WHAT IS THIS PLACE?

The Trooth Archives is a paranormal investigation report, focused on collecting the things that happen around public computers. The machines in internet cafés have been touched by thousands of strangers. We believe they keep something back from every session.

Below are three documented phenomena. Each has been reported independently, across borders, by people who never met. Read them in whatever order you like. We only ask that you do not dismiss what you cannot explain. If you are a trooth seeker and want to donate and become an official Troother, with perks coming soon subscribe today.

Dear trooth seekers,

Welcome back to the archive. Today we tackle the big one, the theory I've been promising to write up for months. Silicon Cache Theory, and the gruesome deaths, disappearances and inexplicable circumstances haunting the old internet cafés of the world. I've been sitting on this case file a long time because I wanted to get it right. So if you're new here, settle in. And if you're a regular, you already know to take this seriously.

Silicon Cache Theory is the idea that old computer hardware absorbs the bad memories and interactions it encounters in public spaces. Now I know, I know, stay with me. Think about who actually uses an internet café. Lots of different people, complete strangers, all sitting at the same tired machines, all there for one reason. Anonymity.

Indulging in things like cheating and affairs. Maybe a spot of fraud. Searching towards things they really, really shouldn't. All the various other bad stuff people get up to on a computer precisely because, as it isn't theirs, they think nobody will ever trace it back to them.

But there's a big problem. All of that bad stuff compiles. The dark, the evil, the wrong. It's so heavy it presses down and leaves a scorch mark. It gets stored. Recorded, deep into the memory of the machine, building and building, until eventually the darkness becomes too powerful and it creates a phenomenon. Something that forces a nasty paranormal experience onto whoever is unlucky enough to be sitting there.

How the cache builds (the important bit)

Now this is where most people get it wrong, so pay attention, because I've done the reading so you don't have to.

It does not happen all at once. This is critical. A single session doesn't do a thing. One bad person having one bad evening on a machine? Nothing. We are talking about years. Years and years of strangers sitting down at the exact same terminal and pouring the worst of themselves into it, one after another after another, none of them ever knowing that the ones before them left something behind.

Every single session leaves a trace. And on its own, one trace is nothing. A smear. A bad feeling soaked into the plastic. But, and this is the part that genuinely gives me chills, they do not stay separate. Over time they start to find each other. The affair from one winter fuses with the fraud from the next, which fuses with whatever somebody searched at three in the morning the following spring, and slowly, quietly, all of it congeals into something far bigger and heavier and worse than the sum of what actually went in.

And it has to go somewhere. So it sinks. Down out of the memory and into the physical guts of the thing, the boards, the wiring, the circuitry itself. And this is the part I need you to really understand, because it's the closest thing we have to hard evidence. The people who have taken these machines apart afterwards all report the exact same thing. Scorched circuitry. Burnt, blackened, discoloured, the components warped and bubbled as though they'd been forced to carry ten times the current they were ever rated for. Boards that look like they've been slowly cooking from the inside for a decade.

That is the residue. Fusing and scarring the hardware. Layer upon layer of human awfulness pressed and burnt into the circuitry until the terminal is no longer empty between users. It is full. And it is holding every last bit of it, all at once, all the time.

And a machine can only hold so much. Once it fills completely, right up to the very limit, the phenomenon can no longer be contained and the evil cracks its circuit board prison. And it explodes outwards. Into whoever happens to be sitting there.

Which brings us, unfortunately, to Berlin.

A documented case

In the back room of a café I won't name here (the family have asked me not to, and I'm respecting that), on a machine that had reportedly been running since the place first opened its doors, a young woman sat down late one evening to check her email. Nothing unusual. The staff say she was there maybe twenty minutes. But they also say that towards the end of it she went very quiet. Very still. And that she was staring, fixed, at the little webcam feed in the corner of the screen.

What she saw, we can only reconstruct from the cases that came before hers. And believe me, there are cases before hers. Because this detail comes up again and again and again in the reports, so often that I've stopped being able to call it a coincidence. So many people have described seeing a single, fleeting moment of their own face on the café webcam. Their own face. Looking back at them in what can only be described as pure, unbridled terror. A face they were absolutely not making. Catching them completely off guard.

Others have reported the smell. This one's almost universal, it's in nearly every file I have. Burning electronics and hot dust, and underneath it, something rotting. Something organic. Something that has no business whatsoever coming out of a computer. And here's the kicker, the staff at the Berlin café mentioned that exact smell in the days beforehand. They just blamed it on the wiring. Of course they did.

And then, trooth seekers, there is the figure.

The gLetch

A number of people who have sat at these machines have seen it. A tall, awful, terrifying figure. Over the years it's come to be known, in the circles that discuss these things, only as the gLetch. A glitching, stuttering entity that appears over the shoulder, or lurking just behind the computer of the user. And the very moment they notice it, they report the same horrible sensation. They immediately begin to feel themselves being drained. Life force pulled out of them, and they are utterly powerless to stop it.

Did the young woman in Berlin see the gLetch that night? I can't tell you that. Nobody can. What I can tell you is what happened next…

What happens afterwards

She was never seen again!

And this, this is the detail that keeps me up at night, this is the reason I keep this archive at all. Because it is not unique to Berlin. Not even close. Every single documented case of this phenomenon has ended the exact same way. A strange disappearance. Or a death. And every single time, without one exception on record, the last confirmed sighting of that person was inside the internet café they had visited. Sat at the machine.

So the next time you find yourself in one of these places, tapping away at a computer that isn't yours, I want you to remember what I've told you here. All of the bad-natured things that have happened in front of that machine, over all those years, did not simply vanish when those people stood up and walked out the door.

The machine remembers them.

It has been holding onto them this entire time.

And one day, it WILL give them BACK, in HORRIFYING fashion.

Stay safe out there, trooth seekers. Keep your wits about you. And as always, if any of this has happened to you, or to someone you love, my inbox is open and the archive is always, always listening.