Polybius, a tempest-style game was released to the public in 1981, and caused its players to go insane, causing them to suffer from intense stress and horrific nightmares. A short time after its release, it supposedly disappeared without a trace. No evidence for the existence of such a game has ever been discovered.
You know how Fox has a weird way of counting Simpsons episodes? They refuse to count a couple of them, making the amount of episodes inconsistent. The reason for this is a lost episode from season 1.
Finding details about this missing episode is difficult, no one who was working on the show at the time likes to talk about it. From what has been pieced together, the lost episode was written entirely by Matt Groening. During production of the first season, Matt started to act strangely. He was very quiet, seemed nervous and morbid. Mentioning this to anyone who was present results in them getting very angry, and forbidding you to ever mention it to Matt. I first heard of it at an event where David Silverman was speaking. Someone in the crowd asked about the episode, and Silverman simply left the stage, ending the presentation hours early. The episode’s production number was 7G06, the title was Dead Bart. The episode labeled 7G06, Moaning Lisa, was made later and given Dead Bart’s production code to hide the latter’s existence.
I’m pretty freaked out.
That thing has been there for almost a week. The figure in the window. It looks featureless, only skin on a human frame, and it’s pressing itself against the glass somehow. I don’t know how it got there, and I don’t know how to get rid of it.
At first I thought it was a prank, a doll or mannequin that some jerks put there to scare me. But I realized as I walked out of my house to pull it away… it wasn’t there. I shrugged it off, thinking that someone had hidden it while I was walking through my door. But I went back in and looked out that same window, and it was looking in, staring at me. I walked around my house, yelling for whoever it was to come out, but no one was there.
Last year I spent six months participating in what I was told was a psychological experiment. I found an ad in my local paper looking for imaginative people looking to make good money, and since it was the only ad that week that I was remotely qualified for, I gave them a call and we arranged an interview.
They told me that all I would have to do is stay in a room, alone, with sensors attached to my head to read my brain activity, and while I was there I would visualize a double of myself. They called it my “tulpa”.
It seemed easy enough, and I agreed to do it as soon as they told me how much I would be paid. And the next day, I began. They brought me to a simple room and gave me a bed, then attached sensors to my head and hooked them into a little black box on the table beside me. They talked me through the process of visualizing my double again, and explained that if I got bored or restless, instead of moving around, I should visualize my double moving around, or try to interact with him, and so on. The idea was to keep him with me the entire time I was in the room.
Recently, a telephone fanatic in the northwest made an interesting discovery. He was exploring the 804 area code (Virginia) and found out that the 840 exchange did something strange. In the vast majority of cases, in fact in all of the cases except one, he would get a recording as if the exchange didn’t exist. However, if he dialed 804-840 and four rather predictable numbers, he got a ring!
After one or two rings, somebody picked up. Being experienced at this kind of thing, he could tell that the call didn’t “supe”, that is, no charges were being incurred for calling this number. (Calls that get you to an error message, or a special operator, generally don’t supervise.) A female voice, with a hint of a Southern accent said,
“Operator, can I help you?”
“Yes,” he said, “What number have I reached?”
“What number did you dial, sir?”
He made up a number that was similar.
“I’m sorry that is not the number you reached.” Click.
