The Deadlands

Good evening.

To start this off, I'm firstly going to have to clarify a few things. First, I'm not an avid Roblox player, and the second being that the story I am going to tell is not recent at all, so I'm going off of plain memory and speculation as to how all of this happened. When I used to play Roblox frequently, I typically rejected most of the game's traditional joyful swing. Instead, I often preferred to look for abnormalties in the website's large list of games to choose from. You can call me an "internet surfer" if that comes to mind, but just remember I only did stuff like this on Roblox, since it seemed pretty much like the only website that had better security when dealing with strange games.

If you weren't able to tell by that evidence, I'm just going to say it plainly. I used to be one of those "myth" investigators during my heyday. I was a member of many different myth-hunting groups, but wasn't a high rank in particular. I was more of a follower than an actual investigator, and would make impossible and arbitrary conclusions to certain "stories" as to how these odd users originated. In fact, I can admit I was kicked from some after getting into arguments with other users over these fringe theories. This might as well have changed around a few years ago.

I can't exactly remember when this was, but given how I remember events that surrounded it, it was likely some time in September or October of 2015. This was back when the myth hunting communities were technically prominent, but before all the YouTubers began investigating them. Roblox by then was a pretty secure website, but some of these "myth" users tended to have forms of coding implemented into their games or used manipulative cheats to create glitches that seemed out of the ordinary. The instances I can describe were those all-black avatar users with sailor hats who would create games with spammed blocks and buzzing noises meant to crash your device, or to scare anyone who entered them. Now am I saying that I wasn't scared of these? Of course not.

Even if I was scared, I was always intrigued. I can look at these memories with some odd form of nostalgia, since typically with all the commotion going on within the community now there's not so many of these games anymore, and the users who put in the most effort to detail are the ones more than likely to be reviewed the most online, or at best noticed by high-level YouTubers.

I'm sure you understand that this has been too long of an introduction anyway, so I'll cut to the story. As stated this was sometime in Fall of 2015. From what I do remember valiantly, I had just came home on a Friday at the precoming of fall break for the next 2 weeks, so yes I was excited. I was around 14 at the time, so I was nothing more than a moody teenager who cared little about the consequences of my actions, and wasn't afraid to stand up to anyone online. I decided that, since nobody at the time was home (my school wasn't that far from my house, so it didn't take long for me to get home before everyone else did) I should get on Roblox and do something stupid. Given my thoughts, I decided that I should join something that would intrigue me after hours of math and science classes. This, of course, came in the opportunity of myth hunting.

I had a very well-placed timezone, if that's all I can say, because after I launched Roblox I went straight to one of my groups to see if a hunt was posted. I was a bit ecstatic, because all of them had just started a few minutes earlier or were halfway. I decided to join the earliest-posted one, which I don't remember clearly but it was a game with a poorly-made house and free modeled corpses. There were about 4 or 5 people in-game just talking about how, due to some random picture on the wall, this could be a "sign" or something that replicated something was going to happen in the near future. Just to clarify, while I don't have a recollection as to which group this was, I remember thinking back on it and seeing how mediocre it was for a myth group, so naturally the investigators weren't very intelligent in deciphering or even understanding what this game was. It wasn't fortunate though that I was one of them, so I agreed with them and began linking their thoughts to the little index I had in my brain of whatever events they were talking about.

I (we) didn't stay long in the game, as I explained it wasn't very well-built and just contained random objects that the creator most likely just added with the thought: "Oh yeah, let me just add a random portrait of a historical person here, they'll obviously thing it relates to this garbage game I made!". I understand that's a rude impression, but I wrote it with a blank check given how idiotic these games seemed the more I think about them. I can even estimate myself that these people were probably younger than me, but who am I to judge? After around 10 minutes of hopping around these posted hunts with roughly the same results, I just decided I'd go on a personal hunt myself and just look for games that seemed creepy. This part gets hazy but a part of me felt it's required to include my theory as to how I found the game that caused my experience that day/night.

I have two theories (or speculative guesses) to how I found it. The first being that I was clicking random comments on the wall of one of my groups, or had been going through my recent games and clicking the related ones that came up. Due to my personal concentration (or lack thereof because I honestly have no clue), it felt like I was searching for around 15 minutes until I came across a game that actually seemed a bit off-key. To note its aberrant features, it did not have a username next to "made by", the section was just blank. Again, this didn't scare me or cause me to cower away, because this was a common glitch back then that users could exploit to make it seem as if their game had no person behind it. What I did notice however was that the game had no visits, and I mean literally no visits. There wasn't even a counter at all to indicate how many players had ever joined. Instead there was just a large white gap inbetween "Favorites" and "Created". The game had one like, which I assumed to have been the creator himself or some person in my shoes who found the same game and considered it a good experience. The name of the game and its thumbnail were themselves odd to say the least, but not too notable at the moment I saw them. The name was "the month of the grape harvest" in all lowercase, and the thumbnail appeared to be a picture of a well-designed empty block room, with a large amount of typical noob avatars staring outside of a window at the viewer. The thumbnail appeared to have rough and burnt edges and was crumpled around the middle, as if someone had somehow managed to screenshot their game using an old-fashioned camera and neglected it long enough for it to rot. Lengthy description, I know, but this is how I interpreted it. I later found out, however, that this was a reference to a relatively unknown painting by surrealist Rene Magritte.

Regardless, I decided to join the game. As the player opened up, it did indeed show the name of the person who made it, but their username was not something you could make on the website. It simply said: "By: .'/" A period, an apostrophe, and a dash. I assumed that I had already loaded into the game and this was some form of overlay or interface that was meant to invoke fear into whoever joined. This was a pre-emptive thought however, since it took the game around four minutes to load, a fact that I know since I had been looking at my clock and had left for a bit. When I came back from getting a drink, I saw from the hallway that the game was still loading and estimated that this might be one of those screamer games with aspects that were meant to crash your computer or install a virus in it. (which would have made sense given the fact I had nearly gotten hacked on this account after placing an infected free model in one of my games)

I was about to consider closing the client, and was about a foot away from my laptop when it loaded in, and my Roblox character spawned. Surprisingly, this game had no content to be noted other than a few things. The game was a baseplate, a gray one, which would be created by a new user when they first created their account. On one half of the map there was a large, uncollisioned, grass material texture that was colored orange. The sky was the regular texture, but my supposition was that it had been edited out of proportion because it had been turned upside down. The game was entirely silent, I couldn't hear myself jump or walk, though every now and then I would faintly hear it silently before it faded out. I figured this must have been some sort of script test, since I saw that in the center of where the baseplate and the grass met, was a spinning, all-gray NPC, that had the name "XYZ".

I have no clue why, but I was oddly fascinated by the sight of it, and stared at it for a few moments before it made a very strange turn before fading completely. I can't really describe it, but it appeared as if it stopped, directed down at me, before having all the limbs spin uncontrollaby at once and then disappear. And then my character was flung highly into the air. For those who have played Roblox for at least a year, you'll know that when your character reaches the impossible high of the map, it will start glitching out as Roblox can't register when something moves past the map's top barrier at a high speed. My character began to glitch out, however it appeared to happen in a fashion where my character was gradually torn apart, before I was killed. Before I could respawn, another game launched on the client that was just called "imitate", by the same user as described earlier. It loaded to something that had more "edge" to it. Not a pun, but it was the same baseplate except there appeared to have been carefully-placed gray blocks around the edges and bottom of it, appearing as if it was a floating mountain. The grass was gone, and at the far end of the map was a tree, a not very well made tree that was welded but unanchored and fiddling every few seconds due to a misplacement of one of its branches. Moreover, though it could have just been hallucinations brought on by anxiety, I could swear I could see disfigured faces pop up in my peripheral vision, along with what I would guess to be a man wearing a gas mask.

By this point things started getting weird.

I noticed that the head on my character, as I walked closer to the tree, appeared to mimic its grotesque movements thus causing it to convulse uncontrollably. My screen appeared to become less saturated but brighter as I walked closer. I decided to stop walking towards it as my monitor at the time had very sensitive reactions to bright lights, which I'll admit myself caused me a lot of problems in unrelated events surrounding this. As soon as I had undone the tree's strange ability, I noticed a player joined the game. His name I don't remember exactly, but it was something along the lines of "pit622of719", a name that didn't in the slightest imply anything. I figured, for a millisecond, that this guy was probably some other myth hunter who found the game as well, but he was not. His avatar was a bacon hair, but he had removed the "man" package thus resulting in his features being blocky and rectangular.

As soon as his character dropped (which meant he had loaded in) he began spamming strange, illogical and brash statements that I didn't understand. They appeared to be a series of word chains that made no sense when implicated in the way he was using them, but each were interrelated by definition. I recall two of his being statements like "infertile pregnancy miscarriage", or "euthanasia injection deceased". This did freak me out, but it wasn't the first time I dealt with people like this. I began asking if he could stop, and surprisingly he did. Except that when he did stop, he exploded. It wasn't graphic, but his character exploded out of nowhere and after that he abruptly left the game. As soon as he exploded, I noted that one of the blocks surrounding where he had previously spawned had jittered as a result of the explosion. I ventured over to it and noticed that there was a small entryway through a gap where the block had been knocked out of place. I walked over to it, and my character fell through an impossibly long passage that could not have made sense given the baseplate's lack of density.

My character hit where I guess the ground was supposed to be, but suddenly took damage as a result of it, reducing me to only a fifth of what I was originally. I had fallen into some form of tunnel/hallway that was made completely out of stone blocks, which extended in an impossible, contorted way that wasn't possible with the meshes at the time, as if I had landed on a set of an impressionist film. In a way, I could correct that assumption given that there were a series of pictures lined among the walls. They appeared to be paintings of people, but only the faces had the most detail. Every one of them were giving off expressions of discomfort, mentally and physically, with ruthless nature. I was dazzled by this, but the mind of mine assumed that these had to be imported from somewhere. Later on, I questioned my own thought, why would someone have the liberty to save these images on their computer, and import them into Roblox without them being filtered? I continued further into the labyrinth that was this Roblox game, before I met the end of the hallway, which was just an invisible wall overlooking a picture of a red valley. After this, a strange, ambient music began to play, though I couldn't consider it music at all. It was mostly a voice reading over a script, accompanied by a piano and a wheezing noise with an occasional sound of a man repeatedly saying "Number nine, Number nine, Number nine". I began to hear loud chanting fill my audio as well, driving me to turn my volume down. I felt some strange form of anxiety wash over me as i began to realize that I may have walked in on something unnecessary. As soon as that emotion entered my head, I was teleported.

I wasn't launched into another game, but I was teleported to some other area of the map not visible from where I was. It appeared to be a completely black-and-white tiled room with an opening in the center of the floor, revealing the bottom of the map where I would die if I jumped out of. I contemplated leaving or jumping out of the hole to see if anything changed, but I was suddenly locked into first person. A second after that, my camera froze and my character couldn't move. I immediately pressed Esc + L + Enter in order to leave the game, but as it clicked leave the button would go gray and the menu would close. At the time of this happening, my character had been staring at one of the corners of the room which had a misalignment with one of the white blocks.

I saw as the icons of the player list, the menu, and the chat, all faded away. This just left me with a blank gray line at the top of my screen. I attempted to exit the game by closing the browser, but to no avail as doing so would cause my monitor to freeze up in a similar reaction to what would happen if I pressed the exit button excessively. As this failed, my screen went black. A triangle with purple outlines appeared simultaneously. I can't describe how it came in, it was just suddenly there. Impulsively deciding to just let it go on from here, I watched as it began zooming in and out at a very fast rate, making it seem like it was jiggling uncontrollably. After a few moments, it stopped, and then I was met with something that sent chills down my spine.

It was a picture of a man, standing in a forest of curved trees. He seemed to be hovering on a broken tree stump, without any facial features except for a mouth with pointed, tapered teeth. If these were the only details, it likely wouldn't have scared me the way it did. Around him, there were pairs of charred hands without flesh, and each hand was stained with blood, as if someone had cut them all off and burned them. My Roblox client started to approach his face, which was an impossible feat for such a game. As it zoomed in, his teeth began to move, and I saw as the other features on his face became more obvious. They were all cut off, but then the skin was gruesomly glued together, giving the impression of being missing.

And then, Roblox crashed. The message was more or less just "an unexpected error occurred and Roblox needs to quit, we're sorry!". I remember vividly that I must have been engaged in some form of paralysis because I was sitting straight up in my chair and I was drenched in sweat as soon as the event was over. I closed the Roblox browser and noticed that, while the experience itself wasn't consciously long for me, it had been around two hours, and I saw outside as the sun was beginning to set. For the rest of the day, I simply paced around attempting to comprehend what had happened. That was until I saw that my monitor had a large black stain on the back of it, telling me that during the whole experience my computer was overheating.

And that's where my memory of this event stops. I remember other events during this sporadically, but I can't explain them in words. I have never reached a conclusion as to whether or not this was real, but I later ended up losing my interest in these games, and left the rest of my hunting groups the following week. I do not remember whether or not the game stayed in my "recently played", but I have never been able to find it. I'm sure you're asking if whether or not this experience has impacted me into the present day. To that the answer is yes, but not in the way you'd think. I had nightmares, of course, but they were nothing that foreshadowed anything larger.

I don't know whether or not this is a warning, but my best hope is whoever made that game has been dealt with.