reveal anything that you learn or think you've learned about the app. The NDA should probably have been a red flag, but that didn't occur to me at the time. What did I care about apps? I used my phone for calls, texts, and very occasionally photos.

I was included to the screen the way McKenna was. I believed that the more time you spent on social media was less time you spent living. But I was happy to beta test for what they were paying. I signed the papers. I've just sent you the update. You will be able to access the new content by the time you get home. I believe you signed up for phase two.

I don't think that's a good idea. Wait, didn't you... You didn't sign up? I thought we'd be doing it together. Hell no. Don't you think the whole thing is suspicious? And more than a little creepy? I gave her a sideways glance, then started the car.

Mysterious, sure. But I wouldn't say suspicious. Seriously? It's obviously product testing for a GPS-based tech startup. You know how these companies are. They mine personal data to sell to third parties all over the world. They collaborate with governments to spy on their own citizens. I don't know. We get some of our funding from the NSF.

All research involves withholding information from the subjects. How is this any different from what we're doing? Well, there's the money involved. We're slaving away in the lab, giving sophomores extra credit or a meal swipe to be in our studies. They offer this crazy amount of money and ask us to sign an NDA. You don't see the difference? We stopped at a traffic light that had just turned red. I had planned on asking McKenna to go for a beer afterward.

Instead, I dropped her off at her car in the university parking lot. See you Monday. That night I typed McKenna Delaport into an image search and found a number of photos posted online. She certainly loved her. social media. The first pick I found was her university headshot in which she was wearing dark-rimmed glasses.

Her dark hair pulled back from her ears. The bottom of the photo cut off just as the milky skin of her neck appeared, an accidental burlesque. The second photo was from her LinkedIn profile. This shot, also framed from the shoulders up, was taken for a psychology conference she attended last year. The third photograph was of her at her sister's wedding. This was easily the shot that best captured her personality.

She looks stunning in a pink dress, thrusting a hip toward the lens and sticking out her tongue for the camera. Playful, silly, unintentionally sexy, nerd goddess. That was McKenna. There was an intimacy to this last photo that made me squirm. It was a very personal image from a family gathering I hadn't been invited to attend. It was the kind of photo that I never would have seen in prior decades. It felt invasive to stare at it, but I reminded myself that I wasn't doing anything illegal.

It was a public image. I didn't hack anybody. It wasn't stalking. It wasn't any different from staring at a billboard that you pass on the highway. After all, she posted it, and there weren't any legal or ethical restrictions on personal use. I downloaded many of the images to a local folder in case they were ever taken down. My own personal photo album of McKenna. I closed the browser and went back to the AGR dataset, but I couldn't get her out of my head.

This was our project. This was supposed to be the thing that finally brought. brought us together. But here I was, working on the data alone, while she was meeting other men. Frustrated, I closed out the dataset and opened the dating app she told me she used. I created an account. I'd never used a dating app before, so I wasn't sure how it worked. I'd assumed that I would just type McKenna della Port into a search box and go, but that wasn't the case.

First, I had to complete a personality profile. Submit. Then images of women popped onto the screen. I scrolled through the photos, wondering if they were randomly selected. If so, I might scroll all day and never come across McKenna. To increase my chances of a match, I went to my interests tab and added some of what I knew to be McKenna's favorite activities. Horse riding, reading by the lake,

and foods, sushi, boxed macaroni and cheese. I was about to enter in my educational background when I had my eureka moment. The data set for Phase 2. I understood what it meant now. Instead of thinking about it as raw data, think of it like a dating app. After a few hours of Internet research,

I'd solved Phase 2. Although the findings were strange. My program proved it was a list of suspects in active homicide investigations. Well, spill it. What did you want to tell me? The AGR app is crowdsourcing detective work. Huh? How does that work?

The app matches a constellation of interests, activities, and physical features. against the bank of suspect profiles. It's going to make someone in Silicon Valley very wealthy. How did you figure it out? I should have been prepared for this question. Of course, she would ask that. And I couldn't tell her that the solution had come to me while trolling on her dating app.

After a few ums and wells, I blurted out. SEO. SEO? Yeah, uh, yeah. You know, basic principles of search engine optimization. It pretty much clicked into place once I started to think of the collected variables as keywords. Impressive. Look, Tyler.

I also wanted to say that I'm sorry about the other day. I was upset and I didn't have the right to attack you for choosing to continue in this study. Clearly it was the right call. Look at you. You figured it out. Oh, don't worry about it. No way. Let's say I make it up to you by buying you a beer after class sometime this week.

I clenched my jaw to keep from smiling too wide. But it was a losing cause. I was a grinning idiot. That sounds great. How about tonight? Sorry, can't tonight. Paper do? No, I've got a first date.

I from my app. I stabbed at my salad and swallowed my thoughts. McKenna didn't notice. She had picked up her phone and was scrolling through the app and smiling. Iler, I think you'll like him. We've been texting all week and I'm feeling optimistic about him. He's also a grad student, studying something very small. At first, I tuned out her description of him.

why did I care about this great new guy she met? But as she went on, a spark of recognition hit, perhaps it was the cadence of her descriptors or just the abstract way we describe people we don't know yet. I realized McKenna wasn't actually describing her online date. She was declaring a wish list of what she wanted him to be. Ambitious, hardworking, positive, pro-social. Maybe he was these things, and maybe he wasn't.

These weren't traits so much as possibilities. We create strangers as much as they reveal themselves to us. It's crazy to think how similar our undergrad research was, especially considering where he went to school. And that just made me depressed. The perfect guy could be sitting right across from her, and she might never realize it due to a faulty hypothesis. She didn't know me at all, really.

He suggested we guess what each other might like based on our profiles and surprise each other. I'm thinking Mexican food. Or maybe Japanese? I nodded politely and was hoping she'd just let the issue die. Would you like to see his profile picture? I gotta go. I'll see you in the lab. Tyler, wait. You haven't even finished your... I went straight to my...

office and logged into the dating app. I updated my profile once more. I squeezed the keywords ambitious and hardworking into my employment background. I added positive and pro-social to my personal description and clicked save. I was determined to figure out the algorithm so that McKenna and I would be a match. That night, after five edits to my profile and eight beers in, my finally founder, McKenna Delaport. Common interests, 72% match. Education, 98% match. Employment, 85% match. I'd solved the app's algorithm.

McKenna and I were compatible. A text message with a push-pin graphic popped up on my screen. It read, Looks like a good match. Would you like to poke this person to start a conversation? I clicked no and closed the app. To keep my mind off, McKenna, I threw myself into the AGR dataset. I called in sick to the lab and skipped classes for the rest of the week.

I'd unlocked more profiles, more maps, and the deeper I got into AGR, the more proficient I became at identifying suspects. It was so much like the dating app, I thought. The way McKenna described her date in keywords was exactly the way I used keywords to match suspects in AGR. But there was something bizarre about this new batch of profiles I had received from Dr. Stonebridge. I was able to identify the people, but they were no longer victims or suspects of violent crime. They just seemed to be random people. Folks from towns all across America. Nothing remarkable.

Obviously, this was the start of a new phase of the study. But what was the connection? I noticed there were tags with each profile. But unlike in the other phases, there was no interface to connect them. Suspicious, I clicked on my dev tools to see if I could inspect the elements of the AGR app. It was a long shot that I'd find anything,

but it was worth a look. Thankfully, someone at AGR must have screwed up a setting because I was able to unlock the source code. Or was that intentional? Did they want us to find the source code? Either way, I downloaded the script, to my cloud drive and opened it in a text editor on my laptop. I gave myself a migraine searching through the foreign-looking text,

but eventually I found it. A small, seemingly insignificant bit of code that had been commented out. I converted it into executable code and rendered the script. It worked, to my surprise. And to my horror, I couldn't believe whatever. was seeing. But once I'd come to terms with it, I called the FBI. Of course, agents found the airport hanger empty. There was no evidence that a Dr. Stonebridge had ever ushered study participants through a maze of curtains and cubicles. No banks of computers, no waiting room.

The AGR app had been wiped from my phone remotely. A search for AGR on the web revealed nothing. And though there are plenty of doctors named Stonebridge in the world, there aren't any that match the person that I had met. I explained it all to an FBI agent named Gomez. That's not surprising. Organizations like this usually operate on the dark web, not on the surface. So you'll be able to find them there?

No. They probably got a hundred fake. company names and profiles already in circulation. Looks like they've taken this one down already. But can't you trace all the shell companies back to the source? You're thinking of the movies. The fantasy is that these companies are like dominoes. You take one down and the others fall.

But in reality, they're like tentacles. You cut one off and move on to the next, but you never get closer to the source. But how did they know I'd gone to the FBI? They probably didn't know that. Not exactly. They likely had an alert set up in case someone accessed the source code. They probably shut down operations and wiped all prints from the hangar before you'd even figured out what you'd stumble on.

And that was the end of that? No more study? No more money. All I had left was the glory of having solved the awful mystery of AGR. It was a dating app, you might say. My theory was that it was designed for predators to find potential victims, allowing them to search by physical attributes, work schedules, family details, commuting patterns. They could use the tracker feature to tell when they had come under suspicion so that they could go dark and change up their pattern. Want to know where to find the highest concentration of red-headed sex workers in the Midwest?

What about the least-betrolled highways in the Pacific Northwest? How about which nurses in Florida are registered gun owners and which are not? The AGR app can supply you with all this information, if you can find it. Of course, it's unlikely it will ever appear under the AGR moniker again, and it's doubtful the software we tested would ever be released as a standalone app. Gomez suggested that the code I uncovered will probably be bundled deep within a separate software package, unknowingly acquired by a third-party vendor and passed on through acquisitions and mergers. The big concern these days is stegomalware, malicious scripts buried within subfolders of subfolders.

That means this software could already be out there, like an unchecked tumor, lurking in. in the deepest source code of your social media, disseminating itself through your vacation videos, birthday memes, your music stream, or even your dating app. It may have already installed a root kit in your operating system to avoid detection. I've texted McKenna about my discovery.

I've left voice messages, but she hasn't been returning my calls or showing up to the lab. It's been a week since her date, but nobody's heard from her. I don't know where she went for dinner or what movie she saw, since her date had insisted that they be a surprise. A smart tactic to make a potential victim difficult to track. If McKenna ever mentioned his name, I don't recall.

Or I wasn't listening. A few times it did. day now, I log into the dating app, scroll through my matches until I find McKenna and press the poke button. She has yet to poke me back. All that remains is her online profile, metadata, and match statistics. But there are always more searches, more matches, more social apps to post your personal information, aren't there? new interfaces and databases, where we can search by name, by category, most recent, most viewed. In time, I may not even remember McKenna as she was, but only as she presented herself in her various profiles.

I will remember her by her keywords, by the web images I downloaded. I will forget how different we were. I will only remember how well-matched we appear to be on a dating site. I will forget that it took days of manipulating the algorithm to generate that match. I will keep searching because there seems to be no end to the app. In fact, there's still one on my laptop. I made a backup of the AGR code before handing the original over to the FBI. I don't plan to share the code or posted.

I will never sell it, not at any price, so don't even bother asking. And once I'm finished with it, I plan to destroy it. I've kept it for only one purpose, to see if I can track down the guy McKennaw, was meeting for her date. After all, he was a grad student in our area. He must have enrolled at our university, if not our program. That makes it likely that he was also part of the AGR study. If I can find him, then maybe I can find McKenna.

Every day, I'll check the app in case she responds to my poke. I'll scour every new media platform to see if she resurfaces somewhere else. It will take a lot of work, but with the right algorithm, I think I can do it. Until then, her pictures and profiles are the only evidence she ever existed. I'm starting to understand her better now. Constructing a life on social media is not the same. as living alive. But it is proof

that one was live. With every social media post, McKenna was asserting that she was alive. That she had been alive. Because once you're gone, what's left?

Oh, don't let that story discourage you from using apps and online services. Not all of them are so deadly. In fact, Let's take a quick break so I can tell you about a decidedly helpful and efficient and non-deadly service for e-commerce businesses.

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Make the new year your best year and grow your business with ShipStation. Use promo code No Sleep today at Shipstation.com to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's Shipstation.com. promo code, No Sleep. And now, it's time to get back to the horror. Let's go deep for this one. In our final tale, we meet a woman who, despite barely knowing her, is invited to an old acquaintance's funeral.

Already feeling awkward being there, the situation is made stranger when the deceased's sister gives the woman a box of old cassette tapes. And as we learn in this tale, shared with us by author Leo Harrison, When she listens to the tapes, she learns disturbing secrets about what happened one summer at a very unique summer camp. Performing this tale are Nicole Doolin, Kristen DiMecurio, and Tanya Milosovich. So as we'll learn, some secrets are buried deep. Some are difficult to fully uncover. That is, unless you're willing to go underground.

On December 10, 2000, first responders, flooded the parking lot of an abandoned strip mall off Highway 385 in Pennington County, South Dakota. In the early hours of the morning, it was said a real estate surveyor had discovered a corpse on the premises and dialed 911. Details came out gradually, fed to the local community and fragments over the course of the following days. A young woman, as of yet unidentified, her body had been curled awkwardly in a corner of a derelict cafe where she had attempted to take refuge from the elements during the previous night's rainstorm.

She had evidently been wandering several days in the wilderness as her clothes were besmirched with grass, dirt, thorns, and bits of twigs. Her body malnourished and emaciated. It was inferred from a set of nearby tracks that she must have traveled southwest from Sheridan Lake, close to the site of some hiking trails and an abandoned summer camp. Why this was and what she had been doing there, no one could tell. It was not considered unusual for bodies to turn up in and around Black Hills National Forest.

Every now and then, campers and hikers would inevitably get lost on the trails, growing disoriented before finally vanishing into the depths of the wilderness, only to be found dead months later. if at all. Some would accidentally stumble off the side of a cliff, perhaps dying instantly, perhaps bleeding out for hours and dying slowly. Others would simply starve to death or succumb to elemental exposure. Others yet would find themselves mauled by a predatory animal,

or perhaps stabbed by some insane vagrant wandering the area. The incident of December 10th, however, was unique amongst. such instances. The young woman in the abandoned mall had not died from starvation, exposure, dehydration, or any of the other common causes. The coroner instead speculated in his report that she had likely experienced a nervous breakdown after becoming lost in the woods, then suffered a heart attack from the sheer panic induced by her situation. Some people twist this around to say that she died of fright, that she witnessed something so horrific in the forest of the Black Hills, it caused her heart to fail. But most commentators agree this is only hearsay, an urban legend.

The young woman was eventually identified as one Lucille Mason, a mentally unstable college dropout and resident of Wyoming who had been passing through the area. When asked about Mason's reasons for visiting Black Hills National Forest by herself, and and in the middle of a harsh winter, those who knew her admitted they had neither seen nor spoken to Lucille in years and that they had no idea what she had been doing out there.

The story was quick to saturate the whispered folklore of rural South Dakota, eventually spreading beyond Pennington County and into the surrounding regions. It soon became something of an obsession among amateur researchers who sought paranormal explanations for Lucille's strange death.

To this day, obscure websites on UFO phenomena still claim that Lucille was an abductee and try to link her story to a broader history of abductions that have allegedly taken place in and around Black Hills National Forest. Others claim she was a victim of a government experiment and cite an implausible web of esoteric theories to support this interpretation. But most commentators agree she was only a troubled individual with a history of mental illness,

who became disoriented in the woods and met with a tragic end. Though I had not considered myself particularly close to Lucille Mason, I was nonetheless invited to her funeral that December in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The service was held in a small Presbyterian cemetery on the outskirts of town. We convened afterwards at the family home, an old Victorian which had been left to Lucille and her sister following the deaths of their parents. I stayed later into the night than I had meant to, to, waiting for the snow to die down, and found myself, I don't remember how, wandering the

holes in a weird trance. I turned a corner on the first story and saw that the door to Lucille's room was halfway open, a sliver of light shining through the crevice. I could hear crying from within. I made the rather impulsive decision to push lightly on the door and look inside. Her sister Melissa was on the edge of the mattress, her head in her hands. Boxes of Lucille's things were sitting on the floor. Some of them overturned haphazardly, their contents strewn about. Yearbooks, CDs, jewelry, paperback novels, a few childhood toys. Melissa stared at me with a look of vague recollection.

We had not seen each other for almost a decade. She had been around 14 or 15 at that time. Now she was almost 31 and hardly recognizable. It did not help that her features were obscured by running mascara. I expected her to turn me away and had almost shut the door when she invited me in. I did as she asked and stood in silence while she tried to gain composure. Searching for something to occupy herself. She went about collecting Lucille's things from the floor.

and putting them back inside their boxes, which I imagined she had knocked over, perhaps in a fit of rage. I wasn't sure how to answer the statement. Lucille and I had met in our freshman year of high school. We had maintained a shallow friendship for a time, but hadn't spoken to each other since the 11th grade when the masons had moved away to Wyoming.

Years had passed since then, and I had hardly even thought of her until receiving the invitation to her funeral. Yes. It was all I could manage to say in response. We were good friends. Melissa was on the verge of saying something else when she came to a halt, distracted by a tattered plush doll she had picked up from the floor.

Forgetting my existence, she rose slowly to her feet and drifted to a leather chair beside a floor lamp. I saw her features illuminated and only just now noticed the truly abysmal state that she was in. Unnaturally pale and gaunt. It almost looked as if she had been starving herself. She seemed transfixed by her sister's little toy rabbit. I remember it was covered in coffee stains and missing one of its black, beady eyes. I was about to excuse myself from the room when she looked up at me, trying, failing to suppress a sob.

I'm sorry? I wanted me to cling to her belongings. If she could have known how horrible I would feel just staring at them. You should take them away from me. Take all of it. Keep it. Sell it. Burn it.

I don't care. She was so distressed in that moment. I would have done almost anything to make it stop. I did not bother trying to calm her down or reason with her. I left that night with Lucille's belongings, sliding around the trunk of my 93 Dodge Dynasty. I sometimes wish I hadn't. Those boxes sat in my attic for years, unopened, untouched,

shoved into a dark corner with the memory of Lucille Mason herself. It wasn't until one morning in October 2005 that I finally rooted through them while preparing for an eBay sale. The contents didn't faze me like they had phased Melissa. I sifted through them cynically, indifferently, looking to see if I couldn't make a quick dollar off them. However, there wasn't much of anything to put up for sale. Most of her possessions either showed significant wear

or were simply too worthless to bother with. One exception was an old cassette player buried at the bottom of a box of Pulp Fantasy books and music magazines. It was a miracle. The old thing even worked when I plugged it in. I set it up in my living room and hit play. Listening to the whirr of the internal mechanism, a few more hours rifling around,

and I stumbled across Lucille's tapes in a separate box. Rather than a collection of albums or audiobooks, what I instead discovered was a set of blank audio cassettes. Maxill Normal Bias U-90s with handwritten labels. Each was marked with a date, beginning November, 1999, and ending March 2000. just months before Lucille's death.

I inserted the tape marked November 21st, 1999, and press play. 21st, 1999. The son is out of sight. So I'm sitting here and the Lord isn't answering the phone, as usual. Tolerate the idea that my thoughts are important enough to document, not even for my own alleged benefit, seems pretentious to me.

The idea is to document them, because they are important, rather to vent, or something like that. Dr. Levitz viewed some BS about containing my issues somewhere. Guessing it must be maintenance. November 28, 1999. Had that nightmare again? The one with the shed? I'm standing in this deserted field in some remote, isolated space. A familiar place, but when I can't recall the name of, I start to walk towards the shed. Just as I'm about to enter, I wake up, and I always feel terrible.

Nothing ever changes. It's always exactly the same. Having it for close to a year now. Sometimes when I think of it for too long, it triggers an episode, as Dr. Levitt calls it. My grades have been slipping lately. I can't find the motivation to show up the classes or study. I got a D on my last exam.

That's a first. Stop thinking about the nightmare. That image of the shed standing in that empty field is seared into my waking thoughts and that awful feeling of terror that's attached to it. That feeling of anxiety I can't make it stop.

They're what I do. I don't know how to make it stop. I will not attempt to recollect and transcribe the contents of the next tape, which seemed only to consist from what I could bear to listen to, of incoherent sobbing and screaming. In retrospect, it seems easy

to recognize that this recording must have captured one of the so-called episodes Lucille had mentioned in the tape of November 28, 1999. Deciding that I had heard quite enough, I packed at the tape collection and stowed it away in a closet. The following evening, I decided I would try to reach out to Melissa Mason, tell her I had discovered a collection of recordings which her sister had left behind, and that I would be more than happy to mail them. I wouldn't mention the awful things I'd heard. Some digging on the internet gave me an address and landline for one Melissa Mason in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

I called the number the next morning, only to hear a voice on the other end that I did not recognize. When I mentioned Melissa Mason, the stranger fell silent, before explaining that Melissa no longer lived at the address. She had been killed, in fact, about a year before, inexplicably bludgeoned in her sleep by an unidentified intruder. She had spent weeks in a coma before finally passing away one evening in June 2003. I was speaking to her former landlord. Taken aback, I mumbled my thanks to the old woman and hung up the phone. With Lucille's parents and only sister long dead, that left no inheritor, at least not as far as I knew. The tape sat in my closet for months.

I kept telling myself I would get rid of them one day. but something within me did not want to part with them. The idea felt wrong somehow. I managed to forget about them for a time until one scorching July day, rotting around my closet in search of a missing box fan, I rediscovered the cassette player and the tape collection. Resolving to finally throw the tapes away

and consign the entire thing to memory, I set them out on my kitchen counter and plan to toss them the next morning. But somehow it never happened. happened. I couldn't bring myself to destroy the last remnants of Lucille's existence. She and her immediate family were gone, and apart from some photos scattered here and there on the internet, these tapes were all that remained of who she really was. I left them untouched for a few more days until later one evening, and under the slight influence of alcohol, I ended up giving

into a buried sense of curiosity. I plugged the cassette player in. I plugged the cassette player in, chose the tape date of December 15th, 1999, and press play. Decided to finish going through the boxes that Mom and Dad left behind. I'd assumed it would be two. Mom was an obsessive documentarian, so of course they were reams upon reams of leather bound pulling with Melissa's birth in 1969 and ending around 1996, just a few months before mom and dad passed away. In particular, caught my eye. A crude label on the spine read M&L, Summer 88.

I opened it up and started picking through the pages, which had been welded together by the residue of Drike. I found myself smiling at the photos of Melissa and I, playing in the yard at our family's old house. In most of the photos, Melissa was teaching me how to do something or another. I was around six or seven years old at the time, just learning to ride my bike and shoot back. The subject matter changed abruptly. Melissa was nowhere to be seen. It was nothing but photos of myself, taken in the same. some strange, unrecognizable place.

Pictures showed me standing in a parking lot near the edge of a forest. It almost resembled the head of a hiking trail in a national park. A sign was visible in the corner of the shop. It read Shady Pine's summer camp. These photos showed me interacting with children whom I can't remember ever having seen. One of these photos stood out in particular. I was seated in a group with about a dozen other children inside a forest of clearing. barely visible in the distant background, run down shed.

It was identical to the one in my recurring nightmare. 20th, a week since I discovered the photo book. I have no recollection of ever having attended a summer champ in the year, 1988. I do not remember a single one of the smiling faces that appear alongside my own those rainy Polaroid photographs. How could I have simply forgotten an entire summer? That run-down shed in the background of my nightmare, it's identical. I keep telling myself that what I'm seeing is only a coincidence,

that I'm just focusing on that detail because of a pattern recognition bias, but something about it seems so wrong. Very first, 2000. We celebrate New Year's Eve, much lately with other people. Which came back from the fall semester. My GPA dropped three. I was as if I totally... I've been distraught ever since I saw the transcript.

Completely distraught. It's been difficult to get out of bed. Most dating a lot more to be by myself. Sometimes at... I find myself rooting around my parents' boxes, looking behind Summer Camp. The more I repeat that name, the more it seems to stir something

in other record. If I did find something when I was browsing the Internet at the public library, there's not much information about it online, but apparently there was indeed A shady pine summer camp in Black Hills National Forest, Pennington County, South Dakota. Near Sheridan Lake.

It used to be some kind of a sleeper until midnight trying to find as much information as possible. Unfortunately, there's not very much out there as the camp was actually sued into oblivion. A lot of official information wound up suppressed somehow. I don't know, really. There's a lot of mystery and ambiguity surrounding the place. I can only find a handful of news stories here and there.

An announcement at the grand opening. a few promo pieces. Also, a couple articles from national sources, recounting the details of the lawsuit, some sort of accident involving a kid who was harmed by an employee. The details are all rather vague. 2000. Dr. Levitt says that he's concerned about my recent behavior, says I don't sound like myself, and that I seem to be focusing all of my attention on irrelevant things when I should be focusing on preparing to improve and change course for the spring semester. He started talking medication again. I told him, I don't need any pills, like I always tell him.

I told him about the photo book, too, about the shed, about shady pines. He agreed that it was odd that perhaps something painful had happened during my time there. He told me to be careful of focusing on it too much, that I should hold off and thinks it might inflame my obsessive tendencies if I dealt myself away now. The articles I brought home from the library, many of them were unremarkable. Mostly just press releases and puffy articles announcing that opening of Shady Pines' summer can't. in 81. I learned that the camp had been funded by a generous grant from a group known as the Apple Seed Foundation and established in early 1981 as a retreat for, quote, gifted K-8 children suffering from conflicts in social integration. Would have applied my younger self, except for the gifted part,

brought in steady business for the next decade, touting its scenic surroundings and staff of well-credentialed mentors drawn from the best counseling programs at psychiatric think. It seems like it would have been awfully expensive to send your kid there for an entire summer. A detail would baffled me, considering my parents struggled to meet their mortgage payments, paid for practically everything on credit cards, and brought melanized clothes and Christmas presents from the carm down the street. The last few articles that I read at the library were published around in 1991 and 1992 near the time of the Camps Court articles, came from national news sources and detailed the controversy and subsequent lawsuit surrounding the accidental death of a camper in summer of

1990. A young boy had suffocated to death on the premises, having been left confined for more than 24 hours in a small airtight trunk behind the camp's medical unit. Though the fine details of the lawsuit were kept quiet, it was easily discerned as the jury had sided with the prosecution's claim of criminal negligence, $50 million from the so-called Apple Seed Foundation, and a former camp employee wound up in prison. The camp shut down for good in 1992, the reputation, obviously destroyed by the lawsuit and all the negative press surrounding it. The former employee who wound up in prison was a deeply disturbed individual. His sentence was reduced on claims of insanity. By all accounts, he seemed to suffer from dissociative identity disorder, as is called these days. He would switch

between different personalities, each of which demonstrated no conscious knowledge of the others. He actually claimed a few years later, after he'd been treated, that the different personalities belonged to spirits which had possessed him. He said it was the spirit of Ormond Crow, the notorious child killer, which had made him do that terrible thing in 1990. The entire story is really weird. 15th to their online search. A lot of the search results only turned up this useless, nonsensical conspiracy type of strict character, Henry Barlow. about the history of UFO sightings in Black Hills National Forest and how he believes this somehow has something to do with the US government paper clip and how that is

somehow connected to Shady Pines and I really don't know to be and draw a lot of strange connections between things how there were these people who would go missing in the 50s and 60s and show up on the side of the highway in South Dakota months later raising without how they've been recruited for a pro- where people would use their abilities to attract and contact, I'm not joking, ghosts. This, according to Henry Barlow's wild imagination, has something to do with shady pines somehow. Suffice it to say, aren't all that useful to me. I gave up looking for information online but was able to track down an interesting book on the shelves of the Cheyenne Public Library

a comprehensive tourist's guide to Black Hills National Forest. I'm thumbing through it now. It goes over all of the major trails, the flora and fauna of the region, full of photos. Stir my memory. Doing on my apartment. My third cigarette. I stayed for eight yards of the Union Pacific Station. There's a cargo train just a whole hours now.

We can't sleep tonight. After I put away that book on Black Hills National Forest, I drifted off and had the most god content of the nightmare. It was that bad? Just how I felt after waking. I've been up ever since. I haven't been able to stop thinking about the nightmare. It was the shed dream again, only this time, instead of ending just before I opened the door and stepped inside,

the dream kept going. I could feel everything just as if I were actually right there in the cool darkness of the night in some isolated rural area standing outside the shed. I could feel my hand gripping the doorknob. could hear the creak of the hinges and feel the musty, stifled air inside that little room. I could smell the mildew and the mold. I had the sense that someone was beside me, guiding me, although I couldn't see them in the darkness.

Walked for a few yards by the light of a lantern and arrived at a cramped. Stranger lifted up some of the floorboard. It was a hatch penetrating the foundation. It almost resembled the door to a... bomb shelter, you'd seen some Cold War era backyard bunker, started the hatch's wheel, and lifted it up. A ladder disappeared into the darkness of a tunnel that, but God knows how many feet below ground,

was when I awoke. I heard my neighbor knocking at the front door. When I opened the door and asked her what was wrong, she said she'd heard me screaming. She was worried I was being attached. January 20th. I was walking. home today taking the scenic route to the historic district when I decided to hang a left down an

alley containing a few interesting out-of-the-way establishments, a tattoo parlor, an antique furniture store, and an occult. I made the impulsive decision to check out the antique store and see if I couldn't find something interesting to lift the mood in my apartment and maybe get my mind off things. But something in the bookseller's display, middle shelf of the rack, the cover consisted of five symbols arranged, transfixed by this, for what must have been a solid, 10 or 15 minutes, just staring. I had seen these symbols somewhere. They were, from left to right, a set of three curved lines running parallel, a square,

than a rectangular frame. I trance until a clerk stepped outside and asked in a concerned tone what it was I wanted. She'd been watching me for several minutes and had probably suspected something was wrong with me. Without thinking, I immediately asked if I could thumb through the book in the display. I looked to a random page and read a few lines. In the initial period of his research, Ryan's most promising subject was Adam Lindemeyer, an undergraduate at Duke. Ryan and his research team found that Linzmayer's results were below chance, even scoring 100% accuracy on one reading.

However, Lindsmayer's accuracy gradually diminished over time. Some have attributed this to Linzmayors' increasingly increasing boredom or exhaustion, while others have cited it as evidence of Ryan's findings on telepity being products. I continued flipping through this book until I'm doing some sort of experiment conducted in the early 20th century. Two men, one middle-aged, another much younger, were seated at a table in an academic setting, while several onlookers gathered one containing one of the mysterious symbols the caption read. 1931 Joseph Banks-Rine analyzes the results of Adam Lindemeyer's reading. the famous Zenner cards are displayed face-up before them.

The book is sitting on my shelf now. I don't particularly care about the content. Only those symbols. The quote-unquote, Zenner cards, as they're called in the book. Evidently, they were used in a series of studies that took place in the 1930s and 40s. The researchers involved with these experiments

went on to claim that their findings were evidence supporting the reality of telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, and other paranormal abilities. When I first arrived home from the store, I stared at those five symbols for hours, trying to remember where it was I knew them from. I couldn't figure out just why I was so transfixed by them. Something about them seemed magnetic. I couldn't pull myself away.

I swallowed some allergy medicine and a couple glasses of wine tell me forget and fall asleep, Only to wake up just an hour and I was very young, no older than six, I think. Seated in a nondescript room, surrounded by several strange people. I thought I recognized one of them as a substitute teacher I'd had for a month in first grade. On a table in front of me, one of the adults in the room asked me what sequence of cards I was seeing in my mind's eyes. Their responses on a notepad and turned over the cards one by one. There were the five familiar symbols, printed on each. At the end, I overheard the adults whispering something about being admitted to the

proof when I woke up. I laid in bed, staring at the ceiling for several hours, and came out here for a smoke. What to make of that dream, something conjured up by my imagination or some forgotten memory. I've been keeping a dream diary. Drawings inspired capture and record my memories of Shaden Pine Summer Camp. For weeks now, I've been having these extremely vivid but fragmented dream-located memories that seem to come out of nowhere. the face of a kid I knew

or a certain board game they had in the rec room or a hiking trip we took I made this habit of just rolling out of bed as soon as the dream is over and sketching what I remember perhaps this sounds insane but I've been considering

making a trip out so that I can see you in behind where it's located off of one of the trails that run through the area I feel gone as if something is calling me there pulling me in like a magnet and I had this strange notion that the only way to end my fixation is to hike out to that abandoned camp in the forest of South Dakota and see it for myself.

Rayhound system, I can take some food, some maps of the trails, and knife protect myself, and I can be there and back again in the course of... That was where Lucille's tape collection ended. I really didn't have the slightest idea what to make of her story, whether I should do anything with the information I now possessed. It seemed clear to me that she had vanished from Cheyenne and visited Black Hills National Forest in a confused, misguided attempt to reconcile herself with some sort of vaguely remembered trauma involving the defunct camp where she had spent a single summer of her childhood. And it was there, on December 10, 2000, that she had lost her mind completely, dying of a heart attack after fleeing from the camp and wandering several days, alone in the woods. I assumed I was the only person in existence who knew about this link between

the sight of Lucille Mason's death and the mysterious recollections which had plagued her in her final months alive. With every immediate relation of Lucille's being long dead, I couldn't think of anyone whom I might reach out to with this information. There was no use telling the authorities. It wasn't as if I had discovered evidence of foul play, just a psychological motive in a case that had long been closed and unequivocally deemed an accidental death. No. Rather than make any attempt to revive the specter of Lucille's sad short life, I simply let it go,

choosing to give her troubled spirit a rest and consigned my discovery to the same corner of my mind where I kept everything that was best left forgotten. Somehow sooner or later the tapes wound up in the trash, carried off to rot in a garbage heap, somewhere. This, however, did not mean that sometimes, driving alone on a dark night or lying awake in bed with a bout of insomnia, I didn't occasionally recall Lucille's story and replay the entire thing in my head. There were details which I would never be able to move on from, the strange

nightmares, the memories of the Xenercarges, they were called, the night terror she had experienced. What had it all meant? What exactly had taken place at this defunct sleepaway camp in the backwoods of Pennington County, South Dakota? Had Lucille's strange, fragmented memories been at all legitimate? Or were they merely the workings of delusion? One day, late in November of 2009, I was traveling up through South Dakota on a business trip. I got laid over waiting for an Amtrak and had to come up with a way to pass the time. As I was leaving the train station to visit a bar I'd heard good things about,

I stopped beside a map in the lobby. The moment I saw the words Black Hills National Forest printed across the topography of the state's southwestern region, a wave of chills came over me. I hadn't even realized until now that I was only 15 miles from Shady Pine Summer Camp. I decided I would go try to see it before my train arrived. It wasn't that far of a drive out to the trailhead after all, and my curiosity was piqued. I boarded a bus going southwest and arrived in Black Hills National Forest before I knew it. I bought a map at a kiosk and began walking.

I didn't really know what I was expecting to get out of the journey. I certainly started to question the decision as I made my way down the trail, into the darkness of the forest. It was a cold day in the middle of winter, so there was pretty much no one else around. Just me, all alone, with only a knife to protect myself. I kept going regardless. The path ahead became narrower, darker, and denser, the closer I came to the region where the camp was allegedly located. I guess that no one had really bothered to maintain this particular stretch of the trail since the camp's closure in the early 1990s.

There were long, gnarled branches blocking many parts of the path. And sometimes they were bad enough that I actually had to cut them down or crouch just to get beyond them. It was almost early dusk when I finally reached an especially unkempt part of the trail that gave way to an expanse of clearing. There, in a field of dead grass, were the overgrown remnants of shady pine summer camp. It was as humble as I had expected. just a few wood cabins and a small playground on the edge of the property. I lingered there for a short moment and seriously considered turning around.

From the looks of it, the old couch seemed like the kind of place where squatters would probably get up to trouble. I could see crushed beer cans and cigarette butts littering the ground, indicating that someone had been there recently. Yet, when I thought again of the time and money I'd invested in coming to this place, I decided I may as well keep moving forward. Why not? I passed through the playgrounds first. It was nothing remarkable.

Just a couple rusty swing sets, some wooden forts, and a rainbow-colored merry-go-round spinning slowly in the wind, creaking as it went. I moved beyond the playground into the Commons area. I took a moment to briefly examine all the different buildings on the property. There were the medical unit, the mess hall, the classroom, and the dormitory, more or less as they would have appeared

when Lucille Mason visited in the summer of 1988. I found nothing especially interesting inside any of these buildings. Only a collection of deserted, vermin-infested little rooms, pervaded throughout by the nauseating stench of mold and mildew. I was about to head out and get back on the trail when I finally saw it. Through a window in the dormitory, I had a good view of the camp's north end. A barren expanse of grass ran maybe 20 or 30 yards before giving way to pine woods. On the very edge of this field was a small dilapidated shed.

The same one which had plagued Lucille in her nightmares. Dusk was getting near by the time I stepped out into the field and started to approach the shed. even though I knew it would be dangerous to remain here any longer, I couldn't help moving forward. After everything I had learned, all the vague, mysterious details that had plagued me for so many years since discovering Lucille's tapes, after all that, I knew I had no other choice than to go as far as I possibly could. In hindsight, I was not fully aware at the time of just how deep and unconscious of fixation had brought me to this point. point. The door to this shed was already ajar. I gave it a nudge. What remained of the sunlight poured into the room as the door swung open easily? There was almost nothing in there.

Just a few empty wooden crates and a table in the corner where someone must have kept their gardening tools once upon a time. I thought of the dream in which Lucille had remembered finding a hatch beneath the floorboards. That was when I noticed a series of floorboards in the northwest corner, which looked as if they were oddly aligned. Pressing on them, I found they weren't completely nailed down. I easily stripped them away one by one. At first it was difficult to tell what was beneath those floorboards.

In the growing darkness, I had to take off my backpack and dig around for my flashlight. When I finally found it and pointed it into the hole, I was met with the sight of a large metal hatch. If I was going to get it open, the only way would be to go down there, under the floorboards. I lowered myself down, shown my light on the hatch, and took a good look. There was a wheel in the center of the hatch. I gave it a turn, or at least tried to. It seemed that decades' worth of rust corrosion had all but locked up the gears.

It took about a quarter of an hour, but I finally managed to force it open. I lifted the hatch and looked inside. The tunnel must have extended at least 40 feet below ground. There had evidently been a ladder once, leading to the bottom, but it had long since fallen apart. Only the first 10 or 15 feet remained. I could see the remnants of the ladder strewn about the tile floor at the bottom of the tunnel. I would have needed a rope and a pulley to get down there, the kind that cave explorers and mountaineers use. as it was I could not go any further.

In a sort of trance, I closed the hatch, hoisted myself up, packed my things, and retraced my steps down the trail. Darkness had fallen. I moved quickly. I remember feeling very afraid, whether due to something I had seen at the camp or the fact I was alone at night on a trail in the middle of nowhere. I really can't recall. Everything about that night is disorienting to remember. Like a half-forgotten dream. I just recall that I wanted to get out of there

and back to the city as fast as possible. Before I knew it, I was back at the train station. I found myself unable to sleep during the overnight train ride. Memories of what I had seen replayed themselves without end as I watched the passing landscape, the dense pine woods and rolling foothills of rural South Dakota. Hiding God knows how many secrets. For many years, I had felt somehow detached and distanced

from the contents of Lucille's tapes, but now I understood it was real. All of it. I couldn't stop wondering what had happened to Lucille in that strange subterranean complex buried beneath the remnants of shady pine summer camp. I couldn't stop wondering why the floors of that underground room had been crafted from the sort of tile you only see in a hospital or a laboratory

when every other structure in the camp had been built from cheap wood. I couldn't stop wondering what Lucille had seen when she visited the camp that day in December 2000. What it was that had caused her to break down, lose her sanity and die of fright. I am grateful to say I will never know for sure. Hales have ended. Are you feeling all right? We did our best to give you a fright. You may feel safe in the bright sunlight, but soon, once again, you'll be sleepless tonight. The No Sleep podcast is presented by Creative Reason Media. The musical score was composed by Brandon Boone. Our production team is Phil Mikulski, Jeff Clement, and Jeff. Jesse Cornett. Our creative content manager is Olivia White. Our editor-in-chief is Jessica McAvoy.

If you would like to find out how you can hear the extended editions of our program, please visit the no-sleeppodcast.com to learn about our season past program, 25 episodes each over two hours long, and three exclusive bonus episodes, all for only $25. On behalf of everyone at the No Sleep Podcast, we thank you for joining us and for being sleepless tonight. This program is copyright 2022 by Creative Reason Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. No duplication or reproduction of this audio program is permitted without the written consent of Creative Reason Media, Inc.