First Crinkle Face Sighting in Maine

Sorry to start the week with such bad news, but we at Malevolent Maine have been informed that the nationwide phenomenon known as Crinkle Face has made its first appearance in Maine. A University of Maine student returning from Spring Break has been taken to a mental health facility in Augusta after experiencing symptoms of the Crinkle Face Phenomenon. For those of you who are unaware, Crinkle Face is a phenomenon of unknown origin, it easily spreads from person to person, and eventually causes a psychotic break down which can lead to violent behavior. The person infected begins to see their reflection in a distorted way (we will include an artists interpretation below), then they begin to see others the same way, until eventually they snap and commit heinous crimes. It is unknown if the student at the university spread Crinkle Face to anyone else, but we will continue to monitor the situation.

Signs to be aware of if you think someone you know might be developing Crinkle Face:
1. Complaining about seeing odd things out of the corner of their eye
2. Avoiding mirrors or other reflective surfaces
3. Increased agitation or paranoia
4. Violent outbursts
5. Mutilation of their own face.

If anyone you know develops or displays any of the above symptoms please do not go near them and immediately report them to the authoritiies. Stay safe out there, Maine, don't get Crinkled!

Artist interpretation of what a person experiencing the Crinkle Face Phenomenon sees.

Rapid Fire - April 2021

It’s time for some more Rapid Fire, MMers!

• Speaking of Rapid Fire, there was a report out of Lebanon of a small lizard engulfed in flames. It was reported by local Bobby Newark that the old house on Mill Road was burned down by this “tiny fire dragon.” While this theory was quickly dismissed by the Lebanon Fire Department, Bobby swears up and down that it’s the truth. After all, he saw it with his own eyes.

• You know the paper mill up in Old Town? Well, when the wind is blowing just right, you can smell it from the University of Maine campus. Joseph Lundgren, a freshman residing in Cumberland Hall, reached out to us. “Yesterday the smell from the paper mill was so strong. Normally, it just smells like rotten eggs or sour milk. But today, it smelled like something else rotting. Like a corpse decomposing or something…” What is rotting at the paper mill, MMers? Is it just the paper, or is it something more...grotesque?

What's that smell?

• “Crinkle crinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.” Today we had another report of a potential Crinkle Face in Maine. James Rideout, a Newfield resident, wrote this to us: “The other night I was looking through my telescope at some constellations. When I was looking at Orion’s Belt, I could have sworn that I saw the stars aligned in the shape of Crinkle Face. I only know about it from your blog, and I really hope that it’s just in my head.” We here at Malevolent Maine take Crinkle Face very seriously, and we want to warn you again of the dangers of Crinkle Face. While we hope that it was just James’ imagination at work, we can’t be 100% sure. God, we hope.

• Last, but certainly not least, MMers, we had a report lost in the mail way up from Presque Isle. The letter was supposed to be delivered in March, but we just received it this week. Harry Bordeau reported an interesting phenomenon he experienced while tapping his maple trees, as he does every year around this time. Here is part of Harry’s letter, “I tapped the tree as I always do, but that wasn’t sap. It was a gooey substance, kind of like that Nickelodeon slime, but it wasn’t green. It was an orange-yellow color, and it smelled like hand sanitizer or some cleaning solution.” While we don’t know what infiltrated Harry’s tree, we do know that there was a reported UFO sighting up in Presque Isle back in January. And while we don’t know what this unidentified “slime” is, we would be willing to bet it’s not from this world…

Is there sap in that tree?

Well, that's it for today, MMers. As always, feel free to send us any strange happenings from around the state. Stay safe out there, Maine!

Video Game Virus?

Happy New Year, MMers! We hope your holidays were happy and bright and you haven't broken your New Year's resolutions yet. We've got a bit of an interesting one for you today and it involves video games. This one came to us from Bill in Camden. 

How many hours did we spend on this baby?

In 1991 Nintendo released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. It was a massive hit. Many of our readers have fond memories of Mario, Yoshi, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Final Fantasy, and many other classic video games. At the time, most games were still developed in Japan and then imported here in America. While we got plenty of the major games, there were still a number of games that never made the transition over to the US, including Final Fantasy V, Shin Megami Tensei, and Tales of Phantasia. Most of the time this happened because it wasn't financially worth it to import the games, but in the case of Dark Hour: Story of a House there was a far different reason.

Dark Hour was developed by an independent programmer, something unpopular at the time. In fact, so the rumor goes it was developed by one man, Mita Shuji, a former employee of Nintendo.. The story goes that Shuji made twelve copies of the game to share with developers at Nintendo. No one would ever talk about their beta testing of the game, but officials at Nintendo refused to give the copies back to Shuji. Several employees who played the game swore they would never speak about what they had witnessed, but did claim to feel sick afterwards. Dizziness, fatigue, nausea, and fainting were all common side effects. Reports even indicated that several of the people who played the game suffered from chronic headaches, mood swings, and general fatigue as much as six months after playing the game. In the end, Nintendo confiscated all twelve copies and destroyed them. 

Except, according to the rumors, there was a secret thirteenth copy that Shuji kept for himself. He mailed this to a random gamer in America, from a list of name she pulled from Nintendo Power magazine subscribers. According to the internet, this unnamed gamer received the game in the mail and assumed he had won a prize. He popped the game into his Super Nintendo and started to play Dark Hour: Story of a House. The game was in Japanese, of course, and he couldn't understand much of it, but he found he couldn't stop playing the game. 

He spent hours playing it, neglecting much of his personal life. He went to work, came home, and started playing Dark Hour. He stopped showering, stopped eating. He was wasting away playing the game. And when he wasn't playing the game, he was working on translating it. Remember, this was in the day before the Internet had really taken off, so this gamer, who the online community has named DGZ - Dark Gamer Zero (or sometimes just Gamer Dark) did most of this translation the old fashioned way, learning Japanese and painstakingly translating each line of dialogue.

We imagine it looked close to this.

No one really knows what Dark Hour is about. Most claim that the game starts in an abandoned house. The player wakes up and has to make his or her way from room to room. That's where the stories differ though. Some versions of the legend say that each room of the house gets more and more disturbing until the final rooms are so sinister that the player can no longer stand it. Other versions of the story claim that each room gets bleaker and bleaker, more simplified, more white space. By the end of the game the player is faced with the void and is left questioning how the house is any different than their own lives.

Either way, the stories all agree that the game only truly ends when the player is driven mad. The stories claim that DGZ finished his translation and made twelve copies of the game. He put these in the mail to twelve random people, then he went home and killed himself. 

What could get worse than this?

Whatever happened to the twelve English copies of Dark Hour is unknown. The story goes that each person who plays the game to completion is driven insane. Rumors have circulated for years that eight of the physical copies of the game cartridge have either been confiscated or destroyed. Each cartridge was labeled with a Japanese character for numbers 1-12. Only cartridge 三  (#3), 八 (#8), 九 (#9), and 十二 (#12) still exist. Several sources claim the game has been uploaded to the dark web, but a cursory (and really cursory; you never know what you will find - or what will find you - on the dark web) search did not turn up any hits. Still, the rumors persist that it can be found, played, copied, and shared if one truly knows where to look.

How does this game induce sickness and madness? Why would Shuji create a game to do this? And what is it really? What do players see in those final screens? Those are unanswered questions we may never discover the truth of. Video games are meant to be a fun source of entertainment, and for as much as some choose to rail against the violence in these games and their corruption of the youth of the world, it appears that is only true of one game: Dark Hour: Story of a House.

Stay safe out there, Maine!

The Ambassador's Final Ride

All aboard, MMers! We've got a story for you about Maine's deep history of rail roads. This one is a little gruesome, so prepare yourself.

Central Maine Railroad

Maine has a rich history of trains. It may not seem like it nowadays, but the in the late 1800s/early 1900s train tracks crisscrossed the state.  The famous Boston & Maine brought thousands of people to the state. A little less familiar is the Maine Central Railroad which ran from Waterville to Portland along tracks known as the Low Road. Our story comes from 1921 and deals with a train, the Ambassador, full of passengers coming to Waterville to enjoy the Opera House and Colby College's football from points south.

Unbeknownst to the the passengers one person on the train, Edward Clarence, had advanced leprosy. Discovered thirty miles south of Waterville, the conductor immediately made the decision to lockdown the passenger cars. The train continued into the Waterville station where the conductor, Thomas Granger, informed the operators of the infection. Doctors were summoned, but no one was allowed on or off the train. 

In the end the entire train was quarantined. The goods carried in the boxcars were unloaded and the cars were unhooked. Then the passenger cars with all of the passengers and all of the employees were transported to a distant section of the rail yard. There, they were locked in, under guard from the Waterville police.

The fear of spread, kept everyone under lockdown. If leprosy were to infect the surrounding towns, it would be catastrophic. So despite the please of the passengers, they were kept under watch while the infection ran its course.

The crew of the Ambassador, 1921

Edward Clarence was the first to succumb to the disease, but by then he had already infected many of the others. Leprosy generally takes between one and five years to kill its victims, but the passengers on the Ambassador didn't have to wait that long. Soon the food and water supplies ran out. That's when things got really awful.

Robin Thatcher, Professor of American History at Colby College in Waterville, and author of The Day the Trains Stopped: A History of the End of the Line for Railroads in Maine sat down and talked with us about the Ambassador Incident.

"When the food and water ran out passengers went mad. Combine that with the leprosy coursing through their veins and their fear of the inevitable end, and things got out of hand. That's an understatement. The people started smashing the windows of the train. The police - these were Waterville police, remember. They were used to some drunk college kids or the occasional car crash, not something like this. They kept boarding up the windows. Then some of the calmer heads on the train tried to stop the rioting. That's when the mob turned on each other."

In her book, Thatcher describes how the passengers of the Ambassador "began tearing each other apart." Using whatever they could find to use as weapons, including their own hands and teeth, a violent battle tore through the cars. The attacks raged for three days and nights. The policemen endured listening to the horrible screams of the wounded and dying. One officer was reported as saying, "This is what Hell sounds like. I will hear this forever." Finally, after three days the cars grew quiet.

They remained locked up for two months. When the boards were finally taken off and the door unlocked, what they found was worse than anyone could imagine.

"They had started to eat each other," Thatcher explained. "In the end, with no food or water, they had turned to the one thing they had - each other."

Site of the old rail yard

In the end, every passenger on the Ambassador died. After a year of further quarantine, the bodies were finally returned to the families. The Ambassador was burned in a farmer's field not long after the bodies were removed. Thomas Granger, the conductor, remained in the engine's cab the entire time. It was determined that he was the last to die so dehydration. Soon after the popularity of the rails declined tot he point that many shut down for good. The horribly tragedy of the Ambassador Incident was soon swept under the rug and everyone did their best to move on from it.

But workers at the rail yard claimed for years that they could hear screams, especially at dusk, right before the sun set. Even now, when the rail yard is long gone, visitors still hear screams of rage and pain. Reports of "lunatic sounds" come in at all times of the year. Perhaps the spirits of those who died on the Ambassador's final ride linger close to the spot of the tragedy.

Stay safe out there, Maine!

Fungus Deer

Welcome back MMers this one comes to us from Mary who lives in Wiscasset. Mary is a retired woman who lives alone and likes to spend as much time as she can outside, she loves power walking around her property which is set back a ways from the road, she likes to play in her garden, and has fun setting up feeding areas for the local wildlife. She has bird feeders, spreads out peanuts for the squirrels, and in the fall she goes and buys as many cheap apples as she can to feed the deer. 

One older buck has been coming to see Mary every year for years. She knows it's the same one because it has uneven antlers, one side is much larger than the other, she figures this is also the reason a hunter hasn’t taken him down yet, he wouldn’t make a very good trophy. However last fall when she saw the old man in the yard his antlers were even stranger. He had what looked like thick white cobwebs growing over his tines. The old buck was also stumbling a bit and seemed to have trouble biting into the apples. Mary thought he looked a bit drunk almost and was worried that the apples she had bought might have gone bad or started to ferment. Eventually the buck strolled off and she didn’t see it again until this fall. 

Picture of Mary's backyard/garden

Mary reported that the old buck showed up again, but the strange white cobwebs on his antlers had spread over his entire head, almost completely covering the deer’s eyes, nose, and mouth. He was acting even stranger than the previous year. He moved very slowly, had no interest in the apples Mary had put out and would just stare at her house. When a younger deer stumbled by her yard and the old buck was still there, it kept its distance from the old deer. As the younger animal went to eat an apple, the old buck sprang into motion and attempted to gore it.  The young deer seemed mostly unharmed but Mary saw that some of the white gunk from the old buck’s antlers was transferred to the other deer. 

Our best guess as to what the white substance looks like

Mary isn’t sure what is going on with this deer, what is wrong with it or if it will start spreading through the local population, but she is extremely worried about the whole affair and asked us to spread word about it. So if you see any deer with this white substance on them please inform your local game warden or report it to the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. Whether it is a fungus, a parasite, or something otherworldly we need to make sure it doesn’t become an epidemic. Stay safe out there Maine!