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JONATHAN SIMS
Statement of Zakray Gooden, regarding a demon he and a group of friends found while exploring an abandoned building. Original statement given February 12th 2013. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, Londan.
JONATHAN SIMS
“I'm not sorry for how I’m giving this to you, if i’m being honest I don’t know if you take statements through the mail like this, but I don’t care, I'm not stepping to a building like yours just to tell you a story.
Anyways, a few years ago during university, me and my friend Naly started a youtube channel. It wasn’t really something that would have a lot of effort put into it, just something for fun we would do after class. Naly was studying journalism and came up with the idea to make the channel about haunted or just scary abandoned places. Some people would call us ‘ghost hunters’ but I don’t think that name fits. We would just research haunted areas, or gruesome parts of history, go to the location, or even just into the nearby woods and talk about everything we found to a camera. We didn’t have any ‘ghost equipment’ or ever tried to find anything, at most we would explore the area after talking about whatever made that place scary in order to get some B-roll.
We tried to hire a cameraman but something would always go wrong, whether we didn’t get along, they were bad at holding a camera, or even if they just simply didn’t want to be out in the woods so late at night. Eventually Naly recruited her girlfriend Akachi to be the camera man, apparently they had met online during their last year in secondary, and after graduating Akachi decided to move here in order to study film. I hadn’t met her before we started working together, but we got along fine,
I mean I don’t think that we would ever talk to each other if we didn’t work on the channel together, it's not like there was anything I could point to and say I didn’t like about her, she just had a different personality than me. She was someone who would ramble on and on for hours yet never show any emotion. Naly said that she did have emotions but just didn’t show them, but I couldn’t even say she had that. During research Akachi could talk about the most horrific and terrible things that could happen to someone, then move on like nothing happened, as if she was just talking about the weather.
But she was good at holding a camera steady and wouldn’t make a sound when it was on so filming with her always went pretty smoothly.
After working on the videos for a bit over a year, we had gained a pretty sizable subscriber count, so we were going to celebrate by revisiting the most ‘haunted’ place that we had gone to, I believe it was an asylum of some kind. We were going to go back but with new stories, with more detailed shots of the place, and it was going to be much longer of an episode.
So we go there, it's dark, it's cold, and just as ‘fun’ of a place as last time. I don’t think it's possible to forget that strong copper smell that would stick to your skin days after you leave. Akachi got the camera set up and began filming. Now we filmed for a while before anything happens. We made a point in not faking anything because our channel wasn’t about catching ghosts on camera, it was more about y’know, telling people the history and stories that come from places not too far away. Most of our time in places like this is just touring around and talking. This time though, we did find something.
I think it was around four in the morning when we heard it. A loud awful scream that echoed off the walls and into my bones. I remember, it didn’t sound human. Writing that makes this all sound stupid, it's not like it was one of those roars that you hear in movies from the evil monster. No, it was kinda like a red fox's scream. Human sounding in a way that makes you uncomfortable but not like something trying to sound human and failing, but just something that happened to sound like us.
Naly instantly got up and tried to find where it was coming from, she was worried that someone had entered and gotten hurt, it was an old building so it made sense that some squatter could have tried to find shelter and just got unlucky and broke something. It wasn’t though. Humans don’t sound like that.
I was the one who ended up finding it.
If I ever see anything like that again in my life, it would still be far too soon. It looked like it was falling apart, and desperately trying to hold its pieces together. Every time its hand moved in order to hold a piece of its flesh together it would just cause another piece to fall. Some of the pieces that fell were long and thin, a ribbon-like strip that would curl as it detached from its arms. Others were just chunks of meat that broke off with a load rip. And it just kept screaming, but every time the mouth opened it would fall loose, snapping the hinges of its jaw with a deep pop. The thing had to physically push its jaw back up in order for the screaming to stop.
As soon as my eyes laid on to that thing, I turned and started to run out the building. When I did, both Naly and Akachi were behind me, frozen in shock. I tried to grab for both of them, but Akachi would budge from her spot. It was like cement had formed at her feet stopping her from moving no matter how hard I tried to save her.
I made it out with Naly, but as the second that we got outside she yelled at me for leaving Akachi in there, and despite my fear and protest she ran back into the asylum to rescue her.
I don’t know how long I stood there staring at the doors, just waiting for them to come back out, hoping for them to be ok, but it felt like years. At one point that hoard screaming got so loud that despite covering my ears the popping of its jaw still echoed though my head.
Evenchaly though Naly came back out, dragging a barely moving Akachi behind her. Akachi was holding her camcorder close to her chest and had a look in her eyes that I thought was shock or fear, but looking back on it, the noises she was shaking from laughter, whatever she saw made her excited.
We tried to continue recording things for the channel but there was something wrong about Akachi after what happened. She seemed out of it most of the time. Only really paying attention when she was holding a camera. And when she had one she would film everything, us, herself, random people that happen to be near us. At one point I watched some of her tapes, only to find just a bunch of recordings of her following people around. Her emotions would show on her face a lot more now as well. She was constantly smiling and laughing, which would normally be a good thing, right? But she was constantly smiling, no matter what we were talking about.
I'm sure that she did drop her smile sometimes but. Something about how her eyes would shine when talking about terrible things she could film, made something inside me turn, like a gut filling to get as away from her as possible.
I left after that. Found a new university and moved towns, never looked back. I don’t know what happened, and quite frankly I don't want to know. But it's not something that I need to be involved with.”
JONATHAN SIMS
Statement ends.
Finding any kind of evidence for this has been difficult, to say the least. Sasha was able to find the youtube channel Gooden was on, including announcements of a celebrity video, but the channel hasn’t updated since that announcement was posted.
Mr. Gooden has refused to do any follow up with us, which was to be expected. But we were able to get in contact with his co-star Naly Keo. Ms Keo confirmed what was stated by Mr Gooden, but has refused to say what happened when she went back into the asylum for her partner, she did say that Akachi still had the recording from that night, but she has no idea where they kept it, promising to try and find it. Although knowing how well recordings about these kinds of things are, I doubt it would have been that much help anyway.
Tim had apparently tried to woo more information out of her, but got rejected and kicked out. So the chances of learning any more information about this is low.
[Papers shuffle]
According to some of the people in Artifact Storage, there is an old Camcorder camera along with a box of tapes that supposedly belonged to an ‘Akachi’ reportedly a Statement giver gave them to the Archive in order to give proof, but no one has been able to get the recording to play. I will see if I can find the Statement that came with them but…
[SIGH]
That may take a while
Recording ends
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