Please don't let curiosity and boredom get a hold of you.

For this whole experience to make sense to you there’s a couple of things you must know about me. I’m 21 but when this whole ordeal happened to me I was around the age of 17. I was just a pretty average teenager who was pretty curious, skeptical and cynical but nothing more than another young adult. When this whole story takes place I was in the middle of moving houses, my old sweet home was a beautiful place with great wilderness and a small friendly town where everyone pretty much knew each other on a first name basis. Unfortunately and with no input from me, I was moving to a foggy, air polluted city near the Capital where people almost always had frowns on their faces. They were always dressed up in a formal attire going to work for just another big corporate company. Now, for those who live in the city this might not seem so extraordinary but for a teenager who hasn’t fully grasped life at this point, being jerked into a surrounding all of a sudden where people who hated their lives dwelled in was not so much of a morale boost. The one thing which affected me the most however was the boredom, we didn’t have much money and our internet was still being installed around where I lived and so I pretty much had nothing to do for the first couple of weeks. I knew my way around computers but I wouldn’t say I was the best at it, I was just a bored kid who spent most of his time in his bedroom, so usually out of curiosity you pick up a couple of useful IT skills. I had a laptop which I had brought from my old house and while it wasn’t perfect, it would do. So, I put 2+2 together, I did what any internet deprived millennial teenager would do in this time of crisis.

I would walk around the outskirts of my city finding free WiFi. One thing you got to know about this city is that it was a selfish one. That was what I learned very quickly after moving here. So you could bet your life that no one was just going to be handing out free WiFi unless it was a Starbucks, and I didn’t have no money to order anything and people give you weird looks if you just go in there and hog the WiFi for hours. So I went to obscure neighbourhood streets which didn’t look too rough and wandered down, seeing what my mobile phone would pick up while holding it in a firm grasp in my shaky right hand. After being nomadic for about an hour I come across a house on top of this dark green hill with the grey rain clouds circling around this old looking house. Everything in my heart was telling me I shouldn’t go there but my phone was on about 15% and I was tired of moving so I thought I’d make the sacrifice. I trekked up the hill and moved into the area where my phone would get full bars and proceeded to gaze at the outside of this house.

The curtains were completely drawn over all of the windows and the outside of the house didn’t look well kept at all. The fence was barely held together by nails and the pathway walking up to the house was coated in long grass which looked like it hasn’t been cut for years. The first thing you would think looking at this house was that no one lived in it but that couldn’t possibly be remotely true because, who would be paying for the WiFi? I just assumed it was an old person who couldn’t look after themselves or didn’t really understand what was going on, or maybe just some smelly individual who didn’t look after the house. Another thing to note is that usually all the WiFi I had come across started with the name of the internet provider and then a random string, but this one seemed very hostile. My memory is a bit foggy so I can’t recall exactly what it was but it had “KOS” at the beginning followed by a bunch of dollar signs, exclamation marks and numbers. Something like that. But hey, what do you know? The internet was WEP which means it had no password to log on and so, I sat myself down in front of the house and began to pull the laptop out of my bag, as I connect to the WiFi it opens up my default browser which was Google Chrome and brings me to a website.

This is common for these sort of connections, definitely for public places with free WiFi or hotspots except this page looked nothing like a sign-up page. The website had the sort of 2004 Yahoo GeoCity vibe going for it with the default font being Comic Sans. The background colour was completely black with the font being a bright red. It had only one message: “WELCOME ALL TO THE EVENT:” What followed next spiked all sorts of red flags in me, but yet at the same time, spawned this flame of mystery inside of me. A link followed straight after the colon, but not a .com or a .co.uk or even a .jp. The link was a random strain of numbers and letters ending in the infamous .onion. For those who don’t know what an onion link is, it is a part of the web which hasn’t been indexed for search engines to find. Most of these are just backup or clones of already existing websites but if someone links to a.onion, it's going to be the second half, what we call the Dark Web.

A lot of people put their websites up on the dark web because it’s not exactly following the most legal of intent. Now I told you before, I was a teenager who was sufficient in IT. I knew what this meant and I knew exactly what I had to boot up to get there, I spent countless hours watching content creators on YouTube go all over this place searching every corner of it in hopes they find something disturbing or creepy. It’s definitely dangerous, there are people who murder real humans live and live stream it for example, but they are a lot harder to come by so I wasn’t too worried. I booted up the Tor browser (which you need to access .onion’s) and copy and pasted the link. I was greeted to another blank page with a buffering logo and suddenly I got chills, like someone inside the house was watching me. This is quite common in unnerving situations however to make sure I look up from my laptop and, the house looks exactly the same as when I got here.

Being slightly reassured I carry on looking at this buffering logo. I am more curious as to what is going on here so I start to look into the code of the website by inspect element. I find in the body of the website some text which must be the same colour as the background colour, it says: “Welcome to the Bi-monthly event. If you are here by mistake, leave. If you’re here because you’re curious, welcome, we’re glad to have you.” I am confused as to what exactly this statement could mean, and what the difference between being here by mistake and being curious could actually mean but I don’t have too much time; suddenly I move back a little bit from the screen as the buffering logo and black background fade into what seems to be a stream of someone’s webcam. The building looks torn down with the wallpaper moldy and peeling off of the wooden walls. The webcam was being pointed towards the man holding it and he appeared to be a man who evidently must be using a voice modifier and what looks to be some sort of mask made out of leather, revealing only his eyes and mouth. In only one sentence he makes my paranoia shoot up faster than I could ever thought was possible: “We have a visitor, hello there visitor. Enjoying your stay?” The fuck could that mean? I mean seriously, what the fuck could that mean? Does he have someone inside of that house? Is this some sort of BnB or BDSM fetish? They are quite common on the dark web so I wouldn’t put it past him.

I make sure once again that I am in direct contact of this house. He mutters the words “Want to see what I have been working on guys?”, he runs downstairs into some sort of underground attic and the movement was quite violent, however it seemed like he had a lot of euphoria from doing so. Upon entering a room with an old wooden door the camera revealed it was pitched black inside, with a sound of a quiet, rough voice. The voice was pre-pubescent I was sure of it but I could have been wrong. The room was way too dark to make out any actual human but there must have been someone in this room.

The voice stated only this: “I want to see daylight again. Please, let me see sunlight again.” I was in a state of absolute disbelief and shock that I couldn’t move for around two minutes after slamming down my laptop. After those minutes of disbelief I decide that this is not worth the free internet and that, I have probably stumbled upon something I was not supposed to. I took the advice of the .onion website and put the laptop into my backpack very quickly. I made sure that my phone was on and just in case I hide it deep inside of my pockets. I was about to stand up from the grass I was sat upon when suddenly, I look at the windows which was covered up by the curtains previously and see two things peeking out of a small gap: 1) I see a Logitech webcam clenched around some leather gloves and 2) I see that exact same mask, the leather mask. The mouth was inheriting this shit eating grin which extended to each side of the mask, with both of his bright blue eyes shining wide open.

At this point I didn’t give two fucks if I had left anything behind, I ran, as far as I possibly could. I kept looking behind me constantly to see if there was any figures chasing me until I made it into a more populated neighbourhood, and until the house upon the hill was covered up by the grey fog. I have been living here since I was 17 and as soon as I made it home I told my parents, they notified the police but by the time they got to the house there was no one there. I also told the police about the website and when they tried to connect to the .onion they had no luck. They also told me that they tried interviewing the people near the hill and they said they never walked up that hill or tried going anywhere near the house. I am still left with this unanswered question to this very day: Who the hell was this guy, and what exactly did I escape from? I can tell you one thing, I never returned back to the house on top of the hill and I never went searching for free WiFi ever again.