Throughout recorded history, the underground has always held a certain macabre mystique. Countless religions have preached of some form of Hell or Underworld, wherein the damned shall be punished for eternity for their transgressions against the divine, deep below the surface. It is unclear where exactly this concept first originated and why it occurs in disparate cultures separated by vast gulfs of space and time.
Yet, similarly, despite this reverential fear of the underground, humanity has also always been fascinated by it. One can find ancient paintings deep within vast cavern complexes, the pigments placed there by human hands hundreds of thousands of years ago, far beyond any conceivable light from the entrance. To this day, spelunking is still a not uncommon pastime. What drives us to go deeper into the dark? What makes us want to descend into the bowels of the earth, to be surrounded by walls of stone, swallowed up by the world itself?
In the modern age, one is far more likely to find oneself underground in the form of a basement, subway, or maintenance tunnel than one is to delve into a cave of some sort. When contrasted against those primeval passageways, such structures are tame and mild in comparison, but that simultaneous combination of fear mixed with the call of the depths is still there.
What follows are accounts which describe various unusual experiences occurring in and around the modern Underworld.
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Letter sent by Alana Jefferson to the Fortean magazine “Unknown Phenomena”, April 2nd, 2004
I’ve kept up with this publication for quite some time now, but up until now I’ve never had any experiences of my own to send in. Last week, however, I had a strange encounter in the Seattle Underground
As I’m sure you’re aware, when I say Seattle Underground, I’m not referring to a subway system or anything of that sort. After the Great Seattle Fire of 1899, a section of the city had its street level raised, leaving some tunnels and abandoned old ground floors left behind from the construction. They had some usage in the 1900s as various dens of inequity and whatnot, with gambling, smuggling, and criminal activities, but by the 1910s they had largely been abandoned.
Nowadays a few sections of the Underground have been renovated enough to be safe for visitors, and since I was spending a few days up in Seattle to visit family anyway I figured I’d take an hour or two to go on one of the tours. It wasn’t really something I’d been especially interested in doing, I just happened to be in the area and had asked some friends as to what tourist attractions were worth visiting. Second to the Space Needle, this was the main attraction that was recommended to me, and since I have quite the fear of heights my choice was made for me.
In all honesty it was slightly disappointing. Sure, conceptually the idea of an underground tunnel network beneath the streets of a major city is intriguing, but in practice I was just slowly walking with a group of other tourists through the musty basements of long dead shopkeepers. Any of the excitement of exploring something long abandoned is rather lost when the place has been made OSHA compliant and routinely walked for years.
Anyway, all this is beside the point. At some point or another, I decided I was bored to tears with the tour guide’s rambling and the “oohs” and “ahs” of all the other tourists as they were pointed out some historically significant bit of rubble. When everyone seemed distracted by some old storefront, I quietly slipped away down a side passage and decided to begin a little bit of exploring.
I had made sure to pack a flashlight (I hadn’t been expecting the guided tour to be illuminated quite so brightly by all the electric lights set up to comply with modern safety standards), so I was able to make out my way quite well. Almost instantly I found the darkness made the tunnel system so much more interesting. It no longer felt like I was just following a path that had been tread a hundred times before, it now felt like an adventure.
I passed through various decrepit basements and passageways, shining my flashlight about to peer at all the odd nooks and crannies. I saw bits of old graffiti, a rat or two, some discarded beer bottles, all the sort of things you’d expect. The floor was often uneven and strewn with debris, so I had to watch my step carefully, which only added to the excitement.
There’s something very odd about being completely surrounded by darkness. The tour route often was interrupted with little glass skylights which let sunlight from the outside world shine down, and what wasn’t illuminated by the sun was kept bright by lamps and the like. Now that I was alone, every so often I would turn off my flashlight and just sit there, surrounded by the void. There’s something deeply humbling about it.
After maybe 45 minutes or so of aimless wandering through the dark, I decided it was probably time to head on back. I knew I’d get a stern talking to from the tour staff, but I figured I could just pretend that I had gotten myself lost and had spent the whole time looking for the tour group. However, I soon discovered that I wouldn’t need to pretend that I had gotten lost, as I realized abruptly that I had no idea where I was.
Now, I know anyone reading this is probably thinking to themselves “What an idiot”, and frankly you’re probably right. I began to panic, worried about how much battery life my flashlight had, whether or not anyone would come to find me when I didn’t turn up with the rest of the group, how soon it would take for me to starve to death, etc.
At some point during my panicked searching for an exit, I began to hear the sound of multiple footsteps somewhere in the distance. My immediate thought was that they were coming from the tour group, and that if I hurried I could catch up with them. I began frantically rushing towards the noise, calling out that I needed help and that I was lost.
Here’s where things got a bit odd. As near as I can tell, the Seattle Underground is supposed to only be one level. It should just be the old street level, nothing more. I’ve never heard anyone talk about stairs leading further down. But lo and behold, as I followed my ears towards what I thought was the tour group, I found myself standing before a set of stairs leading deeper into the earth. The footsteps echoed up from the depths, and without hesitation I began to descend, not even taking the time to think about how strange this was.
The stairs seemed crudely carved out of the very rock itself, with no hand rail or anything like that. The whole stairway seemed completely different from an architectural standpoint from the rest of the Seattle Underground, as if it was been added on as an afterthought for maintenance purposes. It also went down quite a long way, I lost count of how many steps but it must have been over a hundred, easily. I felt my ears pop from the pressure change as I went further down into the depths.
Finally I reached the bottom of the stairs, and I saw the source of the sound of footsteps. I should have realized sooner how odd it was that the sound didn’t seem to move, that it kept emanating from one location.
Before me was a vast line of men and women all marching in unison, going down a long, unlit tunnel. None of them had flashlights or any other form of illumination to guide their way, they just seemed to walk forward, eyes open, smiling wide, their feet in lockstep. There were hundreds of them, all in a single file line stretching off into the distance.
The tunnel they marched down was just as crudely carved as the stairway that led to it, and had more in common with a mine shaft than anything that would make sense to see beneath a city. The smiling marchers seemed mostly to be homeless people, but I saw one or two folks in business suits or nice dresses. I didn’t spend long gawking at the bizarre parade. They didn’t seem to notice me at all, even after I passed my flashlight beam over their blankly grinning faces, but that didn’t make me feel any less afraid. I ran back up the stairs as quickly as possible.
I did manage to reunite with a tour group eventually, though not the one I came in with. They didn’t even seem to notice when I joined the group, they must have assumed I had fallen behind earlier. The rest of the tour was entirely uneventful.
Since I’ve gotten back from Seattle I’ve spent a bit of time looking into various urban legends and folklore of the area, but frankly I can’t find anything that seems even remotely close to what I saw. The marchers didn’t seem to be ghosts, none of them were dressed in any sort of antiquated clothing or looked dead or anything like that. They just seemed… empty.
In any event, I couldn’t exactly go to the police with this sort of thing, so I decided it might be best for my peace of mind to submit my story here, perhaps some of your readers may have some ideas.
Statement posted to the defunct paranormal message board “RealSightings.net” by an anonymous user, August 27th, 2005. Grammar and spelling have been corrected.
I’m homeless, and I have been for about half a decade now. I’m typing this up on one of the computers at the public library. I’m not crazy.
I’m in San Francisco, though I’m trying to get out. There are fake people here. They look just like anyone else, I don’t think most people notice there is anything wrong with them.. Most people don’t pay attention to you when you’re homeless. They just stare forward and ignore you if you try to get their attention. Most of the fake people pretend to be homeless, so I think that’s why nobody ever takes note of how weird they are.
They’re always smiling, ear to ear, like they’re the happiest they’ve ever been. Nobody normal smiles like that for more than a few minutes without hurting their face but they do. They all have this blank stare as well, nothing behind their eyes. Like a TV set turned to static. The ones that are pretending to be homeless don’t panhandle either, nor can you ever see them picking up cans to sell or scrounging through dumpsters or anything like that. They just will walk up to you and start talking.
“Hello sir or madam, are you hungry?” is the line that a lot of them open up with. Fucking weird thing to say. I’ve seen them walk up to people who are in the middle of eating and say that. They say it with such a weird cadence to their voice too, like they don’t speak English and they’re just repeating something phonetically without understanding the words.
When I first heard a fake person say that to me I figured that it must have been doing some of that PC shit about assuming someone’s gender or whatever. I’m not what you’d call androgynous or anything like that, I’ve got a beard that reaches down to my stomach, so I was pretty confused as to why it was saying “sir or madam”, like it couldn’t tell. Then I looked up at its face and I met that vacant stare and circus clown grin and I knew right away this thing wasn’t a real person. I mumbled out a “no” and excused myself, leaving it just standing there, staring at where I had been sitting and smiling like an idiot.
You’ve gotta understand they look completely normal, alright? There’s no plastic sheen to their skin or anything, it’s entirely something wrong with their heads. I bet if you cut one open it would have blood and all the right organs and stuff, but they’re not human. I’ve never seen one eat, or sleep, or take a piss, they just wander around asking people if they’re hungry, if they’re cold, if they’re lonely.
I used to have a buddy, Marvin, an old timer. He’d been homeless far longer than I had, and we occasionally talked and would try and wind up at the same shelters and the like. I don’t really remember how we met. We weren’t very close, mind you, but we knew each other. He was a veteran, I think, or at least claimed to be. He seemed to have something going on with his head, call it mental illness, PTSD or something. When you’re out on the street for long enough, even if you don’t get hooked on anything, your mind starts to go away from you. I read somewhere that if you’re alone for too long you start going crazy, that your brain starts shrinking or something. Nobody ever wants to talk to a bum, so you find yourself isolated even in a crowd of people.
It gets cold up in San Francisco in the winter and sometimes there isn’t enough room in the shelter or they kick you out for being on heroin or something like that. Well, Marvin got himself kicked out for some reason or another and pretty soon found himself with a nasty cold. He was really sick, coughing and wheezing till he was blue in the face. Frankly I was worried he wouldn’t make it, it was raining really hard and he was just sitting there, getting drenched and dozing off. I was trying to talk Marvin into coming with me to a free clinic I knew about, but it was quite a bit away and I didn’t know if he was going to be able to make the walk there without my help.
Now at this point in time I’d already seen a couple of the fake people, had sorta tried to warn other folks about them. How there wasn’t something right with them. I’d told Marvin about them too, but it was always sorta hard to know what he did and didn’t hear you say.
So I was trying to get Marvin up to his feet, and he was mumbling something about needing to sleep, how he’d be alright in the morning, that sort of thing, when from out of an alley came one of the fake people.
“Hello sir or madam, are you sick?” Its face had the same clown smile and empty eyes that they all did. This one didn’t look homeless though, it was wearing a nice dress, like the sort of thing women at Christian charities would wear. I tried to tell it that we were fine, we didn’t need help, but Marvin chose that exact moment to become lucid, and started babbling about needing a doctor.
The fake person’s smile didn’t change, there was no flicker of any sort of recognizable emotion on its stupid grinning face. It didn’t seem to notice the rain pouring down on its head, didn’t even blink as the water ran into its eyes. When Marvin finished talking, it opened its mouth again and said “I am sorry to hear that. I work for a free clinic. It’s right this way. Will you come with me?” It opened its arms as if offering a hug.
I was about to drag Marvin out of there, but he stumbled into its arms and started sobbing and wailing. The fake person closed its arms around him and started stroking his hair mechanically, like an animatronic spinster with a stuffed cat. “There there”, it said, and started leading Marvin into the alley it came from. I started to protest, trying to tell it he was fine, but it just ignored me entirely. It already had its prey.
It practically carried Marvin down into the alley, and I followed behind it, shouting for it to let him go. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it though. I couldn’t bring myself to grab a hold of it. Even now my blood runs cold just thinking about it. He was led down some stairs into a basement door. The stairs seemed to go down far deeper than they should have, and the door was strange. It was a hunk of solid rusted metal, like something you’d see on a submarine or something. The fake person slammed the door in my face before I could get a good look at what was on the other side, but I could have sworn it was just more stairs, leading deeper down. I pounded on the door telling the fake person to let him go, to bring him back, but there was no response. I waited by that door for hours but nobody ever came out.
Two weeks later, I saw Marvin again. I was out waiting in line to be let into a shelter, and he was facing the other way, standing off to the side, facing away from me. He didn’t look sick anymore, and I approached him to ask what had happened with the fake person. He turned around and I saw his blank eyes, that mindless grin. “Hello sir or madam, are you hungry?” it said.
There’s more of them every day now. I’m trying to get out of San Francisco. Hopefully there aren’t fake people anywhere else.
Transcribed excerpt from the conspiracy theory podcast “Total Disclosure: The Truth is Now”, hosted by Trevor Dyson, January 17th, 2006.
Alright folks, we’ve got some listener mail here that is very interesting. Last week we talked about how the government is hiding evidence of top secret underground military bases, subterranean clone labs, the Stephensville cover up, stuff like that. Well, since that episode I received an email from a listener who’d prefer to remain anonymous, and the experiences he describes seem like they may be relevant to that line of thought.
Without further ado, I’m just gonna start reading out this email verbatim. If what he says is true, and I have no reason to doubt this fact, then it reveals some very disturbing things about what’s going on beneath our very feet.
“Hi Trevor. I’ll admit I’m a relatively recent listener, I haven’t really ever been too much into this conspiracy stuff. I’ll be honest, up until recently I considered it to be just some paranoid tinfoil hat nonsense, if you’ll pardon my bluntness. However, since taking my current job I’ve started to become a bit more open minded. I want to tell you about some experiences I’ve had working at the Denver International Airport.
Now listen, I know that everyone thinks the DIA is a hotbed for this sort of thing, but it’s really not, or at least not from I can tell. There are some ‘secret’ tunnels but I’ve been down there and there isn’t really anything of note, they’re just service tunnels to transport luggage and stuff like that without the guests noticing. There is something very strange about the transit system however.
If you’ve never been to the DIA, let me explain briefly I’m talking about when I refer to the transit system. It’s full name is the Denver International Airport Automated Guideway Transit System, and it’s basically a glorified train that takes you from the main terminal to the concourses and vice versa. It’s not anything especially ominous, and the furthest distance you can travel using the system takes about 11 minutes at most. Sure there’s the mile long Deep Time / Deep Space art installation along the way, with some animated lights depicting caves and miners and the like, but it’s more cool than creepy.
Anyway, like with all subterranean train systems, there is a maintenance walkway along the edge of the track. This allows access for repairs and the like, and isn’t anything unusual. However, about every 6 months we find a dead body on this walkway.
The first time I saw one was about 2 years ago now. I’m not going to go into detail as to what I was doing in the transit system when I found it, I don’t want this email to get traced back to me, but I was working on some minor maintenance, nothing that required the system to stop or anything like that. I was carrying some equipment down to the spot that needed some work done, and I just saw a dead man laying face down on the walkway.
Now he wasn’t dressed like he worked at the airport, so I was worried he might have been a passenger, though I had no idea how someone could have gotten off the train and collapsed on the side of the tunnel. When I turned him over to check for a pulse, his face was blank and smiling, completely contented in death. I didn’t see any wounds of any sort, he just was dead, like he’d had a heart attack or something.
I called security in a panic, but when I explained the situation to them, they calmly told me to wait there, to stay put and not touch the body. I didn’t tell them that I’d already done so. A few minutes later, a group of guys in what looked like hazmat gear showed up and sealed the dead man up in a body bag before carrying him away on a stretcher. One of them asked me if I had any contact with the body, and I lied and told him no. He nodded and told me if this ever happened again I was to report a ‘Code Black’ on the radio with my location, and to not tell anyone about this or I would ‘disappear’. That was the exact word he used, ‘disappear’. I didn’t have a chance to ask him what he meant by that before he just walked off with the others, the corpse in tow.
Since that first incident I’ve seen 3 more dead bodies, as I said with an interval of about 6 months between each one. They’re always dressed in regular clothes, always have no wounds or other signs of violence, and they’re always smiling. I have to assume they aren’t passengers on the transit system, otherwise I’m sure there would be media coverage or something. Every time one shows up I call for a ‘Code Black’ and the hazmat guys show up, ask me if I touched the body at all, and then take it away.
I really don’t know what to think about this. I wish there was some sort of easy explanation I could find to write all this off as something normal, something explainable, but it’s utterly inexplicable. I don’t know where the bodies come from, or where they take them. It’s not like there aren’t security cameras down here, so surely there must be footage of what happens, but I can’t exactly go up to security and ask to look over the footage. I have a feeling I wouldn’t have a job for long if I did.
I’m sending this in on a burner email and would like to request that you and your listeners please not try to contact me further. I don’t want to ‘disappear’ like the man in the hazmat suit said.”
That’s the end of the email, and hoo boy what an email it was folks. Mysterious bodies appearing without explanation or warning? Threats of forced disappearances? This whole thing smells of a conspiracy. We’re gonna take a quick ad break here for just a moment, then we’ll be right back to the show folks.
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Further accounts will be posted soon.