ASH: I was pretty sad to leave San Francisco because I really liked the city. In fact, it’s probably the place I’ve liked the most since we started the tour of California even though it was pretty cold and rainy. I guess I’m used to rainy from Kauai, but even there it’s never cold! San Francisco had lots of interesting things to do and see, which I thought was good because sometimes out investigations are really boring when we’re not working. Like when we were looking for the ghost horse at Sossaman Acres. There was nothing really to do there because it was just a big, empty desert. But I liked San Francisco because we were actually able to go do stuff.

Cipher and I went to a bunch of movies because we haven’t seen any in a long time. We spent one day in this theater downtown and just watched one right after the other. We saw Ironman, Prince Caspian, Baby Mama and Indiana Jones. All of them were excellent except Baby Mama, which was just OK. We were laughing about Indiana Jones. It was a really good movie but Indy’s adventures looking for paranormal stuff are really different from ours!

Our next stop will apparently be Sacramento which is about 75 miles to the northeast. Dad said we’re going to be doing some camping for the first few days because there’s a big river he wants to check out. Apparently there are lots of ghost towns in the area too because this is where the California Gold Rush really took place.

MERIDIAN: Back to the woods!
After months of living in beautiful and cosmopolitan San Francisco, we are heading back to the woods for some more camping adventures. Prior to heading into Sacramento, we decided to check out the winding channels and whitewater rapids of the American River system. The river played a huge role in the early history of California, as Sutter’s Mill of gold rush fame, sat on its banks. The river is a sportsman’s paradise and a popular tourist destination, with many brave souls strapping themselves to inflatable rafts for a harrowing trip down its numerous rapids. We, of course, are heading there in search of a ghost.

Our webmasters suggested that we investigate stories of a ghostly boy that is said to wander the river banks near what is called “Sailor Bar.” I’m not really sure if that’s a geographical feature of a gay nightclub, but either way I’d love to check it out. We haven’t had much luck authenticating many of the ghost legends we encountered in San Francisco, and frankly, I’m not too optimistic about this one either. There’s little “meat” to this tale but who am I to turn down a chance to sleep among the trees and enjoy the rushing waters of one of California’s biggest rivers?

I think there’s also another goal here. The last time our merry band camped out in the wild, we had some amazing experiences which we are still struggling to explain and understand. I think all of us are hoping that a trip back to the wild will help clarify exactly what happened in the Big Basin Redwood State Park.

RUNE: Color me amused!
You may ask me: “Rune, what’s your favorite written line in this website since Cipher asked the question ‘Is the promise of some hot ass at sea worth a decapitation?’” And I would answer you that it has to be Meridian’s recent bon mot: “Our webmasters suggested that we investigate stories of a ghostly boy that is said to wander the river banks near what is called “Sailor Bar.” I’m not really sure if that’s a geographical feature of a gay nightclub, but either way I’d love to check it out....” Love it. Loooovvve it!

To conclude any speculation, it turned out that Sailor Bar was, in fact, a geographical formation. Its colorful name did not come from gorgeous go-go boys tea-bagging repressed middle-aged men, but rather from the Gold Rush period when a sailor jumped off his ship and rushed ashore to claim the area for prospecting. If this legend is true, hopefully the young seaman (yikes, poor choice of words there!) struck it rich. Today, the area is a beautiful public beach with low rolling hills clustered with scrubby trees. There is a very heavily used boat launch here for people who are interested in exploring the river or relieving it of some of its fish. Nature and horse trails are also plentiful, as is birdlife which nests all along the river’s edge.

It is here, so it is said, that the phantom of a man in his twenties has been spotted for the past fifty years. The poor soul is said to be a drowning victim, but no body seems to remember his name or the circumstances of his passing. The ghost is said to approached people on the beach, as though seeking help. He has been seen in water-logged clothing, which I presume is why everyone assumes he is a drowning victim. Documentation on this haunting is extremely sparse, with no other details than what I just provided. As such, our investigation here was pretty much doomed from the get-go. Since hanging around the boat landing hoping for something to magically appear did not agree with any of us, we strolled around the area for a while and then called it quits. Again, due to the lack of any credible documentation, we cannot say that Sailor Bar is the site of a legitimate haunting. Probably it’s just a tall tale.



CIPHER: American River fun!
It seemed kind of like a waste of time to come all this way to the American River and then leave because of the lame ghost legend. So, using my amazing skills at verbal persuasion, I talked the team into going whitewater rafting. Honestly, everyone was pretty easy to convince except Meridian who’s much more of the “good book in front of the fire” recreation-type of gal. But it looks like she’s going to suck it up and go. We’re going to camp out and then pay for the rafting trips, as our supplies do not include sink-proof rafts and life-vests, believe it or not! We will have to drive to the South Fork of the American River, which is about an hour outside of Sacramento to the northeast. There’s a rafting company there that offers excursions for newbies like us, hopefully all drowning-free. We’re a little worried just because a lot of the rapids have very colorful names like “Meatgrinder,” “Triple Threat,” “Troublemaker,” and my personal favorite, “Satan’s Cesspool.” They have multi-day excursions which are what most of us want to do, so between that and all the hiking and camping, I don’t anticipate that we’ll be back in the Sacramento area for about another ten days to two weeks. That will be okay though. We all loved San Francisco, but it’s kind of nice to be back in the forest.

In talking about what we want to accomplish while in Sacramento, everyone’s in agreement that exploring the “underground” is a must. Our webmasters turned us onto this, but we don’t know much about it at this point. Apparently part of the modern city was built on top of the nineteenth century part of Sacramento, which left all kinds of caverns and tunnels underneath. All are haunted. There’s a very popular tour you can take in Seattle where you tour the older and now-buried parts of that city, too. I guess the Sacramento underground has not been fully developed for tourists yet, so hopefully it will be a little more “raw.” More to come on all of that!

CIPHER: Sacramento Underground
In what has to be one of the most exciting ventures we’ve been on since leaving the South Pacific, we went looking for the little-known “Sacramento underground.” Quite a number of cities are famous for their lost undergrounds. Hell, the Discovery Channel even has a show dedicated to it, but most of [these] locations are outside of the United States. Let’s face it, we’re not an old enough country to have this kind of weird archaeological past. The Sacramento underground is an interesting exception, however. Like New Orleans, Sacramento was built in a hole and protected by flooding by a series of levees. And like New Orleans, these levees failed and the city drowned. The most devastating floods came in 1850 and 1852, which left most of the city as a waterlogged and muddy mess. Even more devastating, however, was the cholera epidemics that followed. The twin disasters were so devastating that many were advocating for the abandonment of Sacramento. The city government refused to give up, however, and debated on how to fix the problem once and forall. Although raising the height of the levees would seem to have been the most obvious solution, the government decided instead to actually raise the elevation of the city by twelve feet. This was accomplished by a massive reconstruction program in which the ground level of Sacramento was transformed into basements and all the sidewalks, streets, businesses, homes and other buildings were rebuilt on this foundation. Although parts of the underground was filled in with dirt and rock to strengthen the new construction above, much of it was simply left intact as a cavernous shell. The forgotten storefronts and roadways became a series of catacombs, which were regularly used until the 1960s. Then the city government began to close off all the access points to the underground, apparently because the chambers were being used by an undesirable element. This really wasn’t anything knew. Undesirable elements had used the underground for over a century for brothels, opium dens and other criminal activity. Despite their efforts, however, it was impossible to restrict access to an entire subterranean city and plenty of people, especially the homeless, were able to slip inside!

What we have at this point is a general location for the underground, the intact portions of which seem to span several miles along L, J and K streets in the central business district. What we DON’T have is a reliable way in. There are a few notable entrances through the basements of some local businesses, but those are well-known and widely explored. We want to find something new so we anticipate that most of our exploration will be above-ground, looking for a home or business owner who’s willing to let us root around in their basement until we find an entrance. This may be a hopeless occupation!

RUNE: Oh, Cipher! Ye of little hope!
Today we effectively silenced our most eloquent skeptic by finding our long sought-after portal into the belly of nineteenth century Sacramento. Without Trespass to woo information out of young waitresses as he did in L.A., we had to rely on our own diplomacy but had no luck in talking anyone into let us explore their basements. I guess that’s not surprising. Most of the people we talked to probably though we were freaks.

We finally had luck when we were discussing the project while enjoying delicious caramel mochas in a local Borders Books. A middle-aged woman approached us, first striking up a conversation about how we liked our MacBook Pro laptops. Then, to our amazement, she asked if we were with Outcast Earth. We indulged ourselves in a brief feeling of celebrity, remembering only afterward that the Camels with their gaudy paint jobs were sitting in the parking lot outside like the proverbial swollen thumbs! Apparently, however, she has visited the website and was able to put two-and-two together after eavesdropping on our conversation. This invasion of privacy turned out to be fortuetous. She sat down with us and asked about our interest in the underground.

To make a long story short, this lady (whom I will call “Mrs. Salter” to protect her anonimity) is a property owner in the underground area of Sacramento and believes that you can access the catacombs through her basement wall. This is all untested of course, because she confessed that she’s never been brave enough to venture into the tunnels herself. Her proof that her property has an access point is both its proximity to old town Sacramento and that one of her basement walls is strangely constructed of old red brick that she described as looking like “the outside of a bank.” When she bought the property in the early 1980s, her property inspector told her that she must be bordering the “sunken part of the city” based on the wall’s obvious age and construction. Mrs. Salter said that she always got the impression that there was a hollow space on the other side of the “bank wall,” and that sometimes she can hear things moving in the void beyond, presumably animals.

She has invited us to check it out the day after tomorrow on the conditions that we not permanently damage any of her property, assume all risk to life and limb and do not disclose her identity or the location of her real estate. If this pans out, it will be an exciting discovery for us because she is not in the more widely explored area of the underground.

Ash: Our visit to Mrs. Salter’s [place]
[Webmaster’s note: As requested by “Mrs. Salter,” some of the words in this article have been replaced with less descriptive terms in order to protect the location of this investigation.] Today we took a cab over to Mrs. Salter’s [place] because she didn’t want us to drive the camels because she said they stood out too much. Her [place] didn’t seem too old to me, but then dad reminded me that the really old stuff is underground. Mrs. Salter took us down into this very large basement and showed us the brick wall. It was strange because it was the only wall like that in the basement. The other walls all looked more modern but this one looked old. The bricks and [mortar] were kind of worn down and there was one place where it looked like some words had been painted there. We had to move a bunch of shelves and other crap to see it better. Everyone put [their] ears on the wall to see if it sounded hollow on the other side, which I think it did.

Me and Cipher wanted to just punch through it, but dad and the others said no because we weren’t allowed to destroy any of Mrs. Salter’s property. Instead we looked around for a place where the [mortar] between the bricks was loose and we banged out a small hole between the bricks using a hammer and chisel. We couldn’t see anything on the other side so Meridian dropped six glow sticks through the hole and then we held the digital camcorder up to the hole on “night vision” and looked inside that way. We decided at that point that we needed one of those scoping cameras like police use, but this technique worked OK. We could see another brick wall about six feet away and what looked like a wooden door jamb. At that point it seemed like we were definitely at the edge of the underground, but there was no way in without going through the wall which we couldn’t do.

Rune suggested that we check around in other places on Mrs. Salter’s [property]. She thought that if we couldn’t go through the wall maybe we could drop in from above. We went back upstairs and into the [room] that was above the hollow space on the other side of the brick wall. We checked around on the floor until we found what looked like an old iron vent. Polaris and Cipher turned off all the lights and we lay down on the floor and looked through the vent. We could see a faint yellow glow so we knew those were the glow sticks Meridian had dropped through. We also poured down a cup of water and we could hear it hitting the ground below, like it was splashing against cement. Mrs. Salter gave us permission to remove the vent which was really difficult because we didn’t have any tools like that with us and Mrs. Salter didn’t have much. The screws on the vent were rusted so it took about an hour to get the vent off. Then we dropped down more glow-sticks and we could see much better. Right below us was a whole hidden room. We could see the original glow-sticks outside a doorway on the other side of a wall. Dad said it looked like the original glow-sticks had dropped into an alleyway between two buildings. The vent led into the main room of the building across from Mrs. Salter’s basement. We looked around with flashlights and took a bunch of photos, but we didn’t go into the secret room today because we didn’t have any way to get back out because we didn’t bring a ladder or anything. Mrs. Salter said we could come back with more supplies and she’d let us go down through the vent, but we’re still not allowed to bring the Camels which will be a pain in the ass.

Click here for the next journal entry on this topic.

Polaris: I just wanted to share an interesting conversation I had with Coyote today. During our chat, he mentioned that I had received a letter from Jeremy Riposte which was delivered to my parents’ house. Probably only Rune and Ash will remember who Jeremy is, as his connection to Outcast Earth predates most of the current members. This was even before Meridian, Anvil and Trespass. Jeremy is a longtime resident of Kaua’i. I met him in 1998 as he was a frequent patron to my parents’ movie theater in Lihue before we sold it off. He had a real penchant for science fiction and fantasy films, so any time mom and dad had a sci-fi movie revival playing Jeremy was there. He is a great conversationalist with and has a fantastic sense of humor. When I first started organizing Outcast Earth, I mentioned the concept to him as I thought he might be a potential participant. Unfortunately, Jeremy didn’t last long on the short list. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a brilliant guy and a fountain of information about almost everything. He has two Master’s degrees, one in history and the other in philosophy. But he’s also very opinionated and tends to reject any ideas that don’t advance his own personal philosophy. After a series of meetings with him, Rune (who was already an approved member) and I both felt that his inclusion in OCE would actually be counter-productive to our purpose. Jeremy did not take the rejection well and I have not heard from him since, so receiving [his] letter was a surprise. I had Coyote read it to me over the phone.

In a nutshell, Jeremy has formed a tour company based on Kaua’i’s north shore. On an island where tourism is the leading industry, another tour company would probably just become lost in the mix... but Jeremy believes he has a unique “hook.” His company provides “real backcountry adventures that explore the mysterious and mystical past of the Hawai’ian islands.” (That’s a direct quote from his letter.) For upwards of $2200 per person, Jeremy and his guides will outfit the more rugged tourists for 5 to 7-day excursions into the island’s interior, with horseback riding, hiking, climbing and rafting all a part of the experience. And although the plunging waterfalls and mountain vistas will be part of the allure, the real goal is an Indiana Jones-type exploration of lost Polynesian temples, sacrificial altars, caves, tunnels and village sites. Jeremy claims to know where several “undiscovered” sites exist. He’s a big hulk of a man with limitless energy, so if anyone could find hidden Hawai’ian temples I’m sure it would be him! I’m not clear on how he’s planning to provide all this to tourists, considering the logistics and legal issues surrounding the preservation of native relics, but I guess that’s his headache, not mine.

The bottom line is that he wants the OCE team to join him on a tour and provide suggestions and feedback. Our participation would be all-expenses-paid and it may allow us the opportunity to explore Kaua’i in a way that I personally have never done before. It would be about a week out of our California schedule if everyone’s up for it. I emailed Jeremy asking for more details, but right now just want the team’s input.


Rune: I remember Jeremy quite well and glad to hear he’s doing well. I don’t have any real problem with flying back to the island for a week... it’s obviously an easy thing to do from California... but I am more concerned about what Jeremy expects from us? I guess I wouldn’t be opposed to providing personal feedback, but I don’t want to end up on a promotional pamphlet or something. I think he’s an honest person, but he’s also a master of self-promotion and that worries me a little. When we told him that we didn’t want him for Outcast Earth, it was pretty ugly so I’m a little surprised that he’s contacting us out of the blue. One of the issues I always had with him was this sense that he always seemed to be in competition with the rest of us. I don’t want to get into a cycle of one-upmanship with him.

Click here for the next journal entry on this topic.

Click here for previous journal entry relating to this topic

Polaris: The “Other” Entrance into the Sacramento Underground
While we are waiting for Mrs. Salter to give us the go ahead to come back to her place for a better investigation, we decided to look around the downtown Sacramento area for other legends of the underground. If you check out the ghost guidebooks (and we always do!), you will find mention of a fairly famous haunting in a 100-year old building once occupied by a used music store called Records, located on K Street. I say “once occupied” since, as bad luck would have it, the business vacated the building back in April [2008] and has moved into a newer, larger location about two miles away. According to Record’s website, this move was not a willing one, but more of a forced eviction implemented by a city government which is interested in downtown revitalization. It’s kind of a shame, because the idea of a haunted music store filled with musty cardboard boxes and funky vinyl albums has a certain appeal to it. We haven’t gone by to see what the city elder’s inserted into Records former location, afraid I guess that it would be an Urban Outfitters or something lame like that. I mean, not to bash Urban Outfitters specifically, but can a big corporate outlet store really appreciate a good haunting?

The guidebooks will tell you that the store was famous for a female ghost called Gertrude who apparently took up residence in the basement, or what would have been the street-level of old Sacramento. Gertrude (not her real name apparently, but rather the friendly moniker given to her by the Records employees) is said to be a very old woman dressed in a black, Victorian-era dress. If you made too much noise in the store, which I am assuming was kind of an occupational hazard considering the nature of their business, she would confront you and tell you to leave.

There are other reports of ghosts in the underground, although none as well known as Gertrude. The underground itself, which was used for so many years as a haven for brothels and the drug trade, would seem to be a very likely place to encounter ghosts or at least the residual psychic energy left behind by the nefarious denizens who have inhabited these chambers for over a century. There’s also the modern uses for the underground, including as a refuge for the indigent, runaways, addicts and the insane, which should not be discounted when considering the area’s rich psychic potpourri.

WEBMASTER’S NOTE: In conjunction with this article, we emailed the management of Records to ask about the Gertrude legend and any recent activity reported by this phantom. To date, we have received no response from them.

Polaris: Our second (and better) visit to Mrs. Salter’s underground
What we discovered today is that the OCE team will never be known for our engineering expertise... or even our foresight. Equipped with an eight-foot aluminum ladder (Mrs. Salter didn’t have one, but Ace Hardware did!) we headed back to the vent in Mrs. Salter’s floor. But Bob Villa would have been ashamed, for it only occurred to us to measure the vent opening after we had purchased and transported the ladder back to the [place]. Since Mrs. Salter was adamant that we not park the Camels nearby, we transported the ladder by Camel to a nearby [area] and then carried it by hand to Mrs. Salter’s [place]. Since it was made out of aluminum, it wasn’t heavy but this was a time-consuming process only to find [that the ladder] was too wide to fit the vent space. So back we went to Ace. This time however, we asked for advice and purchased a “telescoping attic ladder” ($219.99 retail, thank you) which had appropriate dimensions. Then it occurred to us that fitting our bodies through the vent might be another obstacle. Fortunately, none of us are bulky people. Ash was the skinniest, so [we] sent him down first to steady the bottom of the ladder. I had some guilty visions having to call 911 to have him rescued, but he slipped through the space with virtually no problems.

Despite this embarrassing episode, we were better prepared once we made it underground. Since we had no schematic of the passages, we decided to use three separate methods to help prevent getting lost. Our first method was the excellent GPS system in our iPhones, but fearing that we’d lose reception in the tunnels, Cipher suggested that we borrow a technique perfected by another explorer of subterranean mazes: Theseus. So, armed with very low-tech spindles of string, we tied one end to the ladder and took the rest with us, creating a guideline as we walked. Our third method was to place glow-sticks and mark the walls with chalk arrows pointing back to the way we had come.

The first room we entered (the one right under Mrs. Salter’s [property]), appeared to be the interior of an old store and not a bank as she had presumed. It was completely empty, which was expected. Since the raising of the city was a time-consuming process in the 1860s, it’s not like anyone was trapped in the underground. Everything of value was carefully removed and reinstalled above once the construction project was completed. Or so we thought. As we wandered through the interconnected rooms and alleyways, it was obvious that this part of the underground had not been “discovered” by others in a very long time. We began finding a variety of small items that may have dated back to the mid-nineteenth century. There was nothing so exciting as an intact mercantile or barbershop, but we did find rusting tins, glassware and some discarded metal tools. Knowing that a lot of these areas were used for prostitution, Rune and Cipher began a speculative conversation on OCE’s discovery of “ghost whores.” There was a discussion on whether “ghost whores” imitated in death those activities they performed in life, in the same way other ghosts do, and whether Ash should be dismissed from this investigation until he reached the age of 18. Ash was opposed to the idea.

Once we were out of the room directly beneath Mrs. Salter’s [place], there was no exterior light so we had to depend on flashlights, glow-sticks and night-vision cameras to navigate the passages. As near as we can tell, we were moving through a line of storefronts and with a narrow alleyway on one side and a roadway on the other. Every so often, we would encountered dead ends which we assumed were the rubble-filled buttresses created during the construction to support the streets above. As we moved in one direction, street noises became louder so it was obvious that we were either under or near a modern road. As we moved in another direction we would encounter water pipes, wiring and other substructure features that appeared to be in use today, which made us believe that we were below [currently inhabited areas.] Occasionally, we would find a grate or drainage opening that would allow a shaft of sunlight to invade the forgotten city. Twice we ran into makeshift barriers that would put together with sheets of corrugated metal and iron. They didn't look like something the city established, so we assumed that past dwellers of the underground built them either to section off one area from another or perhaps for their own security. We felt amazingly disconnected from the modern world.

“Do you suppose this is what it’s like to be a C.H.U.D.?” Cipher asked no one in particular. I was impressed that he knew that horror film reference, but he never fails to surprise me. And yes, I do think that’s what it would be like to be a C.H.U.D.

At one point we were actually able to stand beneath a drainage shaft and listen to some man talking on his cell phone. He was totally trashing some woman he worked with. Cipher wanted us to boost him up so we could grab his shoe and scare the shit out of him, but we all declined that idea.

About four hours into our investigation, we had moved across the “roadway” and down what would have originally been a frontier-era sidewalk. The shops that would have existed in this area had been replaced with buttresses and retaining walls. Meridian signaled us to be quiet, and thinking that she had sensed something paranormal, we all clicked off our flashlights and crouched in the darkness. We could hear other voices, but not from the streets above. These voices were in the underground. Cipher scanned the area with our camcorder’s night-vision feature, but it was obvious that we were alone on the forgotten street. It was just as obvious that the voices were not paranormal in nature as they were clearly engaged in conversation... or more to the point, bickering. It was Rune who realized that they were coming from the other side of the buttresses. I will let her fill you in on this “discovery” in her journal entry.



Rune: What the Outcast Earth team REALLY found underground!
Imagine the scene: You are wandering through a dark, dank subterranean maze. All around you is the fetor of a long-gone era – a mixture of dust, mold and regret. You realize that the last people who walked these broken flagstones and hollow storefronts were prospectors, trappers and frontiersmen. As you creep along with your compatriots, your body tingling with anticipation, hoping for forgotten phantoms to reveal themselves, you suddenly hear voices. Your heartbeat quickens and almost defensively you drop into a crouch and hold your breath. Your head cocks to the side as your strain to make out their words. What are the ghosts saying to us? What other-worldly advice can they impart?

Their advice is this: “What kind of a dumb-ass brings all this equipment but forgets spare batteries?”

Huh? That doesn’t seem ghostly, and in point of fact, it was anything but. What we encountered during our tour of Sacramento’s underground were not the floating apparitions of Old West bandits or cat-house girls, but another team of amateur ghost-hunters. (Yeah, I guess it had to happen sooner or later.)

This other “team,” which consisted of three individuals, was on the other side of the buttresses and retaining wall from us. But because these walls are generally rubble-filled voids with plenty of space in between, we were able to hear them quite clearly. Plus, they were being anything but quiet, apparently more concerned with who forgot to pack the batteries than in surveying the underground.

Maybe it was our puckish natures or the fact that these clods had destroyed our sense of wonder, but we decided to seek them out. We kept our flashlights off and crept along the wall behind Cipher, using the camcorder’s night vision to guide us. When we were just a few feet away, separated by the wall, we hunkered down to eavesdrop on them. Two men and a woman, probably in their thirties from the sound of it. The woman had forgotten the batteries and one of the men was giving her hell for it, punctuating every other word with the mighty “f-bomb.” The second male was whining about the entire situation and the affect it was having on his sinuses. Following their flashlight beams, were able to find some gaps in the wall where we could peek through and see them.

The woman had large red hair, tiny black-rimmed glasses and a huge rack. The men were both heavy-set with dark hair. One was dressed in baggy plaid shorts and an oversized Southpole shirt. It was the apparel of a fourteen-year old, although he was clearly more than twice that age. The whiner was dressed in black and was wearing a battery-powered flashlight headband. (Someone obviously shops at Sharper Image!!) They appeared to be armed with digital cameras and a hand-held audio recorder for capturing EVP. It was this latter device that was dead with no fresh batteries at their disposal. What had the woman with the huge rack been thinking???

As near as we could tell, this team of ghostbusters had decided that the room they were in was a former opium den where multiple wretched souls had passed into the great beyond. The forgotten batteries had disrupted their attempt to capture the disembodied voices that surely echoed through the chamber. We hadn’t encountered any such voices, but we were all willing to provide them.

Cipher put his mouth close to a gap in the wall and hissed, “GET... OUT..!”

Unfortunately, they didn’t hear it the first time so [Cipher] had to do it again. This time the argument stopped cold. The Outcast Earth team was doubled-over in the dust, trying very hard to suppress our laughter.

“Did you hear that?” the woman asked anxiously.

“Fuck, yeah,” the dude in the Southpole shirt replied. “Turn out your fucking lights. Shut the fuck up.”

The ghostbusters were silent, standing frozen on the other side of the wall. Cipher moved carefully back to the gap in the bricks and moaned, “I... AM... DEATH!”

“Oh, fuck me! Fuck me! Did you hear that! Fuck me!” Southpole dude yelped.

“Take some photos,” the other man suggested. “Maybe we’ll get some orbs!”

There was a flurry of clicks and flashes from their digital cameras and then they were quiet again.

We waited a full fifteen minutes without moving while the ghostbusters debated the origin of the voice. The Southpole dude used the time to again berate the woman for forgetting batteries.

“We could have gotten that on fucking tape!” he whispered.

“Eat a giant bowl of steaming dog shit,” she suggested.

“What did the voice say?” the guy in black asked.

“I think it said it was going to kill us,” Southpole dude said.

Cipher was yanking on my sleeve, gesturing that I should supply a sound effect. I moved to the gap in the mortar and let out my best erotic moan. Apparently the ghostbusters found such a sound disconcerting because they promptly and clumsily fled.

I know, I know. We shouldn’t have. It was an impulse and to be honest, we all feel a little guilty about it. But just a little. After all, somewhere out there a website is being excitedly updated with the tale of how three intrepid explorers were chased out of the Sacramento underground by murderous ghouls in full orgasm!

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