The SCP Foundation is a wiki of purposefully disturbing stories and images. Click any (NSFW) links in this piece at your own risk!
I’ve never understood why creepiness was regulated to Halloween. January, to my mind, is an infinitely more disturbing season. The sun all but disappears, and on my ever-darker walk home from work I am even more careful to avoid looking in the windows of the abandoned house on my block. Chilly spots manifest in my house that, without fail, remind me of one of the ways you can tell if a ghost is present.
This is why, on long winter nights, I’ll often cozy up to a warm computer monitor and discover the mysteries of the SCP Foundation wiki.
The SCP (the initials stand for “Secure, Contain, Protect”) is a series of documents chronicling the goings-on at various facilities and labs that “operate to maintain human independence from extra-terrestrial, extra-dimensional, and extra-universal threat.” Already been done, you say, thinking of Torchwood and the X-Files, but the SCP has a hard edge that both these shows lacked. Instead of the 90s campiness that almost every “weird” TV show pays homage to at some point, the SCP often wanders into the kind of existential abyss that you find in the best Lovecraft stories.
Or maybe there’s just something far, far creepier to me about reading about Larry the Loving Llama in the dry academic tones that characterize every SCP document (“Subjects with a dead partner will still act as their appropriate half until they also expire… Subjects do not show any negative attitude towards their time inside SCP-1545, instead behaving as if their actions were typical”), as if the directions on your Ibuprofen bottle had suddenly taken a worrying turn.
If you’re visiting the Foundation for the first time, a great place to start is the Object Classes section. The objects (or beings) the Foundation works to secure are divided into three distinct classes: Safe, Euclid, or Keter. “Safe” objects can be deeply strange, but not immediately dangerous to human life (though, often, they can result in death through ignorant misuse.) Objects are classified as Euclid “when its behavior cannot be unerringly predicted, either because the item is sentient, it behaves outside of current scientific knowledge, or its nature is simply poorly understood at present” (Stairs that only lead to a face and train tickets that cause the holder to vanish from spacetime are both good examples.)
“Keter” objects are by far the worst, exhibiting “vigorous, active hostility to human life, civilization, and/or spacetime.” My favorite Keter object (if you can say to have a favorite among objects that are determined to destroy all human life) is SCP-682, a sentient being that can adapt in moments to any kind of environment and heal from any kind of trauma. When the staff isn’t keeping it contained in a vat of acid, they are continually pitting it against other beasts in the Foundation’s menagerie in an effort to find something that can kill it.
Though the objects that the SCP Foundation wiki covers are all vary greatly, there are still constants in their world. Critical sections of SCP documents will always be blacked out, or [EXPUNGED], often leaving more horrifying gaps in the reader’s imagination. Objects are almost always referred to as “it,” even if they’re sentient, humanoid, or human, and are always given a randomly assigned number (which can also make it difficult to find things again in the archive). There will always be SCP task forces with oddly stupid nicknames (my favorite being “Moloch ‘n Load.”) And the Keter objects will always, always, escape their confinement at least once to either messily devour or demonically possess the bodies of the staff (an “event.”)
This last point has resulted in the D-class, the redshirt test-subjects recruited from prisons who are used to test multiverse strip clubs, taste infinite combinations of candy, and serve as blood sacrifices for the more unruly objects. In any case, they are all killed every month and replaced by new prisoners, for security reasons.
Perhaps it is this last point that makes the SCP Foundation wiki such a deeply disturbing read for me: though the documents are authored by many different people, the SCP always seems to work for its own self-interest. Independently funded, by entities whose agendas are never fully understood, the SCP Foundation staff often doesn’t even try to pretend that they want to save the world for any other reason than the fact that they also live there. (Individuals will always be secondary to the post-human creations that result from combining a supercomputer and a human female in SCP-914.)
Other times, the threat faced is so specific in its brutality that ethics become laughable. Some Keter objects can only be lured back into containment with the promise of “a human within the 10-25 years of age bracket… injured, preferably via the breakage of a long bone, such as the femur, or the severing of a major tendon, such as the Achilles Tendon.” Procedure 110-Montauk will always be as horrible as you imagine, and will always go on because the only other option is a “XK class end-of-the-world scenario“ and “she has to be aware of what is going on for 110-Montauk to work.” When I finally emerge from my basement room, blinking in the light of forced cheerfulness and togetherness, I can at least be in the proper frame of mind to be thankful for the unforgivably violent sacrifices upon which the future of all human life depends.
Credit for weird skeleton pic
Tags: conspiracy theories, horrors, the internet, the scp foundation
Aaaaaand, down the SCP hole for the day. For whatever reason, my favorite ones are always the humanoid SCPs. They just seem creepier to me.
i feel you, the humanoid ones are always the scariest. i remember reading one of a woman that was a living drawing, that’s just.. very scary.
Thanks for this. I keep seeing this referenced places, and am interested, but every time I click over to the wiki I get confuzzled.
This was helpful!
I was totally set on leaving work early today because I’m “sick”, but I will gladly stay in my cubicle and get paid to read about the SCP foundation.
relegate
Noooo, don’t put me on Keter duty! D:
Well, this is a whole lot better than the list of top-rated SCP pages I’ve opened in this browser for three days running.
… what I’m saying is, this is relevant to my interests.
Aaah but the best part is that this is a giant collaborative project! How great/terrifying is it that this many people have come together to dedicate themselves to the creation of unimaginable horrors?
it’s good to make friends
… even if you have to cobble them together from any found objects and non-Newtonian fluids you happen upon.
I got really into SCP for awhile, until I discovered SCP-231, Procedure 110-Montauk. Essentially, the story justifies the daily gang rape of a pregnant child by sex offenders because it somehow protects the world from mass destruction. It is obnoxious and as poorly handled as you can imagine.
http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-94525/scp-231#pos…
The discussion thread is even worse because the author and its defenders play the whole “well I didn’t say WHAT the procedure is, but I guarantee it’s 10x worse than whatever you’re picturing [winky face]”, like a bunch of sniggering little boys playing semantics so they can’t get in trouble with Teacher. I originally went so far as to sign up and be accepted as an SCP contributor, but after that piece, I decided I couldn’t participate. Rape is only a plot device for bad, lazy writers.
231 is a problem. Lots of the more prominent personalities there don’t like it either, but once a piece has enough votes, it’s very hard to dislodge it from the main list. If it helps at all, there have been rapey SCPs proposed more recently that were eventually removed because enough people downvoted them that the author retracted the article (the one I’m thinking of specifically is no longer on the site, but one might still find references to it in the forum discussions; I believe its official name was “The Saddest Necrophiliac”), so the site culture has changed since 231 was current.
I can’t think of any others that are as bad as 231, but yeah, the SCP Foundation is probably not a good place if you’re easily triggered by rape or violence generally. The contributors who know what they’re doing are almost always interesting without resorting to rape and misogyny, but the site also has a substantial 14-year-old-boy contingent, who have not figured that out yet. In all cases I can think of, rapey and misogynistic SCP articles get downvoted and deleted pretty quickly, but site rules permit a 24-hour grace period after something is posted, in which the author can make edits and try to get people to reverse their downvotes, so even the very worst stuff stays around for a day, unless the author deletes it him/rself.
It is a shame for sure, as there are some GREAT pieces on that site. (SCP-093 is tremendous http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-093)
I feel like if SCP addressed this head on or somewhere more prominently, it wouldn’t bother me as much. I know it’s a voting system built on the opinions of a large community, so I can understand why it hasn’t been totally removed, but I think some type of official comment or encouraged proper dialogue from the admin/mods would be very very helpful.
At this point, it’s difficult to come up with objections to it that haven’t already been argued several dozen times already (231 is old); I could sympathize with the admin/mods not wanting to see the same conversation happen over and over forever, just making everybody angry. It also, sad to say, seems to be viewed as a more or less settled question, and in one form or another will always be part of the site, which I think is what the designation of 231 as a Heritage Collection piece means.
On the other hand, I notice that the page has been substantially edited since I last read 231, with a poem inserted in invisible (font size 0) text. I suspect that’s an effort to guide interpretation away from what 231 is otherwise clearly about. Future edits might swing it in a still more acceptable direction.
(My personal vote on 231 is a neutral: I can’t really approve of the premise enough to upvote, especially since the but all the details are left out so for all you know it could be a performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show with hand puppets argument is so obviously wrong. On the other hand, I see some validity to the argument that 231 is, in fact, horrible, which is the sort of thing the site is supposed to contain, and part of the horror is that it makes the SCP Foundation complicit by forcing them to do the horrible thing, which makes it a more effective piece than some. On balance, I wish it weren’t on the site, but I’m not sure I agree that it hasn’t earned the right to be. Consequently: no vote.)
I certainly understand not wanting to participate in a site that includes a piece like 231, but if you have the Wikidot account, there’s nothing stopping you from voting down pieces that you find objectionable. (They like it if you leave a comment with a downvote, and there’s the general understanding that you’re supposed to vote on the merits of the story and its presentation, not use your votes to Make Statements, but there’s no requirement that you explain yourself, plenty of people have admitted to downvoting over typos and other irrelevant things, and unless you publicly say that you’re voting things down for specific reasons, nobody can stop you.) The writer may not ever agree with you that a particular component of their piece is bad, but they still want your vote, so making a vigorous argument in the comments against a specific thing can influence the next piece they write, and influence the site overall.
One of my personal favorites is SCP-1193. If we’re going to be talking GREAT pieces.
“One of my personal favorites is SCP-1193. If we’re going to be talking GREAT pieces.”
That one made it in!
… I almost took it out after I tried to explain it to someone and they were just like “So, it’s just a giant arm?” XD
Hi! This is the author of SCP-1193. I think it’s kind of weird that so many people like this piece, because it’s really just such a formalist exercise in SCP writing. If you look at it, it’s basically a series of garden path sentences which escalate ridiculously, set into increasingly unreliable sources (first science that doesn’t work, then an unreliable narrator) which allows me to ratchet up the weirdness load.
Still, though, it’s nice to get some random respect.
“the SCP Foundation is probably not a good place if you’re easily triggered by rape or violence generally”
Yeah, this is one of the main issues I had with the organization of the wiki when I was researching this. There’s no real clue to whether the stories contain triggers at the outset, since everything is just given a number. There’s a tag system, but it’s not very extensive and doesn’t always cover triggering scenarios.
In the original draft of this post, the trigger warning at the top specifically mentioned rape. I’m emailing now to try and get that fixed.
Good afternoon,
I am the author who goes by the handle of Dr. Clef. I am the author of SCP-231 and the creator of Procedure 110-Montauk. I wanted to start off by thanking the author of this article for advertising our web site, and I am gratified to learn that the community which we created so many years ago has brought so many people joy. . . is that the right word for a horror web site? Hm. Something to consider.
Now. Time to get to the subject of SCP-231. Trigger warnings for abuse, sexual abuse.
—–
SCP-231 was written over six years ago (has it really been that long?) in the early days of the Wiki. Back in the day, the SCP Foundation wiki was basically a monster-of-the-week type creepypasta series. I decided to approach SCP-231 from a different direction. Instead of trying to make the monster scary, I wanted to make the containment procedure disturbing. I wanted the Foundation’s actions, not just the nature of the creature in question, the horrifying element.
My mind immediately went to an urban legend I had heard of called The Montauk Project. Allegedly, several young boys were tortured and abused in order to do experiments into time travel and multiple realities. Could I do an article about a horrifying procedure that would give the creators great power in return? I immediately tossed that idea out. “Power” would not be worth it. That would change the Foundation from a group of morally grey pragmatists into outright evil bastards. So the procedure would only be viable if it were absolutely necessary to prevent something even more horrifying. I used a term, XK-class End of the World Scenario to make it very clear that this was a last-chance effort. It was this or destroy everything.
My mind then went into why a procedure like 110-Montauk might be necessary. I had done some research into moral panics, and accusations of Satanic Cults came to mind. I had my article: something created by a Satanic Cult that could only be stopped from destroying the earth by the most horrifying acts possible. . . and I had the bare-bones basis for 231.
Immediately, I realized that I was walking a VERY difficult edge. If I were not extremely careful, this article would become gratuitous. I did what I could in order to prevent that. There would be no pictures of the subject, just like newspapers try to avoid printing photos of victims. There would never be any description of the procedure itself: the reader would have to draw upon the allusions in the article to piece together what it was. There would be a statement by the Foundation expressing regret. There would be tight controls on how evil the Foundation would allow themselves to become: at no time can 110-Montauk be prolonged. Anyone who participated (always indirectly, never directly), was eligible to have their mind wiped and the memories of their time removed. It would be very clear that this is not a loyalty test or a punishment detail. This is absolutely necessary for the sake of the world.
The point of SCP-231 is to place the Foundation in the position of being the monster, trapped between acts of extreme evil and even more horrifying consequences.
[cont.]
[cont.]
Did I succeed? I don’t know. The article is. . . problematic. On the one hand, it is definitely horrifying. On the other hand, I worry that I fell into a common trap back then of overusing sexualized horror (something that I’ve had to go back and fix later on, as I look back at my younger self and wonder how the hell I thought that it was appropriate: I’ve removed or toned down my use of sexual violence as a cheap trick in other SCP articles.) And for that I apologize deeply. I can only say, in expiation, that I never meant to trivialize the act, and I am deeply sorry if I did so unintentionally. My use of it was meant to illustrate the extreme nature of the horror that sexualized violence holds for me.
But would I delete SCP-231? Do I regret writing it? I don’t know. I’m certainly disturbed, at times, by fans who take (I think) an unhealthy fascination with trying to figure out the details of a procedure better left unexplored (which is why I refuse to tell people what the Procedure is: they already know, and if they don’t, they can piece it together). I was VERY disturbed by one young lady who claimed to have fantasized about being in SCP-231-7’s place. And I spent some sleepless nights wondering whether I was a sick bastard for even thinking of it. (I take some comfort from the fact that several famous horror writers who have written much more disturbing fare are, allegedly, some of the nicest people you will ever meet). But if the purpose of horror is to disturb, to make the reader feel a sick punch in the stomach as they come to realize what is going on. . . maybe I did okay?
I do want to clear up one misconception, however: “Where does it say it’s Rape?” This was NEVER meant to be an eye-winking dodge to anyone who accuses SCP-231 of being rape: I think it’s pretty clear that the entire article implies a heavy element of sexual violence to the procedure. The statement was said in response to someone who accused be of being overly graphic in my description of SCP-231. I wanted to bring attention to the fact that at no point was I in any way graphic about the details of Procedure-110-Montauk. At no point is the word “rape” ever used in the article. At no point are any of the procedures ever described. At no point is the procedure ever spoken of in anything but the most clinical and detached manner, as if the author of the article were trying not to think about this horrifying act.
Apparently, I did leave some leeway for readers who want to to come up with different interpretations: one fairly bizarre one states that the victims of 110-Montauk are not humans, but whales which. . . makes it better, maybe? I don’t know. Those who take this interpretation do seem to take some comfort in that idea.
As for the rest. . . I thought I was being funny at the time when I made coy jokes about 110-Montauk “actually” being things like parcheesi and braiding hair.
Yeah. I can see now how that comes off. My apologies.
Dr. Clef
Dr. Clef! Nice to “meet” you– just let me hide all these Altoids tins…
You wrote “The point of SCP-231 is to place the Foundation in the position of being the monster, trapped between acts of extreme evil and even more horrifying consequences”, and I think it was this aspect that led me to include Procedure 110-Montauk in my article.
I did think for some time about leaving it out completely, because you can make the argument that sexual violence is an overused trope in ANY story… but in the end I kept it in because the source of the horror in the story seems to come from the acknowledgement that the sexual violence is horrible, rather than the sexual violence being a means to say, open a Gate to another universe or an excuse for another character’s emotional development.
It definitely leaves me with a feeling of “the world is sick and there’s not anything we can do about it”, which to me is what I look for in a good SCP story, but then you can also read it as “justifying daily gang rape”. So… I’m no longer sure if I made a good decision to include it either.
Clef, given that it would be a very long dialogue before we came to some middleground on 110-Montauk and that these message boards aren’t the best place to do it, I just want to say that I appreciate you coming here to give your viewpoint. Most people would have avoided it or been straight up dickish, and you took the time to come here and write a calm, considerate reply. Thank you for that.
just because you can’t handle real world horror articles does not mean it was poor writing, that is one of the most expertly crafted, clinical, and subtle pieces of horror on that site. It is a website for horror stories that contain all sorts of atrocities and if I’m not mistaken rape is an atrocity.
True story:
When I am feeling especially cynical and hopeless about the world in general, I often find it helpful to look at the SCP Admin Forum. There’s something about this small group of site moderators, having discussions about problematic wiki contributors and finding the best ways of dealing with them while preserving the integrity of the site and not punishing people excessively just because they’re stupid/annoying/whatever, etc., that I find reassuring. Human beings can spend time thinking about the right thing to do in a given situation, and then enact the decision that was reached, without everybody getting all upset and ragequitting and vowing to destroy everything. We can! The SCP admin site proves it!
You obviously haven’t seen all of what goes on in SCP Administration, then.
We get the drama queens, we get the ragequitters, we have the anger and the upset and the rising blood pressure. We just keep it off site on IRC where no one ever gets to see.
I guess our main difference is that we love this site enough that, even if it’s not perfectly the way we want it to be, we’d rather try to make it better than quit it in a huff. Mostly because an early incident where a prominent author took their toys and went home kind of gave us all a bad taste in the mouth for that kind of behavior from anyone. . .
Clef
Well, no, I am not Staff, so I don’t see everything. But I like that it’s collaborative, I like that problems are deliberated before action is taken, I like that there’s a bureaucracy in place to try to ensure that people are dealt with even-handedly. (And by “people,” I mostly mean problematic new users and trolls, not so much the intra-Staff politics. But even the intra-Staff stuff gets a lot of consideration and discussion.) I mean, SCP is run more justly and democratically than a lot of countries. It’s unexpectedly inspirational.
It’s also possible that you’re underestimating the depth of my usual cynicism about humanity.
If you like that, you might also like 200 Phenomena in the City of Calgary http://www.scribd.com/doc/31248842/200-Phenomena-… which is a bunch of microfiction written about creepy stuff/artifacts/rituals in Calgary. Some of them are better than others but the over all tone is really spooky and atmospheric.
Inspired by it, I started doing Secret Chicago, a bunch of microfiction set in Chicago, drawing on local setting, phenomena, history, etc. http://secretchicago.brigidkeely.com/ I have a bunch of new entries to post that are written in long hand on paper that I need to type up, but I’m using a laptop and excessive typing on it is really fatiguing, so I’m holding off on it until I get my desk top set up again (which includes… obtaining a desk. And a chair.) Folks who live in/near Chicago might find it especially interesting I think.
In turn, these projects remind me of “The Holders” series of creepypastas: http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/creepypast…
“The majority of Holders stories begin with the words ‘In any city, in any country, go to any mental institution or halfway house you can get yourself to’… You ask the attendant at the front desk to visit ‘the Holder of whatever’ and follow additional difficult and far-fetched instructions while bizarre and threatening goings-on swirl around you. If successful, you get the object, which might grant powers of some kind. But, as the last line of every story warns, the 538 objects must never be brought together or unspecified cosmic outrage will result.”
I believe “200 phenomena” was written around the same time that the “The Holders” (the “The Holders”? IDK man) stories were, and originated from a lot of the same influences. For “Secret Chicago” I pulled on “200” (but not directly from “Holders”) and some Role Playing stuff I’ve been involved in. An awful lot of Creepy Pasta builds on a shared foundation.
Thanks for sharing that article, it was really neat! And it mentions Kris Straub’s “Candle Cove” which is fantastic. His comic “Broodhollow” is also wonderfully creepy. http://broodhollow.chainsawsuit.com/
I mentioned what it was like reading “Candle Cove” after writing an article about weird children’s TV shows, and another commentator sent me THIS: http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/creepypast…
Ahhh this reminds me of an old article, I think it was pre-wiki (must have been ’03-’05) about a giant exaggerated fetus-thing that was kept in a cell and had to be looked at by someone at all times, lest it teleport out. Definitely years before the Blink episode of Doc Who but very much in that vein.
Are you thinking of SCP-173? “The object cannot move while within a direct line of sight. Line of sight must not be broken at any time with SCP-173. Personnel assigned to enter container are instructed to alert one another before blinking.”
That’s got to be 173. 173 was written in 2007 according to this, not ’03-’05, but it was the first SCP written, the wiki wasn’t started until 2008, and the item description matches up.
That’s the one, wow! And it is indeed more recent than I remembered. The internet does weird things to your memory (remember when youtube was still new? I barely do! I tend to remember seeing all internet vids on youtube even though it started in the mid-’00s). Thanks!
For me, The SCP Foundation is tied with TV Tropes for both “Biggest Rabbit Hole” and “Most Tabs Open at Once.” Once I’m in, I spend days following link after link after link.
(A website with no escape… Huh. Perhaps the wiki is an SCP in its own right?)
Ooooh, favorite skips!
1733 and 1981 are both relatively new ones that I think are just the bee’s knees of creeping horror. 2998 was probably my favorite of the most recent ones. What really got me hooked on SCP were the exploration logs of 093, though. Those were some straight up brilliant worldbuilding.
That's the one, wow! And it is indeed more recent than I remembered. The internet does weird things to your memory (remember when youtube was still new? I barely do! I tend to remember seeing all internet vids on youtube even though it started in the mid-'00s). Thanks!
so my question is, if anybody can participate why makes people think that all these stories are fact and not ficcion?