Internet Freakshow

Ted the Caver

Internet Freakshow - Ted the Caver

This internet freakshow begins on Angelfire of all places. Back as the web was evolving, services like Angelfire and Geocities provided web space and hosting that enabled anyone to create their own websites. These days, the services have faded away to other, easier services. For most people, social media serves their needs to get their stories out to the public. If you’re interested in longer-form blogging, Wordpress sites are a good way to publish your story. But back in 2001, if you had a story to tell, you were likely opening an Angelfire or Geocities account, learning basic HTML, and publishing your story via FTP.

And that is the internet world in which we find Ted the Caver. Published in December 2000 and up until May of 2001, the site is set up as a very primitive blog, updating users on the journey of a caver named Ted, along with his associate, known only as ‘B’.

The site is set up in a format similar to the blogs of today, but the entries are quite long. I guess internet users nearly 20 years ago had longer attention spans than they do today. To modern website visitors the site is very primitive, consisting only of text on a black background, and “Next” links to continue on with the story of Ted. It is set up as a diary of sorts, with the story reading sequentially as you page through it.

He notes at the beginning that, for the most part, the entries are a direct transcript of the caving journals that he kept during his journey, but he does highlight some text that he adds as an addendum, supplementing the story with additional details as he reflected back and transcribed his story.

The story begins as a relatively bland caving exploration story, with Ted and B exploring a relatively well-known and well-traveled cave, but it gets more exciting when they seemingly find a new tunnel that seems to be completely unexplored. The opening to this tunnel is quite small, about the size of a football, far too small to explore other than just by shining a flashlight through the hole and squinting your eyes to see as far as you can. But Ted and B are not content with that level of exploration, instead deciding to come back to the tunnel equipped with various drills, chisels, and other tools to widen the tunnel entrance.

Through the hole, it was obvious that the tunnel opened up not far past the narrow opening. Their idea was that, by just chipping away the rock on the outside, the rest of the tunnel could easily be navigated.

The next several entries in the site are all about the demolition. Throughout the demolition process, Ted posts photos. On the site, he notes that the photos are taken by a disposable camera. For younger listeners to this podcast, this idea may seem very foreign. Photos weren’t always digital, and people didn’t always carry around a very high quality camera with them on their phone at all times. Instead you’d go to convenience stores and buy film, or in this case, an entire camera for the task. Then you’d take this camera to a photo processor who would print out copies.

Similar to the John Titor story on this feed, the quality of the photos presented here lend a lot of credence to the story. You have to consider the time in which this site was published. Most people browsing the web were not doing it on their phones that allowed unlimited zooming on high-resolution screens. They were browsing with dial-up internet on small CRT monitors at limited resolution and, sometimes, limited colors. Judging these photos with the quality standards of today simply isn’t fair. But the photos are still convincing enough, showing the details necessary to continue on with the story. Sure enough, the hole keeps getting larger and the pile of dust and dirt below it keeps getting larger. Eventually it was large enough to stick his head in.

This is the point that the story starts to get a little ominous. They hear a noise. It’s a noise that Ted himself has a hard time describing, but the way I interpreted it, it sounded similar to someone sliding down a rock face. It was loud and noticeable enough to frighten both Ted and B, but not enough to scare them from completing their task and exploring this previously unknown tunnel. At one point, they bring along a dog to accompany them on this journey and the dog is also spooked. They never bother bringing the dog along again.

They evaluate what the sound could be, along with what could’ve gotten the dog spooked. There’s a lot of things that could explain this. The most obvious is some sort of wild animal. A possum or raccoon could’ve fit through the hole even before they started carving away at it. Maybe it’s just a wild animal. Maybe their loud drilling, chipping, chisling, and breaking of rocks has the animals as spooked as they are over this unexplained noise and skittish dog?

Eventually, Ted and B get the hole large enough for Ted to fit though. B has a bit of a bigger build, so B stays behind and Ted describes his journey through the tunnel. This journey, just his description of it, would give anyone claustrophobic weeks of nightmares. His chest scraped the floor, his back scraped the ceiling. He had to remove his helmet and turn his head to the side to make it through, scooting along by digging his toes into the loose gravel and pushing himself, an inch at a time, though this tunnel. Coupled with the mysterious noises before, this journey gets even scarier. If it is an animal as large as a possum or raccoon, there isn’t enough room in this tunnel for them to scoot past each other. If it’s a smaller animal like a rat, there isn’t enough room for Ted to move his hands to his face to protect himself. Even under the best circumstances, this is a terrifying journey. But Ted and B have worked hard over weeks to get there, and there’s no turning back.

There are some photos of this journey, but they’re pretty unremarkable as you’d expect. One is just a pair of feet sticking out of a hole barely bigger than they are. Ted emerges out the other side, but isn’t equipped to do a whole lot of exploring. B is still on the other side of the tunnel, waiting patiently, while Ted does a bit of exploring on the other side. The tunnel opens up to a larger room, large enough for him to stand up. Ted does see some strange drawings or hieroglyphics on the wall, along with a large rock he calls round rock due to its shape. He doesn’t get a photo of the hieroglyphics, although he does draw out a crude representation of what it looked like.

At this point, Ted left the room. He was uncomfortable with the idea of further exploration alone. If something happened to him here, he’d be stranded with no means of rescue. He goes on to talk about similar cavers who ended up in a similar fate, dying just out of reach from rescue due to being unprepared and alone.

He returned later with another friend named Joe that could fit through the tunnel and explore the room on the other side. Unfortunately during this trip, Ted suffered a head injury after removing his helmet to fit through the hole, and he squeezed back through the tunnel as Joe explored the room on the other side. Joe was left alone to explore for around 25 minutes, never answering the calls as Ted and B shouted for him. When he finally emerged, he did so in a panicked, frantic state. Joe was totally despondent as they headed home, unable to answer questions or provide any additional details over what he saw during his exploration.

Now obsessed with the mysteries of the cave, Ted and B headed back. This time, totally prepared. Ted had a video camera to capture the mysteries of the cave. They had a closed phone system, similar to walkie-talkies but corded so the rocks and tunnels couldn’t interfere with the frequencies, allowing them to stay in constant communication as Ted explored. And, of course, plenty of lights and even more motivation to finally put this mystery to rest and explore this cave, the noises, the strange drawings, and the totally unexplained and inconsistent wind they would sometimes feel flowing from this unexplored system.

During this trip, a lot goes wrong for poor Ted. After hearing a loud noise from behind him that got him startled, Ted stood up too quickly and broke his headlamp when it hit the ceiling of the cave. His tether to B’s phone had broken, rendering the phone useless. As he stood there in the pitch-black cave, shaking from fear and still hearing unexplained noises, he broke open glow sticks and tossed them around the room in which he stood. One revealed only cave walls, as you’d expect. One totally disappeared as he threw it. As he passed the round rock towards the exit, he noticed that it had shifted and revealed another tunnel beneath it. The rock obviously couldn’t have moved by itself. He did not take any time to explore this tunnel, obviously shaken by the idea that someone was in that room with him. At this point, Ted was only interested in his escape. During his frantic exit from the tunnel, he realized he’d left his video camera behind. This important video camera that had evidence of his exploration, the drawings on the wall, and maybe picked up some more data not obviously available through Ted and Joe’s memories. That camera had some valuable information on it, but there it sat in that cave, now useless, surrounded by animals or whatever other beings had moved that round rock for access to the cave.

The following entries detail Ted’s process in dealing with the experience and the PTSD he was now suffering from. Depressed, scared, and anxious, Ted was searching for answers while also missing work and trying desperately to get in touch with Joe, the only other person who could understand what Ted was experiencing. Finally, Joe and Ted reunite, and through a late-night and brief discussion, decide on one more visit to put this mystery to rest. B joins them of course. And this is where his journal ends. Ted never updates it again, leaving the internet to speculate endlessly over what could’ve happened to him.

For the conclusion of Ted the Caver, please stay tuned after these words from our sponsors.

If this story has sounded familiar to you, it’s probably because it was turned into a movie many years after it was written. A movie called Living Dark: The Story of Ted the Caver, available on Amazon Prime. It was made in 2012, and while the story is quite different from the story you’ll find on Angelfire, it is a clear inspiration, even using “Ted the Caver” as part of the title. And as something of a horror buff myself, I’d be remiss not to mention the similarities of Ted the Caver with the movie The Descent, a 2005 horror movie where a group of cavers run into underground human-esque monsters, which shares some similarities with this story.

With that story out of the way, we obviously have some important questions about it. Who is Ted, B, and Joe? What ultimately ended up happening to them, and what was in that cave?

The answers unfortunately aren’t nearly as interesting as the questions. In late 2004, just a few short years after Ted published the story, he answered every question you may have about it on a message board for spelunking. While Ted says he’ll be brief, he is very much not brief! His writing style on his message board is identical to the Angelfire site. Very long-winded, using many words when just a few will do. He goes deep into answers that I won’t bore you with here, other than to say that most of the story is a total fabrication. Ted and B did, indeed, find the hole and decided to chip away at it to explore the cave on the other side, and they did hear strange noises emanating from within it. He started the Angelfire site to keep his friends and family up to date on his adventure, but decided halfway through it’d be more fun to write a fiction piece, which is exactly what he did. The strange noises ended up being from the freeway that was built on top of this cave. A totally bland and uninteresting end to a story, as these things usually are.

I think the most interesting part of this story is how it has persisted online, inspiring movies and translation into other languages. This may, indeed, be the earliest example of an internet phenomenon called Creepy Pasta. For those unaware, creepy pasta are horror stories written for the internet, usually short stories, made and intended to be copied, pasted, modified, and expanded upon as they propagate throughout the internet. Ted the Caver may have played an important role in the creation of this subgenre without even knowing it.

If you need further convincing of the power of Ted the Caver and the legacy it has, look no further than the internet which continues to spread the story without ever explaining that it has already been fully debunked by the author itself. In fact, when you Google the tale, you have to dig deep into the results to even find the end of the story, written by Ted himself, a few years after the conclusion of the original journal. The spelunking website that Ted posted to is gone, only accessible through the internet archive, but the myth of Ted the Caver remains. The internet has a way of forgetting things it wants to forget, and remembering the parts it wants to remember. In this case, Ted will live on as a brave cave explorer, risking his life to solve the mystery of the cave he discovered. The cave remains a hypothetical home to intelligent, underground monsters, dormant until they are disturbed by an outside presence. And isn’t that better than the boring reality?