I'm in the process of moving the contents of this blog over to a website on Substack. New content, and old, will appear there over the course of the next few weeks. A few details may change, but the core will stay the same.
Find me here from now on: Lost Media and Other Supernatural Concerns
Report compiled by Tristan Marshall, Visual Media Investigator, Institute for the Study of Forbidden Media
To my superiors:
I apologize for the prolonged lack of communication. I came into contact with a new fragment of Passerine Birds of the Great Lakes (Vol. II) and thought it pertinent that I quarantine until I was positive that I was no longer transmuting. The fragment is in storage at my place of residence; please send an agent to collect it as soon as possible, it’s broken three filing cabinets as of writing.
Unfortunately, due to my contact with Passerine Birds, I had to immediately vacate my civilian employment. I have been squatting in a building that once belonged to the law offices of Peterson and Vanclad PC, Attorneys at Law in the scenic Mistake on the Lake-- Cleveland, Ohio. If I’m correct, then at least one member of the Institute’s Board should have raised eyebrows upon reading that name; Abraham Vanclad was a nightmare to Northern Ohio’s indie publishing scene from 1976 until his death in 2009, due to his litigation of smaller presses when they toed the line of public domain. While most of them were unscrupulous (no tears will be shed for No Vacancy Publishing’s demise, with their $50 submission fee and proto-MLM pay structure) his litigation means that over three dozen anthologies, comprising over 1,000 individual short stories, are now permanently out of print.
And, it seems, Mr. Vanclad kept trophies of sorts-- I don’t see why else the room that was formerly his office would have an aging copy of 1995’s On King Arthur’s Secret Service, an attempt to adapt Arthurian Lore into a James Bond-esque spy-fi setting, or 2048, an anthology that somehow had the blessing of George Orwell’s estate to tell stories of the world of 1984, IngSoc and Big Brother during the titular year. All of these have been documented, and I have done my best to preserve them (again, please send an agent to collect) but the crown jewel of the collection was a copy of Prismatica, the lost 2009 queer fiction anthology curated by Valeria Schrader.
Firstly: it’s braced. I’ve managed to confirm that much-- the paper is impossible for me to tear or cut, the cover is unaffected by mold or any other form of rot or aging. It’s a bona fide anomalous document containing seven pieces of short, queer fiction from the late 2000s.
I’ve inspected the volume fully-- it seems to have lost the ‘bite’ it had circa 2009, as it were. From what I’ve read, Prismatica was weaponized post-publication, being handed out at gun shows, Republican campaign rallies, and other conservative functions disguised as everything from The Turner Diaries to The Anarchist’s Cookbook; excerpts of it were even reportedly published in pamphlets meant to look like Chick Tracts, though they lacked any illustrations. The Institute was predominately straight prior to the mass proliferation of the internet; perhaps the fact that I haven’t been affected by a fully intact copy of Prismatica is due to my own complex relationship with gender.
Regardless, I have read all seven stories, and have summarized them below.
Lipstick Stain
By Julian Schipp
‘Lipstick Stain’ tells the story of a teenaged boy who, after wearing his mother’s lipstick out of curiosity, is forced to eat the rest of it. The effects on his body are horrific-- probably the most graphic description of aluminum poisoning I’ve seen outside of a murder mystery novel. His mother tries to bury his paralyzed body in the yard without realizing that he’s alive.
I had to be careful when reading this; Lipstick Stain was associated with at least a dozen cases of aluminum poisoning reported at the 2012 Republican National Convention; these were likely psychosomatic in nature, due to reading graphic descriptions of the symptoms. Precedent exists for plain text causing illness if the description is graphic enough; see the 1952 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Maladies or the Palmer, Kansas School District’s 2013 STD Education Pamphlets, among others.
Agent O
By Gregory Grimm
A spy thriller pastiche, comedic in nature; the twist is that the James Bond stand-in, ‘Agent O’, is gay, and nobody seems to get it, least of all the object of his affections, Agent Q. I don’t much care for spy fiction, so I don’t know how this stacks up in the genre, but much of the humor seems to come from the fact that it doesn’t occur to most people that LGBTQIA+ people… exist. There’s a line that mentions Agent O foiled ‘a plot wherein terrorists attempted to set off a bomb that would have rendered the citizens of San Francisco unable to be attracted to the opposite sex’. Grimm is listed as having been with ‘a man he considers his husband for fifteen years’ in his bio at the back of the collection; I don’t know if the humor simply isn’t landing with me or if it’s just bad writing.
The anomaly with this work is both active and annoying; every piece of music I hear sounds like it’s straight out of a bad spy film. My playlist says ‘Florence + The Machine’, but I’m hearing the theme to Operation Double 007, a 1967 Italian spy film starring Sean Connery’s brother.
Note: effect faded after approximately six hours.
The Queen in Yellow
By Nannette Simpson
“Over the course of the 20th century, the so-called Yellow Sign, a symbol both deviant and divine, became a common mark for the sexual pariahs of the world-- gay, trans, lesbian, all could come together beneath the Yellow King’s mark and be one.” Thus begins The Queen in Yellow, a tale which attempts to tell a new story from the world of Robert W. Chamber’s horror anthology The King in Yellow. ‘Carcosa’ is misspelled twice in the 5000-word work, and the plot tells the story of a trans woman getting the Yellow Sign tattooed on her right breast, and how it affects her.
There’s a strong theme of reclamation throughout the work, which makes sense; The Yellow Sign and various other hallmarks associated with Hastur were co-opted by Lovecraft for his Cthulhu mythos, and Lovecraft was every flavor of bigot available in the early 1900s. Enjoyable enough.
Again, I had to be careful with this one; copies of The Queen in Yellow distributed at the 2010 Louisville Gun Show resulted in ‘spontaneous changes in human mammaries’, per an Institute report at the time. While reportedly the effect is less pronounced in those who aren’t cis-hetero, I’d rather not risk the chance of me needing a mastectomy while I’m uninsured.
At this point, I started noticing that there were consistent elements in each of the works-- particular word choices and foibles that are hard for unskilled authors to conceal, or easy for a skilled author to accentuate for thematic purposes. For instance, the phrase ‘lemon-scented’ appears in each story, as does the description of a ‘sky so blue you could drown in it’, and both this and Lipstick Stain have a character extinguish a candle by pinching the wick. Schrader was the editor for this, so she may have inserted these phrases… but she could just has easily have written them all herself and published them under a variety of pseudonyms.
Guenevere’s Eyes
By June ‘Jojo’ Johannsen
A lesbian retelling of the tale of Guenevere and Lancelot-- Lancelot in this continuity is a young woman impersonating her older brother, who is a ‘layabout and a lout’. Apparently, the author thought alliteration was appealing to her audience, as it pervades the work. ‘Lancelot’ commissions the assassination of King Arthur so that she and Guenevere can be together.
Note: I’ve been informed that several early King Arthur stories were written in alliterative verse. Perhaps this was intended as a callback to those?
Language and references are both anachronistic; it’s one thing to mention Bedlam House in a vaguely medieval work, but at one point, a ‘village idiot’ croons out a verse from Sloppy Seconds’ immortal song, Why Don’t Lesbians Love Me?, in order to heckle Guenevere and Lancelot kissing in public. He even says ‘dude’.
Guenevere’s Eyes was, perhaps appropriately, reported to cause blindness among seven members of staff at a facility called Camp Bethlehem, a ‘pray the gay away’ conversion camp in Western Pennsylvania-- once again, this doesn’t seem to affect me, but I would caution any of the Institute’s more conservative members against reading it. Furthermore, this shares the ‘lemon-scented’ descriptor with the other works in the anthology, this time talking about some wine that Lancelot drinks.
Great Blue Sea
By Willa Tombstone
As far as I’m aware, the term ‘queerbaiting’ didn’t arise until the mid-2010s; however, the term ‘queer baiting practices’ comes up in this story in an odd context. It’s a cyberpunk future, and ‘fishermen’ are tasked with weeding LGBTQIA+ individuals out of the population by luring them into containment using what I can only describe as rainbow-coded dog whistles. Some of it reminds of Fahrenheit 451, specifically the later theatrical adaptation; it’s legal to be a homosexual as long as you don’t show homosexual behavior, just as it is legal to own books but you are disallowed from reading them. This is the situation our protagonist, a ‘homosexual man of fifty-two years married to a woman with whom he has had five children’, finds himself in.
It’s… grim, to say the least. Rather gruesome, as well. But this anomaly might be the most baffling of the bunch-- it wasn’t obvious to me at first, but after reading it and going to do some light errands, I found that people were asking what my pronouns were regularly-- I’m male-presenting, by and large; could this confound pronouns? Possibly more testing needed.
If I am correct, and Schrader did write all of these stories, or affect them in some way with her editing, then it’s clear that we have someone who has great skill with the art of writing. Five distinct anomalies across five separate works; it’s terrifying, and likely explains how Schrader was able to pull off what she did when she was active.
Schrader was part of a majority-female pro-queer militia calling themselves ‘The Society of Stonewall Scythians’; they were calling for LGBTQIA+ individuals to arm themselves long before it was in vogue to do so, and while it has never been proven, allegations linking the SSS to the 2006 ‘Fountain of Blood’ outside the Sistine Chapel have circulated for over a decade. Schrader herself may be a polymath, versed in both anomalous writing practices and anomalous sculpture.
Royale
By Colleen Pierce
Gay intrigue at a royal palace in the fictional European country of The Republic of Cote Rania. (At least I’m assuming it’s European-- they mention their ‘cousins in England’ at one point.) Surprisingly complex for a short story-- but complex doesn’t mean interesting. It revolves around a succession crisis after the crown prince announces that he will marry his male fiance, and… bearing in mind that I don’t know much about anime, this feels like the plot of a bad anime, one where every character has the same face and there are fewer frames of animation than a Synchro-Vox cartoon.
This story is unique in that its effects seem to be geared towards queer individuals; Cote Rania's flag is described as being 'hued with all the colors of the rainbow... a stain on vexillology, but a flag the people are proud of, and fiercely defend'. This might explain why, in 2018, the Patton Baptist Church in Patton, Nebraska was destroyed following its public burning of the Inclusive Pride Flag; anecdotally speaking, I nearly cursed out a woman for sneering at an agender pride pin I had on my shirt.
Prismatica
By Valeria Schrader
Prismatica is the titular work in the piece, and is less a short story and more of a manifesto by Schrader, beginning with an autobiographical segment. She explains how she was six years old when the Stonewall Riot happened, and that her father berated the television whenever he saw news about it; she reasoned that if these people were capable of making her father angry so easily, that she wanted to know more about them. When she came out as bisexual and trans-femme in 1984, her father attempted to ‘dispose of her’ (her words exactly), but she ‘fought him off with a copy of Juliet & Juliet by Mary Caddick’; Caddick was a queer author who died in 1987, and her work has largely been beneath notice. However, I managed to dig up a police report about the 1984 incident, which states that Willem Schrader, Valeria’s father, was found in a ‘crater’ in his front yard, with ‘several broken bones’. A manifestation of Schrader’s own abilities ,or does Juliet & Juliet have its own anomaly?
In any case, she continues with a screed:
“For centuries, the Christian Man has attempted to lock us in closets and let us suffocate. For centuries, the Christian Woman has pushed to lobotomize us in the name of defending her children. Levi’s tribe is dust, and its laws with it. We will not be beholden to the laws of a God of Hate-- we have a right to live, a right to love, and it will not be abridged by the fascism of the Christian Nation. I refuse to be beholden by any of your Stolen Commandments, and that includes the seventh-- I shalt kill in the name of my own defense, beginning with…”
And then the document goes on to list dozens of names. I’ve looked them up-- all of them were local to Northern Ohio, and all of them are affiliated with some form of homophobic group of some form, ranging from members of the Catholic Church to the law firm of Peterson and Vanclad, PC. Abraham Vanclad was hired by someone else named in the manifesto to sue Schrader and her publishing company for harassment and defamation of character, among other allegations.
Process servers attempting to serve Schrader with papers vanished twice, re-appearing in Nova Scotia weeks later. So, Vanclad took it upon himself to attempt to personally serve Schrader. The result was recorded in a statement to the Cleveland PD by a witness:
“I lived down the hall from her. She seemed nice enough; a little quiet, and clearly a dyke, but she didn’t seem harmful. So when I heard screaming coming from her apartment, I thought ‘oh my god, someone’s hurting her’. I called the police, but when I looked out into the hallway… it was the strangest thing. There was something standing out there, it looked like a sculpture, a man made out of paper, like pages from a book. It was soaking wet, too; it took me a while to realize it wasn’t water or ink. That man was a lawyer, you said? He was just trying to do his job. I hope you catch her.”
And they have yet to; Schrader has been on the run for over a decade at this point. Reportedly, she was sighted at the 2016 Akron Firearm and Hunting Expo, distributing pamphlets; the contents of these pamphlets are unknown, as the majority of them seemingly self-destructed following reading. Notably, Akron held its first Pride parade the following year.
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To my readers: thank you for sticking around, those of you who have. My employment situation varies between 'precarious' and 'non-existent' at the moment; while donations are not expected, I do have a Ko-Fi you can find in the sidebar, if you wish to donate.
I'm behind on Institute work, but hopefully I can make up for lost time. I have a couple of items in the trunk, as it were, waiting to be published.
Be seeing you.
So, this is basically the situation as it stands.
The Head of the Institute, and several board members, were concerned upon seeing my vent post a week or two ago, and they decided a re-assignment would be best for me. I'm still going to be in the Midwest; unfortunately, we don't have bottomless resources to help an archivist and scribe like me move.
As I write this, I'm getting ready to present my two week notice to my civilian job. That's already going to help a bunch with my state of affairs; I don't mean to sound elitist, but I'm overqualified for pretty much every job in this hick town I live in, and my degree makes my resume noxious to anyone looking to hire me within Hornbeck County. It's hard to believe that Superior is less than an hour's drive away from the literal parade of Blue Lives Matter flags I've seen every Fourth of July for the last four years.
My new assignment is going to be in Cleveland. I know Cleveland has a certain image to it (thank you, Mike Polk Jr.) but it's been an area of focus for a few reasons, and yes, one of those reasons is the fact that Bill Watterson seems to be completely impossible to photograph. He's like bigfoot or something. Plus there are marketing jobs all over Cuyahoga County that are looking for people with film degrees, so it shouldn't be too hard for me to find a job up there.
Only problem is that Cleveland is home to a more... athletically-focused branch of the Institute, shall we say. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the local anomalies there relate to the abysmal performance of the Cleveland Guardians (née Indians) and the Browns; at least one person claims to have captured a version of the 2016 World Series on their DVR where the Indians won instead of the Cubs. Someone in Chagrin Falls claimed to have captured a time loop occurring in a game between the Boston Celtics and the Miami Heat, but considering that is literally the premise of an SCP, I'll press X to doubt.
I don't care. I'll learn about knuckleballs and quarterbacks if it means I can get out of this shithole town. Goodbye, Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin and your freaky-ass plastic industry.
But yeah, more sporadic updates. I have gotten a couple of reports I've been meaning to put up, so expect those every other week or so until I get myself situated.
Ms. di Corci from the Alescio Manuscripts case has returned to us with another write-up. This is something she pulled from the files of one of her ‘father’s’ colleagues, regarding a strange art exhibition in the middle of the 2000’s.
As an aside, I have to applaud Ms. di Corci for growing so diligent in her research already. New York, as you can imagine, is a hotspot for a lot of odd media activity; she’s already written up half a dozen cases since joining, but this is the one she’s most comfortable with presenting at the moment.
Before I let her take the metaphorical floor, I leave you with a quote:
“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” --Sir Terry Pratchett
1.
Here's the deal: it’s June 2005. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is hosting an exhibit by an up-and-coming sculptor from the Lower East Side known as Herman Binger. It was a series of stainless steel sculptures depicting melted or melting figures, called ‘Sunwalkers’, because Binger thought that this is what would happen if people walked on the sun-- he called it a ‘perverse transmutation’.
The sculptures looked neat, but nobody knew how they were made; they resembled cast steel, but (this is a quote from the NYT) ‘the combination of humanoid forms below and melted steel on top seems too complex for current artistic techniques’. Binger explained how he did it, and most people accepted his explanation; he took department store mannequins, dismembered them into poses, and dumped molten steel on them. Even from pictures, you can tel something is off about the display. Some of the sculptures had faces that seemed too detailed for a mannequin.
One weird thing is that each of the sculptures also had at least two holes somewhere on them; no larger than a few millimeters. Binger explained that it was his signature, and that if anyone else copied it, he knew that it was plagiarism.
They’ll believe anything in the world of art, it seems.
There was one piece, “Prostrated”, that had a kneeling figure with its mouth open, apparently praying. It was one of the most evocative pieces, in no small part due to the fact that it looked the most melted out of the whole exhibit. It made noise when wind blew through it, so they set up a fan, creating a sound somewhere between a whistle and a scream.
Critics ate it up; the New York Times called the display ‘haunting and evocative’, while the New Yorker called it a ‘must-see’ for anyone visiting the city at the time. MoMA extended the time it would be exhibiting the museum by two more months.
Binger, for his part, had some odd habits when it came to the exhibit; he wouldn’t let anyone else touch the pieces, and insisted on coming in three hours before the museum opened to polish them all by hand. He insisted that he not be disturbed while doing this, on pain of lawsuit against the museum and removal of his exhibits.
In July, Binger announced a new piece for the exhibition; this is unusual in any museum, moreso as the MoMA decided to allow him to display it. Called “Amalgam”, it was almost twenty feet tall, made up of bodies piled on top of each other, all coated in layers of steel, with a single screaming figure at the top.
Nobody was really sure what the exhibit was actually trying to say. Some thought it was a commentary on the horrors of war, with the melting forms being based on allegations of white phosphorus rounds being used in the First Battle of Fallujah. Others thought it was a take on just how badly 9/11 scarred the country, with the melted steel being an allegory for the ruin of the World Trade Center. Some thought it was a parody of statues around the city; Binger had lived in New York his whole life, so the thought was that this was his view of the statues around Manhattan.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far as part of this weird-ass project or community, it’s that the only thing worse than an art critic is a New York art critic.
2.
It took until August for people to notice the smell.
Nobody knew what it was, at first; maintenance at MoMA was called to look into the possibility that a rat or a pigeon had gotten into the ventilation shafts and died, but even that didn’t fix the putrid, stinking scent in the exhibition hall. Anyone who’s been to New York knows that the city has some… interesting smells, but most New Yorkers are used to clouds of gas from the sewers, not rotting flesh and filth. Well, okay, if you live by the Hudson, maybe you’re used to filth.
Eventually, Binger came in and removed one of his sculptures, called ‘Venus di Argent’; it was a take on Venus di Milo, complete with arms being removed, but she was bent in half like she was throwing up, and once-molten metal was coming out of her open mouth. The smell vanished over the course of a few days; Binger explained that a family of mice had gotten trapped in the podium the piece was being displayed on and died.
Again: people in the art world will believe anything.
Nobody knew what Binger was actually doing until a few days before the exhibit was supposed to end. A family visiting from Nebraska came to the MoMA with their six-year-old son. Bringing a six-year-old into a museum with expensive art is already a risk, especially one who’s angry at his Gameboy being taken away by his parents. So, when they got to the Sunwalkers exhibit, this kid started messing with the statues. Eventually-- and don’t ask me how, these were supposedly solid steel-- he ended up knocking over a piece called ‘Mother of Babylon’, a female figure with no legs, sitting on a pedestal. The steel on the face chipped off when it hit the ground.
Beneath that steel was human skin, and a human eye. At first, when the NYPD got there, they thought they were dealing with a corpse inside the statue, like Binger had been grave robbing or something, but that wouldn’t explain why the body was so-well preserved.
And then the eye turned to look at them, and the person inside started letting out a low, rasping moan-- the closest thing they could make to a scream.
3.
All fifteen pieces in the exhibit of them had at least one person inside them; Amalgam had at least ten by itself. Most of the people inside were dead, early works when Binger hadn't perfected his process, but only Venus di Argent had started to rot. Seven survivors were found among the sculptures, and several things about the exhibit began to make sense.
The signature holes left in the metal by Binger were just big enough to put in an IV tube and a catheter. That’s what he was really doing whenever he would ‘clean’ the exhibits by himself--keeping his statues alive with a liquid diet and removing their waste. One of the survivors was the subject in Prostration, and he actually had his mouth propped open so that Binger could force liquids down his throat.
But nobody could explain how they got in there. Pouring molten metal over a corpse makes some sense, god knows it’s probably a more humane way to display bodies than what those fucks who make art out of the corpses of political prisoners do. But pouring molten metal over a living human being, even one who’s drugged or restrained, will definitely kill them. The main explanation for it was the Leidenfrost effect, which is something involving why you can stick a wet hand into a pot of molten metal and not get burned (don’t try that at home) but I call all sorts of bullshit.
You can't just stick steel on top of someone and expect them to survive. The weight of the metal alone would crush bones and organs, assuming they weren't incinerated outright. Binger did something to these people to keep them alive.
I tracked down one of the survivors in Jersey City. She doesn't really remember being in the statue, which I guess is a blessing. All she knows is that she was invited home by Binger one night after a gallery showing of his, had some tea that he said was from "the old country", and next thing she knows, a team of surgeons and engineers are working to get her out of a steel sculpture.
At first, I didn't necessarily think there was something spooky or kooky going on here, beyond some people surviving being encased in steel for a few months. Not that it matters much, because we'll never know his "technique"; one of Binger's victims-- the woman who was in Venus di Argent, the only person who died while on exhibit-- was identified as the niece of an NYPD officer, whose gun "accidentally discharged" into Binger's brain stem when he was cuffed.
At first, I thought the only clue we might have is the tea, but even then, it might just have been drugged. Then I tried to find Binger's autopsy report, hoping to find something behind the miasma of bullshit the NYPD uses to cover their tracks-- but there just wasn't one, nor was there a paper trail indicating that one was absent.
Even for 2005, way back before police accountability was a hot topic, that was weird. But paperwork kept on referring to an incident report not included with the rest of the case file; one FOIL Act request and a bunch of stonewalling from the NYPD later, I had a redacted copy of it in my hands. The report read:
"On 9/25/2005, Assistant Medical Examiner ████████ █████ attempted to begin an autopsy on a subject who died following arrest in connection to Complaint 952930918. Subject's remains had been delivered to the City Mortuary two days prior and were in cold storage.
A.M.E. █████ attempted to begin the autopsy at approximately 5:20 P.M., after a period of thawing. Subject's remains were in a standard body bag, and despite A.M.E. █████ claiming that the profile of the subject's body could be seen while the body bag was closed and had the appropriate weight for a human body, upon opening the body bag, a mass shredded paper smelling heavily of ozone was found within, with no sign of the deceased subject.
The shredded paper appears to correspond to an obscure, currently out-of-print erotic novel originally published in 1978, titled 'Skin of Steel, Heart of Gold'; the similarities between the contents of the novel and the method in which the subject carried out their crimes has been noted.
A. M. E. █████ has been placed on paid administrative leave; as the subject has no known next-of-kin, and was the perpetrator in the deaths of at least seventeen people, the condition and location of his body are considered low priority. No follow-up is required."
I've tried tracking down Skin of Steel, Heart of Gold, but I haven't found anything other than a couple of pieces of superhero-related smut. Considering it's 45-year-old spank material that sounds incredibly niche, and the author died in '89, I'm not surprised. But I'm not sure how Binger could have been inspired by it; he was born in '78, and by the time he would have been old enough to enter a shop that sold that kind of thing, the book would have been out of print for a decade.
I'll keep looking for it, but that's firmly on the back burner. There's a lotta weird shit going on in the five boroughs, and I can't really focus on a serial killer who's been, metaphorically speaking, in the ground for almost twenty years.
I’m sorry for this blog being dead for so long; I got swamped with projects by other Institute members, on top of recovering from COVID. What projects, you ask?
Some members of the Institute prefer to record their findings with audio and then have someone like me transcribe it. The Institute doesn’t have many rules, but one of them is absolutely no automated speech-to-text software like Dragon or Speechnotes; either a human transcribes it, or it collects dust. We learned our lesson the hard way in London.
Believe it or not, this is normally my ‘job’ at the Institute when I’m not busy pursuing a case; the Institute’s Board (if it can be called that) prefers that we have written copies of all reports. I only started this blog, and started documenting new cases, literally because I ran out of work.
Then I got twenty audio recordings on my desk the same day. This is just one of them, sent by an investigator I’ll call Clark, sealed inside a Faraday pouch wrapped under six layers of masking tape in a tamper-proof envelope.
I should note that this transcript discusses the deaths of and injuries to children aged eight and under.
###
[several seconds of clapping to calibrate the audio]
Begin recording.
This is a story that can be told using three graves in Northern Ohio. Their links are not obvious; their dates of death do not line up with each other, but each of them are connected by an insidious thread that I aim to unravel.
The first grave is located in Woodlawn Cemetery in a small town called Norwalk, situated almost exactly at the midpoint between Cleveland and Toledo. It is in an area dedicated to children, and belongs to Suzanna Moore, born May 1997, died October 2003. The circumstances of her death were bizarre-- her father, Alexander Moore, carried her through the front doors of the Emergency Room at the local medical center, saying that she wouldn’t wake up, apparently oblivious to the massive wound in her head and the blood that had run down her face and stained not only her Halloween costume, but also her father’s jacket. Furthermore, he seemed to not comprehend that the ER nurses were telling him that his daughter was dead for almost three hours, until he saw her in the morgue, at which point he had to be restrained for violently attacking several members of ER staff.
I cannot interrogate Alexander Moore about this topic, as he took his life in 2009. His grave is in his native Connecticut; part of his divorce settlement with his ex-wife included the stipulation that he not be buried within five-hundred miles of his daughter’s grave. I did not wish to bother the former Miss Moore, though-- [the tape cuts off here before resuming, audio may have been deleted]
In any event, the information I seek can be more easily obtained from public record than private testimony. Autopsy information does not fall under HIPAA, and I was able to glean the information I required from a line describing the clothing of the deceased.
‘‘Halloween’ costume, styled after an alligator/crocodile wearing a tutu”.
If this sounds like a non-sequitur, then it is time to move on to the second grave.
This one belongs to the Spinelli Family. Miranda Spinelli, born June 1964, died July 2014, and her son Carter, born August 1992, died September 2000. The name ‘Carter Spinelli’ may be familiar to those of you who walk in the more morbid circles of the internet; the ‘true crime’ [He says with no small amount of disgust] podcast Strange Deaths of the 90’s covered it in Episode 129, ‘Kids These Days’.
Carter Spinelli died after jumping off a bridge in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio. While not suicidal, Carter was developmentally disabled--though they used a much harsher term in 2000--and may have had trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. That was the assumption police made when they found him in between the train tracks with a nylon cape from a superhero Halloween costume wrapped around his body. There were allegations that bullies from his school had encouraged him to attempt the jump, as he was apparently called “Specialboy” [all one word, per Clark’s notes] due to his developmental issues, with the words “Specialboy: the World’s First [slur removed] Superhero” written in his 1999-2000 yearbook. These allegations never panned out.
Miranda had a surviving son from a previous marriage, sixteen-year-old Martin Spinelli. After shoving a reporter who was attempting to interview him on the way to school and being suspended following this incident’s broadcast, he threw himself into a project, a video tribute to his little brother, using various imaginary friends of Carter's. Among them was ‘Manda’, who Carter had drawn in the image of a crocodile wearing a tutu.
This was a very elaborate video tribute, with Martin creating puppets and drawings in the image of his little brother's imagination. This became a sort of obsession with him, and he would claim to find himself lurking-- pardon, working on it as late as 3:00 AM. His efforts manifested through his failing school grades, and eventually, the video was shown at a memorial service to Carter on what would have been his ninth birthday in 2001.
An uninvited party was in attendance at the service-- their name was Winston Plummer, a station manager for the local PBS affiliate, WGTE. He was impressed with Martin's work, and asked if he would be interested in working on a series of safety-focused TV shorts that they were planning to air early in the morning; specifically, they were interested in using the Manda puppet. Plummer explained that the aim of the program was to teach children about dangers such as peer pressure, loaded firearms, and high falls. They also invited Miranda onto the show to discuss her son.
The program, called Safety Square, began production in September 2001, before being postponed for reasons that should hopefully be obvious. It resumed in November of that year, and in February of 2002, the first episode, “Don't Go Up”, aired, focusing on the dangers of high falls.
Safety Square is clearly a public access production; it was shot on tape, and the copies of it that exist today are full of magnetic aberrations and glitches that even Institute technology struggles to compensate for and repair when it’s digitized. None of the child actors seen on-screen have camera presence, several of them mispronounce their lines, and they look past the puppets and at the people operating them. To call it ‘low budget’ would be generous.
And-- [clunking sound, scream of pain] SON OF A BIT[audio cuts out here]
Apologies, apologies. I made the mistake of watching “Don’t Go Up” while doing research on this. Its anomaly is probably the least obvious of the six episodes produced; after approximately thirteen minutes, around the time when Manda says the line “Make sure you always hold onto something when you’re going up and down the stairs”, viewers begin to experience feelings of intense vertigo when looking down from a height-- for instance, descending stairs from the second floor to the entrance of your apartment building. It’s just a sprain, and I know that someone is going to lecture me about watching media before it’s been parsed, and I’m not about to let it be you, Tristan.
I didn’t watch any of the others after that. The only reason I watched “Don’t Go Up” was because of Miranda Spinelli’s testimonial at the end, about Carter. She wanted to dedicate the series to him to make sure that no other child in North-West Ohio suffered the same fate that he did.
In the aftermath of “Don’t Go Up”’s airing in February 2002, seventeen children eight and under were admitted to hospitals in the area after falling down flights of stairs, off of playground equipment, or in one case, off of a couch. No fatalities resulted.
Episode 2 of Safety Square is entitled “Safe in the Kitchen”. Individual frames I collected--safely this time, Tristan-- show Manda and several other characters learning how to be safe in the kitchen-- not to drink stuff in cupboards that isn’t clearly labeled, always checking expiration dates, staying away from the knife drawer. That kind of thing. It aired in June of 2002; reportedly, a four-year-old in a town called Berlin Heights crawled into the oven as his mother was starting to prepare dinner, but was unharmed.
The tape for Episode 3, “Fire Safe”, was presumed lost. It evidently surfaced at a garage sale in 2009, shortly before a house fire killed a family of three. The slagged remains of a VCR were found, but the tape inside was not identified, see included documentation.
[I’ll spare you that much. Official Institute reports are very dry compared to what I put up here.]
I believe you see the pattern by now, but in case it’s not evident, Episode 4 was called “Guns Aren’t Fun”. See included data drive for a series of autopsy reports dated to October 2002, soon after the episode aired.
[Again, sparing you that. This is already rough enough to write without me transcribing the autopsy report of a six-year-old.]
Episode 5 was called “Owie!”, make sure there’s an exclamation point in there. It talked about how to deal with injuries if you got hurt-- cuts, scrapes, bruises. It was simple enough for kids to understand, and…
The last episode of Safety Square aired in May of 2003, but they had finished “Owie!” by that time. They didn’t air it until October of that year, to fill a gap in the schedule. It aired a couple of weeks before Halloween 2003, just enough time that a father could help his daughter put together a Halloween costume based on the alligator puppet.
I don’t think the connection was ever made while Miranda Spinelli was alive. It would have broken her heart, knowing something that her surviving son helped create negatively affected, or even killed, so many people.
I talked with Martin Spinelli about this; he works at the local CBS affiliate in Toledo, and denies any knowledge that what he created caused so much harm, going so far as to call me a lunatic and… well, suffice to say, I’m happy that it didn’t escalate. Man looked like he could do some damage with the equipment he was carrying.
I did mention that there were three graves that told this story, but that isn’t quite true; the third one is in the process of being dug. It belongs to a man who was found inside a red 1990 Hyundai Excel in an inlet in Lake Erie. Police ran into some trouble with identifying the body, and understandably so; it was entirely skeletonized by Lake Erie and its wildlife over the course of over twenty-five years. They ran into a break in the case when the glove compartment was opened, and they found a mostly-intact wallet inside. Among other things were a AAA Membership card, a photograph of the deceased and their family, and a driver’s license, issued in 1995.
The name on the license was Winston Plummer, the aforementioned WGTE station manager, who, by all accounts, was alive at the time. Dental records on the body did not match those taken from the entity calling itself Winston Plummer during an exam in 2021-- but they did match those taken from Plummer during a dental exam in 1994.
It’s the teeth. It’s always the teeth they get wrong. They can replicate somebody down to the pattern on their retinas, but they always have trouble with the teeth. I don’t know why.
Winston Plummer, whoever this version of him was, was not located following the discovery of the wreck. He had reportedly come into the station that morning and locked himself in his office; when maintenance unlocked the door, the office looked as if it hadn’t been used or had upkeep done in over twenty years, with rotting carpet, peeling paint, and a stain on the ceiling over where Plummer’s chair used to be.
Publicly, Winston Plummer died from crashing his car into Lake Erie about… four days ago? As of recording. Privately, something is rotten here, and everyone knows it.
I am still investigating Plummer’s posthumous tenure as station manager, and I’m dreading what I will find. While Safety Square was thankfully not more widespread-- the range of casualty failed to even reach nearby Detroit-- Plummer, whatever he was, collaborated with PBS stations across the nation from 1997 until 2023. The infamous ‘Hat Man’ episode of Sesame Street aired during this time-- surely you remember that, with how Big Bird dedicated a whole minute to telling children how important it was to have a fire extinguisher in their house?
Whatever happened to this version of Plummer… the entirety of the office smelled like ozone, and there were… footprints in the carpet. Snowmen don’t come after normal humans, and they don’t attack unprovoked.
I think that Plummer was an Algernite. If so, that’s the longest one has continually existed in our reality. As you can imagine, I’m going to be asking for more resources dedicated to investigating Algernon.
###
Algernon, where Algernites come from, is… a whole can of worms I don’t have time or energy to get into. Turns out, getting COVID makes you long for the sweet embrace of death long after your symptoms are better.
I’m well enough to travel, at least. Algernon will have to wait; some urban explorers and a few dozen institute members are getting together to perform a rescue operation… on an arcade cabinet.
