last updated: September 1st, 2024
Like i mentioned, my friend and fellow researcher of the occult, RazorZer0, was the one who put me onto this case back in 2020. he'd heard from a friend of a friend about a mysterious group that would meet once a year at night up in Algonquin park starting back in the late fall of 2014, but it's not clear how long this has really been going on. Rumors of people found mutilated in the backcountry around the same time - not for food, not in the way that any animal in the park would do it. Rangers with no comment. if you've ever been there, you know that Algonquin has its own share of mysteries and shadowed happenings - at first, this just seemed like some other mild horror story to tell around the campfire. you know, like Tom Thompson's death, the hill people north of Highway 17, the Lost Coin disappearances, the ghosts of the abandoned lumber camps... the place is a magnet for weirdness, and plenty of people that visit there have their own anecdotes about some thing or another to send a chill down your spine.
I dismissed it from mind within a day or two of hearing about it. It was another year before before some scrap of information crossed my path while researching brought this story back to the surface - it was like stepping on a nail, that sharp sudden feeling that jolted my mind awake and had me combing through the archives for weeks as i followed a dissociated thread and found myself doubting my sanity, reaching dead ends, and coming across something bordering on that horrible C word - Conspiracy. I've built a healthy skepticism over the years, but the number of pieces falling into place here have been too numerous for me to ignore. It has me believing that true Evil, true Sin isn't some secret - it's mundane, it happens in plain sight, it's documented in our libraries and papers. It will walk up to you and shake your hand, welcome you to the group, offer you a drink. It will sound so sensational and outlandish that nobody will believe it, or you.
a note sent from a Dr. West to a group known as the Helping Hands
My previous trip to St. Joseph's Villa from some years back had me digging through the history of medical practices in North America, and like any good rabbit hole, I had dug my way down into the darkest part of the history - outre medical conditions, questionable treatments carried out in asylums, the kind of shit that makes your ISP question your search history and pass it along to the authorities. In my search I came across this strange memorandum from a Dr. West, St. Mary's in Arkham, Massachusetts. At a quick glance, it felt like a laugh. Lycanthropy study? helping hands? Arkham isn't even a real place.
but re-reading it, the note gave me pause. A remote Ontario location. The October timeline. Lycanthropy? Werewolves. Yeah I know werewolves, i've seen enough shitty werewolf movies to know how they work. This was probably bullshit, but there was that lingering feeling. The mention of a Toronto office, this Helping Hands organization, also had my curiosity piqued.
Bless the public library, custodians of decades of local papers so dry and mind-numbing they'd make a speed addict nod off. I had that itch you can't ignore, the one that brings you through the doors at opening and gets you kicked out when some politely-coiffed librarian comes by at sundown and politely clears their throat in a way that, also politely, tells you to get the fuck out. Eyes melting out of my head from microfilm exposure, I spent several weeks fighting sleep as i flitted through furniture ads, municipal disputes, zoning notices and movie listings to little avail. Bits and pieces of local scandal popping up now and then.
It was when I started looking through some of the more unscrupulous, sensational journalists and rags that I started finding the thread. More and more, a picture was forming of a lunacy lurking just below the surface of rural life - events so far apart geographically that nobody might ever notice, but with such regularity that an undeniable pattern emerged. Horror stories that read like something out of the National Observer that would hit the radar once, then never be mentioned again, replaced the next week by by-election thought pieces and exposees on street parking. "Research", they called these happenings beforehand. But in their wake, people disappeared and body parts turned up. This was either some elaborate hoax that someone had tied together neatly with some falsified documents and months of scouring for convenient stories that fit the narrative, or it was a reality too horrible for anyone to want to willingly accept. Events best left unexplored past one blood-soaked byline in some out-of-the-way corner of forgotten country.
