There’s this really weird thing I found recently that I’ve been meaning to share and explore a little bit, so here’s a bit of backstory:
I recently moved towns (like, about a year ago, as a rough estimate) to go to college in Ashpan City, NC. Since I got here, I’ve been getting weirder things on my social media feeds that I’m having trouble explaining.
I came across this unsettling YouTube video the other day on my recommended. It was titled “KR Noise” and the thumbnail was just this overexposed photo of a forest- these blackened birch trees against a bright white sky and sharpness turned so high up that I couldn’t actually tell what it was until now, thinking back on it. I watched the video and it was potentially the WEIRDEST thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I clicked on it thinking it was like brown noise or white noise or something to help me focus on homework, but it wasn’t, it was this narration of some abstract physical theory about timelines and ‘jumping’ or something, with a very strange ink-animated diagram explaining it… I don’t actually remember what the theory was about, it was kinda complicated. I was trying to follow along, because I found it interesting, but it was not really making sense. Watching it, I felt… unsafe. Like, not just creeped out, but targeted. Specifically. Like I was being watched, or spoken to directly through the screen.
But here’s the even weirder part. I can’t find the video anywhere.
I looked it up this morning, but there was no trace of it anywhere on the internet at all. Not on YouTube, and it wasn’t uploaded on to any other sites either.
I did find, though, a reference to it somewhere, on a forum called AFysica. A user called xAffo_gato made a post about something called the Kaiser Phenomenon, and it sounded extremely similar to what was being described in the video (I think the video was uploaded by a channel by the name of the Kaiser Institute? Kaiser Institution? Something like that).
I asked them about the video, and they said that they had seen it before, but that it’d been taken down years and years ago, in 2011. Which is weird, considering I definitely saw it last Monday. I think it was Monday.
But I asked them anyway, and they broke the theory down into fundamental parts. It’s mainly about these timelines, called ‘channels,’ which are referred to as the ‘vector’ channel and the ‘sub-scalar’ channel. And they’re connected, or something. You can only be in one at a time, and in order to get to a ‘sub-scalar’ channel, you had to ‘jump’ from the main ‘vector’ timeline. And it was completely random when you did that, and impossible to determine when it would happen.
There’s also an extremely rare but non-zero case that someone can get stuck in-between the main vector and sub-scalar timelines, and in that case their existence is like, superimposed on top of the scalar timeline. I KNOW this doesn’t make sense. I might be relaying this wrong, I don’t know, it honestly doesn’t really make sense to me either, but anyway.
I tried asking xAffo_gato about the video itself and the channel it was on, but I never got a response. Since this whole interaction, I’ve been feeling really strange. Like, chills down my spine, can’t sleep kind of strange. I don’t know what it means.
Oh, and I figured out why the video was so strange to me. I know the woods in the thumbnail, because I live near them. I was out walking this morning and it dawned on me. It’s in Ashpan City, North Carolina (ironic name, considering Ashpan is much less a city and much more a rural hellscape of the greatest proportions). And I am a little freaked out because of this, considering my city’s… extensive… history with sketchy shit. Cults, coverups, stuff like that. Not a safe place to live. If I could, I would have gone back in time and warned myself NOT to move here.
There is some truth to some of the stories they tell here. Like how in 2017 there was some discovered stolen art worth $300,000 inside the walls of Golden Kaye Gallery downtown. That was- partially- true. They just omit the part where there was a hell of a struggle to get it back and half of our local police force mysteriously disappeared after the painting was returned to its owners in New York, and a year later, the art was gone again, and hasn’t been found since.
Or when, in 2011, three highschool kids were found at the bottom of a lake, and autopsies revealed that the bodies’ decay indicated they had been dead for weeks. Only problem is, the three of them went missing only two days before they were found.
And ever since I saw that video, time feels like it’s slower and faster all at once. And I can’t get rid of the tinnitus. It’s less like ringing and more like… A fluorescent light constantly buzzing; flickering on and off. Things flash in the corner of my eyes, and I am overtaken by a sense of paranoia. Like I’m being watched.
I’ve tried to find the video again. I can’t. The idea of stumbling upon it again terrifies me, to the point where I can’t turn my phone on without the overhead light in my bedroom turned on. I don’t know why; I can’t quite place what it was about the video that wracked me to my core with fear.
Am I alone in this?
Or, to ask a slightly more pressing question,
… Am I alone right now?