Kevin's Watch

One of my first registered users at barbariansguild.clanforum.net turned out to have a life stranger than fiction.
Or else someone pulled an elaborate hoax on me.
*I am placing especially pertinant statements in boldface.
*I also used the word censor function, so I will change the altered words back to their original form and place them in italics.
It started out innocently enough with a few game related questions and terrible spelling.
Then she posted a few things about conspiracies which I didn't understand.
Then she began to reveal a little more about herself:

i have been in my cabin for three months with nobody but my sister to visit me. i go on the internet a lot. i seened you playing ampgard in the park last time i was in albequerqe and my best frends ex-boyfriend plays ampgard in new hamshire. i looked up the place where you have new hamshire ampgard and looked it at they websaite and saw a dealy for the barbarians gild. i had a hard life. people threw rocks and softballs at me when i was akid. up until three yeres ago i did not no how to read or right. then i had a stroke and spent three months relising how lonly i have been. but the worse part is that even before the stroke i stayed up here in the medow and mostly kept to myself. now everything just sucks. i dont no your game well enough to understand all the rules you guys talk about but it sounds like fun. i wanna be a amazon and ware war pant.

Things went from odd to utterly bizzare when she began a thread called "strange things in the forest."

i used to live in lubbock when i was a kid. no woods out thier. now i live in the muountens in a medow. i live alone in a small caben and i like to walk in the forest barefoot at nite. sometimes i see strange things out thier. ten yeres ago i saw a wich with to fases but only won head picking todestools wile some big black harry thing followed her. i see fire when its snowy. the fires diffrent colors to. like blue, green, dark blood red, and sparkly yellow. i saw about 20 dorfs with really black beards going into a cave. the cave was turned out to be only a little won no deeper then a few feat but i swear i saw them all go in and nobody ever come out.
i never a bigfoot or a ufo altho the harry thing with wich was pretty close.
i saw lots of things i never will tell espexly wen i had a stroke. rite before then i saw the most horror things i ever did seened. got to go my sister broke the dore in the liqer cabnet.

Moments later she posted again:

shit im back. that scared the hell out of me. it was not my sister broke the liqer cabnet at all she was passed out. i sware to god it was a big fucking bat. biggest bat i ever saw. it stole the bacardi and flew off. then i got scared and tried to wake up my sister but she keeps telling me im drunk and she tells me thier was no bat. then we both hurd a scream and something broke out a window. im scared. fuck she just threw a bottle of pills at me. i had to shut the door. thiers dite pills everware and i think i better lie down coz im very dizzy.

I had, by this time, read a private message. I will only now reveal contents of this message that she herself revealed later: When she was younger she had attended a KISS concert and smoked a joint laced with PCP.
I replied:

I don't know what to think. Check your private messages. Remember that stuff you told me happened to you at the kiss concert? I don't know, maybe this is a big joke from some freak at e-sam. Well its not funny. But if its not a joke I'm getting a little freaked out at how you might take this. I'll write you more privately. If this is for real stay off the diet pills they're probably what gave you that stroke in the first place.

cryptically, she posted:

godgod who is the green man who is the green man

The next morning I woke up to this:

this morning i woke up hereing gun shots. i dont think everything was in my head though. you are right what you pm. when i was seeing kiss i smoked a lased joint and it mite have messed up my head to much but i no what i seened. thank you for your help. the doctor did cut back my dose when i had the stroke. but i had been doing a lot of speed before it happened. you saw the pic i took. i don't want you to worry about it. cleopatra is missing and thier is blood next to her bowl. i will tell my doctor everything.

Cleopatra is her dog, which was part of another private message.
She also posted this in another forum on my site:

this has helped me recover a lot.
www.wilddivine.com/
but it kina scares me because the expermint i was in when i was a kid.

Meanwhile I replied to her other thread with this:

I don't know what to believe. This sounds too strange to be true, but then I think about where you live:
1. Secret Military Projects
2. Atomic Bomb Test Sites
3. UFO Alien Crash/Coverup
4. White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns and other unique places.
5. Santa Fe's Ley Lines
6. Unique geological history
Overall I'd say, quite frankly, anything is possible in New Mexico.

She replied:

expermints. horror horror expermints.

This is where it gets even wierder!
Now a new user registers with the username "1urch." He posts on her thread about wild divine. He has this to say:

1t 1ooks as though 1 found you. encryption 6,4 1eves.

I was freaking out a little and posted this:

This is starting to get really creepy. Cheryl, please send me a private message about "1urch."
1urch, you'd better not be trying to hurt her. You'd be messing with the wrong barbarian, if you did that.

"the Abbasynian" answered me this:

i could never tell you what i no about lurch. they would kill me. i didn't hide well enough.

Early this morning, before I woke up, I found another post from "lurch" on her thread. It said:

c1ever g1r1. You ran. 1 w111 f1nd you. encryption 21,12 defau1t

I logged in that morning and found a private message marked "urgent" with her phone number. It didn't work. I read the latest and posted this:

Cheryl's phone number is no longer working.
I can only assume from statements such as this:

i could never tell you what i no about lurch. they would kill me. i didn't hide well enough.

that she has made a hasty exit from "lurch."
This has been the weirdest series of posts I have ever seen in all my years on internet message boards (I began when computer monitors were text only and forums were known only as BBS).
I still do not know whether this was a hoax or something truly eerie and strange that happens here in New Mexico.
I welcome comments by other users as to their theories explaining what this all means.
Just keep in mind when you post that if all of this is real, it may be hurtful to Cheryl for you to suggest otherwise, so do so respectfully.

That's basically it. I don't expect either "the Abbasynian" or "lurch" to post again.
Strange if true, but is it true, or has somebody been pulling my leg? Either way it is an incredible story.

lurch?

hmmmm....

He's creepy and he's kooky!

Sarge!

LZ, there's a Watcher named lurch who used to post here pretty frequently. But some folks here have met him and I would wager that they would swear that our guy is incapable of murder.

This chick sounds completely messed up, and I think you're spot-on that she's having flashbacks, or new episodes due to her continued drug use. Just be glad she's only pixels on your screen....

aliantha wrote:Sarge!

LZ, there's a Watcher named lurch who used to post here pretty frequently. But some folks here have met him and I would wager that they would swear that our guy is incapable of murder.

This chick sounds completely messed up, and I think you're spot-on that she's having flashbacks, or new episodes due to her continued drug use. Just be glad she's only pixels on your screen....

Yeah, truer words have never been spoken! I had a horrible psycho parasitic girlfriend a little over a year ago. Then we broke up and a girl from a punk rock message board stepped in. I thought I'd never be in a relationship again, but she won my heart, moved over 1000 miles to be with me, and we are getting married next month!
See, had I been single, or had I never been so abused by a crazy woman, I would have done the "damsel in distress" thing with my inner hero and got in some real trouble. As it was, I only felt compelled to defend her from attack, not have a relationship with her!
I went along with her madness before I had even realized it. I ran with her paranoia and started thinking to myself that "1urch" wasn't even human, but was some kind of horrific AI creation!
But see, so many strange things turn out to be true, especially in New Mexico!

Coming here has helped clear my head.

I was getting too wrapped up in the crazy narrative!

Hey your book sounds pretty cool and the price is right.
When they published my novel, they set the price much too high. I was on PBS with my dad, promoting our books, and the paper in Alamogordo published a two page review of "A War of Apes," but all of this only netted me two or three sales!
I thought I had a built in audience for my book when I started playing Amtgard, but only a few people bought my book.
When I get some more money around here I'll be sure to make a purchase.
I haven't read anything new all the way through for a number of years.
I read "the Black Hole" but I had seen the movie and was already familiar with it, then I re-read "Rogue in Space" by Fredric Brown. It has really bothered me that in recent times I have not read much more than stuff in the internet. I think "the Maiden's War" might be a nice place to start!

Thanks! Hope you like it.

I've seen enough forums to pass the gullibility test. This thread is but a mediocre performance. I've been to places where real maniacs roam and I was one of them. This is soooo fake.

Vader's definitely right. The only question in my mind is who's playing the game on who. My guess is LZ's playing it on us.

Well a little history about my website is in order. I started the flame war of the year at a website for amtgard discussion. Not knowing when to quit, I started my own message board. So far, only my girlfriend, one crazy friend, one person from the other site who registered to provoke me, some guy posting jokes, "the Abbasynian" and "1urch," and finally a guy from the other site who is not trying to provoke me. I think the joke guy, "the Abbasynian"and "1urch" are people from the amtgard website pulling my leg. I suppose I was gullible, but I'm fantasy prone and may not ever know for sure. Still it is a wild story.

Well a little history about my website is in order. I started the flame war of the year at a website for amtgard discussion. Not knowing when to quit, I started my own message board. So far, only my girlfriend, one crazy friend, one person from the other site who registered to provoke me, some guy posting jokes, "the Abbasynian" and "1urch," and finally a guy from the other site who is not trying to provoke me. I think the joke guy, "the Abbasynian"and "1urch" are people from the amtgard website pulling my leg. I suppose I was gullible, but I'm fantasy prone and may not ever know for sure. Still it is a wild story.

I wasn't convinced you were telling the truth until you repeated your story word for word.

I don't know why it double posts from time to time.

Well, shoot. I was gonna delete the second post, but now that you've mentioned it, the joke won't work without it....

What joke? I was serious. I have five kids, and the easiest way to catch one in a lie is to ask him to repeat his story!

Internal server errors cause the double posts. Nothing to worry about, just a pain. We usually prune them out when we come across them.

--A

i should have said...

???lurch - (),,, ... >< hmmm & %

I had a fairly serious paranoid episode once and bothered Av and Rus about it (plus a fair number of people off of KW). Thankfully I got better though I was in the hospital for about 5 days. Normally I'm not self-gullible enough to create conspiracy theories around myself and others.

Anyway, the internet is an easy place for people to vent their confusions so I wouldn't be surprised if these kinds of posts are true every so often.

Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you.

Vader wrote:Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you.

Hehe. I knew another guy who said something like that

I'm cynical enough to think that people act better in a society of other people than they would on their own, for fear of getting caught, and that to some extent you can't reveal every little thought or impulse in every setting. However, I think people go out of their way to ignore signs of certain flaws in others. You're not really in danger if you reveal unpalatable emotions.

Anyway, my paranoia was generally not one where I thought people were out to get me.