The obsession I’ve had, for several weeks, is the SCP website. You may remember my introductory post about this from a few weeks ago, where I explained that SCP means Secure. Contain. Protect. The SCP is a website devoted to a fictional organization, kind of like the MIB, only more ruthless, which protects the world from anomalous items, creatures, and events. They contain items that are dangerous to humanity, or just would be a bad idea, and secure these creatures, events, and items in special containment facilities, if possible.
There’s something on the website for everyone. If you like Horror, then there are all manner of horrifying creatures and events to read up on. If you like sci-fi, they got you there, with space and alien related SCPs, and they even have a number of funny ones, too, like the odd business that will deliver llamas to people, anytime, anywhere!
Youtube has a number of channels devoted to readings from the SCP website, along with at least a couple of really good short movies, game walkthroughs, speculations about the events, and creatures, and what would happen if they breached their containment. But most of these videos are devoted to counting which SCPs are the most terrifying, hard to contain, or would cause apocalyptic events should they ever get free. I’ve watched a number of them, which keep listing the same ones over and over, and frankly, I wasn’t that impressed with some of the ones chosen.
Some SCPs are very popular, like The Plague Doctor, which does not mean what you think it means, and uh, yeah, I’m not impressed by him, and tired of hearing about him. Yeah, he is scary, but on the scale of scary, he’s the least frightening thing contained by the SCP.
Here are ten SCPs I was a lot more impressed with:
SCP 610: The Flesh that Hates/ Class-Keter
The Flesh That Hates is an extra dimensional entity that occasional intrudes into this one, to consume organic material, to make it part of itself. It manifests in the form of a skin infection, that quickly takes over its host. Think The Thing crossed with The Blob. It doesn’t really have a singular form of its own, and is at least partially sentient. I think I told you guys about my fear issues surrounding the idea of sentient blobs. So yeah….
This SCP exists in the form of a report about one of its incursions into this world, and how that incursion was contained. I prefer the audio version of this SCP, which comes across as really good horror fiction, told as reports, like World War Z. Its tough to read. You actually start to care about certain characters and there’s a good amount of tension involved in whether or not people will be infected, and have to be killed, plus there’s the body horror angle. This SCP would make for a great Cronenberg-style movie.
SCP 001: When Day Breaks
In light of my issues surrounding sentient snot, I found this SCP to be especially unpleasant. This one is an end of the world scenario, (it’s called a K-Class Scenario in SCP speech), that I guess, happened on an alternate Earth. One day, the sun becomes lethal to all of humanity, and anyone caught out of doors, gets melted into a sentient blob, that begins hunting any surviving people to consume. What’s horrifying about it is that, mentally, the people are still themselves. They just have no bodies of their own, and try to talk the survivors into joining them outdoors.
This SCP exists on the website in the form of several journal type stories, as told by multiple survivors of the events. If you like horror stories, then these stories are definitely for you. You can also listen to the audio versions of these stories on YouTube.
SCP 1936: Daleport
There are a lot of SCPs that exist as scenarios chronicling events that are inexplicable, were, or are still, dangerous to humanity, and that’s what Daleport is about. This one is told in the form of reports and memos about a fictional town, that experiences an inter dimensional war, between multiple gods and entities, and the fallout, and purpose of that war.
A cult in Daleport follows various rituals to bring all these minor and major God’s together in one place, so they can duke it out for supremacy. These entities (many of which are inimical to human life) are meant to kill each other off, thereby reducing their numbers, which has the added benefit of making the multiverse safer for sentient life. Unfortunately, human beings get caught in the crossfire.
Some of the entities attack each other, or humans, some are just there to be observers, but at least one of the beings involved had no agenda to fight, and made some effort at protecting the citizens of Daleport, by opening a portal to lead them to safety. This is a chronicle of the various human expeditions into the affected area, after the battle, and the videos and journals left behind. This SCP is the definition of Lovecraftian, consisting of a war between alien beings, that are largely indifferent to humanity’s suffering.
SCP 1155: Predatory Street Art/Class Keter
As an artist, I found this SCP to be not only terrifying, but also the most fascinating. One of the things that scares me are inanimate objects, that move of their own free will, but at least part of this has to do with the deception behind innocent, or innocuous looking, objects, being evil. Now add predatory to that description, and you can see why something like that would be terrifying.
This SCP is a piece of street graffiti, in the form of a large owl-like bird, that attracts, and then attacks and consumes humans. It lures people near, or waits for people to come near, and if eye contact with it is broken, it shreds the person to pieces with its claws. After reducing a human body to a pile of offal, this usually takes about six seconds, it then moves to a new, different location, thereby making it hard to contain.
This SCP is currently considered Safe, because it’s been contained in an abandoned, and heavily patrolled, shopping mall.
SCP 432: The Cabinet Maze/ Class Safe
Yes, one of the things that scares me is getting lost somewhere, and never being able to get out. The Cabinet Maze is another innocent looking, inter-dimensional SCP, that appears to be a closet, or container, with two wide doors. Any person who goes into the Maze, and closes those doors, will never get back home. They’ll be lost in a maze of dimly lit corridors, until they either die of thirst, or the creature that haunts the maze, finds and consumes them.
This SCP is in the form of reports of human expeditions into the maze. It is possible to survive the maze after some amount of exploration, if the doors are left open, and a person leaves some sort of trail, either with chalk, wires, or a drone. But if the doors are closed, they will open again on a different area of the maze, and that person will never find their way back home.
SCP 087: The Stairwell/ Euclid
Several SCPs are not actually dangerous but exist as A kind of haunting. Nothing actually horrible happens to you, but it’s still pretty terrifying to be in it. I call those situations Invisible Lurkers, something malevolent, that you can’t see, but that you know is there, and is closely watching you. This type of SCP is often referred to as a Cognito-Hazard. It is harmful to the mental state, rather than the physical.
It’s really just an endless stairwell, that seems normal enough, but the further down one goes, the darker and gloomier the stairwell becomes. After a while a person begins to feel a presence, which begins to manifest itself, more and more, in the form of a pale ghostly face, until the person usually just runs back up the stairs in abject terror, and no amount of threats, or coercion, can convince them to go any further.
Yeah, you’re gonna think about this one when going down the stairs to your basement this weekend.
SCP 1730: What Happened to Site 13
This is one of my all-time favorite SCPs.
Some of the SCPs are really hard to classify, because there’s nothing to be contained, and it’s not particularly dangerous to anyone. Some of them are like history reports. Like the Daleport SCP, this one exists as an event, in the form of a story, and is about the destruction, and eventual disappearance of an entire containment facility. For me, this SCP is just a great scary story. It’s fairly long and involved, so it’s best to go to the website and read it, or look up the audio version on YouTube.
Basically, this SCP is an investigation into the events that destroyed a containment site, on an alternate Earth, and is basically a containment breach story. There are a bunch of these types of stories that are reports on what happens when various SCPs get loose in the facility. Most of them are terrifying, but this one was also simply awesome, and involves more than a little bit of military horror, as well.
Here, all the SCPs get loose, because of some unauthorized terminations, lead by one of the doctors at the facility, which all begin to interact in unexpected, and quite frankly, some deeply horrifying ways, causing a massive Daleport like event within the facility, where all the laws of physics get destroyed. Objects, super-beings, creatures, and several cognito hazards, wreak havoc with the staff, which prompts several rescue missions by the SCP mobile task forces, and this story is their report of what they experienced.
If you liked the ending to the movie Cabin in the Woods, or the latest Godzilla movie, then you will love this SCP, where you also get to learn about some of the other SCPs held at the site. (My all time favorite SCP is The Gate Guardian! Look that one up!)
SCP 3008: The Endless Ikea/ Class Euclid
This ain’t like the Cabinet Maze. This exists in the form of a gigantic box store, that appears to be a normal IKEA store, that is the nexus of several different dimensions. Go into the store from any other entrance but the front, and it’s a normal store, but if you go in through the front entrance you will be lost in an inter dimensional facility, that’s larger on the inside than the outside, and unlikely to ever find your way back out, although that has been rumored in a couple of cases.
This Ikea is so large, that an entire community of people are trapped within it. There are store clerks present in the form of golem like entities, that are very helpful during the day, but at night, go into security mode, and attack, and kill, any people they find wandering the isles of the store. The community, that has sprung up in the store, appear to live under a constant state of siege, where they forage in the food court during the day, and hunker down to fight the golems in the evening. There is another faction of people whose job it is to search for any exits.
On the surface it doesn’t sound so bad, but I really cannot imagine spending the rest of my life trapped in a retail box store. That sounds pretty horrifying to me, but some people might actually think it’s funny. I recommend listening to the SCP audio for this one, which exists as a report from one of the rare escapees.
SCP 2935: Dead World/ Keter
On the surface this one appears to be just sad, but after digging a little deeper into this SCP, there is a sinister element involved that produces a real sense of dread. This SCP is a report of an expedition into a world where all life, even birds, and insects, have disappeared, instantly, and simultaneously, with no real answer as to why.
Our world’s SCP receives a call for help from another world, accessed through an underground tunnel. Upon arrival, our expedition finds a dead world, and a report from a more recently deceased human, who claims he is the reason that his world is dead, and that the current finders of his report cannot, now, go back home, lest the same thing happen to their world.
His theory, (and this is the part that’s most chilling), is that the SCP from this now dead world, was lured to yet another world by an entity seeking to escape a world it had already destroyed. After his expedition, he comes back to his home world, but unknowingly carries this entity with him. This newly empty world is the one discovered by our SCP, and now that they’ve discovered it, it would be best, not only for them to remain in this dead world, but to destroy the tunnel home, so that the portal can never be accessed again.
This is another SCP that is best experienced in audio form, and makes for some truly dread inducing listening.
SCP 2086: Rerouting/ Class Keter
As SCPs go, this one is fairly simple. It’s a class of SCP that masquerades as public transportation. This SCP is an insectile creature, that lives in hives. It hunts human beings by masquerading as public transportation. They look like large buses, and are intelligent enough to use human bodies as bait/bus drivers, to lure humans inside. It will travel along bus routes, and even move signage, and once a person has been lured inside, they will be taken to the hive location, and digested.
I think you can see why I added this one. I rode public transportation for years, and not once, did it occur to me, that I might be endangering myself! of course this could explain the numbers of missing human beings every year – they’re being eaten by seemingly innocuous looking objects.
There aren’t any photos for this post because I was too lazy to write this post on my laptop, and I really don’t think stock photos would do much justice to the descriptions of these SCPs.
Next up: 5 Most Awesome SCPs!
Geeking Out about It 