25 Most Frightening SCP (SCP Animation)

The year was 1983, and seven year old Andrea Bradbury was wandering the streets of Nashville, Tennessee. One of her favourite activities was to head down to the local movie theater and fantasize about the movies she’d one day be old enough to see. This fateful weekend, Andrea’s local theater was playing a brand new release: Jaws 3D. What she didn’t know is that this simple, innocent activity would bring little Andrea into dangerous contact with SCP - 178 and change her life forever. Jaws 3D isn’

t exactly a classic - it was one of the many forgettable sequels pumped out to cash in on the 3D craze of the early 1980s. People paid extra for the privilege of sitting in the dark with an uncomfortable pair of cardboard glasses while cheesy effects leapt out of the screen towards them. Many of the moviegoers simply threw away the cheap, disposable glasses as soon as they left the theater, leaving them scattered on the sidewalk outside. Seeing a pair of 3D glasses on the ground, right there for

the taking, was the highlight of little Andrea’s week. She may not have been old enough to see any of the movies, but she knew that a local shop sold books with images that popped off the page with a simple pair of 3D glasses. Excited by the prospect of getting to experience 3D, Andrea grabbed a pair of glasses and ran straight for the bookstore. Later that night, she was in her bedroom, with a stereoscopic image of a Ferris wheel.. Andrea adjusted the glasses - and the Ferris wheel really did

pop right off the page. She marveled at the image coming out of the book and felt like she could almost touch it. But suddenly a strange feeling came over her. She had the feeling that she wasn’t… alone. Still wearing the glasses, Andrea looked up from her book and saw it, standing in the corner of her room. Something huge. Something monstrous. Andrea’s parents heard her scream and came rushing into her room. There was their little girl, dead. It looked like she’d been mauled to death by a wild

animal, but there was no sign of her killer. The windows were shut tight, unable to be opened from outside. It was like whatever horrible creature had done this had vanished into thin air. The coroner's report didn’t give any other clues as to who could have done this, except that whoever, or whatever had murdered her, it appeared to have three long and incredibly sharp claws. The terrible tragedy of Andrea’s death rocked Nashville, but it never made the national papers. Why? Because the SCP Fou

ndation was immediately on the case. Undercover agents in the US Fish and Wildlife Service flagged the strange death as anomalous, and SCP field personnel arrived to do their own investigation of the crime scene. There they quickly discovered Andrea’s 3D glasses - which would eventually be classified as SCP - 178. An Agent looked over the glasses. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary about them, just your regular cardboard frames with blue and red tinted film over the eyes. Every

thing about them seemed normal, so he tried the glasses on himself. He picked up the open book up off the ground where Andrea had likely dropped it, and saw the Ferris wheel pop up off the page. Nothing abnormal. Until he turned his head slightly... He saw the head of some kind of… thing, only an inch away from his own, looking over his shoulder at the book. Being a trained SCP agent, he maintained his composure, and looked around the room. As he did he saw that several other creatures were stan

ding and watching. None of the rest of the recovery team seemed to notice the creatures, and when the agent removed SCP - 178, they vanished. It appeared that they had found whatever had caused Andrea Bradbury’s death. The glasses were immediately taken to the nearest Foundation containment site for further testing. Seeing these mysterious entities through SCP - 178 may have answered one question, but it raised many others. What are these creatures? Were they real, or merely illusions created by

SCP - 178? If they are real, are they somehow summoned by SCP - 178, or simply revealed by them? There was already one death that could be tied to the glasses with some certainty, but just how dangerous were they? The SCP Foundation was about to find out. Foundation scientists devised a series of experiments, with a test chamber separated from an adjoining observation chamber by a panel of reinforced bulletproof glass. A member of D-Class personnel was placed into the test chamber, along with S

CP - 178. He was instructed to put on the glasses and report what he saw back to the researchers. The D-Class followed the orders, however when he did so, he quickly entered a state of extreme distress. He threw away the glasses and covered his eyes, screaming wildly. When ordered to compose himself and explain what he saw under threat of termination, the D-Class described a “hideous” creature standing close to his face, watching. When asked to elaborate, he described it as having “too many eyes

.” After that, the D-Class refused to put the glasses back on again, despite direct orders and threats from Foundation staff. He was then removed from the test chamber and observed. Although he experienced two days of mild paranoia, after thirty total days of observation the D-Class was found to have no long lasting psychological effects. Disappointed by the meager results of the first test, the researchers had at least confirmed that they did indeed have an anomalous object in their possession,

and pressed on with the experiments. They used the same methodology again on another D-Class. She was placed into the chamber and instructed to put on SCP - 178, then describe the entity she saw in great detail. When she put on the glasses she recoiled in horror at the monster she saw staring back at her. She said that the creature was tall and bipedal, with two additional upper appendages ending in large conical protrusions. She also described the creature’s head as being “smooth.” When asked

if the creature exhibited any kind of aggression or hostility, she said that it was completely still. It was just standing there. After a few minutes though, the creature seemed to lose interest, and began staring at the wall. The researchers were happy to learn more about the creature’s physicality, but they still weren’t confident that it wasn’t just an illusion created by the glasses. They needed to engineer an interaction. For the next experiment, they decided to alter the particulars. A fra

ctal blue and red image, in a similar style to the stereoscopic Ferris wheel from the book Andrea had purchased was fixed to one wall. Against the opposite wall, they placed a bucket containing ten standard tennis balls. This time, the D-Class - a convicted murderer and arsonist - was told that he was helping to test a new 3D augmented reality project. The entities he would see, as far as he knew, were little more than digital projections. Though when he actually wore SCP - 178 and saw them, he

commented that whoever designed them must be crazy. The researchers instructed the D-Class to pick up a tennis ball and throw it at one of the entities. The second he did so, deep lacerations began appearing all over his body. The onslaught was brutal and quick, and the D-Class was dead soon after that. This confirmed to the researchers that the creatures did seem to have some level of tangible presence, and they could be extremely violent if provoked. Next, they wished to see if it was possible

to have any kind of interaction with the creatures without it immediately descending into violence. To test this theory, the researchers brought a nineteen year old D-Class into the testing chamber under the same pretence of testing new 3D technology. Much like the others, she was still horrified by the appearance of the creatures, but was calmed down by the researchers. They asked her to speak to the creatures directly, without exhibiting any kind of aggression. She said, “Hello, weird thing,

how are you today?” in a somewhat bored voice. And this was all it took to sign her death warrant - she was immediately slashed to death by invisible creatures. The results seemed clear: Any interaction whatsoever with the creatures while wearing SCP - 178 was a death sentence, like a slightly more outgoing Shy Guy. But the researchers would soon find that this anomaly had even more surprises. For their next test, they brought in two subjects: One would wear SCP - 178, and dictate to the other h

ow they should interact with a creature they could not see. The results of this experiment were bloody, yet informative. Both subjects were slashed to death when the unseeing D-Class interacted with one of the creatures on her companion’s instructions. It appeared that anyone with sufficient knowledge of the creatures who attempts to interact with them is doomed, even if they can’t directly see one of them. It was an upsetting realization for the researchers: SCP - 178 may be much more dangerous

than they initially imagined. And what they’d learn in the next experiment was even worse. They adopted the same methodology as the last for the following experiment - two subjects, one seeing and the other interacting. However, this time, as soon as Subject number one put on the glasses, they knew that something was terribly wrong. He began panicking, stating that the entire chamber was full of the creatures, all standing and watching. The researchers undertook these experiments knowing that t

hey didn’t often turn out well for the D-Class, so they didn’t seem too worried about this new development… that is until the subject stated that they could see three more of the creatures, and they weren’t in the test chamber. They were in the observation room. In fact, one of them was looking right over one of the three researchers’ shoulders. Immediately, the researchers lost composure and began to panic. They were used to putting D-Class in danger, that was part of the job, but they weren’t

prepared for this! In just moments, the observation room became a bloodbath as the three researchers who’d been designing and performing all the experiments were torn to pieces by creatures they couldn’t see SCP - 178 had gone from being one of the more innocent looking anomalies to one of the most mysterious and deadly. The creatures seemed to be powerful, violent, and incredibly numerous. The fact that they can only be observed through 178’s stereoscopic lenses and kill anyone who even attempt

s to interact with them makes them almost impossible to understand. It was always a tragedy when the Foundation lost good researchers, but the work must continue, and the experiments were soon restarted with increased safety measures. Of course those didn’t do much good, and after another disastrous experiment that resulted in the whole sector getting locked down, all research into SCP - 178 was placed under increased scrutiny. They needed to find some way of observing the creatures, without the

risk of having to share space with them. The proposed solution was seeing if the SCP - 178 glasses were compatible with camera technology for remote viewing. Much like all stereoscopic glasses, they found that looking through only one lens at a time was ineffective. The solution was relatively simple: A dual-lens camera in a roughly similar configuration to human eyes. This, however, didn’t give them the comfort, or the answers they hoped for. Researchers commented, upon finally seeing the crea

tures, that they were even more hideous than they’d ever imagined. As they observed a victim interacting with the creatures via their new camera, they found that as soon as the creatures were interacted with in any way, they would grow three long claws and attack. And they were as fast as they were ferocious. From the observations, there were only a few things that the Foundation now knew about them for sure: Their physical appearance, their violent nature, their enhanced physical abilities, and

the fact they appear to be pretty much everywhere. And who knows how long they’d been here, observing us humans while we glided by them, ignorant to their presence? It’s enough to make you think twice before putting on a pair of 3D glasses again. But of course, never putting on the glasses doesn’t mean you’re safe. Just knowing about them puts you in danger. They could be standing next to you right now, looking over your shoulder as you watch this video. Just remember: If you want to be safe, y

ou can’t ever let them know you’re aware. After all, just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you. SCP Foundation agents stationed at Area 37 had intercepted chatter from a normally closed communication system in a nearby city. To anyone else, the calls that the Foundation were eavesdropping would seem innocent - even boring, but the Foundation immediately recognized the coded language being used. They were listening to communications between underground cells of The Serp

ent’s Hand - a dangerous paramilitary organization that stands in opposition to everything the Foundation is trying to do. Once deciphered, the Serpent’s Hand messages revealed plans for killing Foundation personnel, breaking into containment sites, and releasing anomalous creatures and objects into the world - pretty standard stuff for the Foundation’s least-favorite, anomaly-loving insurgents. But they kept using one code that even the Foundation didn’t have any intel on - they kept asking abo

ut the condition of The Sisters. Fate has a funny way of sneaking up on you though, and in time, they would know more about the powerful, sadistic, reality-warping beings known as The Sisters than they could have possibly imagined. But what they would eventually learn was not the kind of data that anyone would ever want to have. After intercepting clear lines of communication from a local Serpent’s Hand cell, triangulating the location of their compound was child’s play, and Mobile Task Forces w

ere dispatched from Area 37 with orders to neutralize the potential threat before they could mount an attack on a facility. Just when the Serpent’s Hands least expected it, they had heavily-armed Foundation soldiers kicking down their doors, crashing through windows, and rappelling down from the ceiling. As expected, the Serpent’s Hand put up a fight, but thanks to their superior training and the element of surprise, the Foundation’s Mobile Task Forces came out on top. They were able to capture

fifteen surviving members of the group for interrogation, as well as a collection of anomalous objects being stored by the group. Among them were a small wooden loom, an enamel needle, and a glass eye. When the task force obtained these seemingly mundane items, a haunted-looking Serpent’s Hand began laughing wildly. He kept repeating, “You have no idea what you’re getting yourselves into...” Nobody knew just how right this man was. Not yet, anyway. Congratulating themselves on a job well done, t

he Mobile Task Forces hauled their captives and the new anomalous items back to Area 37 - a heavily isolated Foundation site that specializes in the early containment of anomalous objects for initial observation and study. The objects hadn’t displayed any anomalous properties in transit - maybe the Serpent’s Hand was lying and these weren’t dangerous items at all, or it was actually just a pile of junk. Either way, they were sent to a Foundation researcher on site to conduct preliminary tests. T

he loom, the needle, and the glass eye were laid out across the table for observation, when suddenly, the attending researcher felt a dark presence looming behind him. He turned, with sweat beading on his brow, and saw three humanoid, translucent figures floating in the air behind him. They would soon become known as SCP - 1765 One, Two, and Three. The researcher could feel the power emanating from these silhouettes - reality seemed to bend and shimmer around them, the way heat distorts the air

into a mirage. He could tell right away that they were powerful reality-warpers. Even in their brief time communicating with the researcher, One, Two, and Three displayed both intelligence and unique personalities. One was clearly the ringleader - displaying an articulate command of language. Two displayed a more mischievous side, speaking with a cockney accent and had a tendency towards creepy giggling. Three was the least communicative of them all - preferring to speak in short, simple sentenc

es, often consisting of just single words. Though of course, actions speak far louder than words - and it didn’t take long for the Sisters to define themselves with their actions. One told the scared and confused researcher that they’d been observing the SCP Foundation for quite some time, and that they deeply admired the Foundation’s adherence to the scientific method. Of course, the researcher wasn’t so much “flattered” by the Sister’s statement as they were “afraid for their life.” They tried

to call security for backup, but found that their tongue was withering and turning into a shrivelled, blackened husk in their mouth. The Sisters didn’t like to be interrupted. As the tongueless researcher slowly collapsed in front of them, the Sisters explained the purpose of their visit - They wished to assist the Foundation in their quest for knowledge, and, as such, they would conduct a number of experiments on their behalf. They would then happily share the resulting data with the Foundatio

n to compare notes. One expressed optimism, saying that she believed they were about to embark on a beautiful scientific relationship. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. The Sisters began their work, moving rapidly around the facility, bending and twisting reality wherever they went. They circled Area 37, marking it as separate from the rest of the world it inhabited. Area 37 no longer belonged to planet earth - it belonged to the Sisters. It was their private experimentation lab, f

illed with live and unwilling guinea pigs. The Foundation attempted to retake the facility by force, sending Mobile Task Force Iota-6, also known as the Canvas Cats, into the belly of the beast, but they never returned. In addition to changing the fabric of reality itself, they also altered the physical structure of Area 37 to better serve their experimental designs. It was divided into four sections, marked A, B, C, and D, each with its own unique purpose. Section A - which had formerly been Ar

ea 37’s storekeeping, mess hall, and dormitories - had been the least affected by the Sisters’ attacks on reality. The biggest alterations were the appearance of two large, metal vats situated in the east corner of the mess hall, a monitoring station connected to other sections of Area 37 that replaced the storekeeping zones, and an imposing marble sign hanging above the dormitories that reads “CONTROL GROUP.” A quick refresher from science class, the control group in an experiment is the group

that isn’t subjected to the experimental effect the others are, so they can be used as a benchmark to measure against. The same was true here - the prisoners in the control group were the safest of all, but they were forced to do something almost as bad, they had to watch the horrors playing out across the rest of the facility. One of the Sisters would occasionally return to this section to oversee the feeding of the control subjects, and to encourage them to take part in the observation of thei

r unlucky peers. Section B - which had formerly been Area 37’s outer grounds and sports facilities - had been transformed into the center of a localized spatial-temporal abnormality. In layman’s terms, this meant that its size, climate, atmospheric composition, pressure, and temporal flow were all subject to constant changes based on the whims of Sister Number One - who oversaw all the experiments performed in Section B. For those unfortunate enough to be trapped in Section B, SCP-1765-1 was the

ir god. But she didn’t subject them to her whims randomly. No, in her own words, the purpose of Section B was to delve into the effects of repetitive action performed under unusual conditions on the human psyche. For example, one experiment was set up to test the physical and mental fortitude of a Researcher, a Field Agent, and a sanitation worker. The trio were confined in a sports center and ordered to measure the length of every single pipe and the angle at which each connected to others with

nothing more than a wrench, a ruler, a brown paper pad and a ballpoint pen. The task was an arduous one taking over ten hours. And as soon as the subjects were done, One restructured the sports center and ordered them to perform the task again. The same happened another 459 times before One finally concluded the experiment, leaving the subjects with broken bodies and minds in the aftermath. Section C - which had previously been the facility’s main office block - exhibited a similar level of ano

malous activity to Section B, except that it was the domain of the more sadistic and mischievous Sister Number Two. Her main area of scientific interest was studying group dynamics and interpersonal relationships during extreme conditions - very extreme conditions. For one experiment, the office block had been transformed into a kind of football stadium, with the goal posts removed and replaced by concrete bunkers. The two teams were the captured Serpent Hand members, and the members of MTF Iota

-6, fresh off their attempt to retake the site. The two groups were forced into a deadly game with incomprehensible rules - including rising platforms and hooded figures throwing fiery projectiles into the crowd, trying to incinerate the players. But victory didn’t lead to safety, as the winners of the game were crushed to death with giant metal hammers, just for the fun of it. Two didn’t even try to pretend that this act had a valid scientific justification. Section D - which had once been the

facility’s high-risk containment area - was now the strangest and most mysterious section of all. Under the charge of the equally peculiar and enigmatic Sister Number Three, this area appeared physically unchanged from its state prior to the arrival of the Sisters. Temporally, however, Section D was the most warped of them all. It existed in a kind of temporal bubble, outside of the rest of our reality’s timeline, giving Three a frightening amount of control over all that went on in her domain o

utside of time. There she was performing the most strange and incomprehensible experiment of all. The subject was the former Site Director of Area 37. He was brought to a table, and asked to choose between two different flavors of ice cream that were presented to him. Sounds simple enough, so then why is this the worst of them all? Because the Site Director is caught in a time loop. He’s been choosing between various flavors of ice cream for over ten thousand hours, and he doesn’t even seem to k

now. Three’s only comment on the matter? “Delicious.” All attempts to liberate the unfortunate inhabitants of Area 37 have failed miserably. The Sisters don’t appear to operate on any form of logic or empathy, and thus, cannot be reasoned with. With talks having failed and Mobile Task Force Iota-6’s attempt to retake the site ending in disaster, the only solution left was to create a guarded perimeter around the area, using technology like the Scranton Reality Anchor to fight back against any po

tential escape by the Sisters. The Sisters are potentially so dangerous that if they ever truly set their minds to leaving, it’s considered acceptable to detonate the facility’s on-site nuclear warhead in hopes of finally putting a stop to them. In the meantime, the Foundation has built giant external servers for processing the vast quantities of research data the Sisters are constantly sending from their horrifying experiments. Sadly for the inhabitants of Area 37, their grim fate continues to

this day. The experiments never stop, and the subjects of said experiments seem to be condemned to the eternal torment of SCP - 1765. In a way, their unwilling sacrifice protects us all - because if ever the Sisters were interested in performing experiments on a larger sample size… Well, all we can do is hope we end up in the control group. One of the primary aims of the SCP foundation is to contain the anomalies that they discover. Secure, Contain, Protect is their mission statement, after all.

However, there are some forces so unknowable and malevolent that there is no way to truly contain them. SCP-4205 is one such force. Very little is known about SCP-4205, even compared to other SCPs, many of which are mysterious by their very nature. We do not know what it is, we do not know what it wants, and we do not have any meaningful way to stop it. The best that can be done to protect yourself from it is to implement the few known preventative measures available, and pray that it doesn’t s

et its sights on you. The little information that exists on SCP-4205 was recorded by Wade Dalitz, a former junior researcher at the Foundation. He wrote the initial report on SCP-4205 on a computer, Terminal 4, which was linked to his brain and consciousness as he wrote. Though his work was highly valuable, and provided many previously unknown insights about the nature of the SCP, sadly his knowledge could not save him. The official entry on SCP-4205 was his final act before his death on Decembe

r 11, 1992. Before we get deeper into that entry, and Wade’s final day on earth, it’s important to understand what SCP-4205 is. Or, at least, understand the little we know about what it is. 4205 is a Keter class SCP, meaning that it’s incredibly difficult or complicated to contain. It also shows extreme hostility toward all life. It is described as an amber-colored pair of human-like eyes, with the ability to appear spontaneously in windows, mirrors, or any other glass or glass-like surface. One

of the reasons so little is known about these eyes, is that anyone who sees them dies within seconds. The effect is nearly instantaneous. Much like the mythical basilisk, the gaze of SCP-4205 is deadly and inescapable. The eyes only seem to appear to people who are alone in a room, and never in places where there’s more than one person. But aside from that, there is no way to predict where the eyes will appear. Since it is unknown if the eyes are part of a corporeal body, or even present on thi

s plane of reality, there is no way to contain them or stop them from killing. This brings us back to that fateful day, December 11, 1992. The day that the SCP Foundation would finally be given some tangible information on the mysterious amber eyes, at the cost of one of their researcher’s lives. Wade Dalitz, a young man fresh out of his university studies, was brought onboard as a Junior Researcher by Dr. Mark Forsyth, a Senior Researcher. Dr. Forsyth recruited Wade after giving a guest lecture

at his university and being impressed by Wade’s keen observational skills, thirst for knowledge of the unexplained, and determination to understand that which seemed to defy explanation. After Wade graduated, he was recruited by Dr. Forsyth, and given the position of Junior Researcher at the SCP Foundation. where he assisted Dr. Forsyth, now a site supervisor, in his research. After several months of working under Dr. Forsyth with minimal responsibilities, Wade was finally given the opportunity

to write his first SCP report... on SCP-4205. Following some initial documented appearances of 4205, Dr. Forsyth approved further research into the anomaly, with Wade appointed as the lead researcher on the subject. According to Wade’s entry, he was responsible for the discovery of SCP-4205 when he spotted the anomaly in a window. Though later reviews of security footage determined that he was not the first person to observe the eyes, he did claim to be the first to observe them and live to tel

l the tale. In his writing on the subject, Wade is puzzled by the fact that he survived his encounter with SCP-4205, and wonders what could have set him apart from the others that fell victim to its gaze. He found himself frustrated as he documented SCP-4205, his rough drafts of reports dissolving into angry rants about his own incompetence. Wade had difficulty adjusting to his new responsibilities, especially with the added element of his assigned subject’s mysterious and volatile nature. In be

tween his reports on SCP-4205, its previous appearances, and its effects on its victims, he wrote letters to his father, desperate for reassurance that he was not messing everything up. Letters that would sadly go unsent. In his coverage of SCP-4205, Wade made note of a troubling recurring element in each victim’s death. When medical professionals attempted to revive the victims, it was always noted that their brain activity stopped much more quickly than in cases of death by natural causes. Whe

n examined, all aspects of the body aside from the brain were completely unharmed. The brain, however, showed massive nerve damage in the amygdala, hippocampus, medial temporal lobe, and occipital lobe. The appearance of this brain trauma has been compared to the effects of electrical shock or a severe head injury. In addition to Wade, six other people on record encountered SCP-4205. Every encounter ended the same way, with sudden brain death and severe nerve damage immediately after viewing the

eyes in a reflective surface. The first encounter occurred on January 5, 1990, when Deputy Liaison Gena viewed the eyes in a reflective glass one-way window. Security tape reveals that the eyes appeared in the window eight minutes before the Deputy Liaison spotted them. As soon as he did, he fell from his chair and immediately died. Though the specifics varied from case to case, the end result of every encounter was the same, with none surviving long enough to relate what they experienced. Ever

y encounter except Wade’s. As he continued his documentation of SCP-4205, Wade’s mental state quickly began to deteriorate. The process of his mind coming apart, and his thoughts giving way to confusion, fear, and anger at his own survival, is documented in his reports on the SCP. He agonized over the question of why he was able to survive gazing into the eyes of SCP-4205 when so many others had not? The question consumed him until he was unable to eat, sleep, or do anything but obsess over the

SCP he was tasked with researching. As he became more agitated, he began to write about the eyes appearing to him again. On one occurrence, he attempted to touch them, and described the sensation like touching a balloon to your arm after it has been charged with static electricity. He continued to report seeing the eyes. The worst was when trying to sleep, during which he was overtaken by violent sleep paralysis and plagued with visions of the amber eyes. The only comfort Wade seemed to find was

in memories of his loved ones. He wrote about his mother and his father, even as their memories grew foggier to him. He also mentioned a man by the name of Theodore Quale, who he claimed was a researcher at the Foundation. Later fact checking determined that this was not the case, and that Quale must have been someone from Wade’s past. He wrote about Quale wistfully, mournfully, with words of love and loss, tormented by the sense that he was losing his grip on reality and everything he once hel

d dear. As Wade descended deeper into a hell inside his own mind, he continued to mull over the questions of SCP-4205. Was there more to it than what was visible? Did it have a body? Why had he survived his encounter with it? And what did it want from him? He decided that those who had perished immediately were the lucky ones. They had escaped the torture that had overtaken his life. The eyes were everywhere now, watching him even as he attempted to unlock their secrets on a Foundation computer.

He spoke to the eyes at one point, but refused to write down what they had said to him. His last entry, his last thought, was a plea for Theodore Quale’s embrace. There is no more written about the research, or about the eyes, only a simple, desperate need for a comfort that is long lost. Now is the part of our story where terror meets tragedy. Contrary to what Wade thought, and what was recorded in his final computer entries, he did not survive his brief brush with SCP-4205. The truth is that

he spotted the amber eyes in the glass above his terminal monitor while recording the entry, and died seconds later. Though his death was swift, it felt agonizingly slow, as revealed by his descent into panic and paranoia recorded in his writings. The entries recorded as a result of the connection Wade and the computer, his physical contact with it at the moment of exposure to SCP-4205’s anomalous effects allowing the terminal to archive his final thoughts before he succumbed to the deadly natur

e of the eyes. The entries were never physically typed, but rather jumped from his dying mind into the mainframe. His entries, the echoes of a dying mind, offer a glimpse into the way that SCP-4205 kills its victims. In the seconds leading up to death, the amber eyes fast-forward a person’s mind, feeding on the electrical impulses that it gives off as it speeds through what seem to be days of fear and of a loosening grip on reality. The death may be swift, but the suffering is long. Wade left th

e foundation with a digital fingerprint, an echo of the person he was at his core in addition to his experiences with SCP-4205 itself. Wade spent his final moments terrified for his life, dreaming of a father that he missed and a long-lost love from his college days. His sacrifice must not be forgotten. Because no one ever survives an encounter with SCP-4205, his documented final moments are the only first-hand account in existence. Junior Researcher Wade Dalitz gave us a gift in death. He allow

ed the SCP Foundation a glimpse into the true horror of the amber eyes, and a reminder of what they are capable of stealing from us. So be careful of windows, mirrors, screens, and all reflective surfaces. When you look into them, you never know what you might see looking back. It goes without saying that the SCP Foundation archives are filled with some terrifying monsters. Even the deadliest creatures can, in theory, be defeated, or at least soundly avoided. After all, they’re just flesh and bl

ood - or in some cases, metal or concrete. But what if reality as you know it one day just…broke. Or worse, you were transported to a reality so frightening and alien to our own that death seemed like the only escape – but you couldn’t even give yourself that. This brings us to today’s topic – the terrifying alternate reality of SCP – 3001. The Foundation is no stranger to freaky alternate dimensions, but what was experienced by joint-lead researcher Dr. Robert Scranton at Site 120 is a truly un

ique nightmare. Co-managed by his wife, Dr. Anna Lang, Site 120 is a facility largely designed for research into SCPs with dangerous reality-warping capabilities in order to mitigate future containment breaches. Reality warpers are among some of the more perplexing and dangerous SCPs, from the pocket dimension-creating SCP – 106 to the SCP-creating Doctor Wondertainment, and everything in between. Scranton and Lang’s goal to further study such entities was an admirable one, if a little over-ambi

tious, and on January 2nd, 2000, during the testing of a new technology created by the Foundation’s leading power couple, disaster finally struck. Scranton and Lang had already been the brains behind one of the Foundation’s most valuable tools in the fight against reality-bending SCPs: The Scranton Reality Anchors. Their follow up, the Lang-Scranton Stabilizer – or LSS – likely would have been an even more advanced variant of their earlier invention and should have been a huge success for the te

am. But things didn’t turn out that way… Dr. Scranton and several other researchers were gathered in Reality Lab A performing routine tests on the LSS prototypes. While other technicians ran diagnostics tests, Scranton stood at the control panel, the blinking red light above the console confirming that everything was going according to plan. But as anyone who’s fallen victim to one of the Foundation’s many anomalies will tell you, just because you’ve done everything correctly doesn’t mean you’re

safe. Scranton began operating the machine, not knowing that something was rumbling up towards him from below. Without warning, a sudden, unexpected burst of seismic activity rocked the entire base. Researchers grabbed onto whatever was closest as the world shook around them. In his panic, Dr. Scranton clung to the LSS control panel as the seismic blast fried the circuits and kicked it into overdrive. There was a blast of magnificent, blinding light, and when the rumbling stopped not only was t

he doctor gone, he had been erased from reality as we know it. The earthquake had caused a deadly malfunction in the machine meant to stabilize reality, and instead tore a rift in it, dragging the unfortunate doctor and the control panel into oblivion. His wife, Dr. Lang, and the many researchers who idolized him were devastated by his unexpected demise at the hand of what should have been his crowning achievement. The one silver lining was that this reality-ripping event had almost definitely e

liminated the doctor quickly and painlessly. As far as The Foundation and his loved ones were concerned, Scranton’s death had been immediate and complete – a luxury afforded to few Foundation employees who die anomalous deaths. But sadly that isn’t how Dr. Scranton’s story – or the story of SCP – 3001 – ends. No, this is where it all begins. How do we know all this? In the hellish new place where Scranton had been transported, the control panel from the LSS that he’d been clinging to for dear li

fe had been transported with him, and continued to record audio data from this anomalous location. Not that Dr. Scranton realized it, not at first, anyway. As far as he knew, he’d suddenly been transported into a pitch-black location. No sights, no sounds, no scents. True nothingness. At first, the doctor was confused. One second, he was testing out his new technology, and the next he was quite literally nowhere. In spite of his current situation, the doctor was still an intelligent and rational

man. He took a moment to compose himself, hoping that in time his eyes would adjust to the new darkness around him. But that moment never came: The darkness remained perfectly absolute. Much like the darkness in another reality-defying SCP, the deadly endless staircase known as SCP – 087, the dark seemed thick, almost like you could touch it. The doctor, not wanting to give himself to despair and die in this impossible place, and with no other options seemingly available, began walking. Either

he’d find his way out, or the Foundation would find him. No need to panic. It may have altered the doctor’s temperament if he knew that the Foundation already assumed he was dead, and that no search party was going to come looking for him. Still, logic dictates that if a person walks for long enough, they’re bound to find something. The problem Scranton was about to face was that SCP – 3001 doesn’t run by any kind of conventional logic. He walked and walked and walked, but he didn’t seem to get

any nearer to or farther from anything but how could even know? After all, in total darkness, there aren’t any landmarks to assist in navigation. The doctor walked and paced and screamed for days on end, but he made no progress. He was alone in an empty world. He had no choice though, so he kept walking, and walking, and walking. For eleven days. During that time, he felt his hunger and thirst grow. He was in terrible pain from a mix of starvation and dehydration, but the release of death didn’t

seem to come for him. He was going to have to learn the rules of this new place the hard way, and it grimly dawned on Dr. Scranton that dying in this place might not even be the worst possible outcome. He paced and repeated facts to himself, hoping to ground himself in the moment and avoid the panic that could so easily set in. “Name, Robert Scranton. Age, 39. Birthday, September 19, 1961. Favorite color, blue. Favorite song, "Living on a Prayer." Wife… Anna…” Little by little, the words seemed

to turn to nonsense in his mouth as the terror grew. Just as he felt like he was about to lose his mind, he noticed something - a small oasis in the endless darkness of SCP – 3001: The glowing red light of the LSS control panel. Where had it come from? And how was it still recording? The doctor had no idea, but he was grateful for any kind of familiarity in the strange darkness around him. Perhaps the LSS could be the key to saving him, or at least figuring out what on earth was going on here?

Whatever the case, there was no denying that having the panel here was better than nothing. At least, when it was found… if it was ever found, then people would know what had happened to him. As the days passed and he continued to mysteriously survive, Dr Scranton deduced that one didn’t need food or water to survive continually in SCP – 3001. The location had an anomalous effect on its inhabitants. As the days passed and turned to weeks of wandering in the darkness, Dr. Scranton further deduced

that he was no longer in his home dimension – this was an entirely separate pocket dimension, much like the one possessed by SCP – 106, but featureless. A perfect, self-contained void. Now dimly illuminated by the red light of the panel, Dr. Scranton explored further into the void around him. He travelled for months on end, the pain of his deficiencies growing by the day, but found he was getting nowhere. All things considered, he wasn’t even sure he was moving, or whether reality and the darkn

ess was swirling around him like a thick liquid. Rather than walking on a single flat surface, he was moving in all directions across a three-dimensional plane. The space-time continuum appeared to be entirely broken here, where movement is more defined by the conscious intention to move than any real geographical repositioning. Dr. Scranton knew that this place broke every single one of Kejel's Laws of Reality Parameters, and from his years working with a plethora of reality warpers in Site 120

, he had a theory for why this pocket dimension was so strange: It had an extraordinarily weak Hume field. Before we get back to Dr. Scranton’s semi-living nightmare, we need a quick primer on Hume theory, and why having a weak Hume field is such a problem. A Hume is a unit of measurement for the strength and amount of reality in a given location or being. In an area with an incredibly low Hume field relative to our world, such as SCP – 3001, universe breaches and anomalous incidences rise signi

ficantly. At the time of his being trapped there, SCP – 3001 had the lowest number of Humes in any recorded environment, making it a phenomenally anomalous zone. It was for this reason that starvation and dehydration never took hold of him despite causing him great pain, and the worst by far was yet to come. Dr. Scranton wasn’t trapped in this dimension for weeks or even months. He was trapped in the darkness for years. And it took a nightmarish toll on his body and mind. The small flashing red

light on his LSS control panel became his only friend and as the years drew on, he would hold entire conversations with his only source of illumination. He knew that his days were numbered – if he didn’t escape dimension within around three years, the Hume field would diffuse further, and he would be left in a truly horrific state. But based on how little headway he’d made in the time he’d been there, he didn’t feel optimistic. He kept speaking into the recorder, if only to break the silence and

prevent him from going completely insane. But even that would only hold it off for so long. Alone and talking to himself endlessly in the darkness, Dr. Scranton could feel his mind slipping as the confines of the pocket dimension constricted and his body began to change. The low Hume field slowly diffused his physical matter, destroying the physical integrity of his body but never being merciful enough to actually let him die. In his haunting audio logs, the doctor described his hands as diffus

ing and thinning out like spider webs. Over time, there was less and less of him, and what was left wasn’t entirely human. As Scranton’s Hume level lowered to equalize with that of SCP – 3001, the lines between his body and the LSS control console began to blur in a twisted marriage of warped flesh and machine. The Lang-Scranton Stabilizer was anything but stable. Before his mind and body became something else entirely, the doctor still had the presence of mind to finally realize how he’d come t

o be in this terrible place. The LSS had opened a wormhole known as a Class-C “Broken Entry” into a paradoxical pocket dimension between layers of reality, and taken him through it. He’d slipped through a crack in reality into absolute darkness, and now he was stuck with a fate far worse than death. How do we know any of this? Much like the event in the first place, it’s a total accident. Testing superior reality-bending technology almost six years after the disappearance caused the sudden retur

n of the missing LSS to Site 120’s Reality Labs. The only trace of Dr. Scranton that it brought back with it was the blood and viscera that coated the console, much to the abject horror of his still grieving wife, Dr. Anna Lang. To this day, Dr. Scranton, formerly one of the Foundation’s brightest minds, remains trapped in the nightmare of SCP – 3001. His current condition whether the doctor is still alive after twenty years of being warped by the low Hume field of 3001’s darkened confines is st

ill unknown. But, for the doctor’s own sake, we hope he’s been dead for quite some time, because few things on earth are as horrifying as the alternative… It’s 3:00 AM, and the facility is quiet. Office workers and administrators roam the halls. Security Officers stand at their posts, clad in advanced tactical armour and carrying standard-issue M4 Carbines. Three Foundation employees sit at flickering monitors, watching a live feed of footage from the containment cell of the infamous SCP-106, or

as it’s referred to by staff, The Old Man. No Foundation personnel are permitted to travel within sixty feet of the cell for security reasons, and nobody is permitted to physically interact with the anomaly without the approval of two-thirds of O5-Command. The observer’s eyes itch and sting from the hours of unending blue-light exposure, but they can’t look away. The Old Man is crafty – he may have the insatiable bloodlust of a hungry great white shark, but he’s not mindless. He’s a calculating

predator, more sadistic than the worst human serial killer, and he’s always searching for the next opportunity. According to Foundation records, he’s been active since at least World War II, and it is estimated that he has hundreds if not thousands of victims to his name. And many of those made the simple, but extremely foolish mistake of underestimating him. After all, it only takes a few seconds of inattentiveness, the briefest moment of distraction, to give him the window he needs. To do wha

t, you ask? Oh, don’t worry, you’ll find out – just like they did. The Old Man has his nickname for a reason – most of the time, he really does look like exactly that - an old man. Or more specifically, an Old Man’s decaying corpse, his body covered in rotten, dark greyish-black flesh that looks like putrid meat. Though the creature has been observed being able to change shape, the rot seems to run too deep for the Old Man to ever hide it. Foundation employees that have observed SCP-106 for exte

nded periods of time have reported seeing it assume the form of grinning, decayed children, and women whose rotted flesh barely hangs on to their creaking bones. Just seeing the images through a video feed is enough to cause a lifetime of insomnia and other sleeping issues. Still, they have a job to do, and the cameras remain fixed on the Old Man. He’s been completely motionless for three months, just sitting there, like a Buddhist monk in deep meditation. A novice might see this period of inact

ivity as a cause for celebration, but those with experience know that this is merely the calm before the storm. SCP–106 can remain in a dormant state for months at a time. Described by Foundation scientists as a “lulling state,” it is believed that The Old Man is simply waiting for its captors to get soft, make a mistake, or simply have a momentary lapse in concentration, which is all it needs to make its move. It had happened so many times before, and it was about to happen again. One of the ob

servers must have felt an overwhelming wave of anxiety when he saw the creature ever so slightly twitch. Just a tiny quiver in the shoulder muscles. But that was enough to tell the observer that their day had just taken a terrifying turn. He grabbed the emergency phone fixed to his desk and practically screamed into the receiver that 106 is moving, that they needed a tactical team stat. But it was already too late. He and the two other observers stared into the monitors with their mouths agape,

as a gooey, rust-like substance began to pool around the creature on the floor of its cell. Slowly, the creature craned its withered neck around. Its face was fixed into a broad, yellow-toothed, lipless grin. Its eyes had the kind of dull, flat malice of an underwater predator. It looked directly into the camera. Directly at them. And smiled. The observers know this was bad. Really, really bad. With what they could have sworn was a little nod, the Old Man began sinking into the rusty puddle it’d

made on the ground beneath it, until it had disappeared entirely. SCP–106 is capable of phasing through any solid surface with ease, making it one of the hardest entities to reliably contain, and earning it a spot on the dreaded “Keter” class – reserved for the anomalies that are a complete nightmare to keep locked up. Through years of costly research and deadly trial and error, the Foundation would later devise ways of at least slowing the creature down. It’s shown to have an aversion to lead,

highly complex or random physical structures, and intense bright light. None of these cause harm to the creature – as far as we know, literally nothing can – but they’ll at least buy you some precious extra seconds with which to at least try and escape, seconds the three observers didn’t have. One of them grabbed the emergency line again and barked into it that they had lost visual on the anomaly. Just then the observers heard a faint crackling sound behind them, and the hissing of a chemical b

urn. They turned in horror to see a huge, rusty burnmark expanding across the wall, right next to the door – which was their only escape route. They backed as far away from the door as they could as a rotten hand began reaching out of the mass of corrosive, black sludge, followed by the grinning face of SCP–106, ready to have some fun. Meanwhile, two heavily-armed Security Officers – Agents Goodwin and Resnick – came charging down the corridor towards the observation rooms. It’d become a bleak s

logan during SCP–106 escape attempts that all you need to do is “follow the screams.” And that motto was proven true that night, because awful things were happening to the observation personnel, they were certainly screaming about it. Of course, even with top-of-the-line firearms, there was little they could do to harm the rampaging Old Man. He seemed immune to all forms of physical damage. All they could hope to do was keep the thing distracted until the scientists and containment specialists f

inished the preparations to lure him back into his containment cell. Goodwin surged forward while Resnick covered his six. Vigilance was key, as – unlike a standard human combatant – SCP–106 could attack from literally any angle including above or below. Physical obstacles were irrelevant to him and no cover was safe. The hardened security officers could see the burnmark on the wall of the observation room as they approached. SCP–106 was perpetually coated in a thick, black mucus with powerful c

orrosive properties that left any surfaces it touched permanently marred. Foundation Scientists speculated that this mucus served as a kind of pre-digestive substance that tenderizes meat and bone alike, but to what purpose this serves is a mystery as the Old Man has never been observed eating. It’s postulated that the only purpose is causing additional pain. Goodwin and Resnick knew to treat this hissing sludge as a potential threat, as the corrosive properties would remain active for as much a

s six hours before finally fizzling out. The two officers shared a quiet nod, before Goodwin breached the observation room door with a hard kick. The two of them surged inside, guns at the ready. In their time working at the Foundation, they’d seen some truly horrific sights. From the mutilation of D-Class Personnel – typically death row prison inmates brought in for use as SCP guinea pigs – to the violence and mayhem of a containment breach. But there was nothing in their past that would ever m

ake the horrifying sight they saw in the observation room that night feel “normal.” All three observers were dead. Almost nothing remained of two of them, and the third, while still intact, no longer looked human. He looked like he’d somehow been dead a hundred years in the brief period that the Old Man had been free. His skin was grey and completely dried out, and his mouth was locked into a perpetual scream. It was a massacre, but there was no sign of the Old Man. Goodwin grabbed his radio, an

d whispered “This is Goodwin in observation room six. Requesting immediate back up. We have no idea where this thing—” But his sentence was cut off by a sudden scream from Agent Resnick. SCP Foundation security officers are as tough as nails – the best of the best, you might say, recruited from the top military organizations in the world – so hearing one of them scream in fright is a rare if not impossible occurrence. But even they were forced to yell out in fear when they looked up to see the O

ld Man standing on the ceiling, grinning down at them. Resnick raised his M4 and shot a three-round burst at center mass. SCP–106 didn’t care. Even under sustained gunfire from the two security officers, it didn’t even flinch. The Old Man simply reached down and snatched Agent Resnick from the ground, like it was picking an apple from a tree. The Old Man held Resnick in one hand and pounded its other rotten fist into the Agent’s body, breaking all of his bones. Resnick screamed for his partner t

o help him but there was no time. Before Goodwin could do anything, SCP–106 began receding back into another slimy burnmark on the wall. Only this time, he was taking his screaming victim with him. Agent Resnick gave one more horrified scream before he was pulled backwards into the inky darkness leaving the room silent except for the burning hiss of the corrosive goo left behind. You might think this would be the end of it, but no. For poor Agent Resnick, the worst was yet to come. He was being

dragged into what SCP Foundation scientists refer to as the Old Man’s “Pocket Dimension”, a miniature layer of reality within our own where the malicious SCP is essentially a cruel, all-powerful God. According to witness reports extracted from victims who were taken to this little nightmare realm, the dimension resembles a series of twisting, endless corridors where the Old Man stalks and tortures his captured victims to the breaking point, manipulating space and time to its own sadistic ends. O

n rare occasions, the SCP will even release its victims, just for the joy of hunting, capturing, and torturing them all over again. While Agent Resnick was learning the true meaning of terror, containment specialists were mobilizing in its cell, preparing the one known tried-and-true method of luring the Old Man back: Tempting it with the prospect of causing even more suffering. In order to do this, Foundation personnel take one of the aforementioned Class D personnel and begin inducing extreme

pain by breaking a major bone or slicing a tendon every twenty minutes. The victim’s agonized screams are then played over the facility’s intercom, acting as bait for the pain-loving Old Man. The screams echo through the facility’s otherwise silent halls, as the mutilated corpse of Agent Resnick falls from a new scorch mark on the ceiling. The Old Man can hear the sounds of suffering ringing out through the air around him, and he can barely contain his excitement over the prospect of a new playt

hing. The snapped femurs, the torn Achilles tendons, it was all too good to miss. Having had its twisted fun with the security officers and observers, SCP-106 wandered back to its containment cell, where a new screaming victim awaited. The other security officers, containment specialists, and scientists evacuated the area, leaving the Old Man alone with his prey. While the unfortunate Class D was left to his fate, the rest of the staff commenced clean up procedures, which mainly involved wiping

the brown and black mucus from the walls. It would probably be at least another month before anything like this happened again, and new personnel would be transferred over to the facility to replace the fallen. All in all, just another night at The SCP Foundation. The year is 1941, and the world is gripped by the most violent and widespread war in history. Millions march to war as bloody battles are fought across the globe, horrendous atrocities are carried out on groups of people, and parts of

London are bombed to rubble on a weekly basis. Considering it’s only been twenty years since the last world war, it must seem to the residents of the early 20th century that the world is coming apart at the seams. And amongst all this chaos, it’d be easy not to notice a secluded manor house in the English countryside disappearing without a trace for eleven days, before suddenly returning to our reality. But thankfully, one organization makes it its sole duty to notice the unnoticeable and unders

tand the impossible - The SCP Foundation. And within that anomalous manor house, Foundation agents and researchers were about to find horrors beyond even their darkest imaginations. This is the grim tale of SCP - 1461, better known as… The House of the Worm. When the manor house reappeared after its eleven day absence, the Foundation zeroed in, sending agents inside to investigate. It was a two-level dwelling complete with twelve bedrooms, four baths, three studies, a main foyer slash ballroom,

a library, a kitchen, and a pantry-basement. The Foundation observed that a number of these rooms had been fitted with rows of bunk beds, similar to a boarding house or barracks. Only later would they understand why. They found that the upper portion of the home exhibited no abnormal qualities whatsoever, but as the agents investigated further, they found an entrance to the truly anomalous portion of the manor - The extensive sub-level system. No previous records of the building kept by the loca

l council indicated that there would be anything below the manor’s basement - so either the mysterious previous occupants, who were nowhere to be found, had built this sub-level, or it’d just appeared here on its own. Regardless of which was the case, agents and researchers knew that whatever had happened down here had everything to do with the manor’s mysterious disappearance. They descended into the depths of what seemed like a man-made cave system, constructed primarily from a mix of concrete

, iron, and brass. It was a behemoth of 20th century technology - intricate, snaking systems of pipes, gears, and pumping pistons. It was like someone had built an entire factory down here - but for what? The agents began to spread out through the labyrinthine bowels of the manor, hoping to find some answers, but all they seemed to discover was more questions. This place hadn’t been built with any form of comprehensible logic. It was full of dead ends, stairways that ascended and descended to no

where, doors that would open to reveal just walls behind them or not open at all. It was like a maze built by a maniac. It didn’t help that it looked like the place was recently hit by an earthquake with some passages caved in and mangled machinery strewn about. It seemed that no human workers had interfered with the impossibly complex and bizarre machinery in quite some time. A number of the materials used to construct said machinery, as well as the gray sandstone filling in the collapsed passa

geways, remain unidentified to this day. Already, the sub-level was proving to be a complex puzzle box with only an estimated 75% of its layout ultimately being mapped by Foundation researchers. However, they would soon realize that this place wasn’t just confusing - it was deadly. The only method of self-maintenance detected by the exploring agents were pipes that would fire a thick, black lubricant onto the surrounding machinery. One of the Foundation agents had the misfortune of getting cover

ed in it while exploring a darkened passageway, and eighty percent of his body was melted as a result. It appeared that the viscous, black goo was incredibly corrosive to all organic matter. A number of the machines also emitted dangerously high quantities of gamma and X-ray radiation, making it difficult to explore many of the caverns without heavy hazmat protection. And worst of all, were the extremely hostile creatures living in the caves who would regularly attack Foundation personnel. These

abominations came to be known as SCP - 1461 - 1, vicious, steampunk Frankenstein monsters - once human, but with large parts of their bodies replaced by crude, mechanical implants - including metal teeth and claws. 1461-1’s have displayed a taste for human flesh, and they have dragged multiple Foundation agents down into their lair to be “converted” into monsters like them. It’s believed that SCP-1461 is capable of controlling these beasts through the strategic use of sound from its brass speak

ing pipes, leading them into areas where Foundation personnel are present to instigate conflict. Many of these pitiful creatures have had their throats replaced by phonographs, endlessly repeating the same nonsense phrases over and over again: “I am what you have made me. I am choice and I am tyranny. Forgive me. I am then and I am now. What gods they will be, then. I am evil and I am flesh. I am the trap. I am the trapped. I am beauty and I am chaos. Children are selfish. I am the worm. I have

broken God.” Still, in spite of mazes, monsters, and deadly chemicals, the agents persisted, and managed to discover several important locations. The Gel Production chamber on Sub-Level 3 creates glass jars from the unidentified sandstone, and fills them with a slime that looks to contain living eyes and teeth. The Factory Deliveries room is filled with a huge number of crates and boxes, which seem to shift and change in number between Foundation patrols. The Speaking Tube Room on Sub-Level Elev

en contains a grand pulpit that acts as the connecting point for the complex array of speaking tubes running through the entire cave system. The body parts of a deceased female also appear to be wired into the machinery, like spare parts. And on Sub-Level Twelve, they found the so-called Catalyst Room. Here, they discovered a huge, complicated, clockwork and steam-powered machine that appeared to be broken and missing some parts. Most horrifying of all though, is the raised platform in the cente

r of the Catalyst Room on top of which is a metal hospital bed. A desiccated male corpse rests upon this bed, its chest punctured by large syringes connected by tubes to some kind of pumping machine. The parts connecting this pumping machine to the overall apparatus of the room were missing though, leaving its purpose a mystery. The Foundation assumed that fluids used to be drawn out of this corpse to somehow power the machine. You may be starting to worry that there don’t seem to be any answers

here, that this house is one big mystery - but lucky for you, you’re wrong. An old journal was also discovered in the Catalyst Room, and if what is written inside is to be believed, then we may finally have some truth about who created the House of the Worm, why it was created, and what horrible events triggered its mysterious disappearance and reappearance. His true name has been redacted by the Foundation and special efforts have been made to maintain secrecy around the House, seeing as it’s

an anomaly of great interest to a cult known as the Church of the Broken God, so we’ll just call the one who made this place “The Inventor.” Before any of this, the Inventor was one of the many Englishmen traumatized and almost killed in the horrific trench battles of World War One. After a near death experience, the Inventor, like many geniuses and madmen, was plagued by surreal and nightmarish visions. He saw a huge creature that he referred to as “The Worm” - a gigantic, metal monstrosity wit

h dragon-like jaws full of gnashing gears that rampaged through Europe, destroying and devouring everything in its path. These apocalyptic visions also presented him with a solution, vague blueprints for a machine that might be the salvation of him and any others willing to take his new gospel to heart. An escape from a world that the Inventor knew in his heart was about to end. He hired work-starved labourers from across the country to help him make his visions a reality and began a massive, se

cret construction project beneath his isolated country manor house. For The Inventor, it was all a labour of love. He wanted to protect his wife, son, and daughter from the terrible jaws of the Worm. But as the project stretched on, his wife began to suspect that he’d lost his mind. Many of his workers, however, felt just the opposite. They became infatuated by the Inventor’s sermons on the nature of the Worm and the coming apocalypse they hoped to escape. Soon enough, they had become a bonafide

cult, constructing the elaborate sublevels underneath the house in preparation for the fast approaching day of reckoning. Then came World War Two. The Inventor saw Hitler, hungry for war, as one of the avatars of the Worm. Finally, knowing the time was right, he activated the machine, and successfully trapped the Worm in the bowels of his mechanized home. However, as the Blitz raged and London’s bombing began, the Inventor felt as though he hadn’t stopped anything. He realized once and for all

that he was never meant to stop the apocalypse, only escape it. And by throwing the final switch and setting the machine he and his followers had built into overdrive, he did just that. This was the moment the House of the Worm disappeared, transporting the Inventor, his family, and his devoted staff to a different world. An empty grey world, devoid of war, but also lacking all the comforts of regular life, including food. Things went downhill from there, as their supplies quickly began to run o

ut, and the cult descended into cannibalism in order to survive. Things weren’t going much better in the Inventor’s personal life. His wife, fearing what would happen to the family, took her own life and the life of his daughter. Though by this point, the Inventor’s mind was so fractured that it’s possible he may have killed them himself. Either way, it was only the Inventor and his son left, and more trouble was brewing. Eudora, one of the staff trapped in the building with the Inventor and his

cult, started a mutiny. She claimed the Worm spoke to her from below, and that their only path to salvation was pleasing the Worm. How would they please it? A sacrifice, of course. They would give it the son of the man who had trapped it. The mutineers took the Inventor’s only remaining child, and descended into the lowest sub levels. The Inventor followed, hoping to track them down, save his son, and salvage something from this nightmare. As he ventured deeper, battling the members of Eudora’s

new cult, he found that they were changing themselves, becoming the half-human cyborg creatures that the Foundation would later discover. The Inventor would find Eudora herself in the Speaking Tube Room. Her body, still living, was wired into the machinery, and she had sacrificed his son to the Worm. In a rage, the Inventor murdered Eudora, or whatever was left of her, then heard a familiar voice speaking out of a nearby speaking tube. It said: “I am what you have made me. I am then and I am no

w. I am choice and I am tyranny. I am evil and I am flesh. I am beauty and I am chaos. I am the worm." The voice was his own. In that terrible moment, the Inventor realised that the Worm wasn’t a giant, all-devouring monster, it was him. In trying to protect his loved ones from a perceived apocalypse, he’d brought them all to their horrible demise. He’d trapped them with the monster he’d hoped for them all to escape from, because no matter what you build, you can’t escape who you are. Grief stri

cken and broken, the Inventor descended into the Catalyst Room. There was his son, stuck with the syringes, drained of all life to fuel the mighty machine his father created. In his last moments, the Inventor decided to do the only noble thing: He threw himself into the machine, destroying both it and himself in the process. The house was transported back to our reality, but the Worm, in a sense, was no more. But who knows if the Worm is really dead. Its thoughts and poisonous intent still linge

rs in the caverns, and rattles through the speaking pipes. Whatever really happened, the Foundation is still picking up the pieces today - and who knows what lurks in the parts still hidden from our knowledge. It all started in 1983 with reports of human trafficking in the heart of Sin City. The FBI had gotten word of a potential trafficking ring operating out of an abandoned department store in Las Vegas, Nevada, and immediately began organizing a secret raid on the building. While they would i

ndeed encounter something horrifying within that abandoned department store, it wasn’t criminals or human trafficking. In fact, it wasn’t human at all. This is the horrifying story of SCP - 847. After weeks of planning, the raid on the department store was conducted in the dead of night. Agents covered all the exits and entrances and a helicopter was stationed nearby in case anyone attempted to run. It should have been a perfect trap. But things never go as planned when you don’t know what you’r

e dealing with. The agents breached the door, and began searching the darkened building. It didn’t appear that there was any power, so the traffickers must have had great night vision and a high tolerance for creepy locales. Agents soon heard a faint humming sound coming from below - a generator. It must be located in the basement and be the hub of this criminal enterprise. Readying themselves for whatever they were about to find, the agents descended into the basement. As they moved deeper into

the building, they found that lighting rigs had been set up - they must be getting closer to something, but that “something” was still a mystery. A senior FBI Special Agent was leading the charge, his pistol drawn and ready. It was quiet. Too quiet. Did the traffickers already realize they were coming and clear out? He was ready to consider this bust a bust when he heard a quiet mewling in the distance. A persistent, whining whimper that was undeniably human. He gave the signal to his fellow ag

ents to follow the noise. They proceeded forward towards the pained sounds and found themselves in a wide, well-lit room filled with department store mannequins. All were broken to some degree - some were totally smashed to pieces, some were chained to walls and locked in cages, others were wrapped in plastic. The agent wondered whether this was some kind of twisted joke, or a messed up avant garde art piece. That’s when he noticed Her: A single, crouched figure in the distance, hunched over and

whimpering in a darkened corner of the room near a full-length mirror. He couldn’t fully make her out, but he got the sense that something was wrong - she was injured, bent over. Was she even missing an arm? Just what had these monsters done to this woman? He whispered a request for back up into his radio, and pushed on. When they got within 50 meters of the strange woman, her demeanor changed entirely. She jerked around - her movements forced, erratic, and painful-looking. The woman stared dir

ectly into the agent’s eyes and began hobbling towards him., occasionally stopping to strike a pose as if modelling during a photo shoot. Just then the agent made a horrifying realization - this thing moving towards them wasn’t a woman at all, it was a living mannequin. As she got closer though, he also realized that the mannequin’s broken left forearm had been carved into a large shiv. A female junior FBI agent had been one of the many to pour into the room when the raid leader had radioed for

backup. The second she entered the fifty meter range of this strange mannequin, everything changed. In an instant, its eyes and mouth began dripping with a thick, viscous resin. Its whimpering gasps suddenly became vicious, earsplitting screeches, and it turned its gaze from the senior FBI agent. It was now focused on the junior agent who had just entered the room and broke into a terrifying run straight towards her. The mannequin moved with a violent, single-minded purpose. Other agents began f

iring but it was running freakishly fast and easily dodged most of the bullets. The few that actually hit seemed to do nothing to slow the creature down. It shrugged off the damage and kept running. With a great leap, it landed on the terrified junior agent, and began jabbing at her with its bladed arm. The other agents stopped firing, fearing they might accidentally hit their colleague during the panic. The mannequin was ruthless, clawing and stabbing, with the strange resin leaking out of its

every orifice. Terrified and unable to reach her gun, the agent remembered her training - she reached into her belt and grabbed her stun gun, jamming the two probes up against the creature’s chest and giving it 30,000 volts. The creature spasmed, fell backwards, and collapsed in a heap on the ground - frozen. This was the first recorded encounter with SCP - 847 - a violent living mannequin with a serious problem with women. This terrifying report was passed up the chain of command until it lande

d on the desk of a Foundation Agent working in the FBI. The Foundation quickly swooped in and claimed the mannequin, delivered necessary amnestic treatment to all who’d witnessed it, and closely observed the female junior FBI agent’s recovery in a private hospital with Foundation ties. As it turns out, they were right to do so, as the junior agent was in for a gruesome fate. While the wounds she’d suffered at the hands of SCP - 847 didn’t appear fatal, the fact that the mannequin’s anomalous res

in excretions entered the open wound changed everything. Several hours after being committed, the junior agent began complaining of limb stiffness and difficulty moving. This quickly developed into full paralysis. Over time, her skin and internal organs began to harden, until the process - dubbed plastination - came to a gruesome end. The junior agent wasn’t just dead, she had been transformed into a mannequin. Foundation researchers were met with a truly horrifying realization - This meant that

all the other broken mannequins found with SCP - 847 were likely once living humans, attacked and transformed by the anomaly, now a source for new harvested body parts. Now safely interred at a Foundation containment facility though, the real tests on SCP - 847 to determine its behavior and physical attributes could begin. The most important detail about SCP - 847 is that its aggression is exclusively directed towards women, as opposed to when it encounters men and its instincts are more self-d

estructive. Through a series of tests and observations, researchers have been able to pin down three different distinct patterns of behavior for SCP - 847. Pattern Z behaviors occur when there are no humans standing within fifty meters of SCP - 847. The mannequin will seek out a full length mirror, and pose in front of it, much like a department store mannequin attempting to show off its clothes. It remains largely inanimate during these periods, and will very occasionally use a finger - or what

ever appendage is available, given its habit for self-mutilation - to scratch messages on nearby surfaces. Pattern Y behaviors occur when male humans with XY chromosomes enter a fifty meter radius around SCP - 847. Just like its reaction to the male FBI agents who found it, 847 will initially emit vocalizations that seem like whimpering gasps, before making eye contact and striking provocative poses while approaching the subject. It will then remain static, and allow the male subject to pose its

body. However, after the male subject leaves the area, 847 will enter a state of considerable distress, and begin removing or shattering parts of its body. The Foundation has found that the parts removed or shattered are often consistent with parts that the male subjects found displeasing during interactions, showing a masochistic desire to impress. These parts are then harvested back from plastinated victims. Which brings us to the most dangerous of its behavior patterns. Pattern X behaviors o

ccur when female humans enter a 50 meter radius around the creature. 847 will immediately become brutally aggressive, switching its noises from whimpers to violent screeches and growls. 847 also experiences enhanced physical capabilities during Pattern X states - its speed has been measured at 45 kilometers per hour, making it as fast as the legendary SCP - 096. It’s also been shown to exhibit extreme physical strength. It’s during this pattern of behavior that it begins excreting its deadly res

in, which has been proven to only be dangerous to women. In these states, the only thing capable of reliably pacifying the being is a powerful electric shock. The shock causes the creature’s resin to harden, temporarily incapacitating it for roughly five minutes. Other conventional weapons and damage has no meaningful effect on SCP - 847. After a number of incidents that had sad and violent endings, the Foundation Ethics Committee forbade the use of female D-Class personnel in SCP - 847 testing.

When it came to female subjects, 847 always slipped into a state of extreme aggression, so instead the Foundation began testing with male subjects in hopes of better understanding the dynamics between human males and SCP-847. Various misogynistic D-Class males were introduced into the containment chamber, which was modelled to look like a bedroom for the purposes of behavioral study. Each one, either during or after their interaction with SCP - 847, was told to comment on some aspect they felt

dissatisfied with. The mannequin shattered its own chest after hearing it described as being out of proportion. After another D-Class called its nose ugly, the mannequin broke it off. After another said that its hair was out of fashion and commented on its inability to drink, it tore out its hair and liver. All parts were replaced after the experiments. Things took their most violent and upsetting turn yet with the introduction of D-7294. A lot of the time, D-Class personnel are considered to be

as anonymous as they are expendable. But D-7294 is an exception. Before becoming D-Class, he was a successful cello teacher who brutally murdered one of his teenage students and her mother. He’s typically employed in tests when the Foundation wishes to see interactions between anomalies and humans with confirmed psychopathic personalities. During his interaction with SCP - 847, he belittled and humiliated the mannequin. He forced it into uncomfortable poses, and even snapped off one of its fing

ers before being dragged from the room by Foundation guards. In the following debrief, he further berated the mannequin as “useless” and “lousy” at its job of being controlled by him. In response, 847 extracted its own brains, eyes, and clavicle before shattering its own hands in dismay. So why does SCP - 847 behave this way? While it may appear monstrous, it seems that the reason SCP - 847 does what it does is all too human: It hurts women because it itself is hurting, and it’s willing to hurt

itself even more for the approval of the objects of its desire. As a result, it’s an anomaly trapped in an endless cycle of pain and violence. Perhaps one day it’ll be able to free itself from the loop, but that day is unlikely to come for this murderous mannequin anytime soon. It’s the holiday season. Outside, it’s cold and there's snow blanketing the ground. But inside, you’re warm, and gathered around the light of a roaring fireplace and a glowing Christmas tree. This is what Christmas is all

about – warmth, joy, and togetherness. But just because you’re comfortable doesn’t mean you’re safe. You were so busy opening presents and stuffing yourself at dinner that you didn’t notice the face pressed up against the window. That long, gaunt face, with the staring eyes, the wide mouth full of yellow teeth, and the scraggly, white beard. You don’t know it yet, but within a few days, you’ll be dead. You might be able to avert this horrible fate, if only you knew what exactly you were dealing

with: SCP – 4666, also known as The Yule Man. A Keter-Class Christmas monster so violent, sadistic, and terrifying, he makes Krampus look like jolly Saint Nick. And this year, just like every other, he’s planning on being very, very naughty. The SCP Foundation began cataloguing the Yule Man in 1974 after a string of violent and eerily similar home invasions during the holiday season, but they have reason to believe that this entity has been around for a whole lot longer. Over 2000 years in fact

. Stories that describe what look to be Yule Man massacres date as far back as the First Century BC in Scandinavia, and there have been reports of similar clusters of events happening around the same time every year since. This monster is prolific, and may have one of the highest body counts of any creature under observation by the Foundation. The Yule Man’s trail of destruction became clearer in the eighteenth century, as accounts of the carnage it leaves became more detailed. Later still, auth

orities even managed to find physical evidence like the Yule Man’s fingerprints – which are similar to human fingerprints, but display a distinct double-whorl pattern not seen in human fingerprints. Much about the anomalous nature of the Yule Man is still unknown though, and the Foundation has yet to discover an effective way to contain it. Their only hope is intercepting it before it can get its long, gnarled fingers on its intended prey. Maybe you’re feeling worried, or that you’re being watch

ed. You have a good reason to be afraid, because during his yearly active period – the twelve days between December 21st and January 2nd – he’s always searching for prey. Nowhere is safe, because while it was initially believed that he only appeared to those who lived north of 40 degrees latitude, it’s now believed that much like Santa Claus, the Yule Man operates worldwide. Anyone could be in his sights right now, blissfully unaware of the nightmare coming down the tracks towards them. Thankful

ly, the SCP Foundation, through analysis of these attacks which are known as Weissnacht Events, they’ve been able to find certain patterns. But first, what does the creature known as The Yule Man even look like? Much like SCP – 096, the Yule Man is a long and lanky humanoid standing about two meters tall, who resembles an emaciated human of European descent, and never wears any clothes or other coverings despite the frigid temperatures he operates in. You might be sad if you’re spending Christma

s alone, but it at least guarantees you safety from the Yule Man, as he only appears at the homes of families with a child under the age of eight present. He also seems to favor isolated and rural locations, and Weissnacht Events only occur when there’s a healthy covering of snow on the ground during the event – hence the name which means “White Night” in English. It’s also vital that you recognize the three distinct stages of a Weissnacht Event, too, or you won’t be seeing much of the New Year.

The first stage occurs during the space of a week. Children in the home might start to seem worried or afraid. They might tell you that they see something strange in the distance. The figure of a man they don’t recognize, standing just far enough away that you can’t fully make him out, except that he’s really tall. Of course, you probably won’t see anything, and your instinct will be to tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of. Even when they tell you, through tears, that there’s a man pressin

g his face up against their bedroom window at night. But they are right to be afraid, and you should be, too. Already at this point, your only hope is to try and spread the word as soon as possible: Report the incident to the local police, write about it on Facebook, tweet about it. Whatever it takes. The SCP Foundation has operatives trawling the internet and monitoring police reports constantly during this period, especially for reports of mysterious men in the snow watching homes from a dista

nce. Getting the Foundation’s attention is your best hope of stopping this thing. And if you don’t? Next comes stage two, taking place between nights eight and eleven of the active period. No longer will the Yule Man just be lurking on the periphery. Now he’s getting closer. You’ll start to hear strange noises in your attic or on the roof, noises that sound almost like footsteps. That’s crazy, you think, it’s probably just an animal. But then, the smell starts. An awful, rotten stench that fills

the house, but no matter how hard you look, you can’t find the source. Finally, on the last night of December, you tell yourself that you’ll take this matter to the police. But of course, it’s already too late. The Yule Man is here for the twelfth night. The Weissnacht is finally upon you. At this point, one of two scenarios will happen. In the first, you and your entire family will be tortured and murdered, except the youngest child, who the Yule Man will kidnap. The SCP Foundation keeps files

on a number of notable instances of this kind of Weissnacht, and the details are truly gruesome. Reports of incidents have involved crucifixion, the removal of tongues, burning, dismemberment, post mortem bitemarks, and decapitation. In all instances though, the entire family was killed except the youngest child, who simply disappeared. The Yule Man is a merciless and sadistic beast. You’re now probably wondering: If that’s the first of two Weissnacht possibilities, what’s the second? In the se

cond, if you’re tremendously lucky, you and your family will survive – but that doesn’t mean you won’t face a grisly experience. In this scenario, which occurs during about fifteen percent of Weissnacht Events, you’ll hear footsteps throughout the night, but thankfully, you wake up alive. And when you do so, there are gifts waiting for you. The problem is, all these gifts are made out of human body parts. For example, in 1976 in Canada, one family received the gift of a ball made from a severed

human head wrapped in skin. In Kazakhstan in 1903, a family received a flute made from a hollowed out human femur. And in the Netherlands in 2003, a family received a wooden hairbrush, covered in human teeth ranging from 400 years old to a mere few days. These gruesome gifts are referred to as SCP – 4666 – A, and it was one of these gifts that gave us the best insight yet available into the true nature of the Yule Man. Several gifts were dropped off at a family's residence in Hoonah, Alaska, in

2018, but most notable among them was the horrific SCP-4666-A-0960 – a life-sized doll made from a human body, with its eyes removed and mouth sewn shut. Worst of all though, was that the girl was still alive. The family who received this twisted gift was given amnestics by the Foundation, and the living doll was taken for medical treatment. Before succumbing to her extensive injuries, the girl was able to deliver some insights into what exactly happened to the children who were abducted during

Weissnacht Events. The children taken by the Yule Man are forced into a large sack that seems much bigger on the inside than it appears as he makes his rounds, travelling from house to house, murdering and kidnapping. His victims are taken to a kind of underground grotto and workshop filled with bones, like a twisted Santa’s workshop, where they’re forced to make toys out of the bodies of their fellow victims. During this time, the Yule Man will continue to torture and torment his victims. He’ll

even take some of them away to cook and eat whenever he feels like it. When asked how she was turned into this human doll, the girl told Foundation personnel that her fellow victims were forced to turn her into this by the Yule Man when she became too weak to continue making toys herself. Her chilling last words were, “When you can’t make the toys, you become the toys.” So if strange things happen to you and your family between the 21st of December and the 1st of January, don’t ignore it. After

all, you never know who’s watching. But if it is the Yule Man’s grinning face pressed up against your window, it may already be too late. Happy Holidays… In a remote part of Russia, a mysterious disease outbreak was tearing through a tiny farming village with terrifying side effects. There was no cure, no clue to where it came from, and worst of all, the disease’s terrifying impact didn’t end with death. No, it was after those carrying the disease died, that the real horror started. After an ag

onizing fever that leaves the victims writhing in pain, they quickly succumb to the disease, only to rise from their graves to wreak havoc on the living. The virus continues to spread, until the corpses outnumber those trying to hide from them, as the world spirals into almost certain ruin. It sounds like the plot of a zombie movie, but for the SCP Foundation this is anything but fiction, and the terror that unfolded in that little Siberian town is the first recorded encounter with SCP - 610, al

so known as, The Flesh That Hates. First, livestock began to vanish from farms. Theft or wild animals were suspected, but no suspects could be found, and no mutilated remains turned up. The animals weren’t being stolen, and they weren’t being eaten, so…what happened to them? With no more animals left to lose, the farmers themselves then began to disappear, but the authorities refused to take the missing persons cases seriously. The missing farmers’ families would contact the police, make a repor

t, and then the whole thing was forgotten. It was written off just as another unsolved disappearance, which wasn’t uncommon in the wild and unforgiving region. Then the police themselves began to disappear. The families of the missing farmers would sometimes report strange sounds from the surrounding woods, describing moans and inhuman screeches of pain. One young boy reported seeing a cow with what he described as “tentacles” lurking around the edge of the trees. Regional police were dispatched

to the location, and ordered to investigate and report back on their findings within 24 hours. But the units sent to the area didn’t report back, and were never heard from again. Upon learning of the reports, the Russian government grew increasingly concerned, fearing domestic insurgency or foreign espionage of some kind could be at play. They sent a small team of special agents to the area, and, one by one, those agents disappeared, just like the others before them. It seemed no one who went i

nto the village after the disappearances started ever came out again. They had all simply vanished. Desperate for answers, the Russian government contacted the only people in the world who could help - The SCP Foundation. What the Foundation found over the course of their investigation would shock and unnerve them, going beyond anything they had previously discovered. Before the investigation officially began, the affected area was sealed off by the Russian government. Not knowing if it would be

safe to send researchers into the containment perimeter, the Foundation set up a small camera mounted unit, nicknamed Herbie, to capture footage of whatever remained of the village. The images captured by Herbie revealed what exactly had become of the people in this doomed village, and the true, nightmarish nature of SCP-610. SCP-610 is a Keter-class entity, meaning it’s an anomaly that’s exceedingly difficult to contain consistently or reliably, with containment procedures often being extensiv

e and complex. 610 is a highly contagious skin disease that initially manifests like an ordinary allergic reaction, with symptoms including increased sensitivity, itching, and a rash. But within just three hours of those initial symptoms appearing, the rash starts to turn into masses of scar tissue on the chest and arms. These masses spread over the legs and back of the victim, and completely consume them in thick, rubbery flesh within five hours. Once they’re covered, the victim will cease all

vital functions. Unfortunately for them, and doubly so for those around them, they do not stay dead. About three minutes after expiring, the victim’s vitals will restart at a heightened rate, and the masses of flesh encasing their body will begin to move and multiply, mutating them into a form beyond anything resembling the human they once were. The specific type of mutation varies from case to case, but has included the head becoming massive and bulbous, the growth of extra limbs, and, in espec

ially gruesome cases, the victim’s body splitting apart to allow extra tendrils of flesh to sprout from the open wound. Occasionally, an infected person will stop moving and become rooted to the ground in a set location. Once it is settled, their flesh will spread itself across the ground, encasing all nearby objects in flaps of scar tissue. The infected that maintain their mobility are highly aggressive, even violent, and will attempt to infect any living thing that comes into their line of sig

ht. The disease does not only infect humans, and can take over any living organism within a matter of hours. Due to the highly contagious and dangerous nature of the disease, safe observation of infected specimens and areas is only possible with drones and mounted cameras. This brings us back to Herbie, the first such mounted camera to record footage of the infected area. Herbie was deployed into the infection site, also known as Site A, without any damage. It remained at the outside perimeter o

f the village for two hours, observing several infected humans, and fire damage to many of the homes, before following an infected into an intact house. Herbie’s camera feed captured the infected person entering the house and sitting down at the table inside. There were several other infected humans in the house, and one unidentified infected creature that remained immobile under the table. After viciously assaulting one of the other infected humans, the infected returned to the table and began

to lay out plates on top of it. Pieces of its flesh began to wriggle and tear away from its body, before settling onto each plate. Once the plates were filled, the infected sitting at the table began to grab at the flesh and crush it into their mouths, in a perverse imitation of a normal mealtime gathering. After capturing this stomach-churning display, Herbie left the house and continued to explore the village. It recorded footage of a large stack of bodies that seemed to be made up of both Rus

sian military and civilians, with an infected sitting on top. As Herbie maneuvered toward the remains of the town hall, an infected grabbed the rover off of the ground. Herbie’s camera was able to capture the face of the infected that grabbed the rover. The face was that of a young girl around ten years old, strangely intact atop a large, distorted body. The final moments of Herbie’s camera feed captured the infected girl’s face bursting open, revealing tendrils of flesh that pulled Herbie into

the gaping maw. Then, the feed cut to black. Herbie was regarded as lost, but the video feed briefly resumed five hours later, showing the camera covered with an unidentified slime. After this, the video feed was cut for good, and Herbie abandoned in Site A. The Foundation has sent several manned expeditions into Site A, where many expedition forces have fallen victim to the infected. Several operatives were also lost in an earthquake that revealed a network of underground tunnels. A manned expe

dition into these tunnels was attempted, and the video feed that was captured by the researchers on the expedition was deeply disturbing. There were images of an abandoned church filled with infected, and a mass of uninfected or partially infected human captives. The final moments of the video feed from this expedition captured several operatives being murdered by an infected human wielding a farming scythe, indicating that the infected are capable of using simple weaponry in addition to brute f

orce. The use of this weapon, paired with the presence of captives in the underground tunnels, paints a terrifying picture of the kind of organization the infected are capable of. No more manned expeditions have been attempted, or, if they have, they have been highly classified. Ordinarily, once a new SCP is discovered, it is placed in containment at the Foundation, with special procedures in place, so that it can be studied or even neutralized in the rare occasions where it’s deemed necessary.

When it comes to SCP-610 though, containment might just be impossible. It simply covers too much area, and is too dangerous to expose to human researchers. Instead, all infected areas have been isolated with the permission of the Russian government. There is an official perimeter established around these areas, and any civilians that approach them are told to leave under the pretense of ongoing military operations. For once, a top secret military project is the more innocent answer. Armed guards

are placed at the perimeter of every infected area, and any living thing with symptoms of SCP-610 spotted near the perimeter is to be immobilized, killed, and burned from as far away as possible. Any living thing that comes in contact with SCP-610, whether a soldier, a scientist, or a civilian, is immediately terminated, and their remains destroyed. If someone comes within three meters of an infected organism, they will be quarantined and remotely examined to determine if they have been infecte

d. While the spread of SCP-610 can be airborne, it has been determined to be far less contagious when spread through air particles as opposed to physical contact. The infection sites remain active to this day, like modern day leper colonies. Though they are isolated from the general population, and the military is doing everything in their power to contain the infected, SCP-610 is still very much alive. It is rare for an entity to exist that the Foundation cannot truly contain, but can only try

to guard against, and that makes this infection all the more terrifying. Who knows how much it has mutated over the years, growing, spreading, hungry for new hosts? There is still so much that the Foundation does not know about the Flesh That Hates, such as how it works, what it can do, or even where it came from, since the origin of the first infection is still, at this point, entirely unknown. It has shown itself to be capable of learning, planning, and protecting itself, so who is to say that

it couldn’t figure out a way to escape from its isolated area? It is so highly contagious, and spreads so quickly, that just one tiny, infected rabbit, and one inattentive soldier, could be enough for SCP-610 to reach the general population. If it did, its violent, destructive nature and hatred for all life would mean that everything, not just the people but animals, plants, and the world itself, could be at risk. And no one is ready for this kind of infection. A disease that turns the human bo

dy against itself, turns our skin into a weapon and a tomb, stripping away identity, humanity, and everything that isn’t made of that same hateful flesh. So, let’s hope that the perimeter holds, and, the next time you feel a little itchy, try not to think about what might happen next. It was November 20th, 2019, and the helicopter circled far above in the freezing wind of the Antarctic. SCP Foundation Site Director Jason Monroe looked down at the isolated above-ground facilities of Provisional S

ite-344-1. Something about this place made him nervous. Edgy. And for good reason: Between 2003 and 2019, twenty-nine Mobile Task Force units and seventy-three members of D-Class personnel had gone missing here and never been found. Monroe thought he was here for a routine investigation into negligence and mismanagement, but little did he know, he was in for so much more. This is the story of SCP - 5545, and one man’s journey into his own worst nightmare. Literally. But this nightmare began a lo

ng time ago - 300 years, to be exact. And like most nightmares, it started as a dream. That dream was one of expansion - national powers across Europe wanted to be the first to conquer the globe and expand into new territories, and sent countless exploratory missions off into the unknown to achieve this goal. Any history book will tell you that the first outsiders to lay eyes upon the continent of Antarctica did so in 1820 - the reality is that the first ones to get there actually landed in the

late 1700s. The hapless explorers ventured into mainland Antarctica and made base camps, before searching and digging for any useful resources nearby. They came upon a strange discovery: A hallway, hidden beneath the ice. Not a passage in the ice, but a true hallway - complete with light fixtures. The confused explorers ventured down into these impossible hallways, and for many of them, it would be the last thing they ever did. No matter how long they walked, it seemed like the hallways just kep

t going. As they continued to walk for hours, they hoped they’d find something… anything. And eventually, they did. They passed from these hallways into somewhere different altogether, and most of them were never heard from again. Those who did manage to escape often died or took their own lives soon after. Whatever it was they’d discovered down there, they didn’t want to live with it on their minds. It’s believed that over seventy colonial explorers disappeared or died this way and that most wh

o found these endless hallways beneath the Antarctic ice never returned. The multiple anomalous objects and phenomena that make up SCP-5545 came into the Foundation’s hands several centuries later on September 18th, 2003, when during an expedition into the Antarctic, they too found the endless hallways. The Foundation built Provisional Site-344-1 around them, hoping to safely seal them off from any other unwitting Antarctic explorers or researchers. But there was something else lurking beneath t

he ice in Antarctica. Something dangerous. The hallways were designated as SCP - 5545 - 1 and were thought to be the extent of the anomalous activity at the site, but soon SCP - 5545 - 2 was discovered, which resulted in the deaths of sixteen researchers. So what exactly is 5545 - 2? It’s an entity so volatile that even knowing about it is considered to be a containment breach, and - as a result - it’s kept in Provisional Site-344-2. Unlike Site - 344 - 1, 344 - 2 isn’t a physical space. It’s co

nceptual, accessible only through the endless hallways, created with the express purpose of keeping 5545 - 1 and 5545 - 2 separate. Why? Because whenever the two come into contact, the result is 5545 - 3: The network of endless hallways expanding. If they remained in contact, the hallways would continue to expand and the entire planet could be filled with endless hallways in just four to six hours. While the two are apart though, 5545 - 3 reverses, but it always would take just a few hours to th

row the whole world into a chaos of infinite hallways. SCP-5545 has been given the classification “Safe”… Wait, we’re dealing with a mysterious and volatile anomaly that’s claimed a huge number of lives and still somehow eludes true Foundation understanding, yet the official SCP Foundation classification is “Safe?” How could this be? Monroe was the Director of Site - 58, and was the definition of no-nonsense. Prior to taking the Site Director position, he was a decorated member of Mobile Task Fo

rce Eta-10 and helped contain numerous Keter-Class anomalies. He’d been around the proverbial block when it came to anomalous activity, and something about SCP - 5545, and the management of Provisional Site 344, seemed awfully suspicious to him. And he had questions. Like how such an unpredictable anomaly could be declared “safe”? And why had there been such a lapse of communication between the Foundation and Doctor Gabriel Reed, who’d been running the facility for the past two decades? And most

of all, just what exactly was the mysterious SCP - 5545 - 2? Monroe started to believe that something terrible had happened at the site, and Reed was covering it all up. But to find out for sure, he’d need to go to Antarctica and investigate it himself. Information around this supposedly “Safe” anomaly was highly classified - those without O5 clearance could face termination for snooping. But that didn’t scare Jason Monroe. He’d dealt with Keters before, he could deal with this. Or so he though

t. Monroe submitted a request and was granted unanimous approval by the O5 Council to travel to Provisional Site 344 and get to the bottom of this mystery. He took a chopper to the base soon after, armed with a concealed firearm and a Hostile Meme Detector - or HMD - to test whether the base and its staff had somehow fallen under a hazardous memetic effect from SCP - 5545. He’d find the answers, or die trying. The moment Monroe arrived, he couldn’t help but notice the strange way the staff behav

ed. They seemed listless; almost depressive. When he showed his credentials to a researcher, they simply said “SCP-5545-2 is contained in Site-344-2.” His request to see Dr. Reed that night was denied. Dr. Reed was busy, he was told. Wait until tomorrow. The next day, Monroe met with Dr. Reed, but the results of the meeting were underwhelming to say the least. Just like the rest of the staff on the site, he seemed exhausted, as though he hadn’t slept in days. His responses were quiet and evasive

, and he refused to tell Monroe anything that wasn’t in the official files already. Monroe ran the conversation through the HMD and found nothing out of the ordinary. What was going on here? Monroe was irritated, but not deterred. Nothing would stop him from finding out the truth. The next day, he flexed his O5 credentials and hacked into the base’s security system. This gave him access to cameras around Site - 344 -1, but more importantly, there was a single camera inside the mysterious Site -

344 - 2. Jackpot. But when he looked at it, the feed was an entirely black screen with the words “SCP-5545-2 is contained in Site-344-2.” The footage of the staff in 344 - 1 was equally strange: The eighteen employees on site all sat at computer banks, with nothing but static playing on their screens. Monroe kept digging though, and was able to hack into the security footage of Dr. Reed’s office. As he watched, he discovered a fifteen minute period where Reed left the office each day. He could u

se this brief window to break in and collect more intel on SCP - 5545 - 2. Monroe was so wrapped up in the investigation that he almost forgot the more immediate danger around him, and nearly wandered into one of the endless hallways of 5545 - 1 by mistake. He made a note to be more careful in future... His first attempt at breaking into Dr. Reed’s office didn’t produce many answers - one piece of evidence was a blurry picture of what looked like a Mobile Task Force entering a 5545 - 1 hallway i

n the dark. Another was a spreadsheet featuring all the personnel, living or dead, who’d worked at the site - but one name, and the details of whether this person was alive or dead, was completely redacted. Anything particularly juicy was hidden behind O5 clearance. If Monroe wanted the answers, he’d need to break through. That night, he had a horrific recurring nightmare, one that had plagued him since he joined MTF Eta-10. He dreamed he was in a fancy dining room with a grand fireplace. The ro

om was full of statues of men and women. The men looked angry, and the women looked afraid. As he approached the fireplace, the ceiling extended infinitely up into the darkness. Suddenly, the zombie-like body of a teenage girl appears in the fireplace, hanging from a long thread. Her eyes look furious and full of rage, and Monroe somehow knows that he’s the reason for her hate. When he steps into the fireplace in this dream, she attacks him, the two intertwine, and they burn forever. The one dif

ference was that in this new iteration of the dream, he blinked upon entering the fireplace, and suddenly, he was in a hallway. He awoke sure that something was terribly wrong here, but he couldn’t give up now. The next day, Monroe broke into Dr. Reed’s office and made a horrifying discovery. He found files indicating that Dr. Reed was knowingly sending Mobile Task Forces and D-Class personnel into the infinite hallways of 5545 - 1 to their doom. He also found evidence that Reed and the research

ers had been spying on him, somehow intercepting copies of the notes he had been taking. That’s when Dr. Reed entered the office and interrupted him. Monroe panicked and drew his weapon, holding the doctor at gunpoint. He was breaking so many Foundation rules, but right now, he feared for his life. The doctor seemed unbothered by Monroe’s threats though. He told Monroe that everything was going to plan, and that he should go back to his room. Monroe was becoming increasingly paranoid - he felt t

hat, at any moment, guards might burst in and execute him. Nothing about this place made sense. He worried he was going insane. Perhaps the only way to find answers was to go even deeper: To risk it all, and venture through the endless hallways to find SCP - 5545 - 2 himself, and finally discover what this thing actually was. Monroe left his room and stepped into one of the endless hallways of 5545 - 1 that was located just across from his dorm. He found that it was a hallway like all the others

on site - Plain concrete, worn with age, with simple light fixtures on the walls. He walked for hours, recording with a concealed device. The lights suddenly went out, leaving him in complete darkness. When they flicked back on, he was in a very different environment: A grand, old carpeted hallway, the kind you’d see in an old mansion. He broke into a cold sweat. What was so familiar about this place?He kept walking, wracked with terror, until this new hallway finally led him to the place he’d

been seeking: Site 344 - 2, the domain of 5545 - 2. It was a large, poorly-lit room, filled with grimacing statues and a large fireplace at the far end. It was the exact same room from Monroe’s dream - with one horrifying difference. Monroe noticed a single white thread hanging down from the infinite ceiling, and when he looked up to find its source, he screamed. There were hundreds of bodies hanging and swinging from the ceiling above him - everyone who SCP - 5545 - 2 had ever killed, including

MTF members, D-Class Personnel, and even the colonial explorers from hundreds of years before. And all of them were him. Every single one. They had his face. And there, hanging in the middle of the room at ground level, was the body of a teenage girl, the one from his dream. In that moment, he finally recognized her: She was the girl he killed. The first him. Hundreds of years ago. Much like Monroe, you’re probably wondering: What is going on here? Thanks to declassified communications between

Dr. Reed and the O5 Council, we can tell you. Jason Monroe is a man who’s been reincarnated hundreds of times over the last three hundred years, ever since he murdered a teenage girl… A girl named Emily… his daughter. This murder sparked the existence of SCP - 5545 as an eternally recurring punishment for his crimes. Since figuring this out, the Foundation has kept tabs on Monroe’s reincarnations - whether they’re MTF members, D-Class personnel, or even Site Directors. They see to it that these

reincarnations always find their way back to 5545 - 2 to take his punishment, and prevent the infinite hallway expansion that threatens to destroy the world. It’s a plan everyone is in on - everyone except him. But every time he enters that nightmare-haunting room, it all comes rushing back. In that moment though, he knew his crime, and he somehow knew how many times this punishment had unfolded for him. He now had two choices: Repent and accept the punishment again, or leave and activate 5545 -

3, potentially allowing the endless tunnels to expand across the world. Like his many predecessors, Monroe made the decent choice. He accepted his punishment and allowed his own string to coil around him as the lights in the room went off, one by one, leaving only darkness. Jason Monroe - that version of him, at least - was never seen again. But The SCP Foundation is already eyeing up his next reincarnation, and preparing to let this twisted cycle play out all over again. Stop me if you've hear

d this one before. A young man was driving home from work late one rainy night when he spotted a woman in a white dress and a red sweater walking along the shoulder of the road. Concerned for her safety, he slowed down and rolled down the window so he could talk to her. When he asked where she was going, she said she was walking to her parents' house. The man pulled over and offered her a ride that she accepted. The woman gave him the address of her home, hopped in the backseat, and the man drov

e off. He sensed that she must've been cold from walking in the rain, so he cranked up the car's heater to help her dry off. Soon she removed her heavy red sweater and placed it on the seat next to her. The man tried to make friendly conversation - asking if the woman had a job, what she was studying at school, where she'd been that day - but she remained quiet, staring out the window. Until they drove past an old graveyard. The woman began pounding on the glass of the car as if she desperately

wanted something. Unsure of what to do, the man pulled over, but before he could ask her what was happening she had gotten out of the car. He exited the car to try and find her but the woman was nowhere to be seen. She must have somehow ran off. Confused, the man got back in his car and drove away. He went on his way and didn’t think of it again until the next day, when he noticed her sweater was still in the back of his car. He decided to go to the house she had originally given him the address

for and give it back to her. He found the home without any trouble, but when he knocked on the door the old woman who answered it was confused by his story. She told him that her daughter couldn't have possibly left her sweater in his car, because she'd died in a car accident 30 years ago. The vanishing hitchhiker is a classic ghost story, with the details varying from place to place and storyteller to storyteller. In Chicago, she goes by Resurrection Mary, named after the graveyard she asks fo

r rides to. In Okinawa, Japan, she's known as the Nightwalker of Nago, and she only appears to taxi drivers. In Kent, England, she's Suzanne, a bride killed in a car wreck on the way to her bachelorette party. In North Carolina, her name is Lydia, and in Hawaii she's believed to be the goddess Pele in human form. But as far as our friends at the SCP Foundation are concerned, the vanishing hitchhiker's name is Mary Talish, also known as SCP-1337. On the 19th of May, 1952, college sophomore Mary T

alish was abducted on her way to class in her hometown of Muncie, Indiana. When police found her body 2 weeks later, her eyes and heart had been torn from her body in a ritualistic fashion, and she had scrapes and bruises that suggested she'd been beaten before her murder. Her killers were never caught, and her body was returned to her family for burial in Tomlinson Cemetery. Starting on the 19th of June that same year, someone matching Mary's description - a caucasian woman with blonde hair, st

anding 150 cm tall and wearing a red sweater - was spotted trying to flag down passing vehicles along Mayflower Road. Since then, every month, on the 19th, Mary has been sighted along that stretch of road, and every month, the same scenario plays out. Mary gives anyone who picks her up directions to her parents' house, then on the way, she instructs the driver to stop at the graveyard where she was buried. She vanishes from the car, leaving her sweater. The driver of the car tries to return the

sweater to her parents' house, only to be told that Mary Talish was dead. When the SCP foundation was made aware of Mary Talish's pattern of haunting in the late 50's, they set up a system where agents would patrol Mayflower Road at hourly intervals with the intention of picking Mary up. Agents were sent on their own in non-Foundation cars and instructed to stick to the accepted script of the vanishing hitchhiker legend, without attempting to engage Mary in further conversation. Mary's parents w

ere also given E-class Agent status to keep them from speaking out about the haunting, and told that the Foundation was working on a way to set the spirit to rest. Early attempts to study the apparition were inconclusive - it proved impossible for the Foundation to relocate her or trigger her manifestation outside of the 19th of every month, and attempts to analyze her sweater were fruitless, since if the sweater wasn't returned to the Talish family home it would simply vanish from containment a

t or around sunset on the next 19th. For 20 years, SCP-1337 events continued to happen as normal. D-Class personnel under the instruction of the Foundation would pick Mary up, drive her past the cemetery, and return her sweater to her parents. It was business as usual, and in fact, it was one of the more sedate recurring apparitions the Foundation had to deal with. But, as you might have guessed, that peace wouldn't last forever. Enter Dr. Lawson - who, in 1972, was placed in charge of all resou

rces regarding SCP-1337. Dr. Lawson was getting sick of all this phantom hitchhiker business, and while most of the Foundation was happy to keep this routine going, Lawson thought that the continual picking up and dropping off of Mary Talish and her red sweater was a waste of the Foundation’s valuable time. After all, it was the early 70's - the price of oil was at an all-time high, so the expense of sending car after car up and down the same road for a solid day once a month just to pick up a g

host was more trouble than it was worth. So, Lawson started developing a plan, one that he didn't go through the proper Foundation channels to approve. He reasoned that the reason Mary's ghost kept coming back was because she wanted something. Since always asked for a ride home, then it must mean that she wanted to return back to her parents. So, logic followed that if she had nothing, or no one, to go back to then she'd stop appearing. On 18th June, 1973, Lawson went ahead with his plan without

his superiors' knowledge and ordered the execution of Mary Talish's parents, as well as the immediate demolition of their family home. According to his journals, Lawson had hoped that his attempt at decommissioning 1337 would significantly cut the Foundation's gas bills, freeing up valuable funds, at which point he'd surely be promoted in 'recognition of his brilliance'. But that wasn't what happened. Lawson was demoted from team leader to junior staff, and only kept on 1337 detail out of the b

elief that, without a family to return to, Lawson would become the new focal point of the haunting should Mary Talish ever return. Though Lawson's actions weren't at all above board, even by SCP Foundation standards, they did seem to have worked. The 19th of June came and went without a single Mary sighting. And she wasn't seen the next month either. A full year went by without any sign of the Mayflower Road apparition. Satisfied with this turn of events, the Foundation made the decision to offi

cially reclassify SCP-1337 from “Safe” to “Safe Decommissioned” and the gas money that was budgeted for the Mayflower Road patrol was redirected to the SCP-682 tank acid fund. But even though everything seemed to have been sorted out, Lawson wasn't entirely satisfied. And just because of his demotion. Whether it was intuition or merely guilt-induced paranoia is unclear, but he suspected that Mary was still out there somewhere. At first he thought that she might show up on the anniversary of her

parents' deaths, but then that date came and went, as did eight more anniversaries after it. Finally, on the 19th of June, 1983, Lawson decided he had to see for himself. Fitted with recording equipment, he drove alone, in a non-Foundation standard car, down that lonely stretch of road where so many before him had stopped to pick up that mysterious blonde woman with the red sweater. He had to prove to himself that she wouldn't show up, that he had really and truly gotten rid of her for good. It

was about 5 o'clock in the evening when he reached Mayflower Road. At first, he didn't experience anything strange. He scanned the roadside, looking for the phantom hitchhiker walking along it, but there was nobody there. Dr. Lawson breathed a sigh of relief - he may have orchestrated the deaths of two innocent people, but at least it hadn't been for nothing. He turned on the recorder he'd brought with him and logged that nothing had happened. SCP-1337 had been permanently neutralized. As he app

roached the t-intersection and prepared to turn onto Marsh Avenue, he looked up to adjust his rear view mirror. To his horror, he found that he wasn't alone in the car - someone was in the seat behind him, someone with blonde hair and a red sweater. His last transmission consisted only of “Wait, who the hell are yo-“, before the recording abruptly stopped. Lawson's car was found soon after by Foundation agents. Lawson was dead in the front seat, bruised and bloody, with his eyes and heart ripped

out in a ritualistic fashion. Just the way Mary Talish had been found all the way back in 1952. It turns out that Mary hadn't been neutralized after all. She'd just been waiting for a chance to get revenge on the man who killed her family. And Mary didn't stop with Dr. Lawson. No longer does she appear, walking along the road waiting for someone to offer her a ride before disappearing without incident. Now, should someone pass by without offering a ride, she will appear in their backseat before

re-enacting the method of her own death upon the driver. And her physical appearance has changed too. Whereas before she looked like the image of the pretty young woman before her tragedy, now recordings show that she appears with the wounds of her death present, her eyes gouged out of their sockets and a massive hole in her chest where her heart should be. The same wounds she inflicts on her victims. The SCP Foundation has tried closing off and even destroying the road, but that has only resul

ted in Mary manifesting at other locations in and around Muncie. Foundation documents reveal that any back road in the city can potentially serve as host to a 1337 event, and all attempts to contain the apparition have failed. The only way someone who has seen Mary can avoid her wrath is by stopping to pick her up, at which point she will de-materialize before reappearing on another road. Mobile Task Forces have been unsuccessful, as Mary only appears to those driving alone, and all agents who h

ave been sent on solo missions to apprehend her have resulted in the death of the agent. SCP-1337 was reinstated, this time as Euclid class. Currently, the foundation's method of managing SCP-1337 is to dispatch a security team on the 19th of every month to monitor all of the places where a potential sighting could take place. As soon as signs of a manifestation are identified, a remotely controlled vehicle containing a single D-class is driven to the location. Once Mary appears in the car, the

car is piloted to the empty lot where her home used to stand, and the remains of the D-class are then disposed of. Like a lot of stories that get passed down as urban legends, the story of SCP-1337 has a lesson that can be taken away from it. This SCP started off as an ordinary local haunting, no more deadly than Lydia, Suzanne, Resurrection Mary, or any of the countless other local versions of the vanishing hitchhiker story. But, thanks to one rogue Foundation doctor and his desire to rush to w

hat he thought would be an efficient solution, the spirit not only became harder to control but also much more violent and bloodthirsty than anyone was prepared to deal with. So, if there's anything we can learn here, it's that no matter if you're a student, an office worker, or a researcher with the SCP Foundation, think twice about cutting corners. It might save you a little bit of time and money in the short term, but in the long term, the results could be fatal. It was 1965 and the Chicago P

D was investigating a meatpacking plant reported to be the home of a devil worshipping cult, complete with allegations of human sacrifice. There the cops were met with heavy resistance. A firefight broke out between the police and the occult worshippers who flooded out of the plant’s basement. The cops were pinned down, and in trouble, but they had a secret weapon - heavily armed, decked out in sophisticated ballistic armour, and covered in strange insignia. Mobile Task Force Epsilon-9, also kno

wn as the Fire Eaters, here to assist the cops on behalf of the SCP Foundation. As always with the Foundation, they had no interest in some mere human cultists. Those were a dime a dozen in the world of anomalous monsters. What the Foundation had taken an interest in was who or what these cultists were worshipping. It’d all begun a few weeks back, near Danforth Meatpacking, an abandoned meat packing plant just outside of Chicago. No one had given the place a thought in decades, that is until peo

ple started going missing. Rumors spread of people being snatched in the surrounding woods by figures dressed in robes. Mysterious voices and noises were said to be coming out from the cavernous belly of the plant. Some even reported seeing smoke rising out of the building - thick, black, noxious smoke. Something was terribly wrong here. Something was...anomalous. The Chicago Police Department Strike Force, in association with the Fire Eaters from the Foundation, mobilized at Danforth Meatpackin

g. While the police were initially reluctant to work with these mysterious figures they turned out to be indispensable for the raid. There were forty-seven cultists holding out in the basement of the plant, many of them heavily armed and all of them hopped up on zealous devotion to their unknown master. All except one of the cultists fought to the death during a tense firefight with Chicago PD and the Fire Eaters. The single survivor was still heavily injured, and was taken to a secure Foundatio

n facility for emergency treatment and debriefing. Typically, the Foundation would need to perform extensive tests on the Danforth Meatpacking plant to discover the source of the anomaly’s activity, however, this time, it was a Chicago detective who asked the question that busted the case wide open: “The hell’s with the giant pig?” And while it would turn out to be a whole lot more than that, there was indeed a giant, iron furnace shaped like a pig in the center of the facility. Measuring 15m by

25m by 20m at its widest points, the thing was a behemoth. It had an internal furnace despite no apparent fuel source, and a five centimeter slot of unknown purpose on the side of the machine’s immense, rusted hide. Naturally, all the police officers involved in the raid had their memories wiped and restructured. And they were lucky, because they’d remain forever ignorant of the true horrors about to unfold in the confines of that godforsaken factory. As is standard procedure, the plant was iso

lated, and a Foundation research team - led by Lead Researcher Westrin, under the authority of Regional Director Caleb - was installed on the new provisional site to conduct tests. Other than everyone feeling somewhat uneasy around it, this new anomaly, dubbed SCP - 4511, didn’t seem to exhibit any strange activity save for its perpetually burning fire, but during the initial research period, a small, white card suddenly popped out of the slot in SCP - 4511’s side. A researcher carefully approac

hed and looked at the card, there was writing. It said, “CURRENT DEMAND: A flock of my own. - SATISFIED.” Though nobody on the team had any idea what this meant. After going through a shoot out with a considerable death toll to get to it, having a giant metal pig shaped furnace spit out a cryptic card was strange. But at the secret medical facility where the surviving cultist was being held, things were about to get a whole lot stranger. As he lay in a bed suffering from his injuries, he pulled

one of the medical staff close and uttered cryptic, dying words: “Give it whatever it demands, or your suffering will be beyond measure.” He expired seconds later, less than 72 hours after the raid. Back at the meat packing plant, at the exact same time, another white card was produced by the machine, reading “CURRENT DEMAND: The metal teeth that endlessly churn. PERIOD: One Week.” Perhaps this entity was a little more intelligent than they thought. A number of researchers on the team, invigorat

ed by this new development, were eager to press forward with experiments. Lead Researcher Westrin, however, did not share their enthusiasm. Something about this entire situation felt like a grim omen to him. This entity had a plan far beyond their understanding - and on some deep, animal level, he knew that helping this thing see its plans through would lead to disastrous results. On this first gut impulse, he denied the request for further experiments. But Regional Director Caleb had other idea

s. Caleb overruled Westrin’s command, and the experiments began shortly after. The entity, jokingly nicknamed The Swine God by researchers, had made its demand: The metal teeth that endlessly churn. But what could that mean? It wasn’t long before the entity began to produce more cards, each with their own strange and esoteric demands. However, on some instinctual level, the researchers at the site understood the demands perfectly. The next card’s demand was "The metal of this suffocating prison.

" Upon receiving this demand, researchers collected scrap metal from around the new site, and tossed them into the furnace beyond the Swine God’s jaws one by one. Inside, they heard the sound of metal crunching. Hours later, all the other metal in the site began to rapidly oxidize and rust - though SCP-4511 itself remained unaffected. The card that came after delivered another simple request: "Oil to slicken my frozen joints." The researchers understood and procured three large barrels of oil an

d tossed them into the furnace. The entity let out a deep gurgle, before shaking violently and expelling excess oil, rusted metal, and two domesticated pig femurs. It turns out that the Swine God had an appetite for pigs, as the next card that rumbled out of the machine bore the request, “Two of my children, made in my image, made in flesh." In response, the researchers provided the entity with two adult pigs. Just like the previous requests, they too were tossed into the fiery depths of the gia

nt pig’s mouth, from which came the horrible sounds of pigs squealing, and then a low, guttural gurgling. Next, the request was, “The hooks used to hang my children's corpses." To satisfy this request the researchers provided seventeen meat hooks. In response, 4511 spat out a metal sphere at an extremely high velocity, killing observing Foundation Agent McHenry. For reasons that weren’t apparent at the time, rather than giving Agent McHenry a proper burial, his body was also fed into the hungry

machine. Lead Researcher Westrin’s concerns were mounting, but that didn’t amount to much now. 4511 had developed a taste for flesh, and the researchers were all too eager to obey its command. On the Swine God’s order, it was fed a German shepherd. An hour later, the entity spat out some teeth. Six of which came from a dog, and one from a human. More than once, it released a card with the blunt request “A worker for the line.” The researchers knew exactly what this meant: It required a human sac

rifice. SCP-4511 was given two D-Class personnel. One was flung back out seconds later, crunched and burned to death with several internal organs missing. The other had a more mysterious and altogether upsetting fate. The second D-class was heard screaming in the belly of the furnace for roughly two hours. Thirty four minutes later, a strange liquid was excreted by the machine. When the liquid was tested, they found trace amounts of chemicals like pig urine and motor oil - but most disturbing of

all, human genetic material that was identical to that of Lead Researcher Westrin. It seemed that the Swine God had finally taken an interest in him. After some final requests for large quantities of coal, and even human children, to fuel its fires, it made the request that sent the whole thing crashing down... “The false foreman, delivered to my maw to prove your faith." Lead Researcher Westrin knew what this meant. They all did. The Swine God was demanding him in sacrifice. Lead Researcher We

strin tried to shut down the entire project, but the Swine God was faster than him. One of his own researchers shot Westrin in the leg, as the others gathered round and forcibly restrained him. He tried to reason with his subordinates, but it didn’t do him any good. The Swine God had crawled into all their minds and corrupted them - they were His servants now, and Westrin was doomed. Despite his protests, the servants forced him into the mouth of SCP - 4511, and after a little over four minutes

of screaming, Westrin was devoured just like all the other sacrifices. Upon receiving news of the horrors unfolding in the Danforth Meat Packing Plant, Regional Director Caleb declared the security of the site compromised, and sent in Mobile Force Epsilon-11, aka the Nine-Tailed Fox. The four elite MTF soldiers were given the simple instruction to figure out exactly what had happened, and to eliminate any potentially compromised Foundation staff members who’d fallen under the Swine God’s power.

When the team arrived, they realized just how far gone the whole place was. Almost everyone was dead, having been sacrificed to the machine, and the ones that were left were completely insane. They attacked the task force, shouting in their madness about how no matter what the Foundation does to them, it would be nothing compared to what it would do. It had them all under its rusty, iron foot. The team was forced to fend off repeated attacks from the pig’s devotees, and even found the powers of

the Swine God starting to affect their own minds. The beast was more powerful and dangerous than anyone had imagined. The trained Foundation researchers and guards had been transformed into the same cultists they’d fought to gain control of the building by the mind-bending power of the Swine God. The MTF were forced to retreat and return with reinforcements to truly clean the place out. Once a slaughterhouse, always a slaughterhouse. At this point, Regional Director Caleb took personal responsib

ility over the casualties since he’d been the one who signed off on the experiments in the first place. He gave up his Regional Director rank, and deemed himself the new Lead Researcher on the 4511 case. Now that he fully understood the scope and danger of the entity they were dealing with, he wanted to lead the charge in discovering more about the anomaly, and hopefully someday negating its deadly effects. This may sound like a happy ending, in spite of all the violence, bloodshed, and human sa

crifice that brought us here. But beware of the premature celebration. Despite investigation, the Swine God retained no evidence of the objects, animals, and people it’d consumed and burned. Perhaps it’d burnt them down to their very atoms, if those even still existed. What we do know is that not long after, after Lead Researcher Caleb and his subordinates installed themselves into the facility, SCP - 4511 produced one more little, white card. It read, “CURRENT DEMAND: A flock of my own. - SATIS

FIED.” And if we’ve learned anything today, it’s that the Swine God gets whatever it demands. A brutal truth that Lead Researcher Caleb is likely to understand much sooner than he thought... It was just a job. You were meant to be mopping floors and cleaning toilets at the Johnston Labs and Pharmaceuticals Research Center for minimum wage. And you were happy about it, grateful for any kind of employment - you didn’t even know that the company signing your checks was the SCP Foundation, an organi

zation dedicated to securing and containing anomalies and protecting humanity from their negative effects at any cost. And today, you’re going to find out exactly how steep that cost can be. The Johnston Labs and Pharmaceuticals Research Center isn’t actually a research center at all: It’s a Foundation front business, with a building solely dedicated to the containment of a single anomaly: SCP-3280. But again, you’re just the janitor, it’s not like they would bother telling you what’s being cont

ained here. If it breaks out, you won’t even know what’s killing you until it’s too late. It begins, like most classic horror stories, on a dark and stormy night. You’re mopping up a silent hallway, whistling a little tune to yourself, when rain starts hammering down on the window next to you. Not long after, you see a bolt of lightning split the distant sky followed by an immense thunder crack. Soon after you hear screaming and panicking from below. Frantic footsteps. Then, the flashing lights

and sirens. You think back to your employee orientation. These flashing lights and wailing sirens can only mean one thing: Containment breach. You run for it, not even knowing what you’re running from. You bring your mop and bucket with you, perhaps just out of habit. You seek refuge in the only place in the facility that truly seems to belong to you: The broom closet. The alarm blares as you lock yourself in the closet. You’re shaking with terror and can hear the screaming of your colleagues. Y

ou hear more noises - running, scrambling, a wet dripping sound, gunshots, and then… silence. All this time, you can’t help but wonder, “Why isn’t anybody coming to help us?” After a while, the only thing you can hear is the rain and the distant thunder. It’s been hours. You’ve only managed to stave off dehydration by drinking the filthy water from the mop sink. But at least it seems like the chaos outside has died down. Carefully, you open the door and peek out of the closet. Darkness, but no d

etectable movement. Now’s your chance and you make a break for it, creeping down the hall. The dark hallway is suddenly lit up by lightning and you can see that there are bodies everywhere. You step over the corpse of Dr. Cawthrone, one of the few scientists working here who actually knew your name. If you can make it to the security office, you might be able to radio for help, or maybe access a computer terminal. On the way to the office you hear another horrific scream start to echo through th

e complex before it’s cut off by a thunderclap. You have to ignore it though and push on. When you enter the security room, you see that the head security officer, Nichols, is already dead. His body has been cut open from neck to groin; gutted. The anomaly, whatever it is, has already been here. You access the computer terminal and open the file for SCP-3280. You’re warned that, as Janitorial Staff, you have Level 0 Clearance, and as a result, information will be omitted from the files you acces

s. It doesn’t matter. You press on and open up the file. Both the object class and the description have been redacted. You can only see the Special Containment Procedures. They dictate that 3280 is to remain contained at the Johnston Labs and Pharmaceuticals Research Center until long term Containment Procedures can be drawn up. If the entity ever reaches beyond Sub-Level 2, the facility enters full lockdown mode. Not even information is allowed in or out of the facility, as this could result in

an XK-Class End of the World Scenario. In other words, nobody is coming to save you. The only other information on the page is a picture of a lightning storm, much like the one you find yourself in right now. Lightning flashes in the hall. You dart around, paranoid, knowing the anomaly could be anywhere. All you can hear now is a quiet drip, drip, drip of blood coming from the body of Security Officer Nichols. Whatever this thing had done to him looked painful. You try to remember him as he was

in life, and then, a revelation hits you. A security officer probably has a lot better clearance than a janitor. You feel around Nichols’ mutilated torso until you find his key card. Thankfully, Nichols was the kind of guy who’d write his password on the underside of the card so he wouldn’t forget it. You easily gain access to the Foundation servers with his login credentials. You now have Level 2 Security Clearance. The terminal gives you the option to view security footage taken throughout th

e site. You’re given access to every camera still working after the containment breach and the subsequent carnage. You select the camera feed for the Second Floor Barracks. There, you see Researcher Jenson hanging from a makeshift noose attached to his bunk. There’s a puddle underneath his corpse. You access the feed from the Second Floor East Wing. There, you see Doctor Emmanuel stumbling down a dark corridor. His movements are oddly listless, like he’s in a trance. Suddenly, there’s another fl

ash of lightning and a crack of thunder. Doctor Emmanuel clutches his gut in pain and crumples to the floor. You access the camera feed from the First Floor Entrance. It seems that the whole area is flooded, is this because of the storm? In a panic, many lower-tier staff members had tried to escape, defying the lockdown protocols in the special containment procedures. Now, they’re floating face down in the water, all dead. You access the camera feed from Sub Level 2, and see another corpse lying

in the corner. He’s wearing an orange jumpsuit - D-Class, no idea why he was down there. The only other notable thing in the basement was a burst pipe, leaking and spraying more water everywhere. With trembling fingers, you select the camera feed for the First Floor Cafeteria. The whole room is practically underwater - the only evidence of the massacre that must have taken place are the fragments of clothing floating on the surface of the water. That, and the fleshy, pink slurry forming at the

bottom of the windows. It reminds you of the gooey meat runoff in chicken nugget factories. You close your eyes and try to center yourself. It’s violent chaos. Looking at more of it isn’t getting you anywhere. Instead, you decide to put those new Level 2 Security Access credentials to good use, and hop back onto the file for SCP-3280. You think to yourself, “There has to be something I can use on here...” But even as you wait for the file to load, some part of you knows that time is running out

for you. Perhaps it’s the stress, or the fear, or the filthy mop water you drank, but you’re feeling the pressure start to mount, physically. Your stomach is beginning to ache. You can see blurry shapes moving in the corners of your eyes. It’s getting harder to focus your vision, and harder still to quiet the terrified voices in your mind. But you can’t get up - not without knowing what is doing this to you. The containment class for SCP-3280 is now declassified. “Euclid.” And what’s more, the S

pecial Containment Procedures have altered, too. They now explain that every week, a new member of D-Class personnel is to be deposited into the entity’s lair in Sub Level 2 through Subterranean Access Point Gamma. The D-Class- or more accurately, the sacrifices - are to be told lies about why exactly they need to descend to the lowest point in the facility. They’re even given a working flashlight and a defensive nightstick to create the illusion that the Foundation expects them to ever return f

rom the depths. Little do they know, they also have a tiny transmitter sewn into their jumpsuit. This broadcasts a frequency that will attract an eager SCP-3280 to the D-Class’ location, like a dinner bell only it can hear. The file specifies that SCP-3280 always prefers live prey. “Well, at least that explains the dead D-Class in Sub Level 2,” you think, hoping that it’ll somehow overwhelm the dizziness you’re feeling, or the nagging pain in your gut. You read on. Somehow, the file’s tone becom

es even more severe. It says that failure to maintain the containment of SCP-3280 will not only trigger a lockdown, it will always call in the intervention of two different Mobile Task Forces: MTF Iota-12, “The Silencers”, and Tau-4, also known as “Water, Water Everywhere.” If twelve hours pass from the point of initial containment breach, and the O5 Council hasn’t been given the “all clear” signal by one of these teams, preparation begins for an imminent XK-Class End of the World Scenario. Just

reading the words sends you into a cold sweat. “End of the World? What on Earth is this creature?” Finally, you reach the description. You get to find out what this horrifying entity actually is. But the last thing you expect is for the first sentence in the file to read, “SCP-3280 is a sapient entity composed of a fluid physically identical to water, capable of traveling roughly two and a half kilometers per hour.” It’s water. It’s literally a living, thinking blob of water. As you read on, th

e concerning details pile up: Any water that the anomalous SCP-3280 water touches, it integrates into its own mass. But any time water is separated from this mass, it remains anomalous, and continues to act independently. When the creature was first discovered, it was a mere 66.4 liters in volume. Now, it’s around twenty five hundred. The water infected by SCP-3280 is hostile to all humans, and not just in a defensive manner. SCP-3280 will actively seek out human prey. And when it finds them, it

forces its mass into any available bodily orifice, including the victim’s pores. This can happen in such a subtle manner that you may not even notice yourself being infiltrated. But below this, the file has a list of symptoms for those experiencing 3280 infiltration: loss of motor control, weakening of the micturition reflex, visual hallucinations, and abdominal pain. As you read the words, your stomach gives another painful churn. Almost like something is moving around inside you. It’s all com

ing together. You read on. The file states that SCP-3280 is so difficult to contain because it exhibits claustrophobic tendencies. Any time it’s placed inside a container, whether organic or inorganic, it escapes with pressurized water jets that travel at over 255 miles per hour. If the water is inside a human, it may literally explode out of them, killing them in the process. Your jittering eyes turn to the gutted body of Security Officer Nichols. It all makes sense now. Everything is becoming

clear as the pain in your stomach builds in its intensity. The file goes on to say that if ever SCP-3280 escapes Sub Level 2, it may be impossible to contain again. If 3280 ever escaped the site proper, it would indeed cause an XK-Class End of the World Scenario to unfold, as 3280 merged with our water cycle and destroyed all of humanity on a global scale. It would become truly impossible for anyone to escape. You can’t read any more. The pain in your stomach is unbearable. You jerk from your se

at and stumble out into the hall, doubled over in agony. You can feel it pulsing in there. Fighting its way out. It must have gotten in through the filthy mop water you were drinking. You didn’t even know it, but your fate has been sealed for hours. You’ve been a dead man walking. The hum of pain builds in your ears and renders you almost deaf. All you can hear is the patter of rain and the distant thunder. You collapse against the glass, feeling the coolness of it against the skin of your face.

And in that moment, you see the water droplets on the window pane reverse direction. They’re slithering up the glass towards your face in defiance of gravity. Then, you realize it’s already over, and not just for you. SCP-3280 has escaped. It’s out there, and it’s going to drown the entire world. As you collapse to your knees and prepare to be torn apart from the inside, your final thought is that at least you won’t be alive to see it. Have you ever had a nightmare that you’re running down a lo

ng, dark hallway, getting chased by something you can’t see? The thing behind you isn’t fast, but that doesn’t matter. You can’t run forever, and the thing knows it. It is a patient predator. It toys with its food. At first, you move with speed and rhythm. The metallic scraping noise behind you grows quieter. You run and stumble through the dark. Your muscles start to ache and your lungs burn. Your pace slows. It’s still coming. You can hear the scraping getting louder. You start to panic. It’s

completely dark. You don’t know where you’re running or even what you’re running from. All you know - as you bump against the walls and the sharp corners that rush towards you - is that you can’t run forever. You trip, fall, and pain explodes through your leg as your knee shatters on the concrete ground. That scraping is getting louder. You can barely breathe. You can’t run anymore with your injury. There’s no way to stop what’s coming. There is no escape. The scraping is right behind you. You s

cream. And then… you wake up. Your heart is pounding like thunder in your chest and your sheets are soaked with sweat, but you’re safe. You’re out of those awful, dark hallways. But what if this wasn’t just a nightmare? What if this scenario was real, and there was no escape from the horror chasing you in the darkness? That’s what it’s like to have a close encounter with SCP-1918, a sadistic, sentient object that loves playing twisted games with its prey. But this monster never plays fair, and e

ven worse, it’s always just a simple door away. It might even be hiding behind a door near you, right now, waiting to start a game with its new playmate. But soon you’ll understand why some doors should never, ever be opened, and why some games are better left unplayed. x SCP - 1918 is an anomaly with two parts: SCP-1918 itself, and SCP-1918-2, the monster’s underground lair. The duo are a match made in hell, as the chambers and hallways of 1918-2 are perfectly tailored to 1918’s violent hobbies

. Nobody knows how long this anomaly has been operating, but it’s probably behind countless disappearances. After all, 1918 has a habit of breaking its toys... The nightmare began in a small town in Maine, with a population of only 226 people. But that population was about to get lower. People in the town began to report strange noises at night, a droning, metal-on-concrete scraping noise, like someone dragging a lead pipe along the ground. At first, people just ignored the sound. It was all in

their heads, or maybe just a faulty oven or a washing machine on the fritz. Anything that would allow them to forget about the noise and get on with their daily lives. But the noises were coming from below. They could be heard out on the streets, most audibly near manholes and sewer grates. People started feeling unsafe in their homes. The noises were spooking animals and children. People were losing sleep. That scraping they all tried to ignore was beginning to get to them all. Letters, emails,

and angry phone calls to the town council were piling up. Something had to be done before the whole town went crazy with fear. The mayor authorized four utility workers to investigate the source of the noise at a local sewage treatment facility. Considering the scraping was loudest near the sewer grates, everyone just assumed that whatever was causing all this must be connected to the sewers. Four utility workers were sent to investigate the facility, only to find that the machinery on site was

working just fine. The source of the problems must have been coming directly from the underground sewer-lines themselves. The four workers, equipped with headlamps, descended into a long service tunnel that fed into the sewer system. As they passed deeper into the tunnel, the darkness around them became thicker. It was a tangible presence that drowned out the light of their headlamps, similar to the anomalous phenomenon exhibited by SCP - 087. When the utility workers tried to turn back, they d

iscovered another impossibility: It seemed that the tunnel behind them had become a solid concrete wall. They were trapped, but where? It was too dark to tell. Confused and terrified, the four men stuck together, attempting to find a way out. It was too dark to see their hand in front of their face, so all they could do was navigate slowly by feeling the walls around them. These walls felt oddly...crusty. There was a kind of faint, metallic stench hanging in the air, too, like old blood. Somethi

ng horrible had happened here, and something horrible was about to happen again. All they could do was keep moving and try to stay calm. Eventually, after hours of pawing at walls in the dark, they found an open doorway. One by one, they filed inside, only to feel blinded when bright, white ceiling lights suddenly switched on. The room was all white, and filled with pipes, large and small, running from wall to wall. Just then one of the utility workers let out an ear-splitting scream and pointed

towards the doorway. His colleagues turned, and gasped in shock. There was something outside the door, and it was staring at them. The object filled up almost the entire doorway. It seemed like a demonic hobby horse, made from a black-and-white, candy-striped metal pole with a crude plastic head on top. The head looked like a clown’s, with a wide, toothy grin, but no visible eyes. It was SCP-1918. The utility workers were frozen as the object leaned forward slightly, and slithered into the room

, the bottom of the metal pipe scraping against the ground. It was the exact same scraping noise that’d been haunting the concerned townsfolk up above. This was the thing behind it all. And as the object moved, its metal pole started to scrape words into the ground: Tik Tak Tow None of the four utility workers were ever seen again. It didn’t take long for the SCP Foundation to descend upon this quiet Maine town and pick up the pieces. All relevant officials were provided amnestics, and cover sto

ries were created for the disappearances of the four utility workers. The Foundation also commandeered the sewage treatment facility that held the entrance to SCP-1918-2, replacing all key roles at the facility with undercover Foundation personnel. SCP-1918 was given a Euclid' classification due to the fixed nature of its hunting grounds, and then the real research began. The Foundation soon made some disturbing discoveries. Entrances into the SCP-1918-2 area didn’t follow any kind of logic. The

hunting ground of SCP-1918 can be entered from almost any location, if you’re unlucky enough. There are currently 9 known entrances, including 5 sewage grates, 3 utility shafts located in a sewage facility, and 1 toilet. And these are just the ones the Foundation knows about. There are a huge number of ways to enter SCP-1918-2, but to this day, nothing has ever been able to leave. SCP-1918-2 is contained twenty meters below the streets of this unassuming Maine town. Personnel, aside from Founda

tion-approved D-class guinea pigs. are refused entrance. Researchers have mapped out the layout of 1918-2 through seismic imaging of SCP-1918’s movements. There are 18 identical room pairs in SCP-1918-2, or 9 compound rooms. Rooms are differentiated between a '1' room and a '2' room by crude carvings on the floors outside of the individual rooms. SCP-1918-2 is symmetrical, with half a meter wide paths circling each compound room. The only deviations to this construction are the location of entra

nces on the sides of each individual room, which vary randomly while the location is “active.” What exactly does SCP-1918 do in this private little maze? It plays games, of course. Its two favorites - as indicated by the words it scrapes onto the ground - are “Tik Tak Tow” and “Memoree” In Tik Tak Tow, 1918 moves to each “1” room, leaving behind "X" markings on the floors if the room is not already marked with an "O" in a manner similar to a game of "Tic Tac Toe''. How a victim is meant to accom

plish making a mark or understand this process is unknown, as no aides are given. Blood is commonly used by victims to make their markings, hence the rusty smell in many of the rooms. In Memoree, the trapped victim is rendered unconscious by blunt force, presumably from SCP-1918. The subject regains consciousness in a random section of the facility. Success is marked by finding a “1” room identical to the central room. This event seems to possess a time limit, as the subject is pursued by SCP-19

18 throughout the halls of the facility. The subject "wins'' by marking the correct room with an "O". What happens if you win or lose these games? It’s important to note that SCP-1918 is very competitive, and doesn’t play fair. If you win, the object will merely accuse you of cheating, and start a new game. This will happen again and again, until eventually… you lose. And when you do? Well, take the horrifying encounter D-Class personnel member D-2934 had with SCP-1918. Wearing video and audio e

quipment, D-2934 was led into SCP-1918-2 by Foundation researchers. When he eventually found his way to the central room, 1918 challenged him to a game of Tik Tak Tow. And, against all odds, D-2934 won the game. But 1918 didn’t take kindly to that. It accused D-2934 of cheating, carving its accusations into the ground before challenging him to a deadly game of Memoree. After hours of chasing, D-2934 eventually lost his mind and was backed into a corner by 1918. As the object made its way towards

him, he panicked, ripped a pipe from the wall, and began smashing 1918’s head. As the plastic cracked under the force of the blows, Foundation scientists could see real brains inside. D-2934 screamed, and the video feed cut off. When the video turned back on some time later, 1918 stared into the camera with a different head mounted atop its metal pole. One that, just a few hours earlier, had belonged to the unfortunate D-2934. If there’s one lesson to be learned from this terrifying anomaly, it

’s that there truly is no escape from SCP-1918. Imagine this - it’s summer vacation and you're a kid. You and your friends are playing in the woods near your neighborhood, just like you've been doing most days during the break from school. One day, you spot a treehouse. It’s not that high off the ground and it's very simply built from leaves, grass, and scraps of wood. You and your friends are curious, so you decide to check it out. Upon investigation, you find a kid in there. He says his name i

s Billy, and this is his treehouse. You don't recognize him from school, but you figure he must just be new in town. He asks if he can join your group, and, wanting to be nice to the new kid, you tell him “okay.” You spend the rest of the day playing with him - games like hide and seek, tag, and red rover, until it's time for everyone to go home for dinner. Strangely, Billy doesn't seem to leave, he just stays in his treehouse. For the rest of the week, playing with Billy and his treehouse becom

e a regular fixture of your daily routine, but oddly enough, he never comes to hang out at any of your houses, and you never seem to see him anywhere else but in the woods. One day, however, he decides to invite one of your friends, Amy, to hang out with him at the treehouse alone. You think nothing of it, but after that point, you never see Billy again. It’s a couple of weeks before you and your friends see Amy again, and when you do, she appears off somehow. She seems to be spending a lot of t

ime in that treehouse. Billy has disappeared, but you and Amy and the rest of the kids keep meeting up to play together in the woods. One day Amy pulls you aside, she wants you to come meet with her tomorrow at the treehouse… alone. This is typically how an SCP-974 infestation begins - with a mysterious new kid inviting a group of friends to hang out in his crudely made treehouse. But as you might have guessed, this kid isn't a kid - he's SCP-974, a carnivorous monster that only looks like a hum

an child. It can live on small woodland animals, but its preferred prey… is kids between the ages of 6 and 12, taking the phrase 'you are what you eat' to the next level. The entity will install itself in an area with a sufficient amount of trees, in proximity to a decent population of children. It will then construct a crude treehouse to serve as its nest, and begin befriending groups of between 2 and 5 children. The creature will engage in normal outdoor games and allow its new 'friends' to co

me and go as they please, building the trust of its newfound playmates. But then, after about a week, it will select its victim. SCP-974 will single out one member of the group and invite them to the treehouse alone. Whether they accept or deny the invitation is irrelevant, because this is the point where SCP-974 will strike, subduing and then devouring that child. After doing so, the creature will disappear from the area, going into a state of hibernation for roughly 12 days. During that time,

it goes through a period of metamorphosis, transforming from whoever it looked like before into an exact likeness of the child it just consumed. SCP-974 will continue this cycle of selecting and catching prey until there are no children left in the surrounding area. While it's initially friendly to children, SCP-974 has an intense fear of any older human beings. The mere presence of a person older than 13 is enough to trigger the creature's fight or flight response, and it will run away if it se

es any adults coming. When running isn't an option, SCP-974 will resort to violence to defend itself. Despite its looks, SCP-974 is much stronger, faster, and more resistant to damage than a child, and it has been known to completely rip adults apart in situations where it felt threatened and cornered. SCP-974 does not appear to be affected by bullets or striking weapons, and the only reliable way to put down an instance seems to be with fire. When infestations are discovered in the wild, the no

rmal SCP foundation protocol is to attempt to capture the creature, but if deadly force is required, agents will set fire to the creature's nest and a portion of the surrounding area until it has been confirmed dead, before covering up the destruction as the result of a regular forest fire. The SCP foundation was able to capture one instance of SCP-974 and place it in containment, hoping that having one in captivity would provide insight into the creature's origins. It was placed in a lightly wo

oded enclosure at Zoological Reserve Site 16, where it immediately started constructing multiple treehouse nests from the plant life it found. Initially, the containment of SCP-974 involved offering the creature live human prey. Once every 3 months, a group of 4 children would be brought in, in accordance with Protocol 12. The children would be given room and board in on-site barracks, and encouraged to explore the enclosure and play with SCP-974. If 974 had not selected a victim within 5 days,

the group of children would be sent away and a new group would be introduced. This system worked for a few years, but as you might expect, the Ethics Committee had a problem with the practice of offering up live children to a deadly anomaly. Now, as of January 1st, 2015, the team at Zoological Reserve Site 16 are no longer able to evoke Protocol 12 in order to acquire children. Attempts to use another SCP - SCP-1680, a collection of clones of a missing 8-year-old boy - failed, as SCP-974 refused

to eat them. The procedures then changed to only allow small animals to be introduced into the enclosure as prey. While it might seem like this was a good idea that would stop SCP-974 from killing any more children, like a lot of seemingly good changes to containment procedures in the Foundation, this well intentioned move would ultimately have deadly consequences. SCP-974 at first seemed to behave normally despite being denied its favorite food. But then, on August 16th, 2015, while on their w

eekly sweep of the enclosure, patrol teams found that 974 had destroyed all of the treehouses it had built in its time in containment. The SCP itself was also nowhere to be found. There was something new in the enclosure though, a small oval of disturbed soil. A geological team was called in, and through ground penetrating radar, it was found that there was a humanoid figure buried there, curled up in a fetal position. This couldn't be SCP-974, could it? The figure was much too long and thin to

be anything resembling a human child. But it had to be SCP-974 - it was the only living thing in the enclosure. The scientists were intrigued, and they theorized that the SCP might have been entering a new life stage. Further scans were conducted over the next 10 days. During that time, the creature never moved from its position, though it did continue to grow. It seemed like it was absorbing nutrients from the surrounding soil. The team decided to exhume the creature to examine it. When they du

g it up, they found that SCP-974 had stretched out, now measuring 220 cm in length and weighing just 37.4 kilograms. It had no features or orifices of any kind anywhere on its body, and its now pale white skin was covered in some kind of sticky mucus that, when examined, was found to contain a previously undiscovered enzyme. The creature was alive, but barely. It wasn't breathing, and its heartbeat was extremely slow, almost to the point of being undetectable. SCP-974 was examined for an additio

nal four weeks, after which it died, and was sent for dissection. Some of the scientists and researchers at Zoological Site 16 were disappointed to hear about 974's death. As vicious and feral as the creature was, they'd developed a certain fondness for it, and its many little treehouses. Luckily, it wouldn't be too much longer until a new specimen was obtained. On October 16th, 2016, a group of no less than 7 instances of SCP-974 were discovered near a major American city. The containment team

was forced to kill 6 of the anomalies in the attempts to capture them, but one instance survived and was taken to Zoological Site 16. As was mandated, the area was burned and Foundation counterintelligence disseminated a cover story about a forest fire caused by an improperly extinguished campfire. The new SCP-974 was, like the original one, placed in the enclosure and denied human prey. Also like the first one, this 974 buried itself after being denied its preferred meals for several months. Th

e decision was made to leave the SCP underground longer than in the first instance, to see what it might become if this developmental stage wasn't interrupted. On January 25th, 2017, the creature finally dug itself free from the earth. Now designated SCP-974-A, it was far more aggressive than any instance of 974 had ever been before. As soon as it was free from the dirt, it made a beeline straight for the nearest monitoring station. It ripped the roof off and tore the 6 team members stationed th

ere to shreds in just 90 seconds. When the response team arrived 15 minutes later, only 12% of the human remains were able to be recovered. But, strangely enough, it at first seemed that one of the team had been spared. Georgia Stone, one of the monitoring team, was severely injured, but apparently in a stable condition. Disoriented, she approached the response team, begging for assistance and urging them to take her out of the enclosure. But the team was skeptical - they knew that SCP-974 could

become an exact copy of any child it consumed, so it followed that the fully-grown SCP-974-A might be able to copy adults. They asked Georgia questions in order to confirm her identity, but she was unable to answer them. Having been found out, SCP-974, still mimicking Georgia, attacked the response team. They'd been armed with flamethrowers, but unfortunately, on top of its resistance to damage, the adult form of 974 didn't seem to be afraid of, or harmed by, fire. The team was at a loss for ho

w to kill this thing, or even subdue it long enough to get out safely. SCP-974-A was tearing through the members of the team like they were made of paper. Thinking quickly, one member of the response team, a guard named Emilio, pulled out one of his standard issue Foundation hand grenades. When SCP-974-A came at him, he pulled the pin and, holding the grenade, shoved his arm into the creature's open mouth. While the explosion destroyed Emilio's arm, it didn't even break the skin of SCP-974-A. Ho

wever, it did result in serious damage to its internal organs, which finally killed it. Following its death, an autopsy was conducted, revealing enough about the creature that a new file of effective methods of extermination was able to be created. After this event, the protocols for SCP-974 containment were completely overhauled. Any instances of SCP-974-A seen in the wild are to be killed as quickly as possible. More disturbingly though, the ethics committee rescinded their previous decision,

and any instances of 974 that are brought into containment are to be provided with human prey again. Letting SCP-974 kill children might not be a very humane way of keeping it contained, but given how much more aggressive and hard to kill this SCP's adult form is, any option that stops the creature's metamorphosis from happening is likely the best option in the long run. So remember: If ever you’re out in the woods and see a crudely constructed treehouse, perhaps think twice about how innocent i

t is. There could be something hungry lurking inside… The first thing that tipped the Foundation off to SCP-087’s presence were the reports of numerous unexplained disappearances on campus. There were plenty of rumors about what might be behind them, but Field Agents suspected that the true source of the vanishing would be something beyond civilian imagination. All anyone knew for sure was that everyone who had gone missing was last seen in a certain administrative building on the university gro

unds, and that the disappearances only seemed to happen when the elevator was out. The campus was soon flooded with Foundation agents, creating a barrier around the administrative building, and the presumed habitat of SCP - 087. Nobody else could get in, and hopefully, whatever was inside couldn’t get out. One of the Foundation’s lead scientists was flown in to consult on the investigation. What could have been behind all those students disappearing? The doctor’s preliminary interviews with univ

ersity staff who worked in the building yielded some interesting details: Strange noises, like banging and even a faint, shrill crying, would be heard from a door that lead to a no longer used stairway in Hallway 3B. Staff in the building had no reason to ever take these stairs, especially considering how many of them reported a strange sense of unease when just standing outside the door. The only reason someone might take those stairs is due to…Elevator malfunctions. In that instant, the doctor

had put it all together. The staff they interviewed had their memory wiped with Amnetics – special chemicals used by the Foundation with the power to delete human memories. The Foundation only used them for staff or civilians who had confirmed contact with an SCP, and the doctor knew that they had a live one on their hands. The staircase. There was something terribly wrong with that staircase, and it was the SCP Foundation’s job to find out what – before it made anybody else disappear. This is

the story of SCP – 087, otherwise known as The Endless Staircase, and the three doomed journeys down into its murky depths. The doctor was more than eager to begin research into the staircase, and its frightening, anomalous properties. After all, you don’t claw your way up to being one of the Foundation’s key researchers without being brave, and perhaps just a little bit deranged. As was standard, once a perimeter was secured around the staircase, the good doctor requested a selection of D-Class

personnel for testing. For those not in the know, D-Class is the Foundation’s polite way of saying “cannon fodder.” The doctor was sent three D-Class prisoners for use in his investigation of SCP – 087. The first, D-8432, was – according to official documentation on the incident – a “43-year old male of average build and appearance and unremarkable psychological background.” This man once worked for the Foundation in a more official capacity, but he was given the often-deadly demotion to D-Clas

s due to a dangerous mistake handling SCP – 682 that lead to the deaths of several other agents. Now, it looked like it would be his turn. The doctor explained his mission to him: Explore the staircase, gather data, help us find out exactly what we’re dealing with here. If you come back alive, there may even be a promotion in it for you. And with that promise, D-8432 was given his load-out: a 75-watt flood lamp with battery power capable of lasting 24 hours, an audio headset, and a handheld camc

order fitted with a transmission stream. D-8432 was then pushed through the door in Hallway 3B, and out onto the staircase. According to declassified Foundation files describing the staircase, “SCP-087 is an unlit platform staircase. Stairs descend on a 38-degree angle for 13 steps before reaching a semi-circular platform of approximately 3 meters in diameter. Descent direction rotates 180 degrees at each platform. The design of SCP-087 limits subjects to a visual range of approximately 1.5 flig

hts.” But in D-8432’s mind, “unlit” really didn’t seem like the right word. He would have chosen “all-consuming darkness.” Despite carrying a powerful 75-watt lamp, D-8432 was only capable of partially lighting the platform he was standing on – and the illumination only stretched down nine of the thirteen steps to the next platform. When D-8432 observed how little help his lamp was giving him, he was instructed to shine it out of the doorway into Hallway 3B. When he did so, the light seemed to s

hine far further than it ever could in SCP – 087. Already, the beginning of anomalous activity was obvious: Everywhere else, darkness is just the absence of light. In SCP – 087, darkness eats light. It was like a tangible, black mass that only a certain amount of light could survive, while the rest just wouldn’t show. D-8432 swallowed hard over a lump in his throat. The door to Hallway 3B was closed behind him, and he was ordered to descend. Surviving to see that promotion was feeling unlikely,

but it’s not like he had a choice. If he tried to escape SCP – 087 before he was permitted, he’d be shot by SCP Foundation Field Agents on the spot. So he followed the high-ranking doctor’s orders and began to descend the steps to the next platform. Nothing about the physical makeup of the staircase itself seemed abnormal – the base and walls were a very plain, dull concrete, with a metal handrail. The only thing that seemed unique about it so far was the strange light-bending properties. That w

as, until he reached the second platform down and he heard it, a soft, echoing cry. A child’s cry. It was shrieks of panic, or maybe even pain, echoing up from below. He was asked why he had stopped, and he explained the crying sound he’d been hearing. It sounded like it was coming from far down the stairs, maybe 200 meters below him. He could just make out the words “please”, help”, and “down here” coming from the darkness. But the team outside the stairwell couldn’t hear anything, so they aske

d him to descend further. Another platform down, and they could hear it too, the unmistakable cries of a terrified child. “Please”, “help”, and “down here.” D-8432 was ordered to keep going and only stop if he noticed changes to the visual environment or in the sounds he was hearing. D-8432, knowing his life was on the line, had to keep going, and descended another twenty flights of stairs before stopping to remark that the sounds of the child hadn’t gotten any closer. They still sounded just as

far away as when he’d first heard them. He was told his observations were noted, and pressured to continue. Within half an hour, D-8432 had descended a full fifty floors, with no sign of a bottom in sight. Somehow the volume of the child’s crying had remained consistent throughout, as if it was moving away from D-8432 at the same rate he was descending. At this point, D-8432 reported that he was feeling uneasy. The doctor said that this was understandable, given the circumstances. He’d been wat

ching what little there was to see over a live video feed the entire time, and something about the truly bottomless nature of the staircase, and the ever-elusive crying, was undeniably eerie. But things were about to really take a turn for the worst. As D-8432 stepped forward towards the next set of stairs, he froze. There was something on the platform below him, barely illuminated by the light of his 75-watt bulb. It was a face. Vaguely human in size and shape, but with a few terrifying differe

nces: it had greyish skin, and no mouth, nostrils, or pupils. And yet, D-8432 could feel that this thing was making eye contact with him. He couldn’t move, trapped in this thing’s piercing gaze. In an instant, the face jerked forwards, suddenly only about a foot away from D-8432’s face – eyes staring into his own. D-8432 screamed and ran, scaling all fifty flights in an astonishing eighteen minutes, before charging out into Hallway 3B. There, he collapsed from the exhaustion and the fear of what

he’d just seen. Upon reviewing the footage, the strange face was designated “SCP-087-1.” Fascinating. It was time for a second experiment. The doctor just had to know more. The second test subject was D-9035, a 28-year-old male with a history of aggravated assaults against women. He was given the same loadout as his predecessor, except this time with an even more powerful 100-watt bulb. He was also given 100 small LED lights that had adhesive backs and a battery life of approximately 3 weeks, w

ith which they intended to permanently illuminate SCP – 087. However, despite the extra wattage of his bulb, he still couldn’t illuminate beyond the ninth step. SCP – 087 wouldn’t allow it. Having no idea of the horrors that lurked below him, he descended on the doctor’s orders, and began fixing the LEDs to walls of each platform he passed. The LED always illuminated the landing, but the light couldn’t pass the first step on either side. The flights of stairs themselves would remain in perpetual

darkness. After the second flight, D-9035 noticed the same crying D-8432 had heard and became uneasy. Just like before, as D-9035 descended, the volume of the crying didn’t seem to increase, as if for every step he descended, the source of the crying descended one, too, keeping them at a constant 200 metres apart. Still, he was ordered to continue his descent and the placing of LED’s even as his paranoia grew. When he reached the 51s floor, he observed damage to the wall and steps – sections ap

peared to have been smashed to rubble by an extreme force. As he descended past the broken step, he only felt his fear, anxiety, and paranoia grow. The doctor made a note of the fact that SCP – 087 seemed to cause instances of anxiety and terror in its occupants, even before they encountered SCP – 087 – 1. As D-9035 reached platform 89 – a full 350 meters under the initial platform – he stopped dead in his tracks, and saw something staring up at him from the platform below. That same terrible, g

rey face, with those dead, white eyes. He was encouraged to stay calm and try to get better footage of the face, but it charged for him and D-9035 ran for his life. He ascended the staircase at a staggering pace, even passing out from exhaustion and remaining motionless for 14 minutes half way. When D-9035 finally gathered the strength to get up, he scrambled back to Hallway 3B and fell into a state of catatonia. He remains unresponsive to all external stimuli to this day, just staring off into

the distance with a haunted expression. Almost like he’s still there in the hallway. The doctor wanted to conduct one more test before he ordered SCP – 087 shut off from the world forever, and it was the most terrifying of all. The final subject was D-9884, a 23-year-old woman with a history of depression and the use of excessive force. The doctor had hoped that D-9884 would travel the deepest yet, and so, he gave her the additional supplies of a backpack containing 3.75 litres of water, 15 nutr

ient bars, and 1 thermal blanket. As far as the Foundation was concerned, she was in this for the long haul. But none of them had any idea quite how right they were. When D-9884 entered SCP – 087, all the lights from the previous expedition had disappeared. Still, she was ordered to go deeper. She heard the crying of the mysterious child – if it was even a child at all – and again she was ordered to go deeper. At the 496th landing, even as D-9884 seemed to slip into a state of mortal terror, onc

e again she was ordered to go even deeper. Every moment, he was hoping to get a better look at the face of SCP – 087 – 1. And when D-9884 finally broke, and fled back upstairs, he did. The face appeared but this time it was mere inches behind her, staring directly into the camera with its blank eyes – startling even this veteran of the supernatural. The face appearing caused D-9884 to panic and flee, but instead of going back up the stairs to safety, she went deeper down the staircase in an atte

mpt to escape it. Deeper, and deeper, and deeper, until her video feed cut out. D-9884 was never seen again. In the aftermath of the tests, the SCP was classified as Euclid – it may have been dangerous, but at least it was easy to contain. The door to Hallway 3B was replaced with one made out of reinforced steel, with an electro-release lock mechanism. It has been disguised to resemble a janitorial closet consistent with the rest of the building. The lock won’t release unless a classified number

of electrical volts are applied, while the key is turned counter clockwise. And after a few inches of foam insulation were applied to the inner side of the door, staff at the building never again reported hearing strange noises. As for the fates of those lost within the endless turning flights and platforms of SCP – 087, we may never know. But one can only assume it isn’t pleasant. Every neighborhood has a house like it. You can probably picture it: That old, decrepit building on the very end o

f the street; it was there when you moved in, and it’ll still be there when you move out. All sorts of salacious rumors spread about houses like this - “it’s a drug lab”, “it’s a hideout for fugitives”, “it’s haunted” - but these are all just stories...right? Some of these houses contain real nightmares, though. Nightmares like SCP-136. There’s a grain of truth in every story, and even lies can reveal certain facts about their tellers. That’s why the SCP Foundation takes reports of so-called nei

ghborhood “haunted houses” seriously, and performs regular checks on such buildings to see if any of them are actually the real deal. Children can have wild imaginations - but when children living on the same street, years apart, with no reason to have been in contact with one another, all start reporting an eerily similar apparition in that creepy, old house. And when the stories go beyond just getting freaked out, and delve into truly life-altering, traumatic, paralytic terror… then the Founda

tion really can’t afford not to look into it. One otherwise-quiet morning in a sleepy American town, a convoy of fumigation and asbestos removal trucks pulled in, surrounding that creepy old house at the end of the street. Residents were probably thinking, “It’s about time someone tore that old death-trap down”, as people in protective suits spilled into the building. These were, of course, Foundation Field agents, who would perform a routine sweep around every room, and fully catalogue the plac

e. It looked like a pretty typical abandoned house. Peeling wallpaper, dusty, rotten furniture, all the trash and rubble that seems to appear in the absence of human life. The full sweep took little more than an hour, but towards the end of the observation period, Agent Sims - a field agent posted in the former children’s bedroom - began acting strangely. He posed a question over the team’s shared radio frequency. “Hey, can anyone else hear that laughter?” Confused, the other people on the team

responded that no, they could not hear any laughter. A few other agents came to check on the room, but they didn’t hear any laughter in there either. Even though Agent Sims appeared visibly uncomfortable, there was no identifiable source for this discomfort. The other agents left him so they could continue investigating the rest of the house. Other than one agent’s fraying nerves, there didn’t appear to actually be anything anomalous about the house. Then Agent Sims screamed, and jumped out of t

he second story window of the house, sailing down towards the ground and fracturing his spine on impact. What could have made him do that? We’re talking about an SCP Foundation field agent here - a highly-trained individual, hand-picked by the Foundation, to observe and track terrifying and potentially deadly anomalies out in the field. What could he possibly have seen in that decrepit old house that would lead him to believe leaping to his death was a preferable alternative to facing it? This w

as a question that the Foundation absolutely had to get an answer to. They intensified their search on the child’s bedroom as the body of Agent Sims was carted away. That’s when they found the object that they would later deem as SCP-136-1, a little rag doll made of old cloth. The kind of thing you could easily imagine getting carted around by some ragamuffin child at the turn of the last century. This was the only object of interest in the entire room, so it was tagged, bagged, and taken back t

o the nearest Foundation containment facility for further testing. They had no idea what they were about to unleash. When the doll was first brought into its containment chamber, one particular scientist on the research team - Dr. Meyers, a headstrong young researcher freshly farmed from a prestigious university - took a morbid interest in the doll. Something about it, even in the absence of readily apparent anomalous effects, made her feel oddly uncomfortable. The doll seemed to carry a vague a

ura of doom. Was this what made Agent Sims act the way he had? Or was this only the beginning? A D-Class was brought in for the first wave of testing. The unfortunate former-arsonist was forced to simply stand around in the room with the doll and wait until something interesting happened, and for twenty minutes, no anomalous activity was reported. Then, the D-Class began frantically looking around the room, like a frightened animal. Dr. Meyers, who had been observing the test, radioed in and ask

ed what was happening. “It’s this laughter. This weird, freaky laughter, like some crazy lady is in here. I can’t see her, though. Can any of you see her? Can any of you hear that?” They couldn’t see or hear anything. According to all their monitors, it was just a lonely D-Class, standing around in an otherwise empty room with nothing but the ragdoll. Five minutes after the D-Class reported hearing the eerie laughter, he collapsed to the ground, shrieking like a maniac and crawling away from som

ething he couldn’t see. He was emitting the desperate screams of a man who truly believed something was about to take his life, but nothing was there. He backed into the corner of the room, gibbering incoherently and scratching desperately at the walls until his fingernails were ripping off, leaving bloody traces behind. In the end, a pair of guards entered the chamber and had to drag him out. The D-Class had urinated in fear, and seemed to have temporarily lost the use of his legs from sheer pa

nic. He was out of commission for several hours afterwards, breaking into on-and-off screaming fits whenever someone approached him. Upon reviewing the footage of the experiment, Dr. Meyers noticed something strange: The moment that the D-Class had begun screaming, the doll had disappeared from the room. It only rematerialized in its previous position when the D-Class was finally dragged from the room. Eventually, the D-Class became lucid enough to be properly interviewed about his experience. H

e said that after first hearing the laughter, a sense of overpowering dread had begun building within him. Five minutes later, that was when the entity - later dubbed SCP-136-2 - first appeared. The vision that appeared to him could generously be described as human, but it was a little too tall to really qualify. The monster appeared to be female, but like a freakish, carnival-house-of-mirrors exaggeration of what one thinks of being female - long, flowing hair, large breasts, and a Barbie-Doll-

Thin waist. She looked like the nightmarish doodle of a hormonal teen boy come to life, with a face twisted into a rictus grin somewhere between arousal and agony, showing way too many teeth. The creature was nude, and posed provocatively, but it was anything but appealing. The D-Class reported that just seeing it was the most frightening experience of his life… and then it started moving. It was slowly floating through the air towards him like a vengeful ghost, that painful smile getting wider

as it drew closer to him. The D-Class could only describe the whole experience as feeling like death itself was coming towards him. When the creature was finally looming over him as he cowered in the corner, it opened its tooth-lined jaws and let out a long, piercing shriek, before disappearing. In the following weeks, the D-Class was kept for testing. He experienced severe night terrors every single night afterwards - all of them related to SCP-136. Further tests looked into the doll itself, bu

t there didn’t seem to be anything anomalous about its construction. It appeared to be made from the kind of plain, non-anomalous materials you’d expect from any doll of this variety. Though occasionally, the exact materials would change, even between observers. In addition to the most common “cloth” variety, witnesses have reported the doll being made of clay, wood, and metal, with 10% viewing the doll as male, with the rest all agreeing that the doll is female. The Foundation conducted a batte

ry of tests on the doll, just to make sure that the results were largely consistent across all subjects. Over 25 different subjects were tested on SCP-136, all reporting roughly the same results: Laughter after twenty minutes of observation, a few minutes of silence, and then - according to subject testimonials - the appearance of the same grinning, naked apparition, inducing a state of truly primal terror in its victims. Interestingly, not all of the subjects were D-Classes: Some were volunteer

ing scientists who were aware of the potential effects, but let their morbid curiosity get the better of them, thinking they would be prepared to face whatever terrifying vision would manifest from the doll. But in every case, they were reduced to the same screaming, traumatized wrecks. But when a Foundation researcher named Dr. Simon, the 25th subject of the SCP-136 experiments, volunteered for testing, things took an even more horrifying turn. During the testing period, Dr. Simon had the unusu

al experience of not actually seeing the SCP-136-2 entity. After being told how terrifying it was by coworkers, he was a little disappointed that he didn’t get to share their fears. Later that day he went to get himself a warm cup of coffee from the site’s employee break room. His coworkers became concerned when his coffee mug dropped to the ground and shattered, as Dr. Simon pointed into a nearby empty hallway and began screaming. He claimed that he could see her floating down the hallway towar

ds him, her face twisted into that menacing grin. As none of the other scientists could see what Simon was seeing, they surrounded him and attempted to calm him, assuming that he was perhaps the victim of some kind of sudden, psychotic break. But minutes later, every scientist in the break room collapsed and fell unconscious. Not long after, they all began to wake back up...Except Dr. Simon. He had fallen into a coma, and died while still on life support three days later. It was the first report

of SCP-136 causing a death since Agent Sims’ unfortunate fall. Dr. Meyers immediately requested that SCP-136 be reclassified from Euclid to Keter Class so more resources could be allocated for its containment. Administration denied any changes to the containment procedures of SCP-136, frustrating Dr. Meyers, but little did she know that it was because site administration had ulterior motives for SCP-136. No matter who they were, whether they were the hardened killers of D-Class, the trained sol

diers of the Foundation field agent corps, or jaded scientists who see any number of horrors each week as part of their normal jobs, SCP-136 had the unique ability to reduce its victims to terrified wrecks. In a move that feels decidedly more in line with the Chaos Insurgency, site administration had started using SCP-136 to assist in enhanced interrogation with detained people of interest. Even the toughest nuts to crack soon became very talkative after the appearance of SCP-136-2 traumatized t

hem for life. Essentially, the administrators were making a kind of deal with the devil: Allowing SCP-136 more free reign, in exchange for them gathering valuable intel from these victims. But as always, the problem with making deals with the devil is that the devil is always going to collect his due in the end. Dr. Meyers’ warnings would continue to fall upon deaf ears though, even as the creature’s power seemed to grow. Tests on D-Classes continued, with the entity traumatizing a whole group a

t once during one of these experiments. However, when Dr. Meyers herself, along with a few agents, entered the testing chamber to drag out their twitching bodies, they all fell unconscious. When Dr. Meyers woke back up, three of the D-Classes had fallen into comas like Dr. Simon, and died shortly after. Dr. Meyers pleaded with the administration to terminate the doll, but her requests were denied. It was proving to be too valuable in its various interrogations. And besides, nobody was sure if th

e doll even could be terminated. Whenever it was damaged, it simply disappeared and reappeared within a one meter radius. The only thing that hadn’t been tried was full vaporization, which Dr. Meyers’ superiors refused to sign off on. SCP-136 was here to stay. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Dr. Meyers herself. After one more unfortunate testing incident where a D-Class disappeared entirely in what seemed to be clear evidence of SCP-136’s growing power, Dr. Meyers implored site adm

inistration to reclassify the anomaly and slate it for termination. It was getting more powerful, more unstable, and more dangerous. But rather than terminate the anomalous ragdoll, in the end all they did was remove Dr. Meyers from the SCP-136 case. With her gone, there was one less thing for them to worry about as they gave more and more victims to SCP-136, using its dark powers to torture detained people of interest into telling them everything they wanted to know. But with the entity seeming

to grow more powerful with every victim, it seems very likely that Dr. Meyers’ worst fears will come true, and one day those controlling the terrifying anomaly will find that they’re the ones hearing a strange, evil laughter coming from nowhere at all. It was a beautiful September day, but Shaun Taylor was trapped in his car in one of the worst cases of gridlock he had ever seen. He tried to look on the bright side though, and while he was stuck in an unmoving car, at least he had a pleasant vi

ew of the wide, shimmering lake just off the road next to him. He was admiring the scene when tiny drops of rain started landing on his windshield. That’s funny, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky a moment ago. There was something off about the rain though. It looked dirty, a rusty red color. Was that… blood? He didn’t have time to think about it, because just then a thick, dense mist began to roll over the lake. A fog of blood. Just off the side of the road, he could see a huge silhouette rising o

ut of the water. Is that an old submarine? What Shaun didn’t know was that he was about to have an encounter with SCP - 1861, also known as The HMS Wintersheimer - a ghostly submarine with strange and terrifying effects. Shaun and the other drivers stuck in traffic that day were far from the first people to have a dangerous brush with this legendary vessel - according to SCP Foundation records, the HMS Wintersheimer has been appearing since as early as 1916. The first recorded incident occurred

in the British seaside town of Innsmouth-On-Sea. You won’t find this town on any maps, or in the history books, and you’re about to find out why. The 500-person population of the town, which had already reduced by the wartime draft into the currently-raging Great World War, awoke to red skies on February 6th, 1916. Citizens left their homes to investigate, only to find their entire town had been enveloped in a thick, red mist. The swelling, crimson clouds up ahead began to rain, showering the to

wn in a hail of viscous, red goop. Anyone unlucky enough to taste it would say that this strange rain was a dreadful mix of salt and copper. This was because, as the Foundation would later determine, the rain and fog was a disgusting combination of saltwater, human blood, and human cerebrospinal fluid. But the real threat was rising, just beyond the beach. Technically speaking, the HMS Wintersheimer vessel is designated as SCP - 1861 - A. It appears to be a World War One-era British B-Class Subm

arine, designed by Vickers for the Royal Navy in 1904. By 1916, this particular type of boat was already on its way to being obsolete, and were largely deployed in Malta, far from the active fronts. So one of these vessels appearing on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of English coastline should have been a clue that something was terribly wrong - but the poor residents of Innsmouth-On-Sea didn’t know the half of it. Soon, figures in what appeared to be archaic diving gear began emerging from t

he Wintersheimer, and made their way into the township. They seemed terrified, running up to and frantically screaming at any local they could find. “Please listen to me, something terrible is about to happen here. We need you to come with us or you’re all going to die. You must believe us!” The locals were frightened by what they heard. They’d been listening to news reports of the Great War unfolding across the globe for two years now. Had it finally come to them? They pictured shells raining d

own from the sky, decimating their defenseless little town in a rain of fire. The Navy must have been brought in to save them before the German bombardment began. While some took more convincing than others, the men in diving suits - known as SCP - 1861 - B - eventually managed to persuade the entire town to join them, and lead the townspeople down to the water. One by one, they were all boarded onto the submarine. Hundreds of them. Many couldn’t believe their eyes as they watched scores of peop

le disappear in front of them into the dark bowels of the Wintersheimer. Where were they all going? How would they all fit in there? But it was too late for any of them to back out now. The vessel submerged once more, and everyone was gone. The entire population of Innsmouth-On-Sea had disappeared in a rain and fog of blood, never to be seen again. The Foundation wiped all records of the town from existence and delivered appropriate amnestic treatment to anyone who still mentioned or remembered

Innsmouth-On-Sea. The fate of those who board the HMS Wintersheimer is always the same - vanished from the face of the earth, explained away by the Foundation as “accidental death by extreme weather event.” There have been hundreds of documented sightings of SCP - 1861, and the anomalous weather event can occur near any body of water wide enough to accommodate SCP-1861-A’s comms tower and topmost platform. Depth does not seem to be any hindrance to the submarine appearing and it can even manifes

t in water that’s just a few inches deep. As Shaun and the other unfortunate victims of the rush hour traffic were being showered in thick, red droplets from above, a crimson mist rolled in between the cars. Shaun had heard of so-called freak weather events before - like raining frogs and fish - but this was something different, and it frightened him. He could see now that the silhouette rising from the lake really was an old submarine, and he watched as a legion of mysterious figures disembarke

d from the vessel and began spilling onto the road. The men in ancient-looking diving suits walked among the cars and one of them approached Shaun’s car. He began tapping frantically on the window and Shaun could tell he was yelling something. Shaun was scared and more, but more than anything else, he was confused. Against his better judgement, he rolled down the window, just a crack, to hear what the man was saying. His British accented voice muted by the diving suit, the man frantically told h

im “Sir! Please listen to me! I’m Lieutenant Samuel Ramsey of the HMS Wintersheimer. We're evacuating the area. Please, you've got to come with me. You're in danger out here.” “HMS?” Shaun thought, “isn’t that what they call British ships? What was a British submarine doing in the middle of a lake in the United States?” Through his windshield, Shaun could already see other men in diving suits leading people from the cars out towards the submarine. Something had to be going on here. Something big

. Lieutenant Ramsey was still banging away at the glass of Shaun’s window, becoming increasingly agitated. “Sir, if you won’t comply with my orders, I’m within my rights to take you by force - for your own safety.” Shaun could feel the fear setting in but he didn’t know what else to do. He turned off the car and took off his seatbelt. He was just about to open the door when there was a tap on the passenger side window of his car. It was a soldier in what looked to be advanced tactical gear. Ther

e were several soldiers directing cars to drive on the shoulder to get around the mess of stopped automobiles. Shaun looked to his left and the man in the diving suit was gone. The soldier tapped again and Shaun didn’t need to be told twice. He followed his directions and drove around the traffic jam and out of the mist. A half mile down the road, Shaun was stopped by another group of soldiers and given an amnestic. He drove away never knowing how close he had come to vanishing in the bowels of

SCP-1861-A. Shaun was lucky that one of the SCP Foundation’s Mobile Task Forces had taken over the situation, but they were too late to help those who had already complied with SCP - 1861 - B’s orders and boarded the Wintersheimer. The Task Force made it their business to save whoever they could, but that wasn’t their only directive: The Foundation had recorded a huge number of SCP - 1861 instances since 1916, and now, they were finally going to figure out what was going on inside. The Foundatio

n had already discovered that those taken onto the Wintersheimer don’t simply disappear - once on board the submarine they are forced into a diving suit of their own, which transforms them into new instances of SCP - 1861 - B. Upon realizing this, Foundation scientists devised an ingenious plot. Six months before this latest instance of 1861, the Foundation dispatched two members of D-Class personnel who were familiar with one another into the red mist. One was instructed not to interact with SC

P - 1861 - B, while the other, named Sal, was ordered to enter the submarine. His mission was to report back all findings to Foundation researcher Dr. Klutch during the next 1861 event. The D-Class who remained on shore was brought in once more by the Mobile Task Force during the September event that Shaun witnessed. They checked each diving suit-wearing anomaly until they heard a familiar voice, muffled by the mask: It was Sal, and he’d been transformed into an instance of SCP - 1861 - B. The h

uman D-Class, receiving questions from Dr. Klutch via a remote broadcast, commenced the interview of his former friend. It is from this vital interview that much of the Foundation’s knowledge of the mysterious HMS Wintersheimer is drawn. According to Sal, the interior of the Wintersheimer - which is a long, narrow, passageway - is a spatial anomaly that seems to stretch on forever. This explains how vast numbers of people, like the entire population of Innsmouth-On-Sea, can disappear into the su

bmarine at once. Sal reported that, about an hour after entering the vessel, the hatch closed and the interior began rapidly filling with water as the submarine descended.Prisoners of the Wintersheimer were faced with two choices: Suit up… or drown. Few chose the latter option, and as soon as the suit was on, the transformation had begun. As soon as everyone was suited up and the submarine had fully descended, causing the 1861 weather event to dissipate on earth, the Wintersheimer had effectivel

y entered an alternate dimension. The airlock opened, and the new recruits were instructed to step outside and take a look around. The Wintersheimer veterans informed the new sailors that everyone on land was likely already dead by this point. When Sal first exited the submarine, he commented on everything around him looking eerily similar to how it’d looked on land before the mist descended. But with one key difference: It seemed as though everything was underwater. Well, not quite that: It was

almost as though everything was water. Like the world had taken on a kind of flowing, liquid state. Sal and the others existed in this otherworldly land of living water for six months, and as the months passed, things only got stranger. They found that they neither needed to eat nor sleep. According to Sal, all they did was breathe - and passed the time by exploring and talking to one another. Anyone who attempted to take off their suit would dissolve and diffuse into the same liquid that surro

unded them. Dr. Klutch asked Sal about the other inhabitants of this alien realm and this was when things got truly disturbing. There were dead humans and animals floating all over the place - missing their eyes, as though they’d been scooped out, and missing their mouths, as though they’d been bitten out of their face by some kind of huge predator. Their empty eye sockets bled constantly, and Sal theorized that this may have something to do with the anomalous blood mists of SCP - 1861. When ask

ed to provide more information on why all the corpses were mutilated in this way, Sal said that one of his superiors on the Wintersheimer told him “the watcher of eyes and biter of teeth deemed them worthy.” Whatever this mysterious being was, it seemed to be a powerful figure within 1861’s water world, and Sal felt lucky that he had never had a direct run-in with the creature himself. For his final request, Dr. Klutch asked Sal to attempt to remove his suit. The Foundation had learned in previo

us instances of 1861 that the diving suits have anomalous durability, and it was impossible for anyone other than the wearer to remove them - hence why the Foundation could never deal with 1861-B by using brute force. Naturally, Klutch was interested in finding out what was going on underneath. Sal expressed fear and anxiety at first, wondering if after all he’d been through whether he could even be considered human anymore. Eventually, he was convinced to remove the suit, and his worst fears we

re confirmed. The second Sal removed his helmet, gallons of seawater poured out and the now empty suit collapsed to the ground. Sal’s body was ever found - only some teeth and a pair of eyes were recovered. The eyes were later confirmed as belonging to a young girl, and the teeth were identified as having come from European red deer. And so the dark mystery of the HMS Wintersheimer continues. Because of the unpredictable nature of its appearances, and the resulting difficulty of containing it, t

he Wintersheimer has earned a Keter Classification. The only containment procedure currently employed by the SCP Foundation is for Mobile Task Forces to try and intercept the submarine when appearances are reported, and hopefully prevent or at least reduce the kidnapping of civilians. With so many questions left unanswered. All we can say for certain is that if a red mist ever descends on you and a stranger in a diving suit tells you that you’re in grave danger - he’s absolutely right. If you ha

ve ever taken a trip to Suntop Mountain in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington State, then you may have come across an old wooden structure - The Suntop Fire Lookout. Built in the early 1930s, the building was used by the US Forest Service to keep watch for any fires in the nearby woodland. At one point, Suntop Fire Lookout would have been manned 365 days a year, complete with a bed for staff who were stationed there on rotation. The single story lookout house overlooks the sc

enic valleys of the White River and Huckleberry Creek, but you’re not here for an informative tourist guide. You probably don’t care about the frankly fascinating history of the lookout and how it was used as part of the Aircraft Warning Service during World War 2, watching for enemy planes. No, you’re here because something much darker lurks inside the Suntop Fire Lookout. And even though it appears to be a simple, one-story-tall wooden structure, it certainly is not short on space. SCP-3333 re

fers to an anomaly that the Foundation discovered inside the Suntop Fire Lookout house. The building’s interior is a single, square room, measuring fourteen feet by fourteen feet, with large windows on all four sides. When standing inside Suntop Fire Lookout, looking up at the wooden ceiling, one will immediately notice a trapdoor. No big deal, right? A lot of places have a ceiling entrance to a small crawl space, there is probably nothing behind the trapdoor, apart from a dusty, old attic. Ther

e’s a latch that maybe once had a padlock there, but not anymore. Opening the trapdoor will reveal a collapsible ladder. Should anyone be brave, or indeed foolish enough, to begin to climb, then they’ll soon find themselves right back where they started, inside Suntop Fire Lookout. Or so it will seem. The thing about being in a place like the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest that surrounds Suntop Fire Lookout is that woodland areas are teeming with life. Not just plants and trees, but bird

s and other animals of the forest. You can never truly be alone in a setting like that, there is always life everywhere around you. So, when you ascend the ladder, and climb out right back into the Suntop Fire Lookout, that is the first, most noticeable difference you will find. It may take a while at first, but the nagging absence of something usually so abundant in a forest will eventually become obvious. It’s quiet, far too quiet. No birdsong, or the sound of distant calls from woodland critt

ers. Just silence, all around. Anyone ascending the ladder will find themselves in a copy of Suntop Fire Lookout’s interior, one story higher than the ground level of the small wooden building, with the stairs leading up to the front door getting taller each time to reach up to the higher and higher building. Now, you know the SCP Foundation and the types of bizarre, inter dimensional anomalies they’re used to dealing with. Perhaps SCP-3333 is a mirror dimension, or a plane of existence where so

und doesn’t travel. It certainly seems to be identical to the Suntop Fire Lookout, save for the lack of any organic life outside. Of course, it’s what you’ll find living inside SCP-3333 that you may want to worry about. Climbing higher, up the next ladder and through the next trapdoor, every time with the same result. You appear at another copy of Suntop Fire Lookout, each one higher up than the last. What first seemed to be an innocuous, unassuming wooden building is now an endless ascension up

into the heavens, towards the unknown in silence, without a shred of plant or animal life outside. As you climb, perhaps you start to think how much higher these copies go. This might even be the biblical Jacob’s Ladder, connecting Heaven and Earth. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? If you were gradually climbing your way up to paradise, it might make it worth the trip. But SCP-3333 is nothing that pleasant. You wouldn’t be the first to attempt this long climb. When the SCP Foundation first disc

overed SCP-3333, a research detail set up an onsite base camp to examine this spatial anomaly. Their first exploration involved sending a member of D-class personnel, designated D-4f68a, up the ladder. His D-number is a hexadecimal code that, when translated to text, reads ‘Oh’, so we’ll call him that for brevity’s sake. During the first day’s exploration, Oh was able to climb 184 iterations of SCP-3333, communicating with head researcher Doctor Williams below. On the second day, Oh could see a

pair of figures standing motionless on a nearby ridge, but the pair could not be seen by Doctor Williams and the other researchers at the base camp. Both figures disappeared shortly after Oh spotted them with the camera he had been issued, and he felt uneasy, almost certain that he saw them point at him. The next day, at the 345th copy of Suntop Fire Lookout, Oh’s behavior started to noticeably change. Previously, he had been anxious about the long climb, and hadn’t questioned directions given t

o him by Doctor Williams. Now, he seemed to speak more casually, resisting instructions, asking Williams to climb back down and even calling her ‘Doc’ instead of ‘Doctor’. Oh also reported seeing writing on the walls, but there was no evidence of this on his camera. It appeared that something had started to affect him. It was when Oh reached level 527 that things seemed to change more dramatically. Rather than SCP-3333 continuing upwards, the copies of Suntop Fire Lookout no longer had a trapdoo

r or ladder. They seemed to be arranged side by side, in a grid-like pattern. Stepping out of the main doorway, Oh remarked on the lack of sunlight, and a walkway that connected directly to the front door of the next iteration of SCP-3333. Oh complained about the lack of natural light, and again requested to be allowed back down. Doctor Williams instructed Oh to use the flashlights he was provided, but they wouldn’t activate and their spare batteries had vanished. Oh then noticed a sudden moveme

nt, and just then his microphone and camera feed went dead, almost as if someone had turned them off. It appeared that SCP-3333 had something else lurking up there. Doctor Williams oversaw the second expedition into SCP-3333. This time members of Mobile Task Force Mod-0, also known by the codename “Characteristic Eigenspaces”, were sent up the ladder. Their ascent through the various copies of Suntop Fire Lookout were not as eventful as Oh’s, with no signs of mysterious figures, or anxious feeli

ngs that Oh seemed to feel as he climbed. When they reached level 527, where the copies of the lookout stop progressing upwards and spread out in a pattern instead, their lights and equipment all seemed to be in working order. However, as the MTF team split up, one by one they encountered some sort of anomaly, or an effect of SCP-3333 that caused each of them to vanish into the dark. Either that, or something took them. These MTF units reappeared confused, and Mod-5, the team’s leader, Graham Pu

rcell, issued an order to retreat and the entire squad went back down the ladders for several days until they finally reached the base camp again. The members of Mod-0 were adamant they did not wish to climb SCP-3333 again, but Doctor Williams was beginning to understand more of the anomaly’s effects. It appeared to cause abrupt changes to people’s personalities, along with some sort of phenomenon that caused things to appear and disappear the higher one climbed. Assuming these were the results

of a memetic effect, Doctor Williams dispatched a ‘counter memetics specialist’ for the next expedition. This specialist was a blind, deaf, and mute woman known as Annette or the ‘Nullwalker’, who communicated via a signaling system embedded in her hand, but was otherwise immune to any memetic influences. Observed by Doctor Williams and Graham Purcell at base camp, Annette made her way to the top of SCP-3333, reporting that she was aware of someone watching her from outside the copies of Suntop

Fire Lookout. On her body camera, a flicker of motion occurred, something looking through the windows that ducked out of frame when the camera passed in its direction. At the apex of SCP-3333, Annette kept her flashlight off, but reported that she could detect blood, following it to what she assumed was a body. Sounds of movement surrounded her, and as Annette switched on her flashlight, Williams and Purcell saw that it wasn’t a body in front of her. Instead, it was a pile of rotting organs, dec

omposing muscles and discarded bones. And among the pile was a metal dog tag, that read ‘MTF Mod-5: Graham Purcell’; the same man who was sitting next to Doctor Williams at base camp. Well, the same man on the outside at least. The explanation for everything going on inside SCP-3333, all these strange occurrences and disappearances, finally came in a video sent from Doctor Williams’ cell phone. In it, a panicked Williams, covered in blood, was fleeing from something at the top of the recursive s

tack of SCP-3333. There was no memetic effect at the apex of the Suntop Fire Lookout copies. Nothing was causing the people that the Foundation sent up to act unlike themselves. They simply weren’t themselves anymore. According to her frantic video, Doctor Williams had discovered the truth about what else was hiding within SCP-3333. With just the right amount of vagueness and intrigue, the research team had been drawn in. It was as if they’d been lured in by the lights of an anglerfish, realizin

g their grim fate only too late. The D-class ‘Oh’, the MTF team, even Annette had been replaced. An unknown group of entities on the top level of SCP-3333 had been carefully observing them, waiting until they would not be seen to slip in and switch places. These entities had been creating imagined anomalous effects, like Oh seeing figures that weren’t really there, as a way of luring more bodies further up the stack. They wanted the Foundation to keep sending expeditions into SCP-3333, to keep t

hem coming back. The mass of organs, musculature, and bones that Annette had stumbled across, revealing the ruse, had once belonged to Graham Purcell, before he was replaced. You see, the entities residing in SCP-3333 weren’t just copying people. They weren’t possessing them or mind-controlling them, or even shape shifting to steal a person’s likeness. They were taking skin. These creatures hollowed out Graham, Oh, Annette and the MTF team, pulling out their innards and crawling their way inside

, filling these fleshy puppets and leaving their internal organs to rot. These hollowed out people become vessels for the entities of SCP-3333 to hide in. The whole thing had been a trap, intentionally exploiting human weaknesses, intrigue, unanswered questions. You know what they say about curiosity, and these entities used it to bring more potential vessels to the top of SCP-3333. They pretended to be the people who they had replaced, imitating them so the Foundation would send more personnel

to explore the tower, increasing their supply of skins. Graham’s dog tag had revealed the deception, and Doctor Williams had escaped up SCP-3333. The members of the research team that had already been replaced were hot on her tail, determined to catch and hollow her out too, and by the end of her video, they had succeeded. A month later though, a team delivering supplies realized what had happened and the trapdoor was sealed. Suntop Fire Lookout was put under permanent guard, but at least fifty

personnel were killed or replaced by one of the entities. A new Mobile Task Force, Lamda-1 “Maxwell’s Demons” was created to hunt down and neutralize any of the entities that escaped SCP-3333, but it’s still unknown how many left the tower and are still out there somewhere, waiting to use someone’s curiosity about the strange and unknown against them. Jay and Michael were a pair of urban exploration YouTubers looking for their big break. You might remember their video exploring the dead mall on

the outskirts of your town, or the supposedly “haunted” 1950s insane asylum out in the styx, but you certainly won’t find these videos anywhere online. After The Incident at SCP - 823, all of their content was scrubbed away from even the most comprehensive internet archives. “Why?” you ask. Because these unfortunate urban explorers decided that their big break would be exploring a certain abandoned theme park. And it would be one of the last decisions they ever made. Michael and Jay had heard ru

mors about the theme park. Its name was lost to time, as was the date of its opening and closing, and the reason it was even abandoned in the first place. Even some of the most hardcore urban explorers didn’t dare to tread there. Something about it, a good friend had once told Jay, just didn’t feel right. Sometimes, if you dare to venture into the forest near the theme park at night, you can still hear music. The jolly, piping tunes of rides and carnival stands still beckoning. As if to say, “We

’re still here. Come and play.” Of course, none of this frightened Jay and Michael. They could already smell the sponsorships from headlamp and compact camera companies. No amount of anxiety would stop them from making their doomed trip to the so-called “Carnival of Horrors.” It’s a terrible shame - if they’d listened to the stories of this place about how unnatural and evil it could be...They might still be alive today. Like all the best urban explorers, they arrived at the woods near the aband

oned theme park in the dead of night. They ignored the signs warning them about everything from structural instability, to dangerous wild animals, to asbestos. Nothing would keep them out. Nothing. They reached the abandoned theme park not long after, though it was a mere shell of its former self. During the several decades of abandonment, nature had reclaimed it. The ferris wheel was covered in overgrown ivy and the carnival stands were blanketed with mold. As the duo swept through the grounds

with their flashlights and cameras, they saw a faded sign that bore the words “Thriller Chiller” - next to the rusty skeleton of what had once been the park’s most popular roller coaster. They also took their time to marvel at the exceptionally creepy-looking Tunnel of Love, the broken down House of Mirrors, and a huge, grinning statue of the park’s former mascot, Happy Hippo. This theme park was like something out of a nightmare, which, naturally, made it potential video gold. But as the excite

d duo wandered further into the park, they couldn’t help but notice the quiet, tinny carnival music. Music that seemed to be drawing them closer. Michael asked Jay if he could hear the strange, impossible music, and felt a chill creep in when he answered that he did. Could all of the stories be true? They were lost in thought, but their legs kept moving. They were getting closer to something now. They could feel a presence. And was that music getting louder? An instant later, though, another sou

nd cut through the silence - BANG! BANG! It echoed out through the still night air. Birds flew from their perches in the trees. Jay and Michael both fell to the ground, dead, their heads taken off by the fifty caliber rounds of a highly-trained Mobile Task Force Sniper on the payroll of the SCP Foundation. Their recording equipment, along with their bodies, were taken and destroyed. Any trace of them was scrubbed from the internet. It may seem a little harsh, but a bullet to the head is a much k

inder fate than what would have awaited these two if they’d kept walking. That’s because the Carnival of Horrors is no dark fairytale. The rumors are all true, and something really is waiting in the dark. That’s why this abandoned theme park is known to the SCP Foundation as SCP - 823, a Euclid class anomaly with a violent history. What’s even more unnerving is that the researchers studying 823 have repeatedly implored the O5 Council to increase the park’s classification to Keter and allocate mo

re resources for containment, only to be denied. But after you’ve heard about the horrors that unfolded there, and the danger it poses, you’ll probably take the researchers’ side. The park is divided into two different zones: The Yellow Zone and the Red Zone. There are to be at least six members of Foundation personnel present in the Yellow Zone at all times to ensure that no civilians wander in. Our two urban explorers earned themselves a death sentence not just by wandering into the Yellow Zon

e, but passing dangerously close to the Red Zone. This is the true epicenter of the park’s dangerous, anomalous activity. It’s a place so hazardous that anyone entering, whether they’re a civilian or a member of Foundation staff, is to be executed at a distance by sniper fire without hesitation. Once upon a time, though nobody knows exactly when, there was a theme park that seemed no different to any other. Eager children and thrill-seeking teens arrived by the busload, ready to stuff their face

s with cotton candy and corn dogs, and then reverse the process on a vast array of rollercoasters. But even then during these good times, there was something dark lurking behind the cheerful facade. Little by little everyone, visitors and employees alike, started falling victim to strange and horrific accidents around the park. Of course, when it comes to theme parks, accidents come with the territory, but none like this. Here are just a handful of the horrific and mysterious deaths that occurre

d while the park was open. So strap in, because just like a roller coaster, this isn’t for the faint of heart. A pair of young lovebirds decided they wanted to enjoy the romance of the Tunnel of Love. The two sat in a swan-shaped boat as they were ferried through darkened passageways. Anyone would assume that they were having a great time, but at some point, terrible shrieks of pain and fear began to echo through the ride. Attendants, confused and terrified, stopped the ride and found that the s

creaming persisted. Just some stupid teens playing a prank, they figured, and started the ride again. But when the swan-shaped boat finally exited the Tunnel of Love, the park employees were greeted to a horrifying sight: The two teens, dead, their bodies somehow fused together at multiple points. Another unlucky customer met a gruesome fate inside the House of Mirrors. They entered, but while inside, they were stalked by a mysterious, carnivorous, humanoid entity known as Subject 79. The custom

er was pursued and eventually caught by Subject 79, and brutally dismembered. Some parts of the body were fused to the House of Mirrors’ interior while others - like the right arm - were never found. This customer actually survived their ordeal - and whether that’s a happy ending is up to you. But it wasn’t just the customers at the park who were in danger. A 23-year-old park employee working a summer job collapsed while entertaining children dressed as the park’s cheerful mascot, Happy Hippo. I

t wasn’t uncommon for people to get overheated and collapse in the heavy suits on hot days, but one thing was different here: He was screaming, crying, and trying desperately to remove his mask. People rushed to help, but nobody could get the suit off, and he was declared dead soon after. When he was eventually cut out of the suit, coroners found that the employee had choked to death. His mouth, trachea, and lungs were filled with a fibrous substance later determined to be identical to the stuff

ing of his costume. An intense roller coaster known as the Thriller Chiller was a magnet for horrific accidents, which became more violent and intense over time. The first accident seemed like a typical theme park tragedy - A safety harness failed dropping a rider fifteen feet during an inverted loop. They landed on the track below, breaking their neck and skull, causing instant death. While this was a tragedy, it wasn’t exactly anomalous. But the next major accident on the ride was an entirely

different story. This time, fifteen people met with disaster while riding the Thriller Chiller roller coaster. Starting from the front and moving back one car at a time, each group of riders was decapitated by blunt force trauma. A new pair of decapitations appeared to happen at every turn and loop on the ride. Forensic scientists still have no idea how this could have possibly occurred. Despite all of these disasters, the park was only finally abandoned after a day known as “Bloody Sunday”, whe

n the anomalous powers of the location reached a twenty year peak. It’s believed that 231 people were killed during the carnage of that day, and another seven were horribly maimed. The SCP Foundation contained the Carnival of Horrors not long after, but the mysterious deaths didn’t even end there. Foundation Mobile Task Force Rho-71, also known as the Origami Toads, were sent in to assess containment procedures and discover the source of all the anomalous deaths. They were unsuccessful though, a

nd instead they merely added to the list, in exceptionally horrifying ways. One agent was found dead, surrounded by empty grenades and bullet casings. It appeared he’d removed the explosive propellant from all of his ballistics and consumed it, dying in the process. Another was found with his jaw broken, having apparently pulled out and inhaled his own teeth, and dying of the resulting internal damage. The commander got the worst fate of all - so horrifying, in fact, that we can’t tell you the f

ull details. All you need to know is that something was shoved into his brain that really didn’t belong there. The Foundation considered having the entire park destroyed with a massive airstrike, courtesy of the Mobile Task Force Nu-7, aka Hammer Down. However, the O5 Council denied this request, on the basis that the park was too close to populated land, they’d have no plausible cover story for the bombing, and they don’t even really know if blowing up the park would prevent anomalous activity

from occurring. The Carnival of Horrors is here to stay, folks, the Foundation just hopes to keep it from getting new visitors. So then back to why the researchers want this place upgraded to Keter. After all, these classifications aren’t about how dangerous an anomaly is - they’re about how difficult and complicated they are to contain. But here’s the problem - according to researchers, the Red Zone - where the dangerous, anomalous activity is at its peak - isn’t bound to one fixed position. It

’s changed position at least three times already, and even worse, it appears to be growing. Not seeming so Euclid class now, is it? After all, you might not even need to visit the Carnival of Horrors to be in grave danger. If it keeps growing then someday soon, the Carnival of Horrors may be visiting you… It’s a perfect day for a wedding. On a warm spring afternoon, a beautiful bride and a handsome groom are exchanging the special rings they had custom designed and made for each other. As they t

ake turns placing the rings on each other's fingers, a man standing at the end of the wedding party steps out of position. He approaches the groomsman next to him and reaches into his jacket, taking out a pair of pliers that he hands to the groomsman. The groomsman happily takes the tool and then, without any hesitation, shoves the pliers into his mouth and begins removing his teeth one by one. When he is finished, he hands the bloody teeth to the man along with the pliers. The man then goes to

the next groomsman who repeats the same process. He continues going down the line until all of the groomsmen and bridesmaids have removed their teeth, seemingly without pain or resistance. The man then approaches the bride and groom. He hands each of them half of the pile of teeth, which they gladly accept. They then begin to eat the teeth without delay, seemingly not bothered by the intense damage they’re causing to their own teeth and jaws by doing so. The man watches as the groom moves the pr

iest who was officiating the wedding aside. As the entire church looks on in joy, the groom opens his mouth and the deafening sound of cicadas are heard. This is only the beginning of what the SCP Foundation has labeled an SCP-2852 event, a terrifying and little understood phenomenon that is better known by the nickname of the anomalous creature responsible for them… Cousin Johnny. The Foundation had been trying to contain Cousin Johnny for decades - not that it’d ever done them any good. Johnny

is a Keter-Class anomaly that’s thus far proven impossible to contain. This is an entity so dangerous and volatile that three different Mobile Task Forces are devoted to detecting and disrupting its activities - MTF Upsilon-36, aka The Party Crashers. MTF Upsilon-52, aka Cater Duty. And MTF Upsilon-99, aka The Altar Boys. But so far all the Foundation has been able to really do is swoop in afterwards and do their best to pick up the pieces of people’s shattered lives. Cousin Johnny has so far b

een observed to only operate in the North American subcontinent, and only seems to appear at Anglican or Catholic baptisms, weddings, and funerals. However, Foundation operatives charged with keeping a lid on Cousin Johnny harbor the hidden fear that he may one day expand his hunting grounds, and wreak terror worldwide. If Johnny became multinational or multi denominational, his violence, insanity, and pure evil may truly become impossible to minimize, so compatible communities are constantly mo

nitored for increased levels of juvenile delinquency, sterility, domestic violence, and divorce. After all this, you’re probably wondering: Who or what actually is Cousin Johnny, and how does he cause so much horrific tragedy? At face value, nothing about the appearance of Cousin Johnny would suggest an anomalous nature, or even any sort of danger. He appears to be a middle-aged white male, often with scruffy hair and a beard. On a cellular level too, Cousin Johnny appears all too human, but whe

n you look at his physiology it’s a whole different story. Cousin Johnny has no identifiable organs whatsoever - his body is made out of a fibrous muscular tissue. The only exceptions are his teeth and hair, which are made of a kind of chitin - a key component of insect exoskeletons, such as those possessed by cicadas. Johnny’s eyes are the first clue that something is off about him. From a distance they appear perfectly normal, but up close, they’re glassy and dead. This is because his eyes are

n’t actually attached to any nerves inside his head. With no nervous system or vocal chords, Johnny’s ability to see, move, and talk defy any kind of logical explanation. His speech will seem completely normal to the people under his spell, but to anyone else, it comes out as complete nonsense, often described as word salad. If people in attendance are briefed in advance about this phenomenon, whatever hypnotic ability causes them to hear his sounds as intelligible words won’t work, and they’ll

be aware of how nonsensical it all sounds. But of course, that doesn’t mean they’re safe. Cousin Johnny appears at family gatherings and religious rituals, and immediately, he’ll be treated as though he’s always been there. You know your Cousin Johnny, right? You go way back. Or at least, you’re pretty sure you do. Nothing will appear unnatural about his sudden presence. In fact, if you’re one of the victims of one of his incidents, chances are, you’ll actually find yourself taking a shine to Co

usin Johnny. Sure his sense of humor is a little crude and raunchy, but you can’t help but enjoy his company. He’s a fun guy to be around, and after all, he’s family! As previously mentioned, he’ll only appear at three different kinds of events: Baptisms, Weddings, and Funerals, and only at those that are affiliated with either the Catholic or Anglican religions. The SCP Foundation has classified baptisms that Cousin Johnny attends as Blue Level Events, Weddings are known as White Level Events,

and Funerals are Black Level Events - with each one escalating in severity, violence, and horror. First, Baptisms - the Blue Level Events. In these events, Cousin Johnny will appear and begin to act as a third godparent, despite there traditionally only being two. As the infant is lowered into the holy water, the entirety of their top layer of skin will come off, like a molting snake. Despite looking horrific, this apparently causes no harm to the child. The godparents will then eat this discard

ed skin, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. After this, the family will leave the church together, and Cousin Johnny will leave with them. He won’t appear at any subsequent celebrations of the child’s baptism. If this is where it ended, it’d be extremely gross - but not exactly a living nightmare. Of course this is just the beginning of the terror. Following Cousin Johnny’s appearance at the baptism, the child’s risk of dying in the next six months skyrockets, and if they survive

, they’re at an increased risk of becoming unstable and violent later on in life. Their parents and godparents will both become unable to conceive any further children, and are likely to be found dead from drowning within five years of the event. Those who were only tangentially involved in the baptism ritual have a massively increased chance of failed pregnancies, or - if they do conceive - they may become a danger to their offspring. Children who live through Blue Level Events and survive past

adolescence, will experience adverse side effects when encountering the songs of cicadas well into adulthood - from experiencing physical sickness to going through dangerous psychotic episodes. Weddings, or White Level Events, are more complex and severe. In this case, Cousin Johnny will insert himself into the wedding as a groomsman, and the most horrifying events will begin to take place after the vows have been exchanged. Johnny will provide various implements that allow the bridesmaids and

groomsmen to remove their teeth, which are then given to the bride and groom to eat - which they do, causing severe damage to their own teeth in the process. The groom will then vocalize an unknown cicada call at an incredible volume, as loud as 140 decibels in some instances, rendering the bride and everyone else near the altar completely deaf. At the wedding reception, where everyone is continuing to behave as if northing out of the ordinary is happening, Cousin Johnny will ruin things further

by giving the best man’s speech. The speech is more of his typical complete nonsense, though if you’re there you’ll never realize this, and think that this is the best speech you’ve ever heard, with some in the audience laughing hysterically while others cry uncontrollably. Once his speech is done, he’ll present a gift to the newly married couple… 3.5 kilograms of human hair in various colors, 13 deceased specimens of a certain cicada known as Linne's cicada, and 23 human teeth in a cardboard b

ox. DNA tests on all gifts have been inconclusive as to their origin. Much like many celebrity marriages, unions that occurred during White Level events never last, and all end up divorced within two years - often as a result of domestic violence, and any children born during their brief marriage will be violent and unstable. But it’s not just the wedding party that gets to experience the fun of a visit from Cousin Johnny. All married individuals who attended the wedding will find that they are

unable to conceive children, despite no biological indicators of infertility. Any children present at the White Level Event will show no interest in romance throughout their life, and often die tragically before reaching the age of eighteen. Finally, and most horrifying of all, are funerals - or Black Level Events. While Blue and White Level Events can potentially be disrupted before they are completed, lessening or preventing the horrific results, there is as yet no way to stop or prevent a Bla

ck Level Event at any stage. Any attempts to prevent Cousin Johnny from entering the church or funeral home will lead to him simply manifesting inside. Once in the room where the funeral is taking place, Cousin Johnny will first take up the role of eulogizer and begin speaking his standard nonsense to the attendants. The person who was emotionally closest to the departed will then open the casket, if this was not already an open casket funeral, and will then produce a large knife. It’s unknown w

here the knives come from as they’re not present before the event and they disappear after. The funeral attendees will then use the knife on their wrists and sometimes throats, draining their blood into the coffin. Many lose more than enough blood to result in death, but none ever die from this, nor do they seem to feel any pain from their wounds. As the attendees take turns bleeding into the coffin, Cousin Johnny continues his eulogy which eventually evolves into a cicada song, the kind sung by

Linne’s cicada males. The attendants sing the same song back to him in a kind of call and response. Cousin Johnny will then approach the coffin and vomit in a mixture of blood, wood pulp, and dead cicadas. The funeral will then proceed as normal, and the blood, vomit, and cicada filled casket is then taken to the cemetery and buried. Black Level Events will usually end with the body being interred in the ground, but if there’s a wake after the funeral, the horrors of the Black Level Event will

continue. At the wake, Cousin Johnny will climb on top of a table, lie down, and encourage the other attendants to devour him, which they do - all while he continues to talk his nonsense. Until there is nothing left. Much like Blue and White Level events, being in attendance leads to horrific after-effects. All participants who experience this event will separate from their family through either suicide, moving, or divorce. Every individual present at the event will also find that they are no lo

nger able to produce offspring, and couples present may also fall victim to incidences of domestic violence, often involving cannibalism, that usually leave one or both participants dead, while six out of ten children involved will attempt to murder one or both of their parents before they turn eighteen. These Black Level Events are so horrible for all involved, that any members of the specialized Cousin Johnny Mobile Task Forces that happen to witness such an event are treated with Class-A amne

stics before they are transferred to another task force or retire, to ensure that they don’t have to live with the memories of what they saw. Prior to that, they are closely monitored for any strange or anti-social behavior to make sure they weren’t affected by the event. And they aren’t the only SCP Foundation staff at risk of having been impacted by Cousin Johnny. It is theorized that as many as a third of Catholic and Anglican D-Class personnel were involved in a Black-Level event at some poi

nt, and were driven to madness and violence by their fateful brushes with the strange relative that no one knows. So next time you’re at a baptism, or a wedding, or a funeral, stay vigilant. Keep an eye on the other guests. And always ask yourself: Do you really have a Cousin Johnny? It was July of 2004, and Bill Murray was enjoying the peak of an extremely successful career. Not only had the iconic actor starred in some of the most beloved comedies of the 20th Century, including Ghostbusters an

d Groundhog Day, he’d voiced the main character of the recently-released live action Garfield movie. It’d been a financial success, but it was a critical flop. Not that this bothered Bill – he was happy with the performance... and the paycheck. What he wouldn’t be quite as happy about was the horrifying encounter he was about to have with SCP – 3166. On July 8th, Bill was enjoying a cold drink on the porch of his luxurious Beverly Hills home. The sky was beginning to darken as the sun set in the

west. It was a blissful evening. His wife, Jennifer, was inside, watching TV. Nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary, until he noticed a quick flash of orange in the distance. It was almost too fast to register, this large, orange shape darting past the corner of his eye. For a second, he entertained the thought that it might have been an escaped tiger, but it was gone too fast to really tell. Bill finished his drink and headed inside. He’d had enough for one night. The next morning, h

e got up to read the paper, and found the Garfield movie getting slaughtered by the critics. One review stated “no one can accuse Garfield: The Movie of infidelity to its source: It faithfully conveys the banality of Jim Davis's cartoon” Another called it“a film without energy and without spirit.” He put the paper down and ate his breakfast. A few blows to the ego were worth it for the paydays that came with big budget family films. Just then his wife came to him with a strange question: Were yo

u walking around downstairs in the middle of the night? No, he hadn’t, he’d been sleeping like a baby. Why did she ask? “Well…” Jennifer said. “I heard some rustling downstairs last night. It sounded like something big.” He hadn’t heard anything though and told her it was probably just her imagination. He put it out of his mind and continued about his day. He decided he would keep his eyes peeled for that orange blur again though. Bill didn’t see anything peculiar the rest of the morning and wen

t to a local café for lunch. He ordered a coffee and a cream cheese bagel, then made a quick trip to the bathroom while his food was prepared. When Bill returned to his table though, he was something strange. Instead of a bagel, there was a large heaping of lasagna on the table. What was going on? This café didn’t even serve lasagna. Bill knew something was terribly wrong. Things only got stranger when Bill came home to find a small tuft of orange fur snagged on the frame of his front door. And

it wasn’t synthetic fur like you see on plush toys or stuffed animals. No, this was real animal fur. Maybe someone was just goofing off or trying to play some weird prank on him, but it didn’t feel like it. Deep down, Bill Murray knew that he was in grave danger. Whoever, or whatever, was behind this… it wanted to hurt him. That night, his worst fears were realized. Bill’s wife had left town for the week and he was heading to the kitchen in the middle of the night for a glass of water, when he s

aw something - A huge figure moving up against the glass door leading to his backyard. The thing was huge, nearly seven feet tall, with a bloated, fur-covered, misshapen body that was pressed up against the door. Its fur was bright, garish orange – a cartoon orange. Strangest of all though was the sound it was making. It sounded like it was purring. Bill backed away from the door and then ran back to his room to hide. The whole night, he sat cowering as he heard scratching against the walls, lik

e something was trying to get in. He was terrified and too scared to do anything, even move. Finally, as morning broke, the noises seemed to stop. Bill had to do something. He couldn’t let this nightmare go on another night. What if things got worse? What if that thing managed to get inside? He called the local police and when they arrived, he explained the incredibly strange situation as best he could. He told them he was being stalked by some kind of huge cat, or at least someone dressed like

a huge cat. Also there was lasagna involved. The officers interviewing him could barely contain their laughter as he told them his story. A giant orange cat? Perhaps, one of them theorized, he’d angered some kind of obsessive Garfield fan through his involvement in the live action movie. After all, the original comic had been running for years and had been extremely popular. Who knows what kind of nut jobs were obsessed with seeing only a faithful adaptation of the source material? As the office

rs departed, Bill was confident that they weren’t taking him seriously. He couldn’t rely on any of them for protection. Thankfully, from a multi-decade movie career, he had plenty of disposable income, and decided to hire a private security team to protect him while he looked into this mystery. He had two trained bodyguards positioned around his home at all times for the next month. They were armed, and given the cryptic orders to fire on anything orange. Meanwhile, Bill began to fall down a Gar

field rabbit hole. He felt strangely compelled to research all the Garfield media he could find, as though the answer to his terrifying situation was somehow hidden between the lines. Bill explored the entire backlog of thousands of comic strips. He read the books and interviews with Jim Davis. He watched the cartoons and straight-to-DVD animated movies. Ironically for a guy who’d recently portrayed the lasagna-loving orange cat, Bill had never felt quite so immersed in the character before. He

found a strange pathos in the routine of Garfield and his friends.One particular comic really piqued his interest, though. Originally published in October of 1989, the comic began with Garfield being woken up by a strange chill, an almost eerie sensation. The character observed aloud that he didn’t feel like he was in his own home. He explored his little home further, trying to find his owner Jon or his housemate and sometimes nemesis, Odie, but found nothing. As Garfield remarked on feeling alo

ne, a purple speech box delivered the sinister message: “You have no idea how alone you are, Garfield.” He then finds that his home looks like it’s been abandoned for years. The “For Sale” sign outside is practically ancient. Garfield slowly comes to a horrifying revelation: Everyone really is gone, and his adventures and friends now exist only in his imagination. He’s trapped in a prison of his own creation, trying to stave off his endless loneliness, in denial about the reality of his situatio

n. The comic ended with a quote directly from Jim Davis himself, saying “An imagination is a powerful tool. It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice... or terrify, all depending upon how we conduct ourselves today...” As he read those words, Bill Murray felt a chill down his spine. Why had he wanted to get involved in the Garfield movie in the first place? What had he gotten himself into? Before he could slip any deeper int

o his own mind, Bill heard a faint, choked scream downstairs. He felt his breath catch in his throat. He was terrified but he needed to see what was happening. He carefully and quietly began to creep down the stairs. At the bottom, he poked his head around a corner, and that’s when he saw a member of his security detail lying dead on the floor. His face was blue from asphyxiation, his mouth was stuffed with lasagna. It looked like he had been force-fed to death. Bill wanted to scream but he coul

dn’t, or maybe knew he shouldn’t. Just then he heard a soft, meaty thumping noise coming from the nearby living room. He didn’t know why, but he felt compelled to approach as if by forces beyond his control. He made his way to the living room, and when he got there, he saw where the noise was coming from. Bill’s jaw dropped in pure horror. There was the other member of his security detail, lying limp and lifeless under a giant orange figure. It was a grotesquely huge creature, wearing what looke

d to be a kind of crude Garfield outfit made of sewn-together cat pelts. It stank of pasta and rotten meat. In its giant paw, it held a golden trophy, which it was using to pound the security guard’s head into mush while making quiet, cat-like purring noises. The creature suddenly stopped and looked up, locking eyes with Bill. The fear of death came over him. He froze, as the giant, freakish Garfield stepped over Donny’s corpse, and began to come towards him. Bill turned and ran, but Garfield wa

s gaining on him. Before he could make it to the front door, the creature knocked him over. He was laid out on the ground, looking up at it, as it reached into its own body cavity and began to pull out handfuls of lasagna. He was just about to shove a wad of the horrible decaying pasta into Bill’s mouth, when suddenly, a DING was heard and the creature stopped. It looked up, as if sniffing the air, and then suddenly turned and lumbered towards the kitchen. Bill watched as the Garfield monster en

tered the kitchen where, somehow, there was a steaming hot fresh lasagna sitting in the open oven. The creature had sensed the presence of external lasagna, and felt the compulsion to integrate it into its body, grabbing fistfulls and shoving it into itself. Just then, a group of highly trained SCP Foundation personnel burst into the room and subdued the creature. It had been an ambush. The Foundation had been tipped off to the presence of the creature by monitoring the local police department d

ispatches, and the report of a seven foot tall comic book cat terrorizing a Hollywood actor was definitely worth looking into. The monster that had almost taken Bill Murray’s life was SCP – 3166, a deadly pataphysical being that tends to manifest around people somehow involved in the Garfield intellectual property. It appears whenever the public perception of Garfield falls out of favor, and because Bill had starred in the critically-panned Garfield movie, he was currently at the very top of SCP

– 3166’s hit list. Thankfully, he managed to survive his terrifying ordeal, and was administered amnestics by Foundation personnel so he could return to his normal life. This frightening and mysterious creature has been around since 1989, appearing after the publication of the haunting Garfield comic that Bill had read that very night. It appeared in the office of United Media, who were the publishers of the Garfield comic strip at the time, and began wreaking havoc. Since then, the creature’s

manifestation has been a constant threat whenever Garfield loses its popularity or audience. As a result, the Foundation has spent years as the funding source behind all Garfield media, and even planting hypnotic memetics into the comic strips to ensure that there is always a loyal fanbase. The fur is indeed real, organic cat fur, albeit an unnaturally orange color, and instead of organs, the creature is filled with lasagna. Worst of all though, is that testing has revealed that the meat in the

lasagna is genetically identical to the flesh of Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis. How did this thing come into existence? Perhaps it was Jim’s sheer force of imagination that dragged it into being. As he himself said, “An imagination is a powerful tool.” All in all, it’s lucky that Bill Murray was able to survive his encounter, and return to his normal life – well, as normal as life can be for Bill Murray. And if you see Bill Murray, don’t bother asking him about SCP – 3166. The amnestics were qui

te effective, and just as he’s fond of saying himself, no one will ever believe you. Cast your mind back to the height of the Cold War. The ever-accelerating nuclear arms race brought us closer than ever before to making the nightmare of nuclear armageddon a terrifying reality. The two main parties in this conflict are the United States and Soviet Union, each amassing huge amounts of nuclear warheads and jumping on any available advantage they can over their enemies. What you may not know is tha

t, in order to detect an impending attack from the United States, the Soviets developed what would become known to the West as the “Dead Hand.” But this experimental piece of technology also has another name: SCP-1984. It is no secret that the Soviet Union feared the threat of US nuclear strikes and invasion just as much as the US feared an attack from them, so SCP-1984 was created to act as a deterrence mechanism, specifically against secure second strikes. Secure second strikes were both a det

errent and overwhelming concern during the Cold War, referring to a country’s ability, after suffering an initial nuclear attack, to still retaliate, firing on their enemy and causing untold damage with their own arsenal of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union knew that any action they made that could be perceived as an attack on United States soil would be threatened with nuclear retaliation, and that if they fired first, America would return fire and potentially annihilate them with a second stri

ke. SCP-1984 was to be an automated system that would activate in response to the destruction of the Soviet’s main command and control structure. Given that the Dead Hand was created during the eighties, you might be forgiven for expecting a nuclear detection system built at this point in history to consist of various sensors connected to a computer network. But you have also probably already realized that, if that was the case, then the Foundation wouldn’t be so interested in it. In actuality,

SCP-1984 is a fully autonomous entity rather than a network of sensors for detecting incoming nuclear attacks or a computer capable of initiating a second strike. Perhaps what makes the Foundation more interested in the Dead Hand is that it is both self-aware, and linked simultaneously to every single one of Russia’s nuclear launch sites. Not only this, but SCP-1984 also has direct access to every single one of the atomic weapons stockpiled by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and is capable

of launching Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles at a moment’s notice. In short, SCP-1984 could very easily and horrifyingly quickly, trigger an all-out nuclear war, resulting in the extinction of all life on Earth. No wonder the Foundation considers the Dead Hand such a massive threat. SCP-1984 itself actually consists of the preserved remains of a Russian soldier by the name of Sergeant Marat Chernikov, who was killed during the Soviet-Afghan War in 1982. Most of the official documentation of

Chernikov’s existence has been expunged by the Russian Federation, and he is only referenced in fragmented documents recovered by the Foundation that refer to a ”Project December.” These remains serve as the location of a semi-sentient consciousness that has been classified as SCP-1984-01. When it remains dormant and is not interfered with, SCP-1984-01 has the ability to receive and process any signal broadcast to it, and is able to decipher information contained in any signal it picks up. Howe

ver, when global military tensions start to climb, especially when those tensions affect the Russian Federation - or what were once the satellite states of the former Soviet Union - the entity begins to manifest itself in the physical world, and usually in various strange and differing ways. SCP-1984-01 has been known to appear in the real world in forms such as a humanoid outline, or a bright-red specter, taking the shape of a child with its legs cut off. Regardless of which shape it appears in

, it is when the Dead Hand manifests in a more physical form that the wider scope of its abilities become clear. As mentioned previously, it can influence and even launch nuclear weapons, overriding their command systems and bypassing launch sequences. After appearing fully, SCP-1984-01 will travel at speeds of up to 140 kilometers an hour, directly to the nearest military installation capable of launching Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Once it reaches its destination, SCP-1984-01 will imm

ediately attempt to override the necessary systems to initiate a launch. After firing missiles at their pre-determined targets, SCP-1984-01 will hastily travel to another facility housing nuclear ordnance, repeating the process until it has successfully launched all of Russia’s atomic weapons. When engaged, the physical manifestation of SCP-1984 is highly aggressive, and will lethally defend itself against anyone that it observes trying to interfere with it or stop it from causing a nuclear laun

ch. The entity has displayed the ability to disrupt the nervous system, causing excruciating pain and debilitating damage to human beings. Its only known weakness, if any, is a susceptibility to microwave radiation. Although, exposure to this doesn’t seem to cause any lasting damage to SCP-1984, instead only temporarily disorientating its physical form. As for the origins of SCP-1984, the Soviet Union’s official liaison with the SCP Foundation offered some clarity on this, ironically, during ear

ly 1984. The liaison, a doctor named Sergei, described information regarding the Dead Hand as being of “grave importance to the continued survival of the human race”. Seeing as he was referring to an entity that could single-handedly launch the Soviet Union’s entire nuclear arsenal, he certainly had a point. A top-secret conference was held in Sarajevo between the Foundation’s O5 Council and officials from both the USSR and United States, using the 1984 Winter Olympics as cover, avoiding too man

y questions about several nations’ high-ranking state officials being in the same place at once. The O5 Council was then given full, in-depth information about the Dead Hand, something they had previously assumed was a more conventional form of nuclear deterrence. SCP-1984 was far more, and worse, far out of the control of the Russian government. It was revealed that the entity had been designed outside the original specifications given to those who developed it. Initially, the Soviets had inten

ded for the Dead Hand to be solely used as a secure second-strike response. If the leaders of the Soviet Union were killed, SCP-1984 would react in-kind to Russia’s enemies, launching back all the USSR’s nuclear missiles in retaliation. This is most likely where the “Dead Hand” nickname comes from, hearkening to the idea of a “dead man’s switch.” Picture that you had been mortally wounded by your worst enemy - shot in the stomach and laying on the ground, rapidly bleeding out. You know that ther

e is no chance you will survive, but you cannot afford to let your enemy get away. What they don’t know is that you rigged the entire building around you both with explosives. With your dying breath, you activate the detonator, assuring your own and your enemy’s mutual destruction. Kaboom, then curtain for both of you. The pressing issue, and reason this secret summit between the USSR, USA and SCP Foundation was held, was that SCP-1984 was no longer interested in just waiting for Russia to be at

tacked and only reacting after the fact. Instead, the entity’s physical form was trying to preemptively strike at the enemies of the Motherland, attempting to activate nuclear launches and send atomic weapons to destroy the United States, France, West Germany, and the People’s Republic of China. In other words, the Dead Hand was eager to get a head start at causing total nuclear annihilation, not to mention potentially killing millions and reducing target countries to little more than irradiated

craters awash with deadly nuclear fallout. Both the Soviet Union and United States begged the SCP Foundation to intervene and contain SCP-1984, and under the direction of the O5 Council, they stepped in to take direct control of the situation, establishing new containment procedures in the hopes of keeping SCP-1984 from hitting as many launch buttons as it could find. The embalmed remains that seemed to create the manifestations of the Dead Hand entity were held securely in an Armed Containment

Complex, near Verkhoyansk, part of the Sakha Republic within the Russian Federation. SCP-1984 was placed within a standard humanoid containment cell, which was itself held within a Faraday cage - a type of enclosure constructed with or covered in conductive material, designed to block electromagnetic fields. This was done to block any external broadcast signals from reaching SCP-1984, and thus causing it to manifest its other form if it learned of an impending attack on Russia - even a fictiona

l one, perhaps as part of a television broadcast. As part of the Dead Hand’s containment, all signals broadcast near its cage are to be monitored, and only broadcasts featuring doctored information would reach the entity. Thanks to the work of the SCP Foundation’s Information Control Team, SCP-1984 is drip-fed a stream of carefully-fabricated information. Using on-site equipment and facilities, a team of military historians, economists, actors, and Soviet media specialists, the Information Contr

ol Team have created an ongoing narrative wherein the Cold War never ended. Through falsified radio and television broadcasts made to look like era-appropriate news organizations, they manage to keep SCP-1984 convinced that the nuclear stalemate between the Soviet Union and United States is still ongoing. Unfortunately, sometimes information from the real world is able to bleed through. An incident involving SCP-1984 occurred on August 8th, 1984, and almost brought forth a full-scale nuclear war

. While preparing for a campaign speech, the fortieth President of the United States Ronald Reagan uttered the following joke: “I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever, we begin bombing in five minutes.” Naturally, thousands of media outlets reported on this, but signals of those broadcasts, including recordings of the President’s remark, made their way to SCP-1984. Foundation researchers were both unsure of how these transmissions breached the

Faraday cage surrounding the Dead Hand, and were unable to prevent what happened next. Hearing what it could only assume was a genuine declaration of war, the manifestation of the SCP-1984-01 entity happened immediately after Reagan’s words reached its containment cell. This time, the entity appeared as a semi-transparent woman, withered and blue, wearing traditional Pashtun dress. Armed personnel guarding SCP-1984’s cage engaged the entity, causing it to retaliate, lashing out and attacking any

that stood in its way. One captain and two privates that suffered the brunt of SCP-1984’s offensive capabilities began bleeding heavily from their ears, seizing violently. Most gruesomely of all, a liquid leaked from their eyes and nose, believed to have been cerebrospinal fluid. While armed personnel attempted to utilize microwave emitting weaponry to slow the entity down, the Information Control Team was frantically trying to record a new falsified broadcast in the hopes that SCP-1984 would c

ease its hostilities and the entity would dissipate before it was able to travel at high speed to any nearby Soviet nuclear facilities and begin bombarding the United States. Their first attempt to record a new broadcast that would result in a cessation of SCP-1984’s slaughter of its guards was interrupted when a nearby wall collapsed. Desperate to re-contain the creature, Information Control Team tried to film the broadcast a second time, and succeeded, although one of the actors portraying a n

ewsreader suffered a stroke and had to be edited out, to convince the Dead Hand of its supposed authenticity. What followed was a short news clip, clarifying that Russia’s Politburo was in on President Reagan’s joke, including old footage of the USSR’s General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko confirming that the Soviet Union’s nuclear forces were not on high alert. Miraculously, after fifteen more minutes of sustained fighting with guards, SCP-1984’s physical manifestation began to disappear, grad

ually dematerializing while it seemed to attack with far-less intensity. Eventually, containment was re-established, at the cost of the deaths of seventeen members of Foundation staff, both guards and researchers. A further eight, however, suffered traumatic brain injuries that left them all permanently disabled. The one upside is that this incident remains the only time SCP-1984 has ever breached its containment and caused harm to others, and considering that it could very well have launched Ru

ssia’s nuclear arsenal, the casualties could easily have been much higher. So remember, folks, don’t joke about nuclear weapons, especially if you’re the president. You never know what anomalies lurking in the bodies of dead Russian soldiers might be listening, and if they are, you better hope they have a sense of humor. You’ve been walking for days. Your body aches, you’re dripping with sweat from the heat of the sun bearing down overhead. And yet, you’re wrapped up in layers upon layers of clo

thing - even your face is covered, and you’re wearing thick, black goggles so that not a single centimeter of your body is exposed. Your journey has been long and you feel like you might die from exhaustion, or from overheating due to these multiple layers of clothes. But dying is better than being exposed. You saw it happen when your entire team...changed. The light can’t be trusted. Not even for a fraction of a second. It’s been like this for years. You’ve learned and survived through painful

experience. Many of those you used to know cannot say the same. You’ve been alone for so long. You might have given up all hope, if it wasn’t for the distress signal coming from a nearby SCP Foundation Containment Facility - Site-46. Any kind of survivors would be better than nothing, no matter what kind of sorry shape they were in. As long as they were still human. You find your way to an opening in the side of a mountain, and slide into the cave, hoping you weren’t spotted. The whole world is

crawling with those things now. You can’t let yourself be seen. As you trudge down the cave towards the entrance, you see what looks like a huge, black snail-trail splattered on the ground, leading into the facility. You try to avoid it and press on. You don’t even need a keycard to enter: The door has been left ajar. The facility reeks of those things, but you can’t see any of them. You just hope they’ve moved on and left some human survivors in their wake. The place looks abandoned. Every step

you take echoes through the empty halls. When you find that the elevator’s out, you take the stairs all the way down to Level B5… Keter Containment. Lucky for you, it seems all the cells are empty now, the horrors that were kept inside of them have all long since flown the coop. You keep following that slimy, black trail until you find an abandoned office. There are no people here anymore - just a broken barricade, some empty medicine bottles, and a bucket that the people inside the office had

apparently been using as a toilet. You breathe a sigh of disappointment at finding no one alive here, but you’re at least relieved to be out of the sun. You can finally remove your jacket and head-wrap. With your uncovered eyes, you notice that a nearby computer terminal is still powered up. You sit down at the desk and turn on the monitor. Because of the Emergency Procedures put into place in a K-Class scenario like this, safeguards no longer apply. You can access all the information you need -

up to and including finding out what actually happened. In the dull glow of a nearby emergency light, you see a dark shape slumping through the halls in shadow. You tense up, then exhale as it slithers off into an adjoining hall. You’re safe - for now. The terminal has finally loaded and authenticated your access. You’re staring at the file for S.D. Locke’s Proposal for SCP-001: When Day Breaks. It’s the only name you can give the apocalypse your world is currently experiencing. This is one of

the only anomalies in the entire history of the SCP Foundation to be given the Apollyon containment class - meaning containment is truly impossible. SCP-001 is the most dangerous enemy that the Foundation, and planet earth, has ever faced. It’s always been a principle of the SCP Foundation to battle in the dark so that the civilian world can thrive in the light, but now, the light has become the enemy. Anyone exposed to any amount of sunlight for even the briefest period of time is subjected to

the effects of SCP-001 - and those effects are beyond horrifying. The SCP Foundation Administrator released an urgent memo telling Foundation personnel to make their way to Site-19 at all costs, because they need all the help they can get. Those exposed to SCP-001 in the process are no longer considered human - their new designation is SCP-001-A. These new entities are to be avoided at all costs. But, in case of emergencies, the Administrator says it is permitted to cut off parts of your transfo

rmed comrades and eat them to avoid starvation. No attempt should be made to kill them, since you won’t succeed, you’ll just put yourself at risk. When the sun changed and became SCP-001, it instantly affected 6.8 billion innocent people. The second the visible light touched them - whether it was from the sun itself or even reflected off the moon - their bodies liquefied, melting like candle wax into puddles of living, gelatinous slime. This effect isn’t isolated to humans, either: Any biologica

l entity exposed to sunlight immediately underwent the same irreversible melting process into SCP-001-A. And the horror had only just begun. People transformed into SCP-001-A will retain shades of their former intelligence and personality. They may even try to will their new gooey mass into a shape resembling their original form. However, these individuals will lose their sense of self if they come into contact with other instances of SCP-001-A. When they come together, 001-A instances will bond

on a molecular level, wadding up into horrific, giant blobs with only one purpose: Integrating more matter into their bodies. That’s why they have to be avoided at all costs. You continue to search the computer terminal for answers. Perhaps there was some kind of contingency plan put in place for this. Some way to reverse the effects, or at least escape the nightmare Earth has become. Instead, you find a series of attachments linked to the SCP-001 file, detailing what seems to be the last days

of the people who’d barricaded themselves in the facility. Most prominent among these were Researcher Dr. Logan Igotta, her partner, Ari, a security officer named Commander Anand, and a few others. Dr. Igotta had locked herself in the office, where she recorded her final messages to the world. In the first audio log, Dr. Igotta and her companions seemed afraid but hopeful that there may be some way out of this situation. Dr. Igotta reported that most of the workers at the facility were transform

ed during the initial event. Their melted bodies had fused outside the facility, and now they were trying to bust their way back in. The defenses had held so far though, and they seemed confident they would hold long enough for them to figure out a way to escape this awful situation. You open the second attachment - an incident report - and realize that things may not have been as hopeful as Dr. Igotta let on. She reported hearing the huge mass of melted creatures hammering on the door outside a

gain, begging for them to come out and experience the sun with them. They wanted desperately to add to their ever-growing biomass. In order to experiment with what exactly would happen, they sent out one of their few remaining D-Classes wearing a full protective suit. He didn’t last long. The huge creature grabbed him with tentacles made of reconstituted flesh. It began ripping off his protective suit as he screamed for mercy. It was a monster made of dozens of people and animals. He could never

overpower it. The second the sun touched his skin, he melted away, and was absorbed by the great mass holding him in place. Guns were ineffective against these SCP-001-A super-entities. Fire would do no good. It seemed that extremely low temperatures were the only way to slow the immense blobs down, and even then, not permanently. There was one ray of light in the darkness: The Site Director had a secret tunnel underneath his office, connected to a tram that could hopefully take them directly t

o Site 19 without risk of SCP-001 exposure. It was a good plan, and by far the best option they had available to them. But the best plans often don’t work in practice. You open the next attachment on the terminal. This time, it’s a video feed. You can actually see Dr. Logan Igotta - and she looks harrowed by what she’s experienced. As it turns out, while the others, including her partner Ari, attempted to exit through the tunnel something had happened. Dr. Igotta heard Ari’s voice over her radio

. But there was something wrong with it. It was too low. Too guttural. And filled with gurgles. SCP-001 had gotten to her. She was changed. The monster from above had crawled in through the ceiling. It had taken them, all of them, and converted them into something less than human. Any hope of escape now seemed gone. Ari told Dr. Igotta that it would be fine. That it was such a bright, beautiful, sunny day outside, and she was wasting it locked up inside that office. She tormented Dr. Igotta with

their shared memories of picnics in the park on sunny days in the past. The monster with Ari’s voice did everything it could to try to convince Dr. Igotta to give up and join them, but she wasn’t ready to go just yet. You look away from the screen when you hear a sound in the corner. You see a dark puddle of some unknown substance, and then, some skeletal hands rising out of it. The hands are pulling themselves out of the puddle, followed by a skeletal face covered in matted hair. You have to s

top yourself from screaming, until a flash from a nearby security light makes the figure disappear. It’s a normal puddle again. Your mind is playing tricks on you. You open the next attachment, another video, and see that Dr. Igotta’s condition has deteriorated. She looked pale, frantic, and thin. She was using a knife to draw her own blood onto a piece of bloodstained parchment covered in strange symbols. Igotta ranted about her theory: What if 001 took the minds and bodies of its victims, but

not their souls? Through performing some kind of arcane blood ritual, she hoped to at least rescue and keep the soul of Ari, even if her mind and body were lost. You open the next attachment. It seems that Igotta’s ritual worked, but not in the way she hoped. The twisted soul of Ari, driven mad by SCP-001, had taken over the file. It begins corrupting the text of the SCP-001 file into crazy ranting about how futile it is to fight. It then cut to an even more frightening video feed: Dr. Igotta in

her sleep, tossing and turning in a makeshift bed in the corner of her office. The camera approaches her, in first person, and lingers over her sleeping body. An oily, skeletal hand reaches past the camera, and runs its fingers through Dr. Igotta’s hair. It’s the exact same hand you saw reaching out of that black puddle earlier. You must have seen Ari’s lingering spirit. With a lump in your throat, you open the next attachment and watch the video. You see Dr. Igotta, now truly broken. She’d bee

n haunted by Ari’s demonic spirit for a long time now, and it has clearly taken its toll. She is waving around a handgun while she speaks. She now believes there is only one way to escape. But not like this. She doesn’t want the gun to draw attention to her body. She doesn’t want to become part of that mass, even if she is dead. She opens a drawer on the desk she’s recording at and places the gun inside. Dr. Igotta then apologizes to her loved ones who are likely long since dead or assimilated,

and turns off the recording for the last time. In that moment, you realize that there’s a single drawer in the desk in front of you. When you reach forward and open it, you see that the same handgun Dr. Igotta was holding is laying inside. You pick it up and study it, weighing up your options. Perhaps there truly is no other way out... Then, you see an update on the file. One more attachment had been added while you were studying the gun. You feel your heart pounding in your chest as you reach f

orward and open the attachment. The text has been changed entirely. The file on SCP-001 is now a poem - an ode to the sun, and to ultimate togetherness. Then a video file spontaneously opens itself on the screen: It’s a video of you, shot from behind. You see those oily, skeletal hands reaching for you in the dark, just like they did with Dr. Igotta. In that moment, you panic and fire the gun behind you, hoping to scare off the spirit. Instead, the sound of the gunshots attracts something far wo

rse. The immense blob of screaming, melted flesh charges towards the office. You try to barricade the door, but it’s not enough. The flesh seeps and bursts through, and grabs you in its meaty tentacles. You scream and try to escape, but it won’t save you. Nothing will save you. The flesh carries you upstairs, out through the empty halls, out into the cave. You can see the light in the distance as the blob ferries you towards it. You won’t be alone for much longer. In fact, you won’t be alone eve

r again... It’s a natural instinct in many species to protect their young - and sometimes it's not just their own babies, but any young that look like them. Regardless of your personal feelings on human’s earliest stage, it is a scientific fact that human babies are designed to emphasize their own adorable helplessness to make sure that other, older humans take care of them. A baby’s cry is an inherently distressing sound, and when we hear it, some deep, primal part of us feels the urge to comfo

rt and care for the child until the sound stops. But of course, we’re talking about the world of the SCP Foundation here - where there are bunnies that can eat anything, teddy bears that might steal your organs to make duplicates of themselves, and chocolate fountains filled with trillions of murderous insects. Nothing is what it seems here, and even the most innocent and cute creatures may be hiding a deadly secret - SCP-734 being no exception. Today, we’re talking about The Baby. This anomaly

proves that dangerous things can come in small packages, but where others only saw misery and death, the SCP Foundation saw a certain potential… Our story begins in the maternity ward of a hospital in the USA, where every medical professional’s worst nightmare was unfolding: An unknown but incredibly fast-acting flesh-eating pathogen seemed to be running rampant across the hospital’s population. It began when patients who weren’t even admitted for dermatological issues started complaining of sev

ere itches and extreme skin pain. Some nurses and doctors in the maternity ward began to experience similar symptoms, as well as one of the infants, leading to a massive quarantine effort. While the initial symptoms first appeared to be limited to severe pain and discomfort on isolated parts of the skin, the condition of the afflicted soon escalated. Their skin began to messily flake off as the cells comprising it lost physical cohesion and died. It was a kind of strange, anomalous rot that seem

ed to work inwards, first destroying the integrity of the outer layer of skin and then causing further disintegration to deeper parts of the body. Once the skin had shed off, the pathogen would turn its attention to what was lying beneath. Against all odds, the disease affected organs, muscle tissue, the vascular system, and even bones. Nothing was spared. The victims’ bodies would completely break down, and they would be dead within a few hours. By the time the pathogen had finished ravaging it

s victims, what was left didn’t even look human anymore. Not only patients but doctors and nurses that had been walking the wards mere hours before were now little more than piles of human tissue sitting in what had previously been their hospital beds. Whatever this was, it seemed like the fastest progressing infection in recorded history. Hospital staff and administrators were terrified - this appeared to be an entirely new disease, with a mysterious form of transmission and, worst of all, no c

ure. They were even more confused when several black vans pulled up outside the hospital, and mysterious men in hazmat suits spilled out and began setting up a quarantine zone around the entire building. Whoever these strange people were, they definitely weren’t the CDC - little did the hospital personnel know that this was the group you never want showing up and putting your location on lockdown - it was the SCP Foundation. The infected remains of the victims were taken away for research purpos

es, and the Foundation operatives immediately began conducting debriefing interviews with witnesses. They soon determined from a mix of eyewitness accounts and hospital surveillance footage that everyone infected with the mysterious pathogen had all been in a particular section of the maternity ward earlier in the day. And when the operatives investigated this area, they found another strange detail. An infant had no registered mother present in the hospital. The Foundation would later learn tha

t this was likely because the baby’s mother was the first victim of the deadly disease. After eliminating all other possible options, it seemed that the only anomalous element that could have caused all of this was the mysterious baby, though just how the mother even survived carrying the baby to term was a mystery in and of itself. The baby was a caucasian male human infant between seven and eight months of age. Nothing appeared outwardly anomalous about the child, but they could confirm that e

very single victim of the anomalous pathogen had come into physical contact with the child earlier that day. Everyone who had been at the hospital was given amnestic treatment, and the Foundation constructed plausible cover stories for the deaths that had occurred that day. Like so many others before it, the child was secured and spirited away to the nearest applicable Foundation containment site. There it was reclassified as SCP-734, and finally the real testing into what precisely this infant

was capable of could begin. Physiologically, SCP-734 appeared mostly non-anomalous. The infant had above-average intelligence and physical aptitude for a child his age but otherwise showed no mutations or abnormalities that would suggest a divergence from typical human biology. Despite a vast array of tests performed by the Foundation into essentially every aspect of 734’s biology, they couldn’t find anything that hinted at the origin of the mysterious pathogen. But through some trial and extrem

ely costly error, the Foundation was able to learn more about how exactly the pathogen worked. The only vector for transmission seemed to be direct contact with the baby itself, up to and including the fluids and residues it leaves behind. Those affected cannot transmit the anomalous “flaking” effect to others, meaning that the risk of an epidemic is relievingly minimal. But of course, accidents still happen, as was discovered when one agent misplaced her sympathy for the baby and decided to rem

ove her mask while interacting with him. Her logic was that her masked face might have caused the baby some kind of distress, and as long as she was only coming into contact with him via her own gloved hands, everything would be fine. But some dust particles were floating in the air at the time, and SCP-734 sneezed in her face. The agent began screaming in pain and recoiling from the baby, but it was already too late. Her fate was sealed. She was taken to the infirmary and given sedatives so tha

t she could hopefully die in as little pain as possible. In roughly 72% of cases, amputation of the affected areas has prevented the entire body from succumbing to the anomalous effects of SCP-734, but this isn’t exactly feasible when the point of contact is the victim’s head. Within hours, the agent’s flesh had flaked off of her face, leaving her looking like a red, bloody skull. A few hours after that, she didn’t have a head at all. Throughout the disintegration process of this unfortunate age

nt, the Foundation took grisly photographs. These photographs are shown to anyone preparing to work on the SCP-734 research project to teach them a hard lesson on the importance of adhering to proper safety protocols. And these protocols about how to deal with the Baby are incredibly tight, given that even incidental contact is often a death sentence. Anyone entering the Baby’s containment chamber needs to wear contained-atmosphere hazmat suits. Anyone who makes physical contact with the Baby, e

ven when suited up, is immediately removed from the area and subject to several hours of quarantine and observation. Even inanimate objects that have been inside the containment chamber need to be thoroughly sterilized before being removed. Given that even anomalous children like SCP-734 have very delicate needs, a handler is always standing by in full hazmat gear to take care of the baby. These handlers are rotated every hour to maintain alertness and safety. These handlers feed and change SCP-

734 regularly and sometimes even provide toys that have been approved by the O5 Council. The Foundation has gone to great lengths to keep SCP-734 alive and comfortable because they believe that SCP-734 could be an important asset for them in the future. Or, more specifically, they see great strategic value in SCP-734’s blood. As mentioned earlier, contact with any matter from SCP-734 triggers its deadly anomalous effects, including bodily fluids like blood. But, unlike many toxic pathogens, in t

his case there is no risk of the infection getting out of control since the infected do not become vectors for transmission. Because of this, the blood of SCP-734 can act as a powerful weapon for both terminating anomalies deemed unviable by the O5 Council and assassinating dangerous people who belong to rival groups. Contact with the blood would completely destroy the target’s body, with no other anomalous effects and no evidence of who exactly conducted the hit. SCP-734 has been fitted with an

arterial catheter so that the Foundation can collect large quantities of blood from the anomalous infant every single week for storage and research. But it isn’t just the blood that the Foundation sees potential in. SCP-734 himself has scored incredibly well on the Aeslinger Loyalty Index, the test the Foundation uses to judge the loyalty of potential applicants to the Foundation cause. As SCP-734 matures, if these scores remain consistent, he will likely be trained to become a Foundation field

agent in the future. An agent capable of killing someone with a touch would, needless to say, be an asset to certain covert missions that the Foundation would probably prefer to keep off the books. Of course, the SCP Foundation recruiting certain compliant anomalies to perform missions for them is far from unprecedented. The most infamous of these is SCP-076, also known as Able, a supernatural, eternally-resurrecting swordsman and perhaps one of the finest warriors who ever lived. The Foundatio

n took note of this and channeled his eternal thirst for battle into working with his very own Mobile Task Force. He could assist in missions by taking out his bloodlust on enemy groups of interest and dangerous anomalies. However, this ended up working a little too well and led to disaster. Able was so good at his job that he burned through all his allotted missions at astonishing speed. Left with nothing more to do, Able got antsy, which led to him turning his murderous desires on his fellow t

eam members and then the Foundation as a whole. It was an all-out massacre before his colleagues were finally able to kill him and return him to containment. The failure of this initiative gave the very idea of letting anomalies work for the Foundation in the field a bad name. But since then, things have changed, especially with the establishment of MTF Alpha-9, aka Last Hope, a new mobile task force formed entirely of anomalous individuals and their handlers. These consist of somewhat more stab

le anomalies, such as Able’s counterpart, SCP-073, also known as Cain. Cain cannot be harmed, with any harm befalling him simply being mirrored back on his attacker, and his vast array of knowledge makes him an incredibly useful intelligence asset. Another of the several members of Last Hope is Iris, also known as SCP-105. Much like Cain, Iris not only has anomalous powers that make her immensely valuable for missions in the field, she’s also compliant and capable of listening to reason, unlike

Cain. Her abilities include being able to actively surveil and even interact with photos of any location, especially when taken with her anomalous camera. Someday, SCP-734 could count himself among other anomalous Foundation agents like these, providing he continues to show promise and doesn’t develop a dislike of the Foundation as he ages, since after all, he won’t be a baby forever. So if ever you find yourself on the Foundation’s bad side, you have a good reason to be paranoid. You’ll have no

idea that one day, the man who’s going to kill you will approach and shake your hand with a smile. It won’t be until later when you feel that strange tingle on your palm and feel the skin starting to flake away that you’ll realize you’ve been a dead man walking for hours.