Does anyone else remember this episode of I Survived?
I need to make sure I’m not going insane. Everyone I have spoken to does not remember. They state my memory of the hour-long segment is a hallucination or nightmare. I am told by reasonable people that it cannot be historic or accurate.
I have scoured on-line for it, including an exploration of the lost media wiki. I cannot find it.
Allow me to give you a bit of context.
The first episode aired in 2008.
I remember exactly where I was. At the time, I lived a life of privilege. I had an effortless day job as a private community security officer. The biggest stressor while on the clock was how fast I could open the gate for the owners.
I had four roommates I shared a house with half a mile from my place of work. The two story structure was worth roughly two million dollars on the market. It was only a block away from the lake. The rent we split made the cost of living affordable.
The resident who lived next to us was a retired construction company owner named McKee. He went by his last name, and as a result his first was a mystery to us. The license plate on his Cadillac even displayed it. Whenever I would take a walk, he would wave to me to be friendly, and he struck up a conversation.
“You might want to search the address of your place on-line,” he said one day when he was out front sweeping up leaves. “A man murdered his family there. It had been vacant for the longest time.”
*
I attended the local college on my days off, where I studied philosophy. No one cared to warn me that panhandlers in a ghost town make more money than an expert on Stoicism, but I digress.
In the little free time I had, I drank Miller Lite with my roommates. They had jobs as waiters and bartenders in the city (our property was three miles out of the more populated area). I read and watched TV.
When the months were warmer I swam. The winters were cold enough to make any non-skier want to stay by the fireplace and enjoy a story.
Even though my social life was scant, I knew I had it easy. Sometimes I would grow numb to the pain-free existence I had accumulated. Guilt had set in.
One way I tried to maintain a mindset of gratitude was by consuming media about true crime.
This might seem counterintuitive if you’re a deep empath. For me it was a way of comparing and contrasting my greatest setbacks with the plight of others.
That content made me feel whiny whenever I moaned about the smallest of things.
Another thing which helped me stay grateful was viewing episodes of I Survived.
For those who may not have seen the program, it was real-life accounts of people who lived through horror. The most harrowing, violent, and disturbing acts of catastrophe, cruelty, and terror imaginable. Each episode often covered up to three stories at the same time. It would cut back and forth with each individual and their narratives.
I am aware that invalidating your own trauma is not a healthy psychological move, either. It was not my intent to treat the pain of others like some kind of spectacle to live through. Not was it to watch them and take relief in how I did not have to endure the same gauntlets they did.
It is that at the time I did not see a problem with staring into someone else’s abyss to be glad it was not my own.
I hope I am not judged for this. I will take it one step further. I will recommend you do it. Especially if you find yourself complaining about the barista getting your order wrong.
The first episode left me shocked and in absolute disbelief. I laid there in my bed, staring at the screen open-mouthed.
Bridget, Daryl, Robert B and John was the title of the first one. I was immediately hooked, and knew I would watch it every week.
*
One Monday evening, I came into the house after a long day of work and studying. I had homework to complete and I was not looking forward to it. The professor had asked us to write a paper. We had to analyze the 1972 essay ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ by Peter Singer. It was due in three days.
Singer’s conclusion was simple. He believed we had a responsibility to do good deeds for those who lived far away and within our vicinity. His notion that most people would only help those in front of them was hard to disagree with.
I grabbed a lager from the refrigerator. I went upstairs, and in the hallway I passed two of my roommates, Josh and William. They were both wearing magenta robes.
“Bachelor party or something?” I asked.
One nodded and the other stood frozen. They both had statuettes of an owl in their hands. The theme of their outing was perplexing to me. I would have tagged along if I could have. In those days I never refused a party, but I knew the next day was going to be busy.
I walked by them and smelled burnt sage. I told them to have a good night and closed my door.
*
After a half hour of trying to write an opening paragraph, I gave up and turned on the TV.
The opening of I Survived had started.
Before I describe what happened next, I would like to give the reader a preface I will always stand on.
I was a bit buzzed from the cheap beer, but I was not under the influence of anything else, illicit or not.
I laid back and was immediately relieved of any duty I felt to my education. I was happy to think about anything other than starving countries. How my failure to remedy those issues in any small way made me an unethical hedonist.
The first person on screen was a woman with straight and long red hair, in her mid twenties.
“My name is Lilly,” she said as her eyes locked onto the camera. “I survived a kidnapping.”
The familiar droning and slow industrial music played in the background. A black screen sat behind her. I expected quick jump cut sequences to at least two other individuals. The first thing that struck me as a bit unusual was how she was the main focus.
“I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. My upbringing was peaceful. I got a job working for the district as a public transportation dispatcher at eighteen.”
They showed the Durham Museum. The Botanical Gardens when she mentioned the location came up second. The tint of the camera was gray. The buildings downtown looked monochromatic.
“I enjoyed the job at first. Then one night I was walking to my car after I’d clocked out. The parking lot was right next to the building. On this night we’d had a bad power outage because of a truck that crashed into a power line a block away. I had to use a flashlight to try and remember where I parked.”
She took in a deep breath and looked at her shoes.
“The next thing I remember was being grabbed,” she said. “Both of my wrists were bound. Someone placed a blindfold over me. They told me that if I struggled, they would kill me.”
An aerial view of an SUV on a freeway came into focus.
The next scene was of two men in black hoodies. They escorted her towards a massive church with golden domes and crosses.
The three struggled to move towards the back of the elaborate and ornate structure. It had tinted glass windows and charcoal outline. They moved through thick mud. The windows still had residual precipitation dripping from their frameworks.
I watched in shock. The flashback sequences were a normal part of the program. Still, they rarely looked like live footage.
They walked her past a field towards a drawbridge where a large bonfire raged. Encircled around it were a group of people who all wore white. They held hands with one another, and I could hear a faint chanting in unison.
They took her over the hinged walkway. A moat below them rippled with signs of life. They guided her down a stone corridor without barriers on either side. An obscured view of the tree tops were in the distance, some of which glinted with frost.
They then ordered her to walk up a spiral staircase made of slate. I wondered if they had taken her to some sort of European country. I was unsure of how many castles there were in the Midwest. I later found out through extensive research that there were more than I anticipated. None I found were in the Scots baronial style featured in the piece, though.
Once they reached the rooftop, Lilly screamed. Her parents were there, imprisoned within aged but sturdy oak pillories. They were beside one another. They saw her and shared in the same pleads for help.
“They only showed me how they had my folks in their custody to exert more power over me,” Lilly told the interviewer. She dropped her head to stare at the ground for a few brooding moments.
It cut to the reenactment, or what I hoped was one, anyways.
The men grabbed both of her arms and dragged her. She became deliberate dead weight and persisted in her scream.
They walked her down to another story of the fortification. They took her through a vestibule lined with uneven bricks which jutted out from the walls.
They brought her into a wide chamber. Torches arranged on support beams made of rock blazed.
She complied with an order to lay down on the flat bed made of concrete.
“The man starts telling me how an asteroid’s headed towards earth,” Lilly said. “The only way to get into Heaven was for them to sacrifice people to their God, whichever one that was. I later found out that they were referring to what was later called asteroid 2008 T3. That one did enter earth’s atmosphere before it exploded over the Nubian desert near Sudan. They were wrong in their method to find salvation, but their knowledge was almost correct. They missed the mark on the whole end-of-the-world thing.”
A shadow moved past the window which allowed a view of the green hills outside. It happened so quick that I guessed as though the average viewer would have failed to notice it.
“Terror filled me,” she said. “The only positive was the heat from the burning wax which surrounded me. This felt good after the coldness I had endured during the forced hike. Also, what I saw hung on the wall gave me a lot of hope.”
The camera panned away from the three and showed what she had discussed. It was a Medieval Huntsman Axe, and its metal shone.
“I don’t even think they noticed it,” she said. “To them it was a mundane prop of the room. I was never a weightlifter, and I wasn’t sure how far my strength could carry me once I got my hands on it. Yet I knew adrenaline would help.”
Before she could leap to grab the old piece of battle-made metal, one of the men retrieved a knife. He pulled it from a sheath hidden on the inside of his coat. The blade had a handle made of emeralds and rubies.
He stretched out his arms as though he was preparing for an embrace. He turned to the second man and stabbed him in the stomach. The individual groaned as blood filled his mouth and a stream of it fell down his front. He slumped to the ground and color drained from his flesh. The man who had committed the act of murder reared his head back and yelled at the vaulted ceiling in triumph.
She jumped up and instead of going for the axe, she went for a closer and still-dangerous item - one of the torches.
She hoisted it off the sconce as he chased after her. He yelled louder with each step as he jumped towards her with the sharp end aimed for her midsection.
She thrust the burning end into his face. He made an effort to grab it from her, but at that point his chest and neck became engulfed in flames.
He screamed and dropped the small saber. The clatter echoed through the space. Whoever they hired as a stuntman to douse himself in gasoline and light a match did a great job, by my estimation.
She ignored his yelps of agony as he scorched to death.
She retrieved the axe, and though it was unwieldy, she dragged it behind her as she made her way to the roof.
She cut her parents out of their devices of subjugation with strained heaves of the blade.
They cried and held each other under the stars before they made the risky choice to leave the castle on their own. On their way out, they passed through rooms filled with cobwebs and heaps of human bones.
They stumbled into a room that had, of all things, a stage set up. There were curtains which had blood splatter on them. A woman in a blue and gold dress sat in the center. Her face was open on one side, but the wound was dry. She stared at the family with her head cocked. They were the strange ones for interrupting her silence or personal show.
“I don’t know if she was a prisoner or someone who gave orders to whatever weird cult ran that place,” Lilly said. “She tried to get our attention as we fled, but we did not turn back to face her.”
Once they made it outside, they hobbled, exhausted and beaten, for miles into woodland. They did find a glowing house, whose door they knocked on to request help.
“The police stated the only castle within a sixty mile radius was property of a wealthy family,” Lilly said. “They owned an acting school and would hold private classes for students there. I told them I wanted to press charges. Nothing came of it…the family was too well-off, and they had the local authorities in their pockets.”
A mist developed behind her in the interview chair. Moonlight trickled in from a skylight.
“Why did this camera crew follow me all the way from there to here?” Lilly asked as her expression became angry. “None of you even tried to help me. I can’t believe how not a single one of you did the right thing. Are you a bunch of sickos? Wait until-“
An arm came into camera-view and moved towards her with a hand opened as though it were getting ready for a choke.
The screen turned into static white noise.
*
Viewing the entire thing from the comfort of my home, I felt horror surge through me. Whoever directed it made it seem so real.
Although it did disturb me, over the course of the rest of the week life became busy again with my job and studies. The episode never left my memory. I could not dwell on it.
The episodes all followed the exact same structure as every other one that preceded the one I viewed. This bothered me, so I searched the guide and tried to Google whatever it was that I had consumed. Everything came up as empty and inconclusive. A strange but blameless and aggressive denial of what I know to have aired.
The final episode aired on December 26th of 2014. I felt as though I had lost a friend who kept me grounded and left me bleeding at the same time.
That same night, I could not sleep. Every time I did I would have a nightmare of falling from a rampart.
I got out of bed and walked out onto the driveway. The balcony above creaked. I walked up a few of the wooden steps to try and peek at what could have made the noise, and nothing was there. A coyote ran along the street when I turned to face it again.
For a second, I saw something above. A thin and fiery tendril blazed across the sky before it vanished as fast as it had formed.
*
Years passed, and my roommates and I all went our separate ways. I was the only one who got a degree. It served little practical use in the work force, I did manage to land a position at a marketing agency.
When I got engaged, Josh was one of the first people to congratulate me. He called me and said he wanted first dibs on being the best man at my wedding.
“We should grab lunch,” he said. “How about in August. We’ll meet at the bar and grill by the old place.”
I agreed.
When that day in August arrived, I went back into that neighborhood. I wanted to get a bit of a nostalgia fix and see how much had changed. A Mazda sat near the front. Everything else looked identical to the way it was before.
I walked into the restaurant and saw Josh.
We ate, had a few drinks, and walked down to the beach as the sun started to lower.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said.
His voice had taken on a cumbersome tone, and I grew a bit anxious but curious.
“What did you think we were doing in the basement when we wore those robes and carried those animal busts?”
“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “You guys have always been nerdy, so I figured it was some kind of board game you guys were getting way too immersed in.”
He started laughing and patted me on the back
“I’m not mad how that was your guess. In truth, we were practicing a spiritual act. I convinced the other guys about it. I never bothered to recruit you into it because I thought you were all over the place with your beliefs. One day you were all about Nietzsche, and the next you were going on about Thoreau. I wasn’t convinced I could persuade you to see the universe the way I did. See, we practiced Hermeticism, the kind that the Order of the Golden Dawn did. Am I making sense?”
I scratched my head and peered out at the mountains and the smooth surface of water. He sounded a bit crazy, but I did not want him to clam up. Something told me now was the time to listen without showing judgment, much as I wanted to.
“The beautiful thing about Hermeticism is it’s all about going into what’s called a state of Gnosis. You get new knowledge and have interactions with the source of wisdom. You don’t have to go to a church or a mosque or a synagogue or any place of worship. It operates under the principle that we are all Divine. I know this is sounding like crazy mysticism, but hear me out. I’ve always practiced it in solitude. Something about that house made me want to get a collective involved. I felt it would take an entire group to fight something that was trying to hurt us when we lived there. Did you ever get that feeling?”
“Yes,” I said.
“The only reason I’m sharing this with you is to let you know that I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“We practiced some potent spell work there. Sometimes people within a certain radius get struck by it. I heard you scream from night terrors. I’ve felt guilty for a long time, and I wanted you to know. I hope true love has cured you of whatever bad mojo we pummeled you with.”
*
The funding for I Survived came from NHNZ, Natural History New Zealand. I have scoured the internet searching for the business emails of executives. I sent them the description you read above.
I bought a boxed set of all the seasons through illegal means. When it arrived, it was a few burned DVD’s with titles written in black sharpie lettering.
I have also streamed every episode I can find.
Does anyone else remember this episode?