It started as most things do, with my boredom.
I was surfing around on YouTube, looking for funny videos or scary videos, when I stumbled across something that caught my interest. It was run by a user who went by The Meat Man and it involved stop motion footage using some very disturbing puppets. The thing that honestly caught my eye first was the thumb nail. It was a figure that appeared to be crafted entirely out of ground meat.
I remember seeing the model and lifting an eyebrow as I took in what I was seeing.
Now, when I tell you that the models were grotesque, I don’t mean that they ugly or badly made. They were very well put together and the amount of detail that had gone into them was astonishing. These meat puppets had hair and clothes and facial features that had all been meticulously crafted to the point of being a little uncanny. I would have almost expected them to blink or move on their own and they seemed too life-like for the medium.
The episode I had found was episode five, and as I watched it, I quickly began to realize that this was no normal bit of YouTube content.
Episode five involved three characters, Lisa, Steve, and Michael as they prepared for the arrival of a fourth character, Dawn. The background music was jangly and discordant, somewhere between a calliope and a merry go round, and it often made the voices hard to hear. The characters were cleaning up the house, which was mostly a sheet of paper with windows drawn near the ceiling and some furniture crafted from modeling clay. As they cleaned, a voice told us how Lisa was being lazy and expecting Michael and Steve to do the majority of the work. I remembered thinking this was odd because her character moved and dusted and tidied at least as much as the others and they seemed to be working well together.
After a few minutes of herky jerky cleaning, a hand came down from the ceiling and congratulated Steve and Michael on a job well done. It then pointed a pudgy finger at Lisa and scolded her for being so lazy. The voice said that Lisa would not be allowed to join the party later, since she hadn’t helped. As Michael and Steve walked off stage, Lisa’s character curled into a ball as loud party music played in the background.
I remember feeling bad as the last frame sat frozen in place, the camera zooming in on the prostrate Lisa as she sat hunkered against a wall. Though I couldn’t hear anything over the loud party music, I could see the small figure shaking a little and thought she might be crying. What the hell was this? And why did it suddenly make me feel almost voyeuristic for watching the suffering of this lumpy not-person?
After that, my morbid curiosity was hooked.
I went to the attached channel and saw that he had about ten videos up, all added within the last month or two. His channel was small, only about eighty subscribers, and they were all in that style of stop motion where he used the figures' grotesqueness to his advantage. I found the first episode, Friendship, and decided to watch it.
The video was about Lisa, the meat puppet from before, and how she was sad and lonely all by herself. The puppet mostly sat in the same familiar position, bent over and appearing to sob. Suddenly, two other familiar puppets, Steve and Michael came into the scene and Lisa looked up and seemed happy to see them. The pudgy hand, whom she called Father, said he had seen that she was lonely and had gotten her some friends so she wouldn’t cry so much. The hand stroked her delicate hair, and it seemed to be much nicer to her now than it had been in the previous episode I’d watched. The three hugged and said they would be friends forever. Then the episode ended and the screen went black. It had lasted less than five minutes all told, but it still made me feel strange and put off. Those puppets were so…odd looking and I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something not right about them.
I was also hooked and immediately loaded up the second video.
It was like a train wreck, and I needed to see how it came out no matter what the carnage looked like.
The next two episodes were pretty similar to what I had come to expect. They were called Cohabitation and Family and followed the lives of Lisa and her new roommates. They set up some furniture and had some getting to know you chatter as wonky music played in the background, making there words hard to hear sometimes. It was the typical stop motion fair, but there were odd refrains sometimes in the middle of the stop motion. During one in particular the boys, Steve and Michael, we’re talking with Lisa about what to make for dinner. The stop motion abruptly cut and you could see five or six seconds of the models just standing as a loud sobbing came from the background. Amidst that sobbing, there was a soft but angry voice trying to quiet the crying. I had to rewind it a few times in order to catch it and I remember wondering if this was some sort of artistic film or something? Was the artist trying to make some kind of point or something? Maybe he was trying to hide it amidst the stop motion to make it even more avant garde?
It wasn’t until the fourth episode that things got bad for Lisa.
I noticed that while the first three videos had come out one a day, the fourth video had taken almost a week to come out. This wouldn’t have been strange for any other channel, but the total shift from episode three to episode four was alarming. The video was about five minutes long, and seemed to entail Lisa going out on her own one night and getting lost. She had gone out for a walk, despite being told not to by the Father Hand, and had gotten herself lost in a forest that had been drawn on white paper. The trees were the big swampy kind you often saw on kids' art assignments, and it was clear that Father Hand was no artist.
He wasn't a consistent narrator either, because his voice and his tone seem to get angrier the longer the episode went on.
The condition of the puppet looked gastly and that only added to the surreal horror of the show. The Lisa puppet was clearly in bad shape, and halfway through the show, a piece fell off of her and landed on the table. The narration ended abruptly as the music continued over the visual of the graying puppet just standing in place. The sound of someone stomping off was audible over the jangly discord and the steps sounded heavy and angry. There was a brief moment where the sound of someone begging to be let go but it cut away just as the sound of screaming started. The video was edited badly, and an attempt had clearly been made to cut it out.
When the show resumed, the Lisa puppet was completed again with what appeared to be a fresh hunk of meat attached.
The piece that had fallen off, however, still lay on the table as though it was no more useful than a snakeskin now.
Towards the end of the episode, the Lisa puppet bent over and seemed to weep as she was alone and scared in the forest. This weeping was over laid by a soft and frantic weeping in the background, though I’m not sure we were meant to hear that part. All of a sudden, the Father Hand came and showed her the way home. It scolded her for running away, and told her she must never do that again. Much like an actual father, the hand seemed relieved as well as angry, and Lisa went with him to the house meekly enough. When they returned the Steve and Michael puppet did not seem happy to see her. They shunned her silently, and the episode ended with Lisa crying in a corner somewhere. Then the episode faded to black and the credits rolled.
I hovered my mouse over episode six, not sure if I really wanted to watch it.
Episode four, called Thankless, made episode five make a lot more sense now. Father Hand was still likely punishing Lisa for “running away” though the start of the episode made it very clear that she had just been going on a walk. The episodes were easy enough to follow, but something in them still made me uneasy. Why were these characters living under this fatherly hand character? Why did the narrator call them roommates if Father Hand treated some of them like children? The whole show just had an odd surrealist nature to it and there seemed to be an underlying story that I just wasn’t getting.
I was invested though and had to see how it came out.
Episode six was the strangest by far, and the comments on the video seem to prove that I wasn’t just going crazy. It was called Melancholy and the episode started with the same weird dance music and a shot of Lisa hunched up and crying. The crying however was not the canned sound it had been before. The episode was 3 1/2 minutes of someone sobbing heartbreakingly, the kind of sobs that are equal parts hopelessness and terror. The camera seemed to be slowly panning in on the intricate face of the meat puppet as the sobs in the background went on and on. I had seen some strange videos in my time, but this one definitely took the cake. The final shot was of the eye of the meat puppet, clearly defined and lovingly traced. You could see the meat beginning to mold, see the bright splotches that decorated the surface, and just before the screen faded to black, you could hear the elevated terror in the voice of the person sobbing before it was shut off by the end of the episode.
I had to take a break after that one, reading the comments as I tried to make sense of what I had just watched. The Meat Man’s audience seemed to be a little divided on whether this was an artistic expression or something much darker. A user had said that the sobbing and screaming had been unique and that he couldn’t find them on any of the usual free use sights. Another user questioned whether they were too real or not, thinking this might be part of someone’s torture fantasy, but others seemed to think it was just some avant-garde piece that was a little too pompous for its own good. What they did agree on was that even if it was acting, the screams were a little too real and that all of them felt some sort of way about those cries of anguish.
I had hoped that maybe episode seven would be a return to sanity.
But episode seven, called Jealousy, was just as weird.
The narrator was telling us that the Dawn character was adjusting very nicely to the house. All the tenants loved her, they all wanted to be her friend, and indeed the Father Hand, Steve, and Michael were all standing around her and moving animatedly. Only one character, Lisa, didn’t seem to want to be friends with Dawn. She seemed to be in another room, still hunkered up and crying. The narrator explained that Lisa was jealous of Dawn, and that Father was becoming cross with her attitude. The sobs from the previous episode were gone, But there were some other low noises barely discernible over the loud jangling music. The puppets seem to be in much better condition as well, and I suppose they had changed the meat on them recently. The Father Hand came and yelled at Lisa some more, but she just stayed hunkered up and crying. Finally he left and the episode ended as the camera zoomed in on the little meat woman, hunkered in her anguish.
I looked at the next episode and wondered if I really wanted to see more? It felt like I had been watching for hours, but it turned out that all seven episodes had taken less than thirty minutes. Something about watching the bi-play between the characters had gripped me, And I felt that I needed to finish it. At the same time, there was something much darker here than I had expected. This was like someone’s confession. The whole thing felt very intimate and I felt almost voyeuristic for watching.
I clicked the next episode though, telling myself that another three episodes wouldn’t do too much damage.
How wrong I was.
Episode eight, called Hatred, opened with Lisa leaning against a paper wall as the others tried to get into her room. They started out nicely asking her to come out, wanting to talk and wanting to see her. The narrator told us that Lisa had been shirking her chores and saying unkind things to Father Hand about the other room mates. Father Hand had, of course, shared these things with the others, and now they wanted to talk with her. As there knocks became pounds, all three of them pulling up on the paper door as they banged and kicked, Lisa pulled her hands to her ears and put her head between her knees. The narrator told us how Michael and Steve wanted to talk with her and how Dawn was really upset that Lisa would judge her so hastily.
As they pounded and banged on the paper door, Father Hand suddenly came into the scene. Lisa looked up from her knees, and seemed unsure of what to make of the sudden appearance of the fatherly falange. Father Hand told her that she had brought discord to the house and that he could no longer ignore her insolence. The hand turned itself into a fist and began to beat the puppet savagely. Chunks of meat fell off and were squashed beneath the pounding. The wire body was twisted and warped and the whole scene was made all the more horrific by the overlying carnival tune that scratched like razors across my brain. It ended as Steve and Michael knocked and the camera zoomed in on the sad pile of meat that Lisa had become.
The episode ended abruptly and when I saw a pale figure staring back at me from the suddenly dark screen.
It took me half a second to realize the pale and sweating figure was me.
Episode nine, Contrision, was next and there was no question on whether I would watch it or not.
I needed to know what came next.
Episode nine was as different from the others as night and day. It was a shaky cam of someone walking through a wood by night. A butter yellow light provided a small patch of illumination, and whoever was recording was breathing heavily as they trudged through the woods. The woods were preternaturally silent as they went, and the leaves crunching underfoot were loud and jarring. The video was four minutes long, and three and a half minutes were nothing but walking feet, crunching leaves, and heavy breathing.
Then, abruptly, they stopped before a small round stone, the ground before it freshly turned up and put to rest sloppily.
“Sleep well, Lisa.” Came the phlegmy voice of the camera man.
Then it all went black again.
I hit the tenth episode before I could think about it, wanting to see how it ended.
Episode ten, Ambivalence, seemed to be a return to normal. Dawn was sitting on the couch, seeming to laugh at something on a tv out of view. Michael and Steve seemed to be milling about, cleaning or just chatting. The wall that had marked Lisa’s room was nowhere to be seen. The Father Hand looked over them, benevolently, as the narrator told us about Michael looking for a book he had misplaced and Dawn watching her favorite show. All seemed well, all seemed normal.
Other than the broken corpse of Lisa that lay on the floor.
The damage that Father Hand had done still lay about the ground and the meat was brown and dry. Flies had begun to circle the meat body, and if one of the puppets had to go near her, they seemed to walk unheading over her body. The only character who seemed to notice her was the Father Hand. He would look down at her from time to time, almost smugly, and shake his head before looking back at the other happy puppets.
Episode ten went dark and I was yet again left wondering what I had just seen? The video had managed to move into my head rent free in less time than it would have taken to watch a movie. I had moved on to other videos, other activities, but the images were never far from my mind. I’d been known to suggest strange videos to friends of mine, even linking them on reddit to certain groups. This one, however, was not one of them. I was hesitant to talk about it, let alone tell people about it.
I did not want others to suffer under this like I was, and that was probably why I was thinking about it when I saw the poster.
I was traveling for work, I work as an expert witness for specific cases, and I do a lot of traveling and a lot of waiting which often leads to the aforementioned boredom. I was driving through Michigan when the call of nature became too much to ignore. Luckily, there was a rest stop up ahead and I was zipping up and heading out of the restroom room when I saw the missing persons wall.
My eyes found the woman before I could stop myself and my breath caught in my throat as I came up short.
The woman’s name was Elizabeth Rainey, 23, and she had been missing for the last four months. The poster was new, unmarred by yellowing and creasing, and I pulled it easily from the bullets in board. Looking at her face, I realized how much work must have gone into each puppet. Her nose, her wide forehead, the small dimple in her chin, the dent in her left cheek from some childhood accident, they were all there and they had all been lovingly added onto the porous face of the meat puppet.
I took the poster back to my car, my check in time approaching quickly, and called a friend of mine who worked at my local police department.
I told him about the girl, about the YouTube channel, about the videos, and he said he’d look into it without much enthusiasm.
When he called me later that day to thank me for the information, he sounded much more interested in what I had to say.
I called him again a few weeks later and offered to buy him drinks if he’d sate my curiosity.
He was willing, but said I might not want to know as bad as I thought I did.
Over drinks, he told me the whole sad story.
My friend had a friend too. His friend was an agent with the FBI and after watching the videos, my friend had told his friend. He sent him a link to the channel and asked him to take a look. After watching the drama himself, he had tracked the IP and decided to see what they could find about this guy. Turned out that Elizabeth wasn’t the only familiar face that was missing in the Michigan area. Michael Chavez, Steven Schoet, and Dawn Lee were also missing from the same area. The IP address was coming from an old house near Lake Huron. The owner, David Matthews, owned the house and quite a lot of acreage out there.
When they had raided his house, they had caught David by surprise and found more than they bargained for.
He had been keeping them in his basement. The sick bastard had a large finished basement with four separate rooms. The central room held a couch, a tv, and a large kitchen table with a small set for the show and a camera. The puppets were on a shelf nearby, their bodies gray and sagging off their clothes hanger bodies.
The other implement in the room was a large, rusty meat grinder.
A meat grinder with strands of rotting meat hanging from the spout.
He said the flies had been thick in the room, and the sounds of moans had not begun until they started kicking down doors.
Dawn, Michael, and Steve were lying in their respective rooms.
“Most of them, anyway.” He had said, taking a long pull from his beer, “He sent me the photos of the crime scene. I wish to God he hadn’t.”
David had been in the room that had likely once belonged to Elizabeth. He had been wearing her dress, the fabric badly stretched around his frame, and was sobbing in the corner. No matter what the agents said to him, his response was always the same, his rocking making a strange grinding noise as his butt slid over the concrete.
“ He said, “I shouldn’t have played God, I shouldn’t have made her sleep.” Just kept saying it again and again and again.”
“The others didn’t say much of anything,” my friend had told me, “He had scooped them to the bone, cutting off fingers and toes and arms and legs, so he could grind them up to make their puppets.”
He’d used tournicates and animal tranquilizers to keep them alive. Michael and Steve were little more than torsos, Steve having half a leg and Michael little more than an elbow. Dawn was missing her legs, but her arms were thankfully intact. She had only been in the basement for a month and it seemed like he hadn’t had as much time to take from her. They had gotten all of them out of there and David Matthews, The Meat Man, was now in custody.
“A real win for the good guys.” my friend had said, his stare a thousand miles long, “Though none of them will ever walk again. The men are in a catatonic state and the girl only gibberish, but at least we saved them before he could finish his sick play.”
They had yet to find Lisa's body, but he told me they hadn't given up yet.
As I sit here, going over the facts as I write, it all just runs through my head like a rat in a maze. Every moan, every sob, was this sicko harvesting his victims so he could replace the flesh of his precious puppets. I was an unwilling participant in this, watching and encouraging this sick bastard to continue. I want to forget it, but I can’t.
I may never forget what I saw in that short hour of my life.
I may never forget the terrible knowledge that The Meat Man has invested in me, and I may find my curiosity sated for quite some time.
I think my days of roaming YouTube in my boredom may be at an end.
---
Comments