Horrible People Who Do Horrible Things
So I’ve written about all of this before, I mean if you just google “Horrible People who do Horrible Things” you’ll see a plethora of reddit posts of mine regarding what I came across on the dark web several years back. Some of them have been taken down but last I checked you should be able to find the ones where I go into the most detail. I’ve been trying for a long time to see if anyone at all might know anything about this, any information, but haven’t had any luck. That’s ok, but I do still feel the need to keep getting the word out, and with a recent update on all of this, this will be my newest effort of doing that. So let me start all the way back from the beginning. Politics is what got me interested in the dark web. I know, like, what exactly is the connection there? It wasn’t from a love of politics; it was from a hatred of it. I should clarify, I’ve never really had a “side,” so to speak, my detest came to be when I had the opportunity of really seeing who “the politician” was. At least in my former town of Grove-Wild, Wisconsin, the beaten to death caricature of the politician – the liar, the robot, the conman, was all too common the case among our office holders and candidates. Still, this fact didn’t cause me to view politics or politicians as horrible – this caricature is to be expected and you just work within that paradigm. Several years back, my hatred emerged in response to the behavior of a particular individual. At this time, Grove-Wild saw a sudden increase in crime and with that it saw this bizarre increase in the prominence of biker gangs – literally, like, 1960s Hells Angels, Easy Rider stuff. Huge portions of the city were spiraling out of control – heavy meth use, prostitution rings, brutal assaults, unsolved murders, even the bombing of a government building was believed to be related to one of the gangs’ activities. An issue to say the least. The members of these gangs often had a pretty fringe political slant, typically of a quasi-extremist nature. This sentiment, among this prominent constituency, had an impact on Grove-Wild’s local government, which is where my hatred was introduced. I’ll never forget this one guy who was running for a Grove-Wild city council seat one year. I’m pretty sure he had a real name he’d use more formally sometimes, but he usually called himself “Jack America.” Campaign ad after ad after ad flooded our local TV stations that year, and how did Jack present himself? Vroom…Vroom. There he was, cruising down the highway, chopper under his feat, leather jacket and all. “Hi, I’m Jack America. When I’m not burning rubber down Grove-Wild’s country roads, I’m…” well, I digress. What many saw as humorously on the nose pandering, I saw as a fundamental lack of concern for what was happening to the city. How much could he have truly cared if the very people he should be using his platform to call out he was too busy cheaply appealing to for some votes? It pissed me off honestly. I swear, a little later, there was even a speech Jack America gave, after winning the city council, where it really seemed like he was dog whistling to the bikers in a rather nefarious manner. You know that bombing incident I referred to earlier? Shortly before it happened, someone had made a call to the police threatening to bomb the very building that ended up, well, being bombed, frantically attempting to have a laundry list of absurd demands be met. In this call, the person at one point referred to the government as “enablers of downgrade and destruction.” In Jack’s speech, who he referred to as “Washington elites,” he described as “promoting great downgrade” several times. A little nod in a certain direction? I’d say so, but others would call it a case of looking a little bit too deep into something. Who knows, but the reality was that I came away thinking of politics and politicians…as just…horrible. What does ANY of this have to do with the dark web? Around the time all of this was happening I was also hearing about the dark web for the first time – particularly Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht’s arrest, stuff like that. I really viewed the dark web as the perfect antithesis to the political environment I had become so exhausted with. While the Jack America’s represented artificiality, deception, ulterior motives, and hidden corruption, the dark web made it perfectly clear what it was all about, practically screaming it in your face. I wasn’t as concerned with its morally questionable content as I was thankful for its transparency. The extent of my exploration for quite a while was pretty vanilla. Drug pages, gun pages, really just hidden wiki stuff, never bought anything though. Pretty much what would be considered the surface web of the dark web. Something I stood firm in believing about the dark web was that it was the perfect anti-political sphere. It WASN’T political, even when it was. Bizarre forums I’d come across, one, notably, showcasing comparison photos of the skin complexion of several of the world’s billionaires to that of the complexion of reptiles, had an underground aura I got a kick out of, while I never got a kick out of anything politically mainstream. It was real even though it wasn’t true. It was honest without being factual. I never in a million years would have even called these political sites, because “political” to me implied something much different – it implied Jack America. I’d have taken this sphere as an alternative to his sphere anytime. – I morally preferred all of it to whatever Jack America offered and thought nothing even remotely horrible about it! Nevertheless, it was when I was on one of these “political…but not political” sites, the “billionaires are reptiles” one to be exact, that my tumble into what the point of this story even is actually occurred. At the bottom of this forum, under a “related sites” section, I clicked the single link provided. Nothing seemed to happen at first but then it started to load, taking several minutes for the site to actually open. What I was directed to was a website, random letters, random numbers.onion, I don’t remember exactly what it was, that consisted of one long paragraph containing what looked like law-text, similar to the text of state statutes, as well as some sort of terms of service that was incredibly convoluted. I remember not being able to understand any of it, not even the general gist. It went on for probably a little less than a hundred pages and was just plainly typed over a white background, similar to a word document. As I was trying to figure out how long the paragraph actually was, I quickly realized that each word was itself an individual link, and no matter what link I clicked on, I’d be brought to a similar page of law text and TOS, albeit with seemingly different content. This discovery lingered in the back of my mind for the next couple of days but I hadn’t returned to it. I only did after bringing it up to a colleague of mine who was also interested in the dark web and was setting me up with a tad more advanced equipment. He became curious and I pulled it up for him, first the reptilian forum, and then the strange links document. I was informed that on occasion, the presence of a directory-abyss like this indicated that behind one door would eventually be the portal through a firewall, likely to a membership-only community and that this site, by the manner in which it was coded, seemingly was set up like this intentionally, like I’d have to find the needle in the haystack. The entire nature of this unnerved me. What exactly was this secret to find? The fact that the place I was looking for it, bizarre law textbook esque-excerpts linked from a forum about billionaires being lizard people, indicated that the secret was perhaps something to fear. How could one not be intrigued by this though? I was, and that’s why I took on the difficult, and perhaps impossible task of clicking on the right link to either take me through a firewall or at least take me to something else. It’d just be a matter of putting in the time, and for a great amount of that, I found no luck. It was a pretty ridiculous task to take on. I mean breaking it down into a math sense, what exactly would my chances be of finding it? All I can tell you…is that I did. And maybe it wasn’t that incredible, maybe more than just one link led to something else, but on one fateful night, the word “insurance” linked me there. The realization that my computer was doing something different when I clicked this word after clicking hundreds of others to no avail caused me to jerk my entire body forward, my head almost slamming into the monitor. It took forever to load, seriously a couple of hours. At a certain point I was thinking it wasn’t even going to work. But sure enough, no more legal text, and I was directed to the following website: Horriblepeoplewhodohorriblethings.onion. In contrast with the unlimited supply of 90s style dark web pages, amateur and simple, this website was much more professional looking, almost weirdly so, just polished and well-constructed, almost like some sort of government website. The exact page I was linked to worked as the “Home” tab, within which a description read: “Welcome to Horrible People who do Horrible Things – A political site. Don’t for a moment take our name as irony or our purpose as anything else.” 5 other tabs named “About Us”, “Resources”, “Videos”, “Contact”, and the sore thumb tab named “Posers” were also present, all containing nothing but the similar legal and TOS jargon from before except for the “Posers” tab which was just empty. Pretty quickly, the website became very glitchy, unloading and reloading text chaotically. In the midst of this, on the “Home” tab, and not the “videos” tab, a video loaded onto the page. Curious, I pressed play. For an irritatingly long time, all I was presented with was a sentence written in a foreign language over a black background. I’m not entirely sure but I think it was in Swedish or one of the Nordic languages. My impatience led me to snoop around and my snooping around led me to quickly realize the video I was watching was in fact a livestream, and that I couldn’t skip forward. The better part of 20 minutes later, a feed in crystal clear quality cut in of an enormous arena, like one of those huge concert halls with a few hundred seats on the ground floor, a huge balcony level at the top, and an array of private boxes in rows in the space in-between. It was absolutely massive. The camera was positioned somewhere high up in the front right corner, revealing a bit of the stage, a bit of the band pit, and the entirety of the audience, which seemed to be occupying every available seat. The moment the feed began, the audience was applauding, and when they stopped, I noticed an orange light near the right corner of the stage turn off, which I interpreted as some sort of queue related to the commencement of the broadcast I was currently viewing. Not that my nerves were running too wild at this point but seeing the size of this event and the conservatism of the audience wearing tuxedos and dresses momentarily dismissed any uneasiness I had acquired from what had led me here, as the formalities of it all suggested something innocent and harmless – and perhaps boring. Even then, I still had no idea what this was. As the feed jumped around from camera to camera, one panning over the audience and one getting a close up on the private boxes, a narrating of sorts started in the background in the calm and quiet tone and cadence of a golf commentator. An American male said: “Aaaand welcome to tonight’s event…glad you could be with us at this political site…the show will begin shortly!” He sounded friendly enough. The only vibe I was getting so far was that this was some kind of rich person thing, some ritsy exclusive ceremony or something. You know, la dee da types. The first thing that significantly drew my attention was when the camera jumped again and the entirety of the stage was in view for the first time, revealing a large metal cage in the center and something odd hanging on the back wall of the stage – some sort of three-dimensional symbol made out of metal in the artsy style of a sculpture. It consisted of three arrows connected together, one pointing up, one horizontal and pointing rightwards, and one pointing down, and a star connected to the front of each of them. Before I could think much more of it, a different American male’s voice, a much more aggressive one, became audible for the entire arena: “We’re just about ready to get started, how’s everyone feeling tonight!?” The crowd enthusiastically cheered. “Is this the site for politics?!” energetically asked the voice? An even louder response. The voice concluded by saying: “Alright you know the drill. This is a no poser zone. Those who are supposed to get a piece of paper will get a piece of paper. And there are more than enough crayons to go around.” The feed at this point took on a different format. It seemed as if people were actually manning the cameras now, showing eager audience members awaiting pieces of paper being handed out to them by workers wearing theater employee-attire. Many audience members were particularly excited about getting the colors of crayons they wanted. A few times the cameras would zoom in on what they were coloring on the paper – and every time it was some sort of poorly drawn out dancing arrangement– two stick figures slow dancing, people in chicken costumes doing the chicken dance – just weird stuff like that that was dance related. Honestly, I’m speaking with hindsight. I don’t remember if I was presently aware at the time that this was the recurring theme of these drawings, or if I just filled in the blanks later after seeing the theme continue into what happened next.The subsequent events of the broadcast were as follows: The employees came out, collected the awful drawings and brought them somewhere backstage. The audience was shown laughing and small talking amongst their presumed friends and families, but eventually grew dead silent. Soon after, the blood curdling scream of a girl that was straight out of a hellish nightmare could be heard. The very second it began I turned pale because of how genuine it absolutely was. I’d never, ever heard anything like this. I can only describe it as a noise a human would make mid-torture, disassociated by pain and every last fiber of your being drowning in the fear for your life. The camera, now in a fixed position center audience, faced the stage. The screaming young girl, dressed in black robes and a black hood, was brought out by a group of people dressed in bird costumes with bird masks. They aggressively shoved her and locked her in the cage, and you can just tell by her frantic motions how downright petrified she was. The bird people crowded around one of the costumed individuals in particular, who was holding a stack of the audience’s papers and anxiously rifling through them. Suddenly this individual stopped, dramatically pointed to the metal symbol on the wall, and shouted “126!”, displaying the stack of papers to the now cheering audience as if stating that was the amount he was holding. When they all began to do the apparent democratically approved dance around the caged girl, which…I don’t even know how I could possibly describe…her screams reached another level, now with hysterical crying and hyperventilating, and I felt like I was going to vomit. I turned the volume all the way down but didn’t click out. I faced away from the screen, composed myself, and unhesitatingly dialed 9-1-1 on my phone. It was just what I instinctively felt I needed to do at that point and I didn’t even care what grief I might get on account of all my other dark web exploration. By the time the police showed up, the livestream had ended. To this day I have no idea what resulted of the girl in the cage. The next month or so after that was surreal. As the police were conducting a forensic analysis of my computer, trying to come away with some important piece of information about what I had watched, I was left in the weirdest mental state, almost like a daze. Aside from being shaken to the core by the poor girl, and my lack of knowledge of what came of her, I was just so creeped out by the unknown nature of the entire thing. There were hundreds and hundreds of people in that arena, all part of a very professionally filmed event, I mean it was exactly like something you’d watch on TV. It didn’t matter what I googled, NOTHING came back related to it, and I mean NOTHING. How was that possible? How was it something that just slipped away from some journalistic coverage of some form, even if it was highly illegal and secretive? Ultimately, I was neither in trouble for anything nor any further enlightened on what I had seen. There was literally nothing the police could find. I even explained the whole “needle in a haystack” links thing and they had no luck. I’m pretty sure they thought I was nutty.During this month without my equipment there was something else that happened I want to tell you about. I still don’t know if this means ANYTHING, but there’s definitely some strangeness here and I feel it’s important. It suddenly came to me one night that I may have known where the arena in the video was. I had noticed when one particular camera angle was present a minor detail on the concert hall’s ceiling. I thought I could make out, during the brief period of time you could barely visualize the back right area of the ceiling, some kind of plumbing problem or…something going on – like pipes and metal sticking out of the ceiling in a way they shouldn’t have been. When I was a little kid I frequented a concert hall in Minneapolis with my parents, only a little bit more than an hour away from Grove-Wild. My older sister was, and still is, a gifted cello player and was often involved in orchestra performances there. This experience was solely the reason for it entering my mind – I hadn’t thought of it in years. But one thing that quickly came back to me once I started thinking about it again was one of the less enjoyable times I had visited the hall. I remember me and my mom and dad were seated definitely somewhere near the back right when we started getting drenched by a downpour of water. The entire performance had to be stopped abruptly because of how much water was coming down through the ceiling. Turns out there was some catastrophic maintenance issue, and the elements of the conditions outdoors at the time – an absolutely cats and dogs rainstorm – were coming in large part right through an open ceiling panel. I couldn’t stop thinking about this possible connection. The concert hall had always seemed huge to me as a kid, I think as huge as the one on horriblepeoplewhodohorriblethings was, but I also understand you think of a lot of places that aren’t that big as big when you’re 7 or 8 years old. So, I actually looked into this – first the arena’s website, and then actually the place itself…in person. The place we’re speaking of is the Minneapolis Morrison Symphony Hall. Their website hasn’t been updated for a long time, but the information you will get on there will inform you that they no longer are the venue for any musical or theatrical performances, and mostly function as a headquarters in the summertime for young girls gymnastics, and during all seasons they also hold rentable storage units. There was a number on the website. When I called no one answered, but I got a call back almost immediately. The woman on the other end, I’m assuming from the front desk, sounded very agitated and demanding, kinda like “Hi, uh, yeah, yeah, so did, did you call, did you just call?!!” Just…aggressive, I guess. After I let her know that I did and that I was just wondering if they recently had any show or performance there even though the website said they had not, she became even more agitated as a result, like very much so, grilling me on wasting her time and why would I ask such a stupid question like that, what was I trying to suggest…and then kept trying to get me on record saying I would never call the number again, which after a while, I just agreed to. It was very, very bizarre.So, yeah, I even drove there and went inside. As I said, it was only a little over an hour away. The building was huge, no doubt. The parking lot was completely empty so I was guaranteed only a short walk to the entrance in the bitter winter cold. It was apparent immediately that the place was abandoned, no one was there, not even someone at the front desk, and I had complete carte blanche in touring the entire building. Strangely, I found nothing whatsoever that resembled a storage unit, and couldn’t even picture where it’d make sense for gymnastics to take place. All of that aside though, and although the stairwells leading to the private boxes and the balcony were sealed off, I did find the ground floor entrance to the concert room I thought was in the video, doors wide opened. This was where I’d watched my sister perform so many times. It was enormous, it was built like how the one in the livestream was, but it’s just one of those things where…I’m not sure. I don’t really know how different these concert rooms look from one another, and the layout of this room could’ve been standard for most of them. It also didn’t help that the only light in the room came from the little from outside, and from my phone flashlight, which prevented me from seeing if the weird part of the ceiling was, well…weird still. The stage curtains weren’t there, which they were in the video, although opened, and no metal symbol or cage was present. Aside from trash on the floor – coffee cups mostly, the only eerie observations I had were a camera hanging high up on one of the walls, two crayons in one of the garbage cans, and a third thing I observed outside of the building in its perimeter. In the field behind the Hall, the grass sunk down at a certain point and lead you to a closed off drainage tunnel. Stuffed up against the locked door were a bunch of red velvet ropes, like the ones used for crowd control at fancy events, and a rolled up red carpet, one you’d see at a similar event. They were placed in a way like they were disposed of quickly, this drainage area being the dumping ground. I still have no idea if there is any connection whatsoever to the Minneapolis Morrison Symphony Hall, but the thing with the camera and crayons creeped me out – although…some would call this a case of looking a bit too deep into something…Please feel free to look into this place, it’s entirely possible someone out there may be able to dig up something I haven’t been able to. There was an oddity that came with my internet habits when I got my equipment back. It was mostly just me obsessively googling anything about any of this, knowing I wouldn’t find anything useful, all the while what I was using to do so was sufficiently equipped to easily go right back to the heart of it all. I suppose this irony, at a certain point, took more prominence in my consciousness than my desire never to seek out what I had seen again, and so I did seek it out. Right back to that friendly place I went – TOR – then the “Billionaires are lizards” forum, then “related sites”, then the law and TOS jargon. I have no idea how long I spent that night clicking on word after word after word, trying to find the needle I desired to find, but had no idea why. Hours in, it actually coincided with my mental asking of this question, “why did I desire this?”, when a little chatbox appeared on my screen. One message awaited my response.“If you want back in so bad, maybe I should just let you back in.” The messenger had no user or picture or anything like that. All there was was the line of text and a little entry box provided for me to reply.It was with this encounter with someone who was clearly involved with what I had seen a month prior that all the awful feelings I had gotten from witnessing that very same thing all came back to me. Typically, when you feel like you’re going to vomit, you, at the very least, wish to pull yourself away from the…”vomit-inducer,” so to speak, so who knows if it was my inability to cope with the existence of an undocumented shadow people ritualistically torturing a girl in a concert hall I may had stepped in just a few weeks before, and the desire to make them no longer undocumented…who knows what it was…but whatever it was put my fingers in the right muscular motions to type “Let me in” into the entry box.The chatbox disappeared and the page automatically refreshed. No hours of waiting this time – horriblepeoplewhodohorriblethings.onion was right in front of me only a moment later. I started to get jittery, my right knee wouldn’t stop shaking and I felt like I was in the modestly-tame stages of a building panic attack. The website was just as glitchy as before. The unloading and reloading of the words that made up the description in the “Home” tab made it difficult to read, but my clear memory of what it was filled in the blanks. “Welcome to Horrible People who do Horrible Things – A political site. Don’t for a moment take our name as irony or our purpose as anything else.” No livestream loaded onto this tab as it had before. The tabs “About Us,” “Resources”, “Videos”, and “Contact” still contained the weird legal text and terms of service text. The sore thumb, “Posers”, was no longer empty, and looked similar to the others, but was different. It wasn’t legal or terms of service text, but rather the tab contained text outlying what legal actions could be taken against unauthorized visitors to the site – albeit in a vague, out of context sense with phrases like “Unlawful entry punishable with Acts 1-5,” and who knows what “Acts 1-5″ even are. It was under this tab that the glitchiness soon loaded a livestream onto the page. I clicked play immediately. There was no going back at that point. I was simply going to endure whatever came my way. No foreign text this time, it went right to the similar varying camera angles of the arena. Right as a closeup shot on the audience began, I instinctively pulled out my phone and started videoing my computer screen itself – thinking it may be useful later to have the faces on record, as well as to have a copy of the livestream itself. No applauding or commentary of any kind this time, the hundreds of people were already coloring something onto their pieces of paper. Like before, the angles then switched over to the cameras being directly manned, and I was clearly able to see what was being illustrated on these sheets: various body parts. Eyes, ears, lips, legs, feet. There were a few outliers to this pattern as well. One person’s paper had a poorly drawn picture of a naked man lying on top of a naked woman, and another had a picture of a head with a screwdriver sticking out of it. The employees collected and went backstage. I braced for impact. I knew the next part of the sequence. The blood curdling scream began and out she came – a different black robed, black hooded girl. If it was even possible, I took in even more so this time just how incapacitating her screaming was. I mean, the people in the bird costumes weren’t even really doing anything in particular at the exact time she was was screaming to really cause the screaming. This was either a scream in reaction of whatever happened before she came on stage, or in fearful dread of what was to happen after she’s danced around in the variety of the people’s choice. Although, no dancing came this time. She was thrown into the cage and the bird people crowded around the one with all the papers. After some paper rifling, the individual didn’t point to the three arrowed symbol…they pointed to their right eye. Intense cheering ensued, like violently aggressive celebratory shouting, and you could see audience members throwing their hands up in the air in ecstasy. “82!” the bird person yelled, showing the stack to the audience. This is the part I have the hardest time telling. No decent person wishes to maintain a clear memory of something like this for years. One of the bird people took a box from an unseen person backstage and along with the others began walking toward the girl, who seemed to be going in and out of a faint. The man with the box entered the cage with the girl and fended off her punches and kicks and slaps. He revealed the contents of the box to be a collection of awful tools – knives, icepicks, pliers, the last of these he chose for himself. And then, to the petrification of the girl, to the amusement of the audience, who evidently were the patrons of what was clear to me now an IRL redroom, and to the horror of myself, the costumed individual went on to gouge her right eye out, as the will of the people had sent him to do. I vomited all over my keyboard and began to cry. My phone fell right out of my hands, effectively ending the useful part of the video record, except for a little bit of audio you can continue to hear afterwards of the stream in the background. What…the…fuck? The audience’s cheering turned into some bizarre chant I couldn’t understand and I tried desperately to click out, but as I was attempting to do so, I noticed another orange light appear near the stage like before. The angle switched to manned again, and I was met with extreme close up’s of the audience members faces looking directly into the camera…as if looking at me. Every few seconds, the angle would switch, and it’d be another member doing the same. I was frightened. This awareness of my being a viewer, who evidently wasn’t supposed to leave, scared me to death. They didn’t say anything at first, but eventually, each member would scream one word at me before the camera switched to the next close up. “POSER!”…”POSER!”…”POSER!” The rest of the audience off camera could be heard manically laughing at whatever this fucking taunt was. I started sweating and my heart was going a mile a minute. I was able to click out finally but was immediately redirected to the “Resources” tab. I was in shock at this point but still somehow managed to read what was in front of me. It was no longer law and TOS text, but a list of what they referred to as “related sites.” Three were linked for me and briefly described: The dark web forum about billionaire’s looking like reptiles, which had led me here, a dark web forum detailing secret government proposals for a North American Union, comparable to the EU, and a dark web forum arguing that all of the English Grammer ever used in court cases was flawed and that all court case precedents and decisions had to naturally be disregarded on account of this. The end of each link had the words “a political site” written in parentheses. Once again, I wasn’t able to click out of anything. A chatbox appeared.“You’re going so soon? You haven’t even contributed to the site. All must contribute. If you don’t, how can you blame us for thinking you are a poser?”I frantically replied “Let me out.” This was the heart dropping response I received.“How does this sound? An assistant of ours will gladly meet with you tomorrow. You can brainstorm some ideas together and determine what your contribution will be! Lunch at the Wells Diner? A stroll through Kolvee Park after, perhaps?”In true “dark web horror story” fashion, my location had been exposed apparently. These were local Grove-Wild establishments very close to where I lived. I had had enough. Absolutely…enough. I got up, yanked the power cord out of the wall, and proceeded to flood my computer and all of its various attachments in the bathtub. I knew police weren’t an option anymore, but it didn’t matter that much. Lucky for me, I was in my final days of living in my apartment anyway, and already had arrangements made for the house I’d be moving to out of state. As far as those last days there went, I barely held out mentally, spending the early hours of the morning sitting on a chair facing my front door, my loaded shotgun next to me. I was so relieved when I was finally out of there, away from where they thought I was. I was never contacted by them, or at least, to date I haven’t been. No letter in the mail like the horror stories…nothing like that. The video I took of the second livestream, in addition to some pictures I took at the Concert Hall in Minneapolis, are on one of my reddit posts about all of this, please check them out if you haven’t. Like I said before, I’m just really desperate for someone out there to maybe have some kernel of knowledge they can add to this. Like the first girl, I have no idea what happened to the second girl and sometimes I just hope that what I witnessed was some kind of weird alternative art thing…I don’t even know. Keep in mind that this all happened quite awhile ago, in fact I just passed my 7-year anniversary at my aforementioned out of state house a few months ago. It was only yesterday, yes, just yesterday…that I’ve run into a new detail on all of this…an update. A bit of context first. After this experience, I came away thinking of the dark web…as just…horrible. Needless to say, I never went back. My replacement hobby became one directly connected to my paranoia of being watched – I genuinely enjoyed spending a lot of time in areas with big crowds. Blending in, feeling small. Carnivals, movie theaters, marketplaces, I just felt much more comfortable being surrounded by people and did such for several years without taking any notice to anything. The forums I enjoyed that were crowd-dominated did evolve overtime, however, and this is where we fast forward to more recent times. Eventually, it became political season again in the state I resided. There was this one candidate running for Governor that I really began to admire – not just the crowds I could exist in at his rallies, but his actual political message. He articulated the issue of human trafficking and combatting it in a way that… I don’t know…just came off as really decent and heartfelt. I know it was because of how cold the world felt to me after what I had seen, so in a way, the dark web sparked an interest in politics in me. I realized that politics and politicians really could offer the change needed to improve upon the cold world that is so real, even the parts that existed in the shadows. A man saying he wants to make the world a better place by combatting the wicked idea of human beings existing as a commodity on the black market? I’d take the sphere of that guy as an alternative to the dark web anytime – I morally preferred this to whatever the Dark Web offered and thought nothing even remotely horrible about it!So now, yesterday. That man, that great…great man. He won his gubernatorial race, and I found myself in the crowd at his campaign Headquarters watching his victory speech, the guy was only a few feet in front of me. How did the soon to be Governor present himself? For starters, he opened his speech like this:“This is the site right here, this is the political site, the site for real political change, you and I, together!” He went on with his speech. When he was discussing his time working for an anti human trafficking non-profit, he mentioned the number of missing women that had been successfully located and rescued under his watch. For some reason, in immediate response to this, three people somewhere in the back began booing and yelling obscenities out, only to quicky be removed by security. As others were counter-booing them, the governor elect said this. “Thank you officers, thank you, yes please remove them. You come hear to listen, folks, not to be a poser.”A little nod in a certain direction? Maybe the world itself is a mix of both people looking too deep into things, and truth existing somewhere in the insanity of it all. I sure hope this Jack America type wasn’t dog whistling. How nefarious something like that would’ve been. How much could he have truly cared if the very people he should be using his platform to call out he was too busy cheaply appealing to!? All I knew was this: When I heard the noticeably significant increase in cheering that came with his uttering of the word “poser,” I was consumed with the reality that everything…was just…horrible. Credit: Matthew Joseph Craker Instagram Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.