Witness Statement of Muhammad ‘Alan’ Malik regarding a sinkhole found during renovations to his basement between June 25th and July 19th, 2021.
Statement provided to the Toronto Police Department on July 21st, 2021.
Statement
My wife Justine and I moved in to the house on George Street about four years ago. We knew going in that it was a bit of a fixer upper. I mean, in this market what else are you going to get? But it was our first home together. Our first real home! It could’ve been a complete shithole and I still would’ve seen it as a palace.
We started with the repairs as soon as we moved in. There was a lot to be done, we had to replace the windows, we redid the bathrooms and the kitchen, and replaced some of the flooring. The basement wasn’t exactly a high priority for me at the time. It was more of a project I figured I’d tackle when we had more time and money.
At the time, we really only used the basement for storage anyway. That was where we put all the boxes we couldn’t be bothered to unpack, or the things we didn’t need year round. Seasonal decorations, the cushions for the patio furniture, the canopy of the gazebo and other stuff like that. I did eventually plan to fully finish the basement and turn it into a rec room with only a section off to the side for storage, but as life went on, that just got pushed lower and lower on my list of priorities.
Justine got pregnant so I focused more on the baby and on my actual 9/5 to make sure we were in a good place financially. We slowed down with the renovations since the big ones were done.
I put a little bit of money aside from each paycheque for the basement, but I didn’t pay that much attention to the growing nest egg I had until recently when I realized I’d blown past my savings goal a couple of months back. I figured that since I had the money, and our son Darius was getting older now it was finally time to finally get around to actually finishing the basement. So that’s exactly what I did.
I built up some new walls to give the basement a couple of different rooms. One was a living room, one was an office one was just meant to be a nice playroom for Darius and the last one was just for storage. I got all of that set up just fine and started on the flooring next. I was just about done with the living room, and had been moving furniture down there when I found out about the sinkhole.
My friend Saleem and I had been in the middle of moving the furniture when the ground crumbled. We’d set one couch down in the center of the room and turned away for just about two seconds. When we’d turned back, the couch was breaking through the wood flooring I’d installed and sinking into the ground.
I remember Saleem and I both froze and stared at it before figuring out what was going on. Then we kept our distance before running upstairs to get my family out and call the fire department. We got lucky. It wasn’t a very big sinkhole. Maybe about four or five feet across at most and the rest of the house was still relatively structurally sound.
Still, I don’t know how the hell I’d missed it. I mean, there had to be some sort of warning sign, right? Some sign that the concrete was unstable? I mean, shit, what if it gave while I’d been standing on it or something? Or worse, while Justina or Darius were standing on it?
We spent the next few days at a hotel until it was concluded that we were safe to go back into the house. I guess it was really only impacting a small area under the floor of the basement. The rest of the foundation was miraculously not damaged. I was told that so long as I got it handled immediately, we should be fine. I took that as great news. I mean, this was every homeowners nightmare. But it was better than finding out your house was so fucked up that it was past liveable, right?
I hired a contractor to get the thing filled in. He was a family friend and I trusted him to both get the job done right, and fairly inexpensively. He was booked pretty solid until end of July/Early August. Not ideal, but I figured I could tolerate the giant hole in my basement until I had time to get him in. Until my guy could get to it, I covered it up with a piece of plywood and told my son not to play downstairs.
Now, about a week after the sinkhole had opened up, Saleem and his family were over for dinner. We were having a barbecue out back and we got to talking. I guess his kids had been asking to see the sinkhole and were under the impression that they’d be allowed to go inside. (Kids, right?)
Well, obviously neither of us were going to put his kids in a sinkhole, but I guess their questions had gotten him curious about just what was in there.
I told him it was probably just dirt, but he still wanted to go in and take some pictures, just to show them to his kids. After a while, I figured I might as well just let him. Maybe we could get my couch out of there while we were at it. I mean, it was a good couch. I didn’t really want to lose it if I could help it.
So Saleem and I went downstairs and we removed the plywood covering. The sinkhole didn’t look that deep. Maybe about six to eight feet. You wouldn’t want to go down there without a way out, but we figured we could make it work. I got a ladder from the garage to put in the hole and sent Saleem down first. The couch hadn’t been that heavy, so I figured that maybe we could get some rope around it and between the two of us, we could push and pull it back up.
Saleem went down the ladder and I tossed the rope to him, but when I looked down he was just looking around the sinkhole with this look of awe on his face. He kept telling me that I had to come down and see it for myself. The couch could wait. I couldn’t imagine just what was down there to grab Saleems attention like that, so I climbed down the ladder.
He was right. I had to see it for myself.
I’ve seen pictures of sinkholes online before. The walls are usually just made of dirt, not smooth stone blocks. And normal sinkholes definitely don’t have pictures in them.
Saleem had taken out his phone and was shining the light on the stone walls. In some sort of faded paint or dye, someone had drawn crude images of people that were little different than stick figures. In the image, they all seemed to be running from something. A single man painted in red.
Saleem said something like:
“That’s some spooky looking shit, right?” before continuing through the sinkhole, which was a hell of a lot longer than I’d expected it to be. In fact, the more I looked at it, the more I couldn’t help but think it looked more like a tunnel.
I looked back up towards where the sinkhole had opened. There were smooth chiseled stones in the ceiling, although some of them looked to have fallen away near the edges of the hole. I could see their broken remains on the floor beneath my couch. They’d probably come loose over time and fallen down, exposing the floor of my basement as they did. This wasn’t a sinkhole… This was something else.
Saleem was keeping his flashlight on the images painted on the stone walls. Most depicted the Red Man attacking people, standing over them, and seemingly tearing at them. I turned on my own flashlight to look down and see if I could find the end of the tunnel. In one direction, there was just darkness as far as I could see. I couldn’t imagine how far down it went. In the other direction though, I saw what looked like some sort of ending. Saleem saw it too.
Slowly we made our way down the tunnel, getting closer and closer to the end we could see. As we drew nearer, I began to realize that what was looming before us was a stone door. At some point, long ago it had probably been red. But the paint on it was faded in all but a few places.
Saleem got there first and took some photos of it on his phone. I think he even recorded some video. While he was doing that, I tried to open the door. It was too heavy for me to budge it on my own, and even with Saleem helping we didn’t get it to move. It was just too heavy. I’m not sure how anyone could’ve opened it.
We took a few more pictures before heading back. Saleem wanted to explore the other side of the tunnel, so we followed it for a little bit, although not very far. We only walked for about six or seven minutes before we found a section where the tunnel had collapsed in on itself, and I convinced him it probably wasn’t the best idea to stick around after that. We climbed the ladder back into my basement and covered the hole with plywood again.
When we got back upstairs, neither of us could stop talking about what we’d seen. Saleems kids were obviously thrilled by the whole thing. But I honestly couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy about it. That whole place had just seemed so… Impossible. Like, we lived just outside of Toronto Canada and if you’re not a local, this part of the world isn’t exactly known for its ruins.
I showed my wife some of the pictures we’d taken that night as we talked about what to do. Neither of us were exactly sure what to do when you found some weird archeological shit in your basement. But we knew we had to call someone.
Eventually, we sent an email out to a guy from the University of Toronto by the name of Dr. Donald Richards. He was one of the professors of one of the anthropology programs there. We figured that maybe he could make sense of just whatever the hell we were looking at and the morning after we’d sent the email, Dr. Richards had sent us a reply.
Hi Muhammad and Justine
Thank you for reaching out with this. You’ve certainly found something interesting! Just from the images you’ve provided, I’m unable to immediately determine just who left these ruins behind or for what purpose. I would love the opportunity to take a closer look at this if possible. My schedule is fairly booked until this weekend, but perhaps I could see this tunnel for myself on either the coming Saturday or Sunday? I’d love the opportunity to document it before you have to seal it up again.
Sincerely
Donald
I told him that Saturday would be just fine.
The week sort of carried on uneventfully for the most part after that. I told Saleem what was going on, obviously. I figured he’d want to be there when Dr. Richards took a look at the place. Justine seemed to just want to get the whole thing over with and really, I couldn’t blame her. Neither of us wanted to go down into the basement. I guess it was just my imagination running away with me, but I didn’t really want to be alone with that sinkhole. Maybe this sounds silly, but I kept imagining some of those stones in the ceiling falling away, leaving weak spots in the basement floor for more holes to open up if I stepped on them at just the right time. Honestly, until that whole space beneath my house was filled in, I wanted to spend as little time in the basement as possible if for no other reason than my own safety.
When I started hearing noises downstairs though… I had to investigate.
It was pretty late at night when I first heard them. I’d gone to bed a little early and woken up just past midnight. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I figured I’d get up, have some water and watch some TV. I was in the kitchen pouring myself a drink and debating nuking some leftovers when I heard it. A faint, distant scratching coming from somewhere in the house. Like an animal moving around.
I’d stopped for a moment to listen. It was hard to tell exactly where it was coming from at first, but I knew it was inside the house. It had to be. I’d checked the living room and even gone to the back door to look outside. Nothing. The sound was strongest inside the kitchen, near the basement door.
I started thinking about the sinkhole and opened the door to listen. I could hear the scratching even louder. It was definitely coming from downstairs.
Slowly I started descending the steps, stopping on the last one out of an (admittedly childish) fear of the floor collapsing under me. The lights of the basement were off, but I could hear the scratching… And in the low light from the kitchen, I could see the plywood I’d put over the hole in the floor. There was movement coming from under it. The sounds of something scraping against the stone walls down there.
I stared for a few moments, eyes narrowed as I listened to it moving around. The scraping came and went… But it was there. Something was down there. An animal, maybe? It wasn’t exactly crazy to suggest that there might be some rats, or even raccoons down there. I didn’t know a lot about animals but I could’ve sworn that whatever was down there sounded like something bigger, but if there were anything that big down there, Saleem and I definitely would’ve noticed it! I stared at the plywood for a bit, before deciding that just for the sake of security, I’d reinforce it a little bit.
I turned the lights on and braved the treacherous basement floor for a few moments to grab some of the things we’d already brought down and pulling them over to weigh down the edges of the plywood.
The scratching sound in the tunnel beneath seemed to pause when it heard me moving around. I assumed I’d probably scared whatever it was off. Once I was confident that an army of raccoons wasn’t about to break through the plywood and invade my basement, I shut the lights off and headed back upstairs.
As I closed the door behind me again, I was already hearing that scratching noise. It sounded just a little bit different, this time… Maybe it was just my imagination but I could’ve sworn that it sounded like something was scratching at the plywood itself this time.
I told Justine about the scratching I’d heard the next day, and that we’d probably need someone to capture or kill whatever was down there before we’d filled it in. She hadn’t exactly been thrilled by the news since that was probably going to be another expense. But at least she knew.
As the week went on, I heard scratching a few more times from the tunnel under the basement. Sometimes I even heard it during the day, but neither of us thought about it too hard.
Saturday eventually rolled around and with it came Dr. Richards.
He was somewhere between 50 and 60 with horn rimmed glasses, short graying hair and a stony expression. He greeted us warmly when he arrived and we’d sat down for a few moments to talk about how we’d come across the tunnel. I watched him taking notes on a little notepad as we spoke. After a few minutes, he asked if he could see the tunnel and I told him he could.
Saleem and I led him to the basement and pulled the things I’d used to weigh the plywood down off. I’d told Dr. Richards that I’d heard movement inside and thought there might be rats or something down there, just a friendly warning. When we finally pulled the plywood off, Saleem got the ladder we’d used the other day and we put it down into the tunnel. I went down first, followed by Dr. Richards and finally Saleem.
We’d brought some lanterns with us to light up the cavern a little better than our phones had. The light seemed to shine off the smooth stone walls.
When he got his first look at it, Dr. Richards had stared at it with a look of wonder on his face. He looked like he was setting his eyes upon the holy grail. I got the impression that he might not have fully believed in what we’d found up until then… But now that he was seeing it for himself, he absolutely believed.
Dr. Richards spent the first several minutes looking over the faded paintings on the walls, filming it all with a handheld recorder and taking pictures. At one point, Saleem asked him: “Do you know what this is?”
Dr. Richards had looked back at him and told us that he wasn’t entirely sure. According to him, the stonework on the walls was somewhat consistent with the stonework done by some other culture they’d found ruins of. Prae Hydrian, I think he called it. Although the faded drawings seemed inconsistent with what he’d seen in other ruins. He said some other things, but I don’t remember much about those.
After a while, we offered to show him the large stone door we’d found and Dr. Richards had enthusiastically told us to lead on. Saleem had taken one of the lanterns and headed down the tunnel, towards where we’d found the door. I expected it to be right there, waiting for us and as immovable as ever. We hadn’t brought anything to try and open the door. While Saleem had seemed to want to know what was on the other side, I personally couldn’t really have cared less.
I figured that if Dr. Richards wanted to know so bad, he could open it himself. I’d sort of imagined he and his people would eventually dig out some way to access the tunnel without going through the hole in my basement, and I could fill it up without affecting his work.
This time though, when we reached the door we found it open.
Not thrown wide open. Only one of the stone doors had been moved and pushed to the side just enough for something or someone to slip through it. But it hadn’t been like that when we’d left it… And as Dr. Richards enthused over the stonework, Saleem and I could only stare uneasily.
We both knew that something was very, very wrong.
I mentioned to Dr. Richards that the door had been closed when last we’d been down there, although he didn’t seem that bothered by it… Honestly, I don’t think he believed us, or thought we were just trying to screw with him. I watched as he grabbed the door and started to push it, nudging it open a little more. He got it to budge more than Saleem and I had and with a little bit of effort, he got one of the doors open wide enough for all three of us to walk through. He went in first and after a moment, Saleem followed him. I hung back.
I hadn’t cared what was in there before and now, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know. But they were already in there. And it didn’t take that long for the curiosity to get to me.
I held up one of the lanterns and I followed Dr. Richards and Saleem inside.
I’m not really sure what I’d been expecting. But I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a tomb.
Unlike the tunnel outside, this area didn’t seem as though it had quite the same attention put into its construction. If anything it looked more like what I’d expected to find down here. A stone cave, with jutting stalagmites and stalactites and what looked to be dozens of chambers splitting off from the entrance. My shoes kicked against the scattered bones as soon as I stepped inside. Looking down, I could see that the floor was absolutely covered in them. Some of them were probably just animal bones… Some of them. But a lot of them very clearly weren’t.
I could see a broken human skull just a few feet away from me. And up ahead, by where Saleem was standing I could see a mostly complete human skeleton. These bodies had to be ancient… The bones were little more than just dust. But that didn’t unsettle me any less. It wasn’t just the skeletons of the dead either. Looking up along the walls, I could see other bodies.
I was sure they’d once been human. Although their skin was dried out until it barely resembled skin. Their faces were still clearly visible and I could even make out the individual features on most of them. Between the sunken, empty eyes and jutting teeth, some of them still had lips and noses. Some had faces that were little more than just skulls. But there was one thing all of them had in common.
All of them looked like they’d been screaming.
One of the mummified bodies was huddled into a corner, hands over its face. Another was propped up against the wall, mouth open impossibly wide. You could still see the eyelids squeezed shut as they screamed. I looked ahead at Saleem. The color had completely drained from his face. I could see him staring at one of the mummified bodies, looking as though he was ready to vomit.
“Fascinating!” I could hear Dr. Richards saying. That was one word for it.
As before, he filmed and documented everything, looking like a kid in a candy shop. Meanwhile, I could barely stand the sight of what I was looking at. It turned my stomach. I couldn’t stay…
I’d only made it a few feet into the tomb when I turned back. Dr. Richards had been exploring one of the side passages when I left. I could hear Saleem approaching me from behind, coming to check on me.
I told him that I was going to head back up. He said that he’d get Dr. Richards and we could all go back together. I watched him dip back into the cave, and just looked away from it, staring back down the tunnel.
I could see the distant light from the hole in the ceiling up ahead. It wasn’t that far away… Just a couple of minutes and I’d be home again, and I never had to go back down again. If Dr. Richards wanted to explore this nightmare, then he was more than welcome to.
As I stared down the tunnel though, I could’ve sworn I saw something staring back at me… It was hard to tell in the low light. But I could’ve sworn I saw a face looking at me from the darkness, near one of the walls. It might’ve been a human face… Maybe? Although it looked a little too gaunt and too red.
I blinked, and squinted to try and get a better look. But when I tried to focus on it, it was gone. I looked back towards the door to the cavern, to call out to Saleem to hurry it up. And as I did, I heard the ladder we’d set at the mouth of the cave fall.
When I looked back, it was lying on the ground. I stared at it for a moment. There was no way that ladder should’ve fallen over… It hadn’t had the room to fall over! Almost on cue, Saleem and Dr. Richards emerged from the cave. They both saw what I saw. The ladder lying on the ground.
Lantern in hand, I headed over towards it. Saleem and I took a minute to get it back up, and I climbed out first. Looking around my basement, I didn’t immediately see anything out of place. I wondered for a moment if something had just run into the ladder and knocked it over. I mean, there had been something living down there, right?
I stopped to help Saleem and Dr. Richards out behind me, before we went upstairs again. And as we stepped up into my kitchen…
That’s when I saw the blood.
I remember the way my heart began to race in my chest as my blood ran cold. Dark red blood stained the white tile floor. I remember calling out to Justine, then calling out for Darius.
No answer.
Saleem was calling for his own wife. He called for his kids. I’d never seen such a look of dread in his eyes. Behind us, Dr. Richards was dead silent, a look of horror mounting on his face.
The three of us tore through the house… It didn’t take us long to find the bodies. Most of them were in the hall, leading to the front door. Justine… Darius… Saleems wife, his children…
Oh God…
The blood… The state of their bodies I can’t… I can’t get it out of my head. And the looks on their faces…
I’ll never forget the looks on their faces. All of them had the same one. A silent, eternal scream of terror. The last thing they’d felt as their killer had come for them.
Beyond the bodies, the front door hung open. We could see bloody footprints leading outside. But wherever it went after that… I don’t know.
The only thing I know for certain is that whatever was trapped down there, in those caverns… It wasn’t supposed to get out.