The 2000s. The times of my childhood. Back then, almost anything could be posted anywhere on the internet without much of an issue. One infamous example of this was shock videos. Videos made just to be shocking, with some level of creeps and terror in some. Sometimes just creeps. Other times… just gross out stuff. Many of these videos disappeared during the 2010s due to evolving site-wide policies. Although, some of them can still be found. On either remaining gore websites or on somebody’s hard drive somewhere.
There were two videos that stuck out to me that era. One was titled “Lol Superman” and showed people hitting the ground after falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11. I want to be serious about it. It wasn’t filmed for shock value. A photojournalist just wanted to capture the goings ons at the base of a historic tragedy, even if it would never be shown on TV. By its very nature… it was just terrifying. Of course, it was reuploaded with tasteless cheeky titles like the one mentioned above, and sometimes tasteless music, all throughout the Mid-Late 2000s, until all the videos got taken down by filters at some point in the 2010s. The footage itself was never the biggest thing. Not everyone saw how horrible it was. It’s very hard to find now though.
As for the other video… well… most of the details surrounding it have been burned into my head at this point.
Sometime in the Summer of 2007, I was watching videos of house fires. I wasn’t an arsonist or anything. I was just curious about the destruction. As I watched through about a dozen videos, I came across some videos with odd titles. Titles like “We Didn’t Start The Fire” and “Man turns red.” I watched some of the videos, including the two I just mentioned, both of which well represented the videos in general.
The former of the two was a video taken in a hallway of an office or apartment building, where every room had smoke billowing out. It included the cameraman aiming into the rooms and seeing flaming furniture, and the song “We Didn’t Start The Fire” was playing over it.
The latter video was of a flaming person running down the road, only to collapse and freeze in one spot. It had hip hop music playing over it.
The reuploads were in bad taste. It was weird to watch them reposted as jokes despite the horrid things that went on in them. Maybe those who reposted them that way did so for catharsis. To help deal with their own feelings that they have towards that kind of stuff. But that was less likely, considering the shock humor trend of the time, which I knew there was a line for. I stumbled upon the original uploads of those videos. It was haunting to hear the screams down the hall in the apartment building and the in-shock grunts of the flaming man. Just chilling all around.
After scrolling almost seamlessly, avoiding the videos with “LOL” or “LMAO” in their titles, I saw a video titled “Somethinginthefire.mp4” that had an image of a nighttime house fire in its thumbnail. I clicked on it, hoping I’d see a normal video that wasn’t posted for shock value.
It began in the backyard of a suburban two story house with three back windows on both floors. Flames could be seen in two of the three upper floor windows. Not the middle one. Blinking red lights from firetrucks could be seen down the spaces in between houses. The cameraman steps up to the back door and opens it. He just walked into the house despite their clearly being fires inside. Maybe he was a firefighter, but he should’ve been working on putting the fires out if he were. He stepped by the living room. Smoke billowed against the ceiling, coming down a flight of stairs. The cameraman moved towards the stair case. Murmuring voices could be heard coming from a nearby room. It sounded like multiple people were speaking at once, so I couldn’t make out what they were saying. The cameraman moved up the staircase, coughing a few times as he ascended to the upper floor of the house.
One thing I noticed was that he didn’t talk at all. He did cough quite a bit… he even grunted once… but he didn’t react in any other way or any more than that. It was weird that he was in the house at all. There was smoke all over the place and he wasn’t choosing to get away from it. In fact, it felt weird enough that a chill ran down my spine. Why was he walking into a burning house? Why did it seem like he wanted to show something specific? What did he want to film specifically, if so? I couldn’t assume it was something scary, so I watched on, curious about what the cameraman wanted to film.
After he made it to the upper floor, he stepped down the hallway until he got to the room at the end. The one to his right. He opened the door. The sight was dreadful. The bed was up in flames, with the blankets pretty much charred and melted away. Luckily, nobody seemed to be laying in it. The flames had spread across the left side of the room. All over the dresser, picture frames, lamp, and bedside table. The camera panned to the right. When the light adjusted, a hand could be seen sticking out of the closet. In between the wall and the partly open wooden slider door. The cameraman stepped up to it and slid the door open.
A man stepped out. He looked to be in his early twenties. I wanted to say he was human, but he clearly wasn’t. Something was off about him. His skin buldged out in multiple places, as if it wasn’t attached to his body and was fake. Some of the bumps were moving too… as if spiders were crawling under his skin. The entire sight sent chills down my spine.
He stood still right outside the closet, staring ahead at where the flaming bed was. The cameraman sprinted out of the room and moved down the hallway. At the end of the hallway, a hexagon had been drawn in a drooping dark liquid on the wall. The cameraman moved up to it and observed it up and down. He slid his finger across the side closest to the bottom, then he held it in front of the camera. The liquid was all over it. He moved into the bathroom and switched the light on. He put his finger up front of the camera again and you could see the black liquid was actually red. It resembled blood. My stomach sank. Maybe it was fake. I tried to assure myself, but the anxiousness didn’t ease. I almost clicked the back button when I heard a wailing cry. The cameraman stepped out of the bathroom and went back downstairs, coughing a bit along the way.
Downstairs, the cameraman turned a corner into a livingroom. Four men wearing matching black clothes stood in front of the TV, in the middle of the room. They were speaking to each other all at once. The camera moved to the right. A woman was sitting in the corner, hands clenched over her eyes and tears running down her face. The camera zoomed in on her face and mostly held still until a thump came from somewhere off camera. The cameraman climbed back up the stairs, walked towards the hexagon, but then turned to his left and opened the door. It was so nonchalant that I leaned back in my seat, expecting something terrifying. But the immediate sight was of an empty adult-sized bed with a blanket sitting on the floor. Then I saw the flames all over the wall around the window.
The camera was aimed down at a growing flame on the floor. It spread across the blanket, yet the cameraman stood still. He aimed the camera up and aimed it towards the wall to the left. It was your average white painted wall, until the paint began to drip. The wet dripping paint turned dark purple as it inched down to the floor. Soon, the entire wall was a purple drooping liquid.
The camera was aimed at the ground. The purple liquid pooled on the floor. It appeared to be steaming. As it neared their feet, the cameraman backed away a couple of feet, then he aimed the camera back up at the wall. A person sized hole was forming, with the inner parts of the wall having turned into a pile of mush as well.
A hand reached out of the hole, then an arm, then more arm… just one long arm, far longer than any arm I’ve ever seen, reached into the room. It didn’t look like a mannequin. It bent in a way that was so natural. But it was longer than a human arm would be. More chills ran all over me. Hopefully there’d be something human at the end of it. An orange glow illuminated the wall. The camera panned right, towards the bed. Most of the bed was up in flames. Everything up to the pillows.
The camera was aimed at the ground. The flames spread across the purple mush. The cameraman stepped back. The arm squirmed around on the wall as the flames engulfed the hole, then it stopped moving. A moment later, a flaming black mush tumbled out. It had to be the size of two or three people. I couldn’t make out its exact shape, or what it even was, which was more terrifying than knowing, according to the dread I felt watching it sqirm around. What made it worse was what I could see when the thing turned around, back facing the camera, and the lighting adjusted. Just a fuzzy blackness. Like a tarantula. The pit in my stomach got deeper. The thing froze in one spot. I refused to take a guess at what it was. I didn’t want to know, as a terrified 8 year old.
The cameraman finally walked back down the hallway and went down the stairs. The only sound was the cameraman’s footsteps across wooden flooring. The second they stepped into the livingroom, the crying woman from earlier was standing in one spot. One of the men from earlier was standing to her right, pointing a gun at her head. The man pulled the trigger and a red mist exploded from the opposite side of her head. She fell to the ground with a lifeless thud.
I flinched. I never watched anybody do… that… before.
The cameraman stepped through the living room and went out the back door. After reaching the end of the yard, he aimed the camera back towards the house. All three upper floor windows were burning. The bottom two were fine. I skipped through the video. It was just footage of the house burning. The fires spread to all of the visible windows, then the firefighters ran into the backyard and sprayed the fire out. The video ended before the flames were entirely extinguished though.
How could a video of a house fire creep me out more than just terrify me? None of what was in the video looked fake. It all looked too natural. I didn’t stick around on the page for much longer. I only bothered to read the top comment under the video, then I hit the back button. I had to watch something light.
While Lol Superman was more about the demise of victims, Somethinginthefire.mp4 was more about some strange creepy things that I couldn’t tell whether or not they wanted to victimize others. On top of it being a house fire video that didn’t make sense the more I thought about it. I’d be content if I never saw either of those videos again, but shock videos like those ones stick with you. They have given me some sort of obsession, where even though I’m not into them, I can’t stop acknowledging them or thinking about them. Death should never be purposefully trivialized with silly music, but the main point is… anxious obsession is something serious I should find some sort of catharsis for.
I hadn’t encountered the video again until Spring 2008. I was watching through tons of videos about controlling fires when I came across a video titled “THIS FIRE IS OUT OF CONTROL” with an image of the hexagon drawn on the wall as the thumbnail. I scrolled down pretty fast and never saw it again.
Throughout the following years, just wondering what was under that guy’s skin, wondering what that flaming creature really was… thinking about how close the cameraman was standing to the flames each gave me chills every time. Wondering why they shot that lady was a whole other thing…
Shock videos, particularily the horrible and horrifying ones, but the actual videos themselves regardless of whether or not they were posted for shock value, have always piqued my non-interest anxious obsession. There really needs to be tighter filters so this stuff stops popping up as unrelated search results. Anyone else ever just cover the thumbnails when you know one of those videos are going to pop up but you want/need to search for something else?
By now, I’ve become desensitized to my memories of watching the video. I wanted to watch it again for some kind of closure. Over the past month, I scoured YouTube, but couldn’t find it. On Google, I used advanced search operators like quotation marks to look for discussion threads about the video, but nothing came up. It wasn’t infamous or anything. It only had 200-something views. Maybe it was wiped from the internet, like with Lol Superman and many other shock videos. But who knows, maybe I’m better off not watching it again.