This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/torremotumbo on 2024-11-05 23:16:15+00:00.
Click here to read part 1.
This post will be a bit shorter than the first two, but I am confident of what I need to do next and will keep on updating you guys until I get to the bottom of the situation.I feel as if finding and listening to these songs has unleashed some kind of evil presence into my life. Whatever it is, it’s been haunting me in ways that become more obvious and frequent with time. At home, I constantly find things out of place that I know I didn’t move, things like my keys, books and frames fall to the floor with no explanation, the smoke alarm has gone off a couple of times and I’ve been experiencing sleep paralysis pretty much every night.
Worst of all, I hear noises of something or someone moving around in my house. This happens at all hours of the day - I hear things in plain daylight and they also wake me up in the middle of the night. I’ve searched the house multiple times but there’s never any evidence of anyone having been there other than me.
It all sounds so cliché - hell, I’ve even thought about bringing a priest over, even though I’m not a very religious person. I don’t know what to do other than trying to get to the bottom of where this music comes from.
I previously mentioned how the songs that I found in the old USB have been changing in different ways - in order to gain some clarity and assurance, I decided to do some formal testing of the different mutations that I have noticed so far.
Despite my analytical and technological limitations, I’ve tried to be as scientific as possible and the results have been undeniably unnatural. I should mention that the results I’ll be posting will be limited. I do not want to get into any legal issues with the university, or worse, to reveal my identity. Having said that, I am willing to take a few small liberties because as far as I know, these songs have not been formally published and I have not found anything online regarding the origins of the project.
First I focused on the issue of time. As you know, the songs have been changing in length - I did some tests with two different computers to isolate and explore the issue in more detail. I transferred one of the songs that had been changing the most with an external drive from my laptop to the main computer that is used in the university’s recording studio. I’m friends with the engineer there and he helped me to set up an A/B comparison.
In all my days of being around recording sessions, I had never been so terrified by the idea of an A/B.
Normally I love these. They are usually set up for exciting and interesting comparisons between two different takes, mixes or masters. You can really get a sense of the incredible depth that lies below the surface of sound and how small differences can have profound emotional impact on the listening experience. Sometimes, whether a song is truly great comes down to the tiniest bit of difference in certain levels or frequencies. Sound is a beautiful and deep thing that I’ve always thought to be sacred, but this is something else. This is about something profane and corrupted. I opened the exact same file with the same audio software on both computers and set their playback markers to zero and pressed play on both computers at the same time. Nothing out of the ordinary happened - the songs played normally and were in sync. I tried with a few more songs from the folder, but everything seemed to be ok. I wasn’t about to give up.
I went back and played the songs again from the top. Multiple times. Nothing.
It was getting late. I could tell that my friend was growing impatient, especially since I was purposefully vague about what I was looking for. I didn’t feel like I could just come out and say what I was testing for without sounding like a complete nut job. He was beginning to worm around in his seat and sighing loudly. After a few minutes, he said he was going to check out for the night but that I could stay back and continue looking for whatever it was I needed to find. He gave me instructions on how to turn off the studio equipment and lock up. He wished me luck and headed out.
Things changed almost immediately after he left - I started to feel very uneasy and anxious. I was the only person left at the studio and there was a heaviness in the air that hadn’t been there before. I tried to distract myself by continuing my tests. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. That’s when it happened.
One of the songs I had previously tested started to phase out, as if they were recorded at different speeds.
I quickly stopped the tracks and played a different track (some generic beat I found online) in order to make sure that it wasn’t a sample rate issue or anything of the sort. That played fine. But something else happened again that has been freaking me out since a few days ago. The green light belonging to the front facing camera of my laptop turned on. It’s happened a few times already and I never have any other programs opened that would even use the camera. I quickly put some tape over the camera and thought about what to do next. I could go home, or I could continue with the tests to see if I found anything else. I decided to stay a bit longer since it’s not like going home would be any more comforting.
I imported another song on both computers and pressed play. This time the rhythm wasn’t phasing, but I began to hear something I hadn’t heard before coming from the speakers that made my blood curdle - it was screaming. It wasn’t very clear so I put up the master volume on the console and leaned in a bit closer. It wasn’t just one voice. It was like a choir of screaming voices. They were starting to get louder.
I tried to stop both tracks but neither keyboard was responding. I brought down the fader on the console but it wasn’t responding either - the volume became so oppressively loud that I had to cover my ears.
Then I remembered there was a power switch for the speakers on the wall. I quickly ran toward it and flipped the switch. I almost wish I hadn’t.
The music immediately stopped but the screaming continued - this time inside the building. It was coming from right outside the main studio room. As soon as I exited the studio, the screams stopped.
To my left, I heard a door shut very loudly - It was the basement door.
I stared at it for a bit, placed my hand on the handle and slowly opened it.
I saw the stairs leading down into the basement. I started walking down slowly.
Looking back, I know I was acting incredibly carelessly. But in the moment, I was in a kind of trance.
Completely possessed by my need for answers. Reaching the basement floor, I looked around and tried to hear for any movement. There was a very specific kind of silence that felt like “less than nothing”.
The best way I can describe it is like a very faint “white noise” that was all around me. Like when you record silence on to tape and listen back at a very loud level - a kind of negative hiss.
I turned to the table where I had been working and saw the computer there. Something came over me. A cold sweat. I couldn’t move or breathe. I knew that something was there in the room and was trying to communicate with me, or manipulate me.
It felt as if the air was sucked out of the room when I remembered two things.
One, that when I first attempted to listen to the song on the computer, I could only hear white noise.
Two, that amongst all the equipment in the basement, I had found an old oscilloscope that was in working order.
I had received the message - a weight was lifted off of me and I could move again. I can’t describe where the urge came from to do what I did next. It felt as if the thought had been put in my mind by a demon.
I grabbed the oscilloscope from one of the rooms and connected it to the old computer’s headphone output. I turned it on and went to the only folder it contained. I then played the track in it, so that the noise would feed into the oscilloscope. Its screen started to show what normal white noise looks like, except in its distinctive green color. I wasn’t at all sure what I was looking for, but I started to turn the fine tune knobs on it to see what would happen. I think the white noise began to change because I noticed that an image began to take form. I leaned in closer to the screen to try to make sense of it. I kept on messing with the knobs until the image became as clear as possible. What I saw in that oscilloscope screen will haunt me for the rest of my days.
It was an image of my mother.