Life is a strange thing. One moment it can be heading on a trajectory, and you can be certain of the direction it will end up. Then just like that, an event comes along that fundamentally alters the course of your life. For me, this event was my run-in with a man named Owen Scholbach.
On the surface, it seemed so benign. I had a chance encounter with an elderly man. He lived alone and was lonely (many are), he refused to break off the conversation and made me talk for longer than I wanted to (very common), he was sad and had regrets (they all do), and he told stories that were downright fantastic (this is where it got weird).
I met Owen during summer break after my junior year of college. I had a summer job as a furniture mover, and I was helping him move his belongings from his house into an assisted living facility. As a mover, I got to see inside people’s homes, and I always thought this revealed a lot about a person. I didn’t know anything about Owen at the time, but after the fact I learned that he was generally regarded as a kook in my hometown of Tioga, and most people had a negative opinion of him (this was especially true for the older people). This contradicted what I saw in his home.
Owen’s home did not appear to be the home of a kook. Everything in his home was neat and organized. It was obvious that a woman had never lived there, and yet it was decorated in a way that made it feel warm and inviting nonetheless. On top of that there was Owen’s appearance. He was old and frail, yet he carried himself in a way that appeared dignified, and he spoke in a way that was respectful and articulate. The only odd thing I noticed is that he didn’t have any pictures of relatives in his home, which in hindsight makes me very sad. My point is that it was tempting for me to dismiss him as a kook, and yet I have a hard time rationalizing how a home like this could belong to a madman. In a way his warm demeanor was comforting, but in a way it only made his stories all the more disturbing, because it meant they were probably true.
I could tell Owen was sad and lonely, as he kept interrupting me and my coworker while we moved his stuff. My coworker was annoyed, and to be honest so was I. Owen mostly wanted to make small talk. But before I departed he pulled me aside and said he wanted to stay in touch. He said I was a kind person and he had something really important he needed to tell me. I agreed to exchange contact information with him, mostly out of pity. I thought this would be the end of my interactions with him, and yet I wasn’t surprised when he reached out to me several weeks later and said he wanted me to visit him. I didn’t want to meet him, but I felt obligated, so I agreed to visit him in his assisted living facility. It might sound strange that I agreed to visit him, but keep in mind that I lived in the Midwest, and I had heard this sales pitch before (or at least I thought I had). I assumed he was a lonely old man and he wanted to push Jesus onto me, just so he’d have an excuse to talk to somebody.
I quickly realized that this was far more than a conversation about Jesus. In fact, I saw that it was one of those pivotal conversations that drastically changed my life’s trajectory, one that shook me to the very core of my soul. Owen’s story was fantastic, and yet compelling. He claimed that he had been the main person at the center of the Tioga Days Incident. I had only heard about this incident in passing, and what I had heard was scant at best. Tioga Days is an annual summer event held on the founding day of the town of Tioga. Supposedly a long time ago (as in many decades ago), someone had been murdered in a grisly manner at one of these events. Or several people had been murdered, depending on who you ask. But that’s the extent to which I had heard of it. For reasons I never understood, it was a taboo subject which people only spoke about in hushed tones.
Owen offered a very different account from what I had been told. He claimed there were multiple grisly murders in the months leading up to the incident. As many as 20 people may have been murdered, although it’s difficult to say for sure which stemmed directly from the incident. The entire town was on edge, and many people wanted to cancel Tioga Days altogether that year.
Owen said he had always been a studious person who was keen to notice patterns. On top of that, he was always reading and acquiring new knowledge. He noticed that these murders fit a pattern, and that the pattern conformed to prior references he had discovered to supernatural beings. These were different from supernatural beings you would find in mainstream, or even esoteric, references. Information about them was scant at best, and always existed on the periphery of human knowledge.
He claimed there were many such supernatural beings, but in this particular case, there was one individual being responsible for the murders, which Owen called “the kkkkchsma”. That’s the best spelling I can provide, but it’s pronounced with a combination of guttural hissing and what almost sounds like a real word. Where Owen got this name from, I have no idea. He said the kkkkchsma was a parasitic monster that inhabited people’s bodies by making a small hole at the base of their neck and burrowing inside of them. Once inside, it could control a person’s actions, but it had one weakness in that it could only last several days before needing to find a new host.
Owen became concerned about all the murders and tried to learn as much as he could about the kkkkchsma. Back in his day, this meant spending long nights in the library, and even travelling out of town to visit different libraries. Through his studies, he learned that the kkkkchsma had another weaknesses: it was very arrogant. He wrote multiple letters in the local newspaper taunting the kkkkchsma, in an attempt to provoke it out of hiding. Needless to say, this made him a very unpopular person in Tioga. People wanted an end to the murders, and they wanted justice. People thought Owen was exploiting a very serious attention to fulfill his childish need for attention. Many people began to suspect he was behind the murders, and some people even wanted to kill him in response.
This all came to a head at Tioga Days. Owen claimed his letter writing campaign provoked the kkkkchsma into attending the Tioga Days event. To everyone’s shock, Owen yanked the microphone from a band while it was performing and claimed he was going to put a stop to the murders. What happened next shocked people even more. Owen began uttering guttural, unearthly groans and screeches. He claimed it was part of a secret language spoken by the kkkkchsma, and that what he was saying was the gravest insult known to the kkkkchsma. Shortly thereafter, yelling and screaming emerged from the crowd. A woman’s head exploded, with multiple tentacles emerging in its place. This creature ran towards Owen, apparently in an attempt to kill him. A vigilant person in the crowd pulled out their revolver and shot the kkkchsma dead in its tracks.
I wanted to dismiss Owen’s testimony as nonsense, but I wasn’t able to. He had newspaper clippings showing all of his letters to the paper, along with articles about the murders. I nearly froze when he showed me a news story labeled “The Tioga Days Incident”, and it documented the story exactly as he told it. What was most chilling is that it had an image someone had caught of the kkkkchsma. It was indeed a headless woman with tentacles emerging from the base of her neck. Owen wanted to show me the books he found that referenced the kkkkchsma, but I’m afraid to say I had seen enough. I wasn’t able to take any more and I bolted for the door.
I was able to put this out of mind for several years, but this state of denial caused me to develop several neuroses as a result. Eventually I had to confront what I had seen. My neuroses went away almost immediately, but they were replaced with a sense of constant fear. This story is disturbing due to the graphic murders, but it’s also disturbing on a deeper level. If these supernatural beings are real, and there’s next to no documentation for their existence, then how widespread are they? If they are widespread, then what chance does humanity stand in fighting this kind of evil? This made me question everything we thought we knew about the history of humanity.
These are the kinds of questions I now spend most of my days pondering. I’m scared a lot of the time. I’m scared for myself and what will happen to me if I keep researching these beings. But I’m also scared for humanity and what will happen to it if I do nothing to stop them. There’s only so much fear I can feel though, and sometimes it’s replaced by anger. I’m angry that people ostracize me whenever I bring this up. I angry that something this evil is being allowed to run unchecked. And then sometimes I’m sad. I’m sad, because I know I’m going to end up like Owen. I will always remember how apprehensive he was when he talked to me. He seemed angry, like he was tired of constantly being ostracized for doing the right thing. But even more so, he seemed sad. I feel really bad for running out on him like that, and I’m sad to say he passed away before I ever got a chance to make amends with him. I’ll never forget the way he broke down crying, saying he was so sorry for passing this knowledge onto me. And now in a sense of karmic justice, I’m saying the same thing to you. Understand though that I’m only trying to do the right thing, and I’m so very scared.