True Internet Horrors: Chip-Chan, Local 58, and The Plague Doctor

Gather round for three stories the internet found and couldn't put down. A DVD arrived in Sweden with no return address — on it, a figure in a plague doctor mask standing inside an abandoned psychiatric hospital where hundreds of people were executed. The audio carried photographs hidden in frequencies the human ear can't detect. In Seoul, a woman livestreamed herself 24 hours a day from a filth-filled apartment, claiming a corrupt police officer had implanted a chip in her ankle to control her sleep. Thousands watched. Nobody came. And somewhere in West Virginia, a public access TV station started broadcasting messages that didn't belong to it. The signal told you not to look at the moon. Then something reversed the signal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:22AJ Gentile?

  Gather round. This happened in 2008. A user on 4chan discovered something on an unsecured webcam. A feed from Seoul, South Korea. A woman's apartment. She was lying motionless on a thin mat surrounded by towers of boxes and trash. The 4chan user thought she was dead. Then she moved. The woman sat up, wrote something on a whiteboard, and held it to the camera. Broken English. "My name is Chip Chan. Police officer put chip in my ankle. He control my brain."

• 0:54AJ Gentile?

  She collapsed back onto the mat, unconscious. 20 hours later, she was still there. Same position. She hadn't moved a muscle. The internet had found its new obsession.

• 1:17AJ Gentile?

  Before the stream, she was normal. Jane, a Korean woman in her 30s who wrote a blog. She talked about restaurants. She gave movie reviews. She talked about her weekend plans, her friends, her job. Ordinary life documented in ordinary ways. Then around 2006, the post changed. She wrote about footsteps in the hallway that stopped outside her door. Cars that waited outside her window. She constantly felt like she was being watched. She wrote about a police officer who kept showing up places she went. Coffee shops, the grocery store, where she worked. Always the same man, always watching. She wrote about waking up exhausted with no memory of falling asleep. Her apartment was rearranged. Objects moved from their normal places. Windows opened that she remembered closing.

• 2:01AJ Gentile?

  She would suddenly be missing time. She lost hours at a time and had no idea why. The blog posts became frantic and paranoid. Then they stopped.

• 2:11AJ Gentile?

  But two years later, she was back. She livestreamed herself 24 hours a day from an apartment that looked like a hoarder's tomb. Boxes stacked to the ceiling, trash bags lined every wall. The floor was buried under food containers, empty bottles, and crumpled paper. Her windows were completely covered with newspaper and cardboard. No natural light made it inside.

• 2:33AJ Gentile?

  She called him P, a corrupt police officer who had implanted a verit chip in her ankle sometime in the late 1990s. The same technology nightclubs were using to identify VIP customers. The same RFID technology medical facilities use to store patient data. An implant about the size of a grain of rice that could be read by external scanners. These chips are real, and they could be read by scanning equipment passively, meaning you don't have to activate them. They just work. According to Chip Chan, her chip was different. P could trigger it remotely from anywhere in the city. He could force her to go unconscious with the push of a button. He controlled exactly when she slept and when she woke up. She lived entirely within his schedule. She was a puppet, and P held the strings.

• 3:18AJ Gentile?

  The apartment had three webcams positioned in the corners. These were professional setups with good angles and clear resolution. She installed them herself to document what happened during the hours of missing time. She said she was looking for evidence, proof that P was controlling her. She wanted to document the crime. What she created was a window into hell, and the world started watching. The stream never stopped. The cameras captured everything. She ate ramen noodles with plastic spoons. She wrote desperate messages on whiteboards in broken English. She slept in contorted positions for 18 to 20 hours straight without moving a muscle. During these sleep periods, she looked dead. She didn't shift or turn over. She didn't twitch. You had to concentrate just to make sure she was breathing.

• 4:01AJ Gentile?

  This death-like stillness went on for almost every day. Early viewers timed her blackouts with stopwatches. They created detailed spreadsheets. The pattern was consistent and unnatural. She suddenly collapsed into a deep sleep at the same exact time every day. Then she woke up at the same time, day in, day out, like she was programmed, like she was being controlled.

• 4:25AJ Gentile?

  Humans don't sleep like this. Even heavily sedated patients shift position occasionally, not chit-chat. She slept like she was paralyzed. And every day, people watched. They wanted to help her expose the corrupt police officer who was controlling her. Imagine how surprised they were when the police showed up.

• 4:47Speaker 02

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• 5:15Speaker 03

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• 5:51AJ Gentile?

  Thousands of people watched. The stream spread from 4chan to the rest of the internet. Viewers formed communities dedicated to watching her 24 hours a day. They called themselves "The Investigators." They analyzed every frame of footage. They worked in shifts. Documented her health decline with scientific precision. They set up rotation schedules to monitor her breathing during the 24-hour sleep periods to make sure she was still alive. They watched her waste away in real time.

• 6:20AJ Gentile?

  As the months passed, her apartment got messier. Chip Chan got thinner and thinner. Her clothes hung loose. Bruises appeared on her arms and legs for no apparent reason. The dark circles under her eyes got darker. Her hair became stringy. She never washed it. Her writing became shakier, harder to read. But the messages are what frightened people the most. They became even more frantic. "P watching always." "Chip makes pain in head." "Help me, please." Nobody believed. Dedicated viewers in Seoul tracked down her address and called the police. Two officers knocked on her door. Chip Chan opened it. She was disheveled and stunned. Then she panicked. She ranted. She pointed at her ankle. She pointed at the cameras.

• 7:03AJ Gentile?

  She showed them her whiteboards, her messages. She tried to show them the implant site. She begged them to scan her ankle for the chip. The officers looked around the apartment. The filth, the chaos, the bizarre webcam setup, the paranoid writings that covered every surface. What they saw was a mentally ill woman living in squalor. And after five minutes, they left. Chip Chan wrote a new message for the cameras. "Police are P's friends. They help him." Viewers were outraged. In real time, they watched the police completely dismiss her. People posted angry comments about Korean Mental Health Services. They organized more calls to the authorities. They started fundraising campaigns to help her. And through it all, they never stopped watching.

• 7:47AJ Gentile?

  And something else bothered her viewers. Technical details that didn't add up. Sometimes camera angles shifted while she slept. Not a lot, just slight adjustments. Better framing, better lighting, cleaner shots of Chip Chan lying unconscious. She was never awake when the cameras moved, and she was always alone. The cameras were being operated remotely. Someone was directing the production, adjusting the angles, making sure the global audience had the best possible view of her suffering.

• 8:17AJ Gentile?

  The investigators debated this obsessively. Was it P. controlling the cameras along with her mind? Was it Chip Chan herself, using automation software she'd set up during lucid moments? Or was it something more disturbing? A third party monetizing her breakdown? The stream became their daily dose of tragedy, their mystery to decode, their community center. They logged on every morning to check if she was still breathing. They posted details when she shifted position. They celebrated when she woke up and wrote new messages. People created wikis to document her sleeping patterns. Others analyzed timestamps looking for hidden meaning. They turned her isolation into their connection. Her pain became content. Her psychological breakdown became entertainment.

• 9:02AJ Gentile?

  Viewers donated money to her PayPal account. She used it to order food delivery, the only contact she had with the outside world. They felt generous, helpful, like they were participating in her care. They never realized they were participating in her destruction.

• 9:26AJ Gentile?

  The stream ran for years. Different platforms, different cameras, different angles of the same broken woman in the same filthy apartment. When her stream crashed, dedicated fans found new hosting. Whenever she was banned from a platform for violating its terms of service, she would show up somewhere else. Chip Chan's current status is unknown. The last confirmed sighting was several years ago. Some say she died from malnutrition and neglect. Some say she was finally institutionalized after a neighbor complained about the smell. Some say she's still there, in that apartment, still broadcasting to whatever audience remains, still waiting for someone to save her from P.'s control.

• 10:06AJ Gentile?

  The dedicated subreddit still exists, posts from people claiming to have found new streams, screenshots that might be her, IP addresses that might lead back to Seoul. The investigation never really ended, it just got quieter. The tragedy isn't whether the chip actually exists. They do. These are real devices used for real purposes. But these chips don't control minds. That technology doesn't exist, at least not that we know of. The tragedy is simpler and more universal. Thousands of people watched a woman's life fall apart, but they enjoyed the mystery. She wasn't a person to save, she was a puzzle to solve. She was content. And we're still doing it. Every day, we carry tracking devices in our pockets. We broadcast our locations to corporations and governments that aren't looking out for us.

• 10:50AJ Gentile?

  We stream our lives to strangers who'll never help us. We invite surveillance into our most private moments and call it connection. We live in voluntary versions of Chip Chan's apartment. We just have better Wi-Fi and cleaner floors. Chip Chan was the extreme version of what we do willingly. She lived totally connected, yet totally alone. The cameras never stopped rolling, the audience never stopped watching, the show never ended. The archives still exist. Thousands of hours of footage, screenshots of desperate cries for help, videos of a woman slowly disappearing while the world watched. If you search long enough, you'll find them. You can watch a few minutes and see what everyone else saw.

• 11:31AJ Gentile?

  A woman sleeping unnaturally still on a thin mat for hours, writing messages that nobody answered, begging for help that never came. But remember while you're watching her, you're not investigating a mystery, you're participating in one. And the mystery isn't what happened to Chip Chan. The mystery is why we watch.

• 12:06AJ Gentile?

  Gather round, this happened. And leave the TV off for this one. In 2015, a YouTube channel appeared called Local 58. It looked like recordings from a public access station out of Mason County, West Virginia. Call sign WCLV-TV. The videos were short, two or three minutes each. Weather bulletins, emergency broadcasts, kids' shows, the kind of programming that aired at 3 a.m. on stations nobody watched. But the broadcasts kept getting hijacked, and the hijacked messages all said the same thing: don't look at the moon.

• 12:49AJ Gentile?

  The first video is called "Weather Service." A standard weather alert fills the screen. White text on a colored background. The kind of message your local station runs during a tornado warning. Then the screen glitches, the alert changes, then the words appear: "Do not look at the moon tonight."

• 13:06AJ Gentile?

  The station is trying to warn its viewers, but something else is taking control of the signal. The text flickers, distorts, and flips. Now the message reads: "Look at the moon, his throne, his crown."

• 13:21AJ Gentile?

  Whatever hijacked that broadcast didn't just override the warning, it reversed it. The station tried to protect you. The thing that took over the signal wanted you outside.

• 13:32AJ Gentile?

  The next video is "Contingency." It opens with the presidential seal and an emergency broadcast tone. The voice is calm and measured, the kind you'd hear during a real national crisis.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  The worst has come to pass. Despite the sacrifices of our citizens and the might of our armed forces, the United States has been forced to surrender to her enemy. Though they may occupy our borders, our streets, and our homes, the enemy will never occupy our spirit. That is why all Americans are now called up to act, to preserve the memory of the United States, clear and bright, untarnished and uncompromised.

• 14:12AJ Gentile?

  America has lost a war. A foreign power controls the country. There is no path to victory. But the government has one final plan. It's called the Victory Position. The broadcast walks viewers through it step by step. Lie face down on American soil. Press your body to the earth. Place your hands behind your head, close your eyes. The instructions are precise. The tone is reassuring. They tell you this is your duty as a citizen. They tell you the pain will be brief. They tell you this is how you win.

• 14:44AJ Gentile?

  It takes a few seconds to register. The government is telling its citizens to kill themselves. And it's framing suicide as patriotism. The broadcast ends with a waving flag and the words, "Victory is yours, America." The National Anthem plays over footage of rolling hills and farmland. And the delivery is so convincing that your body responds before your brain catches up. Your pulse rises, your hands go cold, because you've heard that tone before. Every tornado warning, every amber alert, every emergency broadcast you've ever received used that exact voice. Calm, authoritative, trustworthy. The voice that says, "Do what we tell you and you'll be safe."

• 15:26AJ Gentile?

  In January 2018, about a year later, every phone in Hawaii received an emergency alert. "Ballistic missile inbound. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill."

• 15:38Speaker 05

  Oh gosh, what happened? Holy crap! Did something happen? It says "This is not a drill."

• 15:44Speaker 06

  Missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill. They called a nuclear bomb strike on us and I'll try and keep you updated on what happened. Let's go, Dad.

• 15:56Speaker 07

  They're not gonna tell us. But we need to know! Like, people vacationing out here. Oh, man, okay. This ain't no joke.

• 16:02Speaker 08

  If you're watching this video, that means I didn't make it.

• 16:07Speaker 08

  Because of the missile that's coming towards Hawaii.

• 16:14Speaker 08

  I had a good life.

• 16:21AJ Gentile?

  For 38 minutes, people believed it. Some said goodbye to their families. Some hid their children in storm drains. It was a false alarm. An employee clicked the wrong button on a computer. But, for 38 minutes, a million people obeyed a message on a screen without question. But contingency was just the beginning. The next broadcast didn't just tell you to go outside, they showed you what happens to the people who do.

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• 17:52AJ Gentile?

  The next video is called, "You're on the fastest available route." Dash cam footage. Someone driving at night. A GPS voice gives directions. "Turn left. Continue straight." The road gets darker. The turns stop making sense. The GPS tells the driver to follow signs for, "Do not enter." It tells them to turn off their headlights. The driver does it. Every time, the driver obeys. The road disappears into trees. In the final frame, a single flash of light. There's a figure standing in the woods.

• 18:36AJ Gentile?

  Not a person. Something taller, thinner, standing perfectly still between the trees.

• 18:45AJ Gentile?

  Then there's real sleep. It looked like a sleep aid program from the early 80s. Soft music, a calm voice telling you to relax. Breathe in, hold, breathe out. The screen shows gentle patterns. Your eyes get heavy, and that's the point. Then the instructions change. Stand up, walk to the door, open it, step outside, look at the sky. The voice never changes pitch, never gets urgent. It guides you outside the way a meditation app guides you through breathing exercises. And behind the text on screen, almost too faint to notice on first viewing, there are faces, distorted, stretched, watching from behind the broadcast.

• 19:25AJ Gentile?

  Thousands of viewers didn't notice the faces until their third or fourth time through the video. They went back and checked. The faces were there from the first frame, watching the whole time.

• 19:37AJ Gentile?

  Sky Watching starts as an astronomy program. A cheerful host points out constellations.

• 19:45AJ Gentile?

  Then the footage cuts to a field at night. No crickets, no wind, dozens of people standing completely still, heads tilted back at the same angle. Nobody moves, nobody speaks. They're all staring at the same point in the sky. Viewers who went frame by frame found something above the field, a shape in the sky, barely visible, looking down at the people who are looking back. Nobody knows why.

• 20:12AJ Gentile?

  Show for Children opens with a cartoon skeleton named Cadaver doing a little dance. Silly music plays. It looks like an 80s kid show. Then the moon rises in the cartoon. The skeleton stops dancing. The animation shifts from cartoon to photorealistic. A real human skeleton fills the screen. The music is gone. What replaces it is the music.

• 20:54AJ Gentile?

  The pattern across every video is the same. Weather alerts, government broadcasts, GPS navigation, sleep programs, children's shows. Every system designed to keep you safe has been turned into a weapon. And every one of them is trying to get you to do the same thing. Go outside, look up. And the people who do, the ones in the field, the ones following the GPS, the ones lying face down in the victory position, they don't come back the same. And some of them, they don't come back at all.

• 21:33AJ Gentile?

  One person made all of this, a cartoonist named Chris Straub. He made the first video weather service in 2015 using iMovie. Posted it on a shared YouTube channel nobody was watching. It got a few thousand views and sat there. Two years later, he created the dedicated Local 58 channel and started uploading the rest. Seven videos over eight years. The longest, a 30-minute piece called C-L-O-S-E, came in 2023 with an alternate reality game attached. A real website, local58.tv, filled with hidden messages and coded transmissions, fragments of a story that had been building since the first upload. No behind the scenes, no interviews explaining the lore. Straub never broke character. The channel exists the way a real hijacked TV station would. The broadcasts are there, but nobody's explaining them.

• 22:22AJ Gentile?

  Before Local 58, there was no name for this kind of horror. Creepy VHS-style videos existed, but nobody had put together the broadcast format, the institutional authority, and the slow corruption of trusted systems into a single concept. After Local 58, there was a name: analog horror. The Mandela Catalog, Gemini Home Entertainment, Monument Mythos, The Back Rooms. Dozens of channels, hundreds of videos, millions of views. All of it traces back to one cartoonist who made a fake weather bulletin on iMovie and told you not to look at the moon. But here's the part nobody talks about. Straub also wrote a creepypasta called Candle Cove. A forum thread about a kids TV show that never existed, broadcasted a local station nobody could find records of. The puppets had human teeth.

• 23:06AJ Gentile?

  The show aired screaming and static, and the station that broadcasted was called WCLV. The same call letters as Local 58. Candle Cove. C-A-N-D-L-E-C-O-V-E. WCLV. Straub also created a webcomic called Brood Hollow, set in a town where reality is thin and something ancient watches from the edges. One of its characters, a skeleton named Cadaver, is the same skeleton that dances in Local 58's "Show for Children." The same skeleton that stops dancing when the moon comes up.

• 23:39AJ Gentile?

  Brood Hollow, Candle Cove, Local 58, all set in or around the same fictional town in West Virginia. All connected to the same thing. Straub has never explained what it means. The channel has over half a million subscribers and 20 million views. The website is still live. The signal is still broadcasting. And if you're watching this late at night, alone, in the dark, don't look out the window. Not because something is out there, because some part of you, trained by a lifetime of obeying screens, might actually do what the broadcast tells you.

• 24:12AJ Gentile?

  Why are you still watching this?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Brianna Stewart here with Ally Bank. Whether it's at work or with family, life never calls a timeout. Sometimes you're ready, and sometimes you have to react on your feet. Unexpected travel, retail therapy, and of course, the kids need new kicks right now. Ally gets it, and they build banking around real life. So even in those clutch money moments, you can spend and save confidently with the bank that's got your back. Ally. Do it right. Ally Bank. Member FDIC.

• 24:56AJ Gentile?

  Gather out. This happened in 2015. A tech blogger in Sweden opened his mail. Inside was an envelope, no return address. It was postmarked "from Poland." It held a DVD. He figured it was software someone wanted him to review. He grabbed a spare laptop, the kind you use when you don't trust what you're about to run. There was no software. Just a two-minute, black-and-white video of a figure in a plague-doctor mask, standing in a ruined building, holding up one hand with a blinking light in its palm.

• 25:28AJ Gentile?

  The audio underneath was a voice repeating the same phrase: "I would love to kill you." He posted it online and asked for help. And the internet answered.

• 25:53AJ Gentile?

  The video had 700,000 views within a week. Thousands of amateur cryptographers, puzzle solvers, and horror fans picked apart every frame. The footage showed a figure standing inside a crumbling building. Through two holes in a brick wall, trees swayed in the wind. Graffiti covered the walls, debris littered the floor. The figure wore a long, dark cloak with a hood pulled up. On its face was a plague-doctor mask. Long leather beak curved downward, round, black goggles. The kind of mask doctors wore during the Black Death. Stuffed with herbs because it hid the smell. A costume designed to visit the dying.

• 26:29AJ Gentile?

  The figure raised one hand, palm out. A light blinked in the center of its palm. Irregular pulses, not Morse code. The audio was almost unbearable. Distorted, buzzing, electronic screaming. At the end, the figure pointed directly at the camera. People analyzed the hand signals. Three fingers, then one, then two. They pulled apart the metadata. They ran the audio through spectrogram software, a tool that turns sound into visual image, showing frequencies the human ear can't hear. Spectrogram showed a skull. And underneath the skull encoded text. But that wasn't the worst part. Hidden in the audio frequencies were photographs. Not glitches that look like faces. Actual images deliberately encoded into the sound.

• 27:13AJ Gentile?

  Women's bodies, mutilation, close-up of wounds. One image matched a crime scene photo from the Boston Strangler case. Albert Salvo's victims from the 1960s.

• 27:25AJ Gentile?

  Another came from a German exploitation film called Slasher. A third was from The Bunny Game, a horror movie so extreme it was banned in the UK.

• 27:35AJ Gentile?

  Real murder victims mixed with stills from banned films. All of it buried in frequencies only machines could read. And the deeper people dug, the worse it got. The video was packed with coded messages. Different ciphers, different encryption methods, different languages. The title "11BX1371" came from a hidden code, a base 64 string on the DVD's menu screen. And binary code in the YouTube description decoded to "Muerte", "Death" in Spanish.

• 28:06AJ Gentile?

  The description also read "Te queda uno año menos." "You have one less year." A geometric symbol near the end of the video, a box divided into triangles. This turned out to be Pigpen cipher, which uses geometric symbols to represent letters of the alphabet. Decoded, it read "Ad oppanare hominis", Latin for "to attack men." More text buried in the spectrogram. "You are already dead." Then a longer message. "The eagle equals infected will spread his disease. We are the antivirus. We will protect the world body." And "Strike an arrow through the heart of the eagle." The American eagle. The number 1371 in the title matched the year of major plague outbreaks in medieval Europe.

• 28:49AJ Gentile?

  The plague doctor costume, the messages about disease, about infection, about targeting America. People started talking about bioterrorism. Forums debated whether to alert the FBI. The Washington Post ran a piece. Gizmodo, Slate, everyone wanted to know the same thing. Whether this was a manifesto, a threat, or the work of a killer documenting his crimes. The light blinking in the plague doctor's palm looked like a countdown. Then, someone identified the building.

• 29:30AJ Gentile?

  A Polish internet user recognized the windows and the graffiti. The video was filmed inside Zofiówka sanatorium, an abandoned psychiatric hospital outside Warsaw in a town called Oczwick. The building had a history that made everything worse. Zofiówka opened in 1908. A group of Polish Jewish doctors raised money to build a mental health facility for Jewish patients. They called their organization "The Society of Poor Jews with Nervous and Mental Illnesses." By 1935, the sanatorium had 275 beds. It was built as a place to heal people. Then the Nazis came. In 1940, Zofiówka fell inside the Oczwick ghetto. Nearly 400 patients started starving. The Germans weren't going to waste resources on people they planned to kill anyway.

• 30:15AJ Gentile?

  On August 19, 1942, German soldiers and Ukrainian guards rounded up all the patients and staff into the first pavilion. They shot between 100 and 140 people where they stood. The survivors, along with the entire Jewish population, about 7,000 people, were loaded into trains. A few doctors tried to escape by ambulance. Most didn't make it. Some staff chose suicide over the camps. The sanatorium never reopened. The buildings were left to rot. Out of every abandoned building in Poland, someone chose this one. They dressed as a plague doctor, a figure from the era of the Black Death, a costume designed because of the dying, and filmed a video about disease and killing in a building where patients were executed.

• 30:58AJ Gentile?

  The graffiti in the video wasn't present in the photos of the room taken in November 2013. The video was made sometime between then and its upload in May 2015. Someone spent months planning this, building the costume, encoding the images, layering the ciphers. And the video had been online longer than anyone realized. Before the DVD arrived in Sweden, before the blog posts, a YouTube account called AETBX had uploaded it on May 9, 2015. The account had no other content. When reporters tracked down the user, he said his name was Daniel. He was from Spain, and a girl he didn't know had emailed him the video after finding it on a park bench. Nobody could explain AETBX. Nobody could explain the DVD.

• 31:41AJ Gentile?

  The video had appeared on 4chan's Paranormal Board even before the YouTube upload. Someone was seeding copies across the internet through channels nobody could trace. Disks in subway stations, files on park benches, anonymous uploads on obscure forums. The mystery had layers inside layers. Every answer opened a new door, and someone decided to walk through one.

• 32:09Speaker 00

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• 32:31AJ Gentile?

  In late November 2015, a Twitter account appeared under the name ParkerWarnerWright. The owner claimed to have made the video. Other people were making the same claim at the same time, but Wright did something none of them could. On New Year's Eve, he uploaded a sequel, 11B31369. Same plague doctor, same sanatorium, same style, new ciphers.

• 32:53AJ Gentile?

  The figure appeared outside in the forest first, then inside the building. Later in the video, a woman in a white dress with bandages covering her face joined the plague doctor. Three weeks later, The Daily Dot published an interview. Wright said he was an American living in Poland. The videos were an art project, an elaborate cryptographic puzzle. He'd left copies on discs, hidden in a Warsaw subway station and a park, and posted an early version to 4chan's Paranormal Board. The Swedish blogger got his DVD because he'd handed Wright a business card at a tech convention. Wright said he had built the plague doctor mask himself from scratch. He challenged anyone to make an exact copy, and nobody ever did.

• 33:31AJ Gentile?

  In April 2019, a third video appeared, 11B451T8. More ciphers, more encoded messages. The project had been running for four years. An IMDb listing credited a second person, someone named Emir Yakimos. Nobody has ever identified who that is. Wright hid eight USB drives around Warsaw with GPS coordinates for his followers to find. Each one held encrypted bonus content. His last known video, The Trigger, appeared in 2021. His YouTube channel still exists. Wright never showed his face, not once. He communicated only through text, social media posts, emails to reporters, encrypted messages to followers.

• 34:15AJ Gentile?

  An American living in Poland, wearing a handmade mask no one could copy, filming inside buildings where people were murdered, encoding crime scene photos into sound frequencies. He called it art. He spent months designing the costume, encoding photographs of real murder victims into audio, and layering ciphers in three languages across every frame. He chose a building where Nazi soldiers executed psychiatric patients. He mailed anonymous DVDs across international borders to a stranger in another country.

• 34:45AJ Gentile?

  Art. The Swedish blogger eventually accepted Wright's story. The costume details match between videos. The cipher style was consistent. The mask challenge went unanswered. Wright was almost certainly the creator. But knowing who made it doesn't make it less disturbing. The spectrogram images are still there. Every time someone plays the video, the audio carries photographs of real victims. Encoded in frequencies, the ear can't hear, but software can see. Two minutes of a plague doctor staring at the camera in a room where patients were shot. The families of the people in those spectrograms were never contacted, never told their loved ones' crime scene photos were buried in the sound of an anonymous internet video. The video is still on YouTube. You can watch it right now.

• 35:28AJ Gentile?

  Two minutes, black and white, a blinking light, and in the frequencies underneath, the dead are still there, just waiting for someone like you to look.

• 35:44AJ Gentile?

  Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is AJ. This is The Y Files, and that was a Campfire story. No debunking, no analysis, just a creepy story to scare you and the kids. And that one is true and unsolved. Now, if you had fun, I'd appreciate it if you can like, subscribe, comment, and share. That stuff really helps. And like most topics we cover here, today's was recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to see, go to theyfiles.com/tips or send us an email. We'd love to cover that story. And if you'd like to hear any of these Campfire stories expanded into a full episode, there's a few I'd like to do, then definitely let me know. Remember, The Y Files is also a podcast. You can take us on the road. I post deep dives into the stories we cover on the channel. I also post episodes that wouldn't be allowed on the channel. Podcast is called The Y Files, Operation Podcast, and it's available everywhere.

• 36:29AJ Gentile?

  And if you're listening on an audio platform, do me a favor, hit the thumbs up, or the like, or the follow, or whatever those buttons are. Those really do help. Now, if you need more Y Files in your life, check out our Discord. We're about to hit 100,000 members over there. It's a lot of fun. It's a really supportive community. There's someone on there 24/7, and it's free to join. Speaking of 24/7, check out our 24/7... I'm plowing through the plugs. Speaking of 24/7, make sure you check out our 24/7 stream of The Y Files. Backstage, over there we run episodes back to back with some fun content in between, and the live chat is super, super fun. Special thanks to our patrons who make this channel possible and make every episode of the Live Files happen. Every episode is dedicated to our Patreon members, I could not do this without you. And if you'd like to support the channel, keep us going, consider becoming a member on Patreon.

• 37:13AJ Gentile?

  For as little as three bucks a month, get access to perks like videos early with no commercials, exclusive merch, and two private live streams every week just for you to hear the whistle in my teeth, it's because I'm going too fast. The, the private live streams are a lot of fun, for members only, uh, my webcam is on, everyone on the team has their camera on, you can talk to all of us, turn your camera on, jump up on stage, ask a question, it's a lot of, I think it's the best perk there is. Another great way to support the channel, grab something from the Live Files store, that is, shop at thelivefiles.com, you'll find it. But if you're gonna buy merch, become a member on YouTube, YouTube members get 10% off everything in the Live Files store forever, so you can get us fed 40 bucks on t-shirts and festival mugs, become a member on, on YouTube for three bucks, pays for itself, and that money goes to the team, not to me.

• 37:58AJ Gentile?

  Those are the plugs, I got through them as fast as I could. And that's gonna do it, till next time be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 38:59Speaker 12

  I fear the crackhead and got stuck inside mail's hole With MKUltra, I'm being only too aware Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone? On a film set, were the shadows people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told And his name was Cold And I can't believe, I'm dancing with the fish Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more time, beat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth

• 39:43Speaker 12

  And one more time, beat all through the night

• 40:05Speaker 12

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come To a god that is secret city underground Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Stargate, and what the dark watchers found In a simulation, don't you worry though The black nights had a lot of tone Miss so, I can't believe, I'm dancing with the fish Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more time, beat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth

• 40:49Speaker 12

  And one more time, beat all through the night Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more time, beat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth And one more time, beat all through the night

• 42:01Speaker 02

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• 42:27Speaker 10

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