The evidence

For those who don't believe me. For those who laugh at me... I have the evidence. And I will put it right here, where the world can see and judge for itself.

Soon.

The Conspiracy

I spoke up. Not because I wanted to. No, it was my DUTY to speak up and tell the truth. But they just yelled at me, called me "crazy", told me to sit down and shut up. How can I shut up when there's so much evidence?! I showed them everything. Everything! I don't understand why they don't see it, the truth. I guess they're blind, blinded by the FILTH they're fed from those who protect this town's secrets. Those who run this town, this island.

The sheriff, she's a good person but she's as blind as the rest of them, she has absolutely no idea what's going on right under her nose - Bannerman and her deputy both. The so-called "law". They're powerless and they are ignorant, just like the other "zombies" in this dying town.

The Pale Men will return. Not today, not tomorrow - but soon. I can FEEL them. I can smell them. They smell of brine and corruption, of the deep dark sea and of death, ancient restless death. The Pale Men are coming back and they will bring the poisoned mist with them, just as they did before, but this time there will be no protection, this time we won't be spared a watery grave by rituals and "good medicine".

This time they will drag us down, down, down into the black ocean where we will endure in cold pain and endless darkness for all eternity.

The Toad Woman

Local Wabanaki lore speaks of the Toad-Woman: Pook-jin-squis, a harbinger of evil. She roams the swamps and dark forests of the Northeast, and in her trail is just death and darkness. To see her is bad fortune. To photograph her, then, must be doubly so.

This might not be the Toad-Woman. Pook-jin-squis is most probably a myth...but with roots in the truth. Whatever this picture is, it could be those very roots. Photographed in Moon Bog, there's some indefinably evil about this moss grown thing; something that meshes very well with the tales of the Toad-Woman.

Suffice it to say, I stay away from that place after the sun's gone down - and not just because of the awful pollution from the quarry.

WTF?

Don't even ask me what these things are - I don't want to know. Submitted by 'Anonymous in Maine'.

Real? Photoshopped? I don't have any way of verifying what they are or where they come from, but there's a strange symmetry to the second photograph...

The Pale Men, legend says, are mutated and malformed, joined with creatures of the sea. Some are only slightly larger than humans, some are giants, with the tentacles of octopi and the claws of crabs.

If that doesn't sound like something straight out of Lovecraft, I don't know what would.

I have a feeling that these pictures are an 'artist's impression' of the very creatures I have spent the last few years looking for. How else would he/she have gotten them? This island isn't that big. And the Pale Men have never been sighted elsewhere. They are bound to Solomon Island. Something draws them here, something keeps a few here, and something will draw the rest of them back...some day.

Let's just pray that 'some day' isn't soon.

The Pods

Take a look at this picture.

I go on and on about the Pale Men. I realize that I might sound like a broken record. But the fact is that the Pale Men are real: I've seen them myself, I know they're here. They're few. They are bound to water and fog. They cannot survive without either. And there aren't enough to pose any kind of threat.

But there could be. They could be coming back. They could be multiplying.

This isn't a recent photograph. It's part of my grandfather's collection. It could be anything, obviously, but I know that these are 'eggs' pulled from the Pale Men from the depths of the ocean onto the shore. What lies within, I don't know. And there are no reports of these pods after 1973, when this picture was taken.

The Keewaqu

Everyone's probably heard of the Wendigo; the ravaged, ravenous remnants of men possessed by darker things - forced, in their terrible hunger, to devour their own. The Wabanaki call these cannibalistic creatures keewaqu or kiwakwa.

Most of us, however, haven't seen one. I knew they existed, but I didn't know they existed here; not until I was shown a decomposing carcass...supposedly of kiwakwa.

This drawing is an artist's reconstruction of what this thing might look like, based on the remains we photographed: a pronounced spine, sharp claws, a huge mouth and a low, crawling gait. It could be an animal, sure, but I'm not sure which animal fits this description - or matches that appearance. And even if it isn't keewaqu, I still wouldn't want to meet this thing in the forest late at night. Or any time.

The Pale Men

My grandfather showed me a lot of things before he passed away, back in '93. He showed me things that I almost wished I hadn't seen. He showed me evidence that's completely irrefutable; evidence I cannot in good conscience show anyone - and wouldn't be able to, not unless I could take them to the spot my grandfather brought me to.

But he also left me some photographs he took. My grandfather was an avid photographer - with a taste for the esoteric - and he spent his whole life on Solomon Island, searching for evidence to the things he knew were real.

Like this photograph, which was taken in 1986.

My grandfather called them the Pale Men. They have also been called Nábleikr. They came from the sea, and they were first brought here by what I guess would be Vikings - a long time ago. According to my research, it would have been around 900 or 1000 AD, when Norsemen were rumored to have visited North America. Most vanished when the Vikings left, but some stayed behind - in the dark, cold water, waiting for...something? Someone? Occasionally they will rise up to the surface, go on land, searching... That's how my grandfather got this photograph.

He never told me what happened next.