Beyond the swings stood a line of conifers that hid from us, we believed, what remained of the hospital. The play area here would have been designed for the less afflicted of the young inmates. The huts and outbuildings were left over from attempts to develop the site after the hospital’s eventual closure in 1994. No wonder plans to turn the old Scarisbrick Eye Hospital into luxury apartments had failed. There was a clear vibe I am sure you sensed more keenly than I did. I know you think I am the Man without Fear, Mr. Logic the Knock-Off Spock, but even I felt the need for caution as I powered on towards the trees.
When I realized you had not kept up with me, I stopped. You were paused between the swings and the ducks, your scarf and the tail of your trenchcoat flapping in the wind, that faraway look on your face.
I saw nothing but you. I asked what you saw.
“Blind children,” you said, “only some of them dead. This is what happens when we lurk, they say.”
I took a photograph of you, one we could perhaps post with the report if we found the Root Room and investigated the sighting, explained the images recorded there that had appeared on the subreddit r/eerie_england. You certainly looked striking beside the frames, against the black hills on the horizon. Given what we both already knew of the strange history of the Eye Hospital, it was no stretch of the imagination to conjure children’s voices. And you, of course, are the most naturally creative person I have ever met.
“Lurking got us into this,” you said.
“And debunking,” I said, “will get us out.”
You walked toward me.
We stood hand in hand now and stared at the trees.
“They could have made the film here,” you said.
“You know I have not seen that film. Someone made a film here, though.”
“The clip could be from the film.”
“I hope not,” I said. “Given what you say about the film.”
“One of us will be proved right.”
“Both of us could be wrong.”
We walked into the trees.
Quickly, the crags and outlines of black buildings absorbed the black trunks of the pines and loomed in the distance.
• • •
When this appeared as a thread on r/eerie_england — with no attribution and reposted from so many other crank belfries hosted on YouTube and 4Chan that it was impossible to authenticate — you fixated on the room with the roots and I the operating theater. The footage of sentient aggressive roots is unusual, I admit, considering the paranormal internet’s glut of grainy Rake shots and out-of-focus Shadow People seemingly filmed with a baked potato. But you theorized the Clip was taken from the legendary 1998 British found footage horror film, The Claustrophile. The snatch we have of an operating theater resonated with me as a possible link to the Geer Controversy and the subsequent closure of the Scarisbrick Eye Hospital after a series of sightings of an “ghost made of roots” in the late 1980s.
You are right that I merely lurked when the Root Room Clip appeared, not posting questions under my username Schnöder_Mammon, staying out of the discussion as to how easily it would be to fake the “jumble-sale octopus,” that clearly the root creature is a fake; or how unrealistic the behavior of the explorers. For me, the root thing was a vanishing point that drew the eye away from the key revelation: someone may have found Geer’s theater. As you know, I use eerie_england to find fun mysteries to solve and, if possible, help the vexed and perplexed.
You did not lurk. You did contribute a post speculating that the Root Room Clip could have a relation to The Claustrophile, possibly an outtake or part of a “making of…” support feature. This was dismissed by the usual posters, u/Urgh-Urgh-Urgh and u/UrbanSanitizer who believe that The Claustrophile is an internet hoax. It is impossible to see the film now because it was never made. Someone somewhere back in the day just started talking about The Claustrophile as if it were real and, on eerie_england at least, triggered false memories in some of the more credulous spook chasers. Of course, you were also dismissed by u/descender98, the eerie_englander who not only claims to have perfect recall of the film but says it’s not a feature film at all, but literal found footage. It really happened. It’s all true, the document of an urban exploration group chased deeper and deeper into a vast underground complex called the Crocell by a demon made of roots that kills two of them, then stalks the others further into the bowels of the Earth and some gross final revelation at its core.
I am only aware of this plot outline because you recounted it to me. I have found no evidence that the film was ever distributed or who starred or who made it, though it is briefly discussed in a few books and articles, and there’s the dedicated eerie-england thread that seems to exist only to mock descender98.
You told me you saw it when you were five years old by mistake, that you, late one evening, felt ill and crept downstairs. Thinking you would quickly curl up and sleep, your father let you stay up with him and watch a film for a bit. You say he cannot have been aware of how disturbing the film and its root monster were when he had ordered the VHS from a magazine ad, how you would never forget its mesmerizing tracking shots though underground passageways, its long, hyper-tense chases through abysses and squeezes, the bodies, the mass graves, the gore, its tubing and scrolling, black-slams and jump-cuts and sense always of something lurking in the darkness at the fringes of the shot. We had discussed this many times, seeing as your viewing of the film seems to have occurred between the time your father refused to believe you that a nocturnal entity called the Milkcurdler lived in the kitchen and your father’s sudden and to-this-day unexplained disappearance.
We have discussed the trauma of this many times. We know it has a bearing. I will tell you now that as I never believed that The Claustrophile is a real film and not a weirdo’s art project metastasized into an internet hoax, I knew we would not, as you hoped, find the Crocell set under the ruins of Scarisbrick Eye Hospital, even though, as The Claustrophile was supposedly made in the mid- to late-90s, the hospital was abandoned by then, reputedly and alarmingly haunted, so it’s feasible it could have been used as a cheap location for a trashy film.
I was after something else, some other story, but you know that.
• • •
Anyone else but me would have fled back to the car here, after what you said and how you said it meshed with what I knew of the Scarisbrick Eye Hospital and the bizarre case of Professor Geer and Sally Bretby, the disappearances of both in 1988 setting in train events that led to the closure of the 185-year-old institution six years later.
My knowledge of the Scarisbrick Controversy comes from several articles and documentary features. A piece in the Fortean Times detailed the hospital’s rather sedate and benign past as a pioneering facility initially concerned with treating an outbreak of trachoma — an infection causing blindness — after the Napoleonic War. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries it had risen to prominence, adopting and utilizing each advance in medical science, from the ophthalmoscope to the laser, eventually, in the 1950s specializing in the treatment of children. Its only claim to occult status being a few sightings of a “kind, blind, gray-shrouded ghost-girl called Effi,” who apparently dispersed like a dandelion clock if you said her name out loud.
Things got kind of kinky with the arrival of Randall Geer, Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology in the early 1980s. Geer had a trail-blazing career at the prestigious Moorcroft Eye Hospital but seems to have come into conflict with colleagues and the board there and was somehow forced to take a career plunge and pay cut to wash up at the remote Scarisbrick. There is no evidence for this, it’s mere speculation, but the writer known as Tibet, the author of two features on Scarisbrick on the Nostophobia YouTube Channel suggests that Geer wanted this move. It allowed him to continue his research with less scrutiny, his work into curing blindness by bypassing the eyes altogether.
Tibet recounts how in 1988, Geer set out to save the sight of Sally Bretby, a girl with an exotic and rare-to-the-point-of-novelty virus that was eating her cornea. What Geer proposed was conducted off the record, without supervision, and in secret. Whatever he did, he did in bespoke facilities he had built underneath the hospital. Whatever he did is ultimately unknown as both he and Bretby disappeared, never, according to Tibet, re-emerging from the sub-levels of the hospital. In an attempt to save one person’s sight, Geer lost it completely for two.
The disappearances were reported. There were searches. Lurid suggestions in the Daily Mail and The Sun that Geer had abducted or eloped with Sally, others that he had murdered, even eaten her. In Tibet’s second feature, he details how some six months after the disappearance of Geer and Bretby, several of the young patients at the Scarisbrick reported a presence on the wards that initially only made itself felt, that seemed like a heavy dark shadow falling over a bed. The first to see it was a boy called Kit Tobler who reported a girl with a man’s head and long branches for arms had stood over him. No one believed Kit. He was blind. Then a girl called Tilly Parkin saw gliding towards her a heap of worms in the shape of a girl but with male genitalia for hands. Another child saw a girl without eyes and fingers as long as broomsticks being mounted by a man with roots coming out of his mouth.
When the staff started to see the Root Thing, too, the hospital was shut down, temporarily, then permanently. My last reference, a piece called “A Site for Sore Eyes” in the Paranormal Review recapped the above accounts as part of an investigation into a plethora of sightings during daylight of a strange humanoid creature with long thin trailing handless limbs, witnessed by several demolition experts attempting to clear the Scarisbrick. Suddenly, the developers pulled out. Work ended. Ever since, the site has lain vacant and exposed, with whatever the workmen saw, if it still creeps in and out of existence here, unseen by anyone. I said to you, at the treeline, you realize that if this is not the place someone filmed the roots in the room, we may well be the first people to walk here for decades.
“You like that idea,” you said. “It makes us the hero. It’s not true, in any case.”
“It does not look safe in there,” I said.
“We are not going in there,” you said. “We are going under there.”
You took the first step forward.
• • •
The stairwell was a black mouth in what felt more like a cloud of darkness than a dark room.
“Is that the scariest thing you have ever seen?” I said, again trying to lighten the mood as I’d taken your silence as fear or the manifestation of that self-destructive inner focus of yours.
“No,” you said.
“Scarier than the Milkcurdler?”
“Nothing is scarier than the Milkcurdler. You?”
I did not mention the account of a man dragged into a canal to drown in a short story I’d read in a collection called The Underkin and Other Stories by Astraea Themis. I had found the book discarded in the waiting room of the railway station at Farworth. I read it on the train and must have been so unsettled by it, and a story about the Chalk Ghost of Wallend Spur, that I left the book on my seat. I certainly did not have it in my possession when I returned home. I did not describe this to you again. I told you not to worry. The place, although dark, seemed empty.
“It’s not,” you said. “If it were, there would be rats.”
We started to take the stairs down. Slowly.
• • •
You opened the door before I could.
I knew it would be empty of life, empty of unlife.
It was empty.
You walked right in.
I followed into a nondescript space measuring about five meters by five meters. There was no crack or crevice in the floor or walls, no drain or gully from which a root or plant could extend or intrude. Neither of us had to say it, but this was either not the room we see in the Clip, or the Clip was, as I had assumed, a hoax or prank. If you remember here, I did ask you if anything we had seen before had reminded you of the Crocell, the underground setting of The Claustrophile, and you admitted it had not. This seemed a positive development to me.
You then did say, I’ll admit, that we should leave. Not should. That you needed to leave. You could feel it. It rots, you said, it ages.
I am hoping that despite what happened you do understand that even though we seemed to have been unable to connect the Root Room Clip to The Claustrophile and what we had found implied the Clip was a hoax, a lot could be achieved if we could confirm that the room at the end was Geer’s Theater. I could not have anticipated what would happen when we left the False Root Room and entered the room at the end of the corridor. I could not foresee how alive I ought to have been to your distress. I am hoping that you understand that as my flashlight beam found in the final chamber equipment — bed frame with restraints, standing lamps, surgical devices and mirrors, cabinets of vials and rolls of gauze bandages — that when you said what you said, I was preoccupied with the revelation that this was surely Geer’s Theater, where Geer had attempted revolutionary cures involving psychotropic drugs that rerouted sensory perception back into the brain, allowing the patient to visualize literally with the mind’s eye, that believing Sally Bretby to be cured he had removed her to a private facility elsewhere, that believing the drugs to be safe, he had distributed them among the other inmates, only realizing his mistake, his work imperfect, his procedure flawed when the children started to see monsters in the shadows, creatures half-hermaphrodite, half-bipedal mangrove-stump trailing tendrils and dirt.
You must believe me that I was not tuned in to what you were saying. For a moment, I could see it all. Standing on the shoulders of the writer Tibet and the Paranormal Review, I could hypothesize Geer being shut down by the hospital board and, at the whiff of scandal, the hospital liquidated by the Ministry of Health, Sally Bretby’s silence bought with a substantial compensatory payment, Geer himself disappearing to some other jurisdiction where oversight is even slacker, Vietnam maybe, Nigeria, North Korea, and thus did not register what you muttered insistently.
You must believe me that I was shaken out of my theorizing and speculation when you screamed as if something had ripped your viscera from your bones, your scream that haunts me even now and seems to reverberate every time I stare into your eyes or hold you in my arms and we lie face to face and fail to connect liked we used to connect. I know you say now that what you felt at the Eye Hospital, in Geer’s Theater, was a deep evil that has lurked there since the mad ophthalmologist released it from Sally Bretby’s darkest, most lurid fears. I have always tried to understand why it is that you sometimes experience certain places as aligned, vibrating with latent good or evil, places that I only see as suggestive or darkly picturesque, or where bad vibes are at least offset by the ordering imposed by reason and logical connectiveness and the act of trespass and the act of recording. You say Geer released a shapeless thing from Sally Bretby that can access and extract from anyone entering a disturbed zone surrounding a vertical helix the Theater serves as a base point.
Later that night, your hands shook around a coffee cup in a service station coffee franchise and set against the black rain-splattered glass and neon-smears, your face mascara-streaked, you told me that that residues of Geer’s method had thrashed and threshed you until it found the memory. The Thing in the Kitchen, the Midnight Ravenous, the Time-Eater. You had felt the Milkcurdler formulating itself again in Geer’s Theater. You must believe me that I was trying to be helpful when I told you the Milkcurdler is not real. I told you that an amorphous, invertebrate, frilled and pulsing intelligence as white as white shadow that accelerates time and life cycles and decays organic things is some psychological device you have designed subconsciously to protect you from some other older more horrible truth that acts as the guardian at the root of a devastating childhood intrusion, that you and I must work harder to define and heal. I know you say there is no more horrible truth than the existence of the Milkcurdler. I know now that when in Geer’s Theater you screamed, It’s coming, and called its name, you were experiencing something bespoke and metaphorical to you. For there is no Milkcurdler. I saw nothing. I want to be clear, I want you to understand that after your second scream, after I saw the terror in your eyes prised wide and tear-steaked, as if something behind me were about to deliver its death-blow, I only hurried us out of the theater and the basement, the dead hospital’s grounds and on through the loneliest playground, for you; to calm you, not because I felt it there or feared it.
I know that three weeks later, when we talk, when we analyze, when we try not to, you are still saying Geer had found it in you, made it swirl and shimmer, made it hungry again. You are still wary. You have salted the kitchen, laid traps for the lurker. Something is different. What it is, I cannot comment. I cannot entertain.
