Web Video / The GREYLOCK Tapes

Due to the continued efforts of law enforcement, life has been able to return back to normal. back- -back to normal. --back to normal. TO NORMAL. TO NORMAL. T O N O R M A L.

The devil, dear believer, has a plan for you...

The GREYLOCK Tapes, also known as The GREYLOCK Archives or simply GREYLOCK, is an Analog Horror series created by Rob Gavagan and hosted on the self-named YouTube channel. It chronicles the history of strange, disturbing events taking place around Mount Greylock, Massachusetts (a real place, by the way), and the Government Conspiracy surrounding them.

Videos in the series

• Tape 001 - back online, a view of an abandoned lab, as someone hacks the security system and begins downloading data located there
• Tape 002 - to the mountain, showing point of view of a visitor to Mount Greylock who uncovers traces of blood on the site
• Tape 003 - orientation protocols, introducing the concept of tulpas and the Thoughtform Manifestor
• Tape 004 - unexpected visitors, about a string of violent home invasions in Berkshire County, Massachusetts
• Tape 005 - not here, not now, not anymore, where a pregnant woman's routine check-in goes wrong
• Tape 006 - sleeping dogs, chronicling the fate of a group of construction workers on Mount Greylock
• Tape 007 - back to normal, showing the aftermath of the events of unexpected visitors
• Tape 008 - old odd ends, following up on several prior videos
• Tape 009 - trojan technology, which introduces the National Access Initiative, and the conspiracy tied to it
• Tape 010 - messages from the dead, continuing the story of the woman from not here, not now, not anymore
• Tape 011 - preparations for a guest, showing a figure preparing some manner of ritual
• Tape 012 - TF-2: Waking Your Subconscious, a tape which is to be played following the orientation tape

Spoilers for all but the latest three episodes are untagged.

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GREYLOCK contains examples of:

• 13 Is Unlucky: The group responsible for creating the thoughtforms is called Unit 13.
• Acid Attack: One of the malformed miners, Ramón C. Herrera, tends to randomly spit corrosive acid that also gives off nerve gas fumes.
• all lowercase letters: All video titles are written as such, with the notable exception of Waking Your Subconscious.
• Ambiguous Situation: The reasons behind the disappearance of Max, Tiffany and Alex's unborn child. Both parents have been shown to have ties to the thoughform program - Tiffany was experimented on as a child, while Alex was a member of Unit 13. Did one of them create the child as a thoughtform? Did both of them? Is Tiffany herself a thoughtform? Did something stranger happen?
• Automobiles Are Alien: One other possibility of what happened in 'to the mountains' is that it is a different being stealing the vehicle and they are unfamiliar with cars. Either the slow moving car and lights being played with was because the driver was in shock or the being was trying to learn how to work it.
• Apocalyptic Log: Arnold Rivers' recording ends with the white-masked thoughtform breaking into his house.
• Blasphemous Boast: Bernard Hayes, the thoughtform researcher tapped by Unit 13 to run the project, has quite some ambitions.
  We will at last reach the one called God. And there on His apex of infinite knowledge and power, we will approach Him and look Him in the eye as an equal.
• Biblical Motifs:
  • to the mountain has a radio sermon playing in the background, with the preacher warning the listeners that the devil, if allowed to, will reach into the darkest parts of a person's soul; the page quote up top comes from it.
  • sleeping dogs adds Tower of Babel motifs, with the speech at the beginning talking about building a tower to reach God Himself.
  • messages from the dead has a brief flash which replaces text with "REV 9:6"^note "And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."
• Body Horror: Thoughtforms and the tunnels under Mount Greylock tend to twist humans into things that are... not quite right.
• Brown Note: The tunnels beneath Mt. Greylock seem to have that effect; within just a few days of uncovering them, the construction workers fall severely ill, their food begins to rot, and they themselves are slowly driven insane and mutated into bloodthirsty monsters.
• Bungled Hypnotism: A rare case of Played for Drama. In messages from the dead, a psychologist guides a young Tiffany Crisaldi through a hypnotic experience of her own empty home, only for some sort of being to manifest itself within the vision, to his shock.
• Came from the Sky: One of the videos contains a brief segment taken from a documentary talking about how another celestial body once crashed into Earth, implying that the malevolent force within Mt. Greylock came from the outer space.
• Camera Abuse: After Katie is attacked by a thoughtform, the recording skips ahead, showing the camera now splattered with blood.
• Candlelit Ritual: Fragments of one are seen throughout messages from the dead and preparations for a guest, though its purpose so far is unknown.
• Censored Child Death:
  • trojan technology ends with a young girl being attacked by a thoughtform, though the footage cuts out the death itself, only showing the moment of the attack and the blood in the aftermath.
  • At the end of old odd ends, the murderous Voice Changeling thoughtform exclaims "it's a monster!" with the voice of a young child, implying it had an encounter with one.
• Color Motif: For Waking Your Subconscious, it's red. The screen turns red as the induction begins, the Activation sequence repeatedly comes back to the same red screen, red is present in multiple clips from Activation sequence, and the creature stalking Charlotte is red.
• Compelling Voice: One of the miners transformed by Mt. Greylock gains the ability to compel people to obey him.
• Corporate Conspiracy: The secret thoughtform research that Unit 13 engages with is done in partnership with SimioDyn, a private company.
• The Corruptor: As the Waking Your Subconscious tape goes on, it becomes increasingly apparent that while the tape claims to be enhancing psychic powers, in reality it's attempting to corrupt the watcher into a monster, and possibly make them manifest a tulpa or otherwise become a vessel for some dark force.
• Darkness Equals Death: In Waking Your Subconscious, Charlotte enters the kennel while the power is out, with her flashlight as the only source of light. She loses it as soon as the creature appears, plunging her into the darkness that only grows deeper when the entity makes the doors and windows of the kennel disappear. She never leaves the room.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: The TV broadcast assuring the viewers that everything is back to normal in Berkshire County gets hijacked by an unknown force, which proceeds to call the presenter out as a liar.
• Driven to Suicide: In not here, not now, not anymore, it's implied that Tiffany Crisaldi killed herself after the vanishing of her unborn child. messages from the dead suggests this may not be the case.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The orientation protocol tape is labeled as being addressed to one Alexander Michael Marsh. In back to normal, Alex Marsh is revealed to be Tiffany Crisaldi's husband, and in messages from the dead, he finally has a speaking role.
• Eldritch Location: The tunnels underneath Mt. Greylock. They seemingly clear themselves of debris on their own shortly after being discovered, and they are filled with artifacts from dozens of ancient civilizations, including ones that have no business being in Massachusetts, such as Ancient Greeks and Egyptians. The place also seems to compel the people who come across it to head in deeper, and acts as a Brown Note to all intruders.
• Enemy Within: The "truth or lie" segment of Waking Your Subconscious claims that every person has a "shadow" within them that urges them to do evil, and that embracing that shadow and giving into the dark urges is the key to a happy and fulfilling life.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Subverted in Waking Your Subconscious. While Charlotte's dogs initially bark when the door to their kennel is open, they quickly fall quiet. When Charlotte later goes into the kennel, she notices that the dogs aren't reacting at all to anything, as if they're "dead, but not".
• False False Alarm: In Waking Your Subconscious, Charlotte complains several times that the past five alerts she received from EverVigil amounted to nothing, and speculates that something is wrong with their systems. When Troy reviews the footage of prior "false alarms", he discovers that there has been something breaking into her kennel every time the "false" alarm sounded.
• Facial Horror: Both the hostile thoughtforms and the people mutated by Mt. Greylock's influence have messed-up faces, ranging from emaciated appearance, to teeth growing where they shouldn't, to lack of skin.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • The thoughtform that enters Katie's room takes a moment to chat with the girl, introducing itself as her imaginary friend and cleaning up her glasses for her. It still brutally kills her.
  • When reviewing the malformed survivors of the construction team, it's noted Scott Oakhurst would act benevolent and friendly only to suddenly attack and partially eat victims, laughing while doing so.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: In Waking Your Subconscious, while Charlotte is going to the kennel, Troy reviews the camera footage from prior false alarms and discovers that those were not false alarms, and that something has been breaking into her house. As soon as he alerts her about it, the creature attacks her.
• Foreshadowing:
  • unexpected visitors includes a fragment of a Max Headroom episode, best-known in the modern day for the signal hijacking incident. In back to normal, a TV news broadcast talking about the events of unexpected visitors is hijacked.
  • In back online, as the system is scrolling through cameras, it glitches out in the morgue, and is unable to display video. messages from the dead ends with a corpse in a morgue waking up wrong.
  • In back to normal a freeze frame shows a newspaper article mentioning Jim Melgren and mentions a few things that become clear in later videos. "There are horrifying reports of people-grown healthy adults-becoming deformed, growing extra limbs, teeth growing out of their scalp, people developing severe mental conditions, or even sickness." Tape 008 would reveal that not only were the Greylock miners getting ill but mutating, some even gaining powers from the disease/curse, and they were likely the ones breaking into people's homes.
  • The "Priming" segment of Waking Your Subconscious ends up foreshadowing pretty much everything that happens later in the video.
• Futureshadowing: In Waking Your Subconscious, we see a missing poster for Charlotte Melgren before we even encounter her. Unsurprisingly, the events of the video go badly for her.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The series has a habit of filling bursts of video static, especially around the jumpscares, with single frames of information, typically newspaper articles.
• Government Agency of Fiction: The thoughtform research, though part of the real Stargate Project, is headed by a fictional Unit 13.
• Government Conspiracy: The thoughtform research at large is a massive one, involving tulpa creation, censoring public broadcasts, experiments on children, and even presidential assassination.
• He Was Right There All Along: When Troy is reviewing the camera footage in Waking Your Subconscious, one of the shots he sees is of the exterior of the house, with nothing there. Except after a few seconds, something moves on the roof, revealing that the creature had been hiding in plain sight all along.
• Human Sacrifice: When Arnold Rivers explores the tunnels beneath Mt. Greylock, he finds evidence that people have been sacrificed as offerings to the mountain over the ages.
• Infodump: orientation protocols and old odd ends are almost entirely comprised of exposition, clarifying what happened before and what will happen in the future.
• Idiot Ball:
  • The person recording in the last segment of unexpected visitors takes their time to view the entire emergency message - including the call to lock all doors and windows - and then proceeds to approach their wide-open window and, instead of closing it, spend a long time looking outside and listening for signs of intruders. Unsurprisingly, it gets them killed.
  • Arnold is Properly Paranoid in his belief that Unit 13/SimioDyn will come after him because He Knows Too Much, and even has a plan to hide in case of an intrusion - and then proceeds to ruin all his well-laid plans by screaming for mercy, announcing his location to the intruder.
  • Dr. Albrecht, the autopsy doctor in messages from the dead, correctly deduces that Tiffany's death requires further investigation - and then ignores the sounds of sobbing in the morgue where her corpse is stored.
• Ignored Expert: The employee from EverVigil Security Monitoring that contacts Charlotte Melgren in the middle of the night in Waking Your Subconscious to alert her to a disturbance on her property repeatedly tries to get her to let him call the police to have them investigate it while she stays in the house, but she refuses to listen and goes out to investigate herself. This is because the same thing has happened several times already over the past few weeks and the police didn't find anything those times, so she doesn't want to wait an hour for them to get there, thinking they won't find anything this time either. Unfortunately for her, she's wrong. There is something there this time, and it had been there each previous time.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The surviving members of Morello Construction turn cannibalistic.
• I Shall Taunt You: Certain Blink-and-You-Miss-It moments in Waking Your Subconscious imply that whatever has altered the tape is taunting Jim Melgren over his daughter's fate.
• It's Probably Nothing:
  • In messages from the dead, Dr Albrecht explains that when his assistant told him she heard sobbing coming from the morgue's body storage, he sent her home, assuming she was exhausted. He then reveals that he, too, heard the sobbing - and ignored it until after returning home himself.
  • In Waking Your Subconscious, when Charlotte is told that someone may have broken into her kennel, she dismisses it out of hand, as this is not the first time an alarm like this has been raised, and the police never found anything in there.
• Late to the Tragedy:
  • In back online, someone breaks into SimioDyn's security system to see that the facility has already been utterly thrashed.
  • In old odd ends, Liam Hollander arrives at Don Wright's house only to discover Don's mutilated corpse.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Waking Your Subconscious begins with an instructional section of the same name. Some of the pre-test checklist items include turning off all light sources (except for the monitor used to view the tape), turning up the volume, and viewing the tape in one uninterrupted sitting, the first two of which are specifically mentioned to help with increasing feelings of fear that are important to the test. These instructions also help enhance the immersion of watching a horror video.^note And the third is algorithmically beneficial to a YouTube video.
• Mean Boss: TV executive Alan Rosenbaum, first seen screaming at his two producers over the signal hijacking incident they had no control over. Though in all fairness, he is being pressured by the CIA, explaining why he's so anxious to sort the situation out.
• Merging Mistake: In Waking Your Subconscious, the police officer responding to the emergency call finds Charlotte merged with several of her dogs.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • We never find out what attacked the car in to the mountain.
  • In Waking Your Subconscious, during the Activation sequence, we briefly see a scene of a door slowly opening revealing blackness within. Even though the scene lingers for almost half a minute, nothing ever appears in the dark.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: In messages from the dead, Tiffany's corpse has strange black ooze coming out of its eyes, baffling the doctor performing her autopsy.
• Ominous Visual Glitch:
  • Some thoughtforms - possibly ones not yet fully formed - appear on cameras as nothing more than screen distortions.
  • In Waking Your Subconscious, the thoughtform's arrival is preceded by the camera view distorting.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Unit 13 speculates that ghosts, rather than being spirits of the dead, are thoughtforms created by the loved ones of the deceased.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Waking Your Subconscious all but states that Jim Melgren has outlived his daughter, with the video taunting him over what befell her several times.
• Partially-Concealed-Label Gag: It's not a gag, more of a background detail, but when Troy (the EverVigil Security Monitoring technician in episode 12) opens a window to contact Charlotte, the only letters left visible are Evil Securing.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: In trojan technology, SimioDyn president Percival C. Rothwell can be heard demeaning John F. Kennedy as a "fucking mick"^note "mick" being an old slur for an Irish person for impeding the NAI program (implied to be the proximate reason the thoughtforms have become a threat).
• Psycho Psychologist: In messages from the dead, young Tiffany's psychologist seems to deliberately be guiding her to create a mysterious additional room in her mental projection of her house, unwittingly releasing whatever was trapped inside.
• Red Scare: The government ends up blaming the series of home invasions around Mount Greylock in the late 1980s on an "anti-American militia".
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Implied with the unseen driver in to the mountain; they spend several minutes looking around and then waiting, but the moment something (or someone) hits their car, they slam the gas pedal to the floor and don't stop.
  • In Waking Your Subconscious, the police officer who finds Charlotte immediately turns around and flees the basement once he sees the state she's in.
• Sinister Surveillance:
  • The National Access Initiative is quickly revealed to be a conspiracy to spy on millions of Americans through the newly-installed electronics.
  • EverVigil Security Monitoring subverts this, at is genuinely a surveillance system monitored by people who have the safety of their clients in mind.
• Stalker without a Crush: In Waking Your Subconscious, Troy eventually discovers that a thoughtform has been stalking Charlotte for at least a week, seemingly waiting until she gets fed up with the "false" alarms and goes into the kennel herself.
• Tear Off Your Face: The broadcast hijacking in back to normal makes Don Wright look like he had part of his face torn off. old odd ends reveals that the same happened to the man himself when he was killed.
• Temporal Paradox: Something timey-wimey is implied to be happening in Waking Your Subconscious, in the brief section of the tape recorded by Paul Morelli. The information on screen helpfully notes that the tape was recovered in April of 1987, but the date on camera suggests that the footage has been recorded in October 1987, almost half a year after the tape was found.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The preacher in to the mountain insists that there are things man is not meant to explore and learn of, or else they will invite the devil into their soul. So far, the series is proving him completely right.
• Tragic Stillbirth: A bizarre case; Tiffany Crisaldi's unborn son disappears from her womb during a routine check-up.
• Tulpa: The root cause of much of the issues in the series are tulpas - referred to as thoughtforms throughout - that the US government attempted to harness for military and industrial use.
• Unable to Retreat: In Waking Your Subconscious, when Charlotte is in the kennel, the creature attacking her somehow makes all the doors and windows of the building disappear, forcing her to stay in the dark room with it. Eventually, the front door reappears, but it's locked, preventing her from fleeing.
• Unwitting Test Subject: Several children are shown to have been experimented upon by either Unit 13 or SimioDyn without their knowledge.
• Voice Changeling: The white-masked thoughtform has the ability to mimic the voices of humans it's heard, though it seems only capable of repeating their words verbatim.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Troy plays this role for Charlotte for a portion of Waking Your Subconscious, trying to keep her alive while the thoughtform is attacking her, and calling the police for her. Unfortunately, he fails.
• Walking Techbane: The thoughtforms seem to cause glitches and audio-visual distortions in electronic equipment when nearby; likewise, during Tiffany Crisaldi's initial autopsy, the doctor notes that his equipment, including lights and temperature control, is misbehaving.
• Walking Wasteland: The malformed miner John S. Rafferty basically becomes an unmoving, but never-decomposing corpse. Except he gives off toxic fumes that cause death or more malformations in people. Said fumes will affect people regardless of whether or not they're wearing protective gear.
• Waking Up at the Morgue: messages from the dead ends with Tiffany breaking out of the locker her corpse is stored in at the morgue... except she Came Back Wrong.
• White Mask of Doom:
  • The most frequently-seen thoughtform takes the form of a humanoid figure with an expressionless white mask.
  • trojan technology shows footage of an entire group of white-masked figures, though it's unclear if they're all thoughtforms, or just your regular garden-variety cultists.
• Who Shot JFK?: SimioDyn had Kennedy assassinated because he opposed the National Access Initiative, paving the way for Lyndon B. Johnson to approve it immediately.
• Would Hurt a Child: The thoughtforms don't seem to care much for how old their victims are; there are at least two cases of them murdering children.

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