Lost Tapes of the Internet

It started with a computer tower salvaged from a dumpster outside a Detroit loft at 4 AM. The narrator had crashed at a friend's party, woke up disoriented, and when his girlfriend came to pick him up, he spotted a smashed monitor and a surprisingly intact tower next to a dumpster. He took it home, wiped clean, running Windows XP. Out of morbid curiosity, he searched for hidden files. The only thing he found was a single .avi file tucked inside a folder called "Barbie" in the Windows System 32 directory.

The Video in the Dumpster Tower

The footage was an hour long: a woman sitting in a chair against a white backdrop, talking to someone off-camera. The audio was nearly unusable—drowned in harsh static. The narrator imported it into Final Cut and tried to isolate her voice, with little success. But watching her body language told a story. She appeared to be answering questions. About fifteen minutes in, her face reddened and contorted. Soon she was sobbing hysterically. One of the few words he could lip-read was "skin"—she repeated it many times, at one point pulling at the skin on her arm. For the last twenty minutes, she just cried with her head down. Then the screen faded to black.