Salvation, Indiana was your typical, midwestern
American town. The kind of place where everyone knew each
other, where everyone was comfortable leaving their doors unlocked at night, where there
was a sense of trust between neighbors that you couldn’t find in a more populated area. The kind of place where word traveled fast,
and where people talked about things that were improper in hushed voices, behind the
backs of others. In Salvation, being an outsider or deviating
from the norm was akin to complete isolation. You either fit in, or you got out. And if you didn’t, Salvation had its ways
of making you conform to the mold. Gossip, organized stalking efforts, discrimination. These small-town methods were often employed
by the town’s inner circle to keep those who they had a distaste for in check. And unfortunately, this cliquish mentality
can be the norm when it comes to small towns. There’s nothing anomalous about the ugliness
of human nature. But Salvation did have its secrets. The kind that, if brought to light, would
tear a small town apart. The kind that attracted the attention of the
US government’s Unusual Incidents Unit, a branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
that dealt with the paranormal and supernatural. The US Government’s answer to the SCP Foundation. Between June 18th and June 23rd, 1976, the
town of Salvation Indiana underwent swaths of extreme anomalous activity that affected
the town’s entire population, but was mainly centered around Salvation’s high school,
appropriately named, well, Salvation High School. Two UIU agents were dispatched to Salvation
to assess the reports of anomalous activity, record it, and of course, help cover it up. This was one of the few times the UIU got
the jump on an anomalous incident before a larger, more prominent organization such as
the SCP Foundation or the Global Occult Coalition . Bet they got a company pizza party for that
one. The operation went smoothly, with the agents
using an early amnestic, labeled CHEMICAL 110 to wipe the memories of the townsfolk
after interviewing them. Although in later years, study of CHEMICAL
110 would prove it to be incredibly dangerous, as the amnestic was both toxic and had a degrading,
damaging effect on human memory centers. Between this and the Foundation’s early
amnestic models also proving to be incredibly dangerous, the 1970s were an interesting time
indeed in the field of supernatural coverup operations. The timeline of events the agents established
depicted an eerie scene. It was only a few days, but what occurred
was both horrifying and strange. On Sunday night, 10th-grade students at Salvation
High School reported hearing what they described as “someone trying to speak under the ground”
while passing by the school on their way home from a church service. One student reported it to her mother, who
ignored it entirely. On Monday, an 11th-grade student of Salvation
High School claimed during gym class that he could hear voices coming from underneath
the school’s pool. Several other students corroborated this story. When school officials came to investigate,
they didn’t find anything unusual. But the UIU agents found that the lining at
the bottom of the pool was cracked. On the same day, several female students reported
seeing “faceless things” instead of their own reflections in a bathroom mirror. They did not seem bothered by this. During lunch announcements, many students
described being able to hear a third voice alongside the two other students speaking
unintelligibly below the broadcast. Curiously, the agents found that the PA room,
where the broadcast originated from, sat in a media center near the pool. On Tuesday, students arriving at school noticed
that the Indiana state flag was more than three meters above the top of the flagpole,
attached to nothing, just floating. The American flag was not found. And more importantly, the students claimed
they could see nine female figures hanging by ropes from the flagpole, who disappeared
immediately after being seen. During a biology class, one student suddenly
stood up, and rolled their eyes to the back of their head. They descended suddenly into the floor and
disappeared entirely. Shortly after, they reappeared above a ceiling
panel in the corner of the room. No other students were able to identify the
student, and several of their classmates insisted that their actions were just a joke. The UIU agents were unable to find proof of
the student’s existence in Salvation’s enrollment records. Similarly, students described yet another
student they didn’t recognize, walking the halls of the high school. They were unable to define any details of
their appearance, save for one thing that stood out: they wore a purple satchel with
the word “syncope” embroidered on the side. A custodian reported seeing something staring
at him, standing at the bottom of the school pool. On Wednesday, the horror only sped up, as
school staff noted that there was a full two inches of water across all levels of the school. For whatever reason, the school’s principal
decided not to close the school. At 7:56 AM, the entirety of the student body
heard an unknown voice whisper the word “hello” in their right ear. Members of the school band realized their
instruments no longer produced any sound, but whenever they played, they reported seeing
a small, black, human-shaped entity flickering in and out of view in the corner of the room,
facing the wall. One student saw a dark figure walking up and
away from the school through the air at an impossible angle. Eventually, the figure disappeared from her
sight and was never seen again. No other student addressed this. On Thursday, a student in gym class avoided
a dodgeball as it phased through his body. He sunk into the floor, screaming for help. Nobody who noticed seemed motivated enough
to help him. The entire school shifted roughly one foot
off of its foundations at 11 AM. The vice-principal, who was sent to inspect
the building’s integrity, described seeing, “something small, with too many faces”
grinning at him from underneath the building before the school inexplicably resettled back
to its original position. The boys' locker rooms disappeared, and were
replaced with what witnesses described as “something that screamed”. They were unable to provide any details. As the students left for the day, they saw
nine young women hanging in the air, tilted forward at an angle above the school’s parking
lot. They could be seen silently mouthing words,
and their appearances were described by witnesses as “ugly” and ”unremarkable”. They vanished, and again the majority of the
town’s residents report hearing a child's voice say the word “hello” below them
upon the figure's disappearance. A panic ensued, as town officials had no explanation
for these events. Salvation’s principal made the call to close
the school on Friday. However, when Friday morning arrived, the
entire student body showed up for school. The building was locked, so the students simply
waited outside to be let in. No individuals could describe why they were
there. There was a knock on a window, and the students
saw a small, black entity standing outside of a second-story classroom. The entity phased in and out of the school’s
windows over and over, until suddenly disappearing. After this, the front door unlocked itself,
and the mass gathering of students entered the building. However, what they found was unlike the small
school they had come to know over the years. Inside, Salvation High school was transformed
into a non-euclidean space, meaning that reality didn’t work inside it the way it should. Hallways that led right instead led downward. Stairs that went up instead curved left. As the students moved through the school,
they couldn’t help but feel like they were always moving down. Lower and lower. Some heard whispers, others heard drums in
the distance. As they approached the basement, they saw
a massive, stone archway. Suddenly, the students shifted, encasing the
entire group in rock and earth for twenty seconds. After this brief, suffocating torture ended,
the students reappeared back in the school, except this time, every one of them reported
being the only one in the building. They described the experience, wandering the
building alone before coming to what they called a “doorway below a doorway”, and
ending up inside a small sub-basement room. There they saw three mysterious visions. A woman crouched over a body of water, surrounded
and covered in blood. A farmhouse in a group of trees that were
burning, nine white humanoid figures floated in the air overhead. A weeping woman digging in a field until her
hands began to rot and fall apart. When these visions subsided, the black entity
reappeared again. It whispered “hello”, and the group of
students were suddenly surrounded by nine screaming female figures. After this, the students reappeared inside
their own homes. It was at this point that the UIU began to
enter the town to distribute amnestics to the subjects. More anomalous activity was recorded in rapid
succession. Bodies hanging in the sky. Water taps leak human hair and mucus instead
of water. Individuals reported that their facial features
had disappeared entirely. Others reported seeing faceless creatures
in the town. The black entity frantically appearing and
reappearing in rapid succession throughout the town. Even a weeping young woman running back into
the school building, who witnesses lost after she entered the school’s basement. The cover-up effort was brutal, but it worked. The townspeople of Salvation were convinced
that they saw hallucinations as a result of toxic gasses blown south from a factory up
north. But what was the connection between all the
phenomena? Nine faceless, female entities. Water and blood. Something that literally upsets the entire
foundation of Salvation High School. A small, black entity. Adults in the town ignoring the things their
children saw, and acting indifferent toward them. All of this sounds a lot like a dirty, dark
secret being unearthed in the town of Salvation. Something people would rather turn a blind
eye to and ignore. But they couldn’t. Because the terror was only getting started. A week after these events occurred, contractors
assessing the damage to the school discovered the sub-basement room, where the students
had various visions of anomalous entities. Behind it, was the entrance that led to the
large, stone archway. This antechamber was discovered after one
of the members of the contracting team slipped and fell beneath a collapsed section of wall
and floor that led to the massive area underneath the school. The contracting team attempted to extract
them, but they did not succeed. Their disappearance caught the attention of
the SCP Foundation, who assessed the school and deemed the area beneath the school to
be anomalous, as the building’s architecture should not be able to accommodate the size
of the area. It was designated SCP-3935, and as the Foundation
began investigating it, they were determined to uncover the truth of what was really occurring
in Salvation, Indiana. While exploring SCP-3935, they came across
the stone archway, a piece of architecture whose origins are unknown. Inscribed on the arch was a phrase that read: “The way below winds deeper, longer,
Unspeakable its patterns laid The lost forever, damned to wander
This thing a quiet madness made.” After the initial establishment of SCP-3935
as an anomalous location, the Foundation poured deeper into Salvation’s mystery and came
across the documents created by the UIU agents. The Foundation, being much more thorough in
their containment methods than the UIU, decided that the small town of 1,400 people was easy
enough to relocate entirely, and the entire area could be condemned, feeding into the
excuse of a hazardous waste facility nearby leaking noxious gasses into the town’s water
and air supply. With the townsfolk successfully relocated,
Salvation was quarantined and cut off from the rest of the world. Roads were removed and rerouted, and Foundation
personnel turned over any trespassers to local authorities. Salvation High School became a hub for Foundation
researchers studying SCP-3935 and the events that occurred in the town, and the building
was heavily guarded when not in use by the organization. The initial exploration attempt into SCP-3935
was conducted by a team of Foundation agents, shortly after members of the contracting team
were lost. There was a slight hope they could be recovered,
and the effort was dubbed a search and rescue mission. Three agents, Ellis, Porter, and Haskel, were
tasked with entering SCP-3935, all equipped with recording equipment and a shoulder-mounted
lamp system. They entered a cramped, narrow space beyond
the archway, where the subterranean stone walls got tighter and tighter, and the air
felt stuffy and uneasy. On the walls, images resembling a child’s
drawings were carved into the rock. As the team continued to push through the
rock tunnel, they found it difficult to breathe. The walls were getting narrower, too close
for comfort. Suddenly, Porter’s voice cut out, and his
camera feed went black. When it came back, it appeared to be looking
up at two sources of light, most likely the other two agent’s lamps, as Porter fell
from a great distance. His screaming was heard, on both the cameras
and by the other agents, but they couldn’t figure out where he was. Ellis and Haskel began to panic, moving faster
and attempting to struggle forward. The rock tunnel was so tight, so constraining,
that they were unable to move more than a few steps in a second. After a short period of time, both men fell
forward into a larger, open space. As they searched for Porter, who wasn’t
behind them, they came to the conclusion that he must have fallen into a ravine or slipped
beneath the rocks. There was no other explanation for how he
disappeared so suddenly. But their talk was cut short when they realized
what was in front of them. They hadn’t noticed it at first, but when
they turned their lamps forward, they noticed a gigantic structure, seemingly carved out
of stone. It resembled Salvation High school, almost
perfectly. The main entrance was visible, and the windows
too. A stone replica of the school, hidden in this
massive, underground area. The agents couldn’t believe it. There was a thick layer of fog in front of
them, but they could make out a narrow stone bridge that extended across a large chasm,
leading to the stone replica of the school. As they examined further, they noticed that
underneath the school was another model of the school. And under that one was another. It went on indefinitely, extending deeper
and deeper into the ground, in the direction that all things in Salvation seemed to go
- down. On the other side of the bridge, hanging mid-air,
were nine female entities, their faces obscured by long white hair. The two agents stood still in fear. After a short time, the figures appeared ten
meters backwards, and then another ten, and then they appeared right in front of the door
of the stone school structure. Slowly, they lifted their heads, revealing
their featureless faces to the agents, who recoiled in fear. After that, they disappeared. The two agents debated going back for reinforcements,
but they pushed onward after hearing the sudden sound of many voices speaking in hushed tones
in the distance. It could have been the lost contractors, or
their lost man, Porter. They entered the stone school and began searching. Inside, they couldn’t make heads or tails
of the architecture. As they ran down the hallways, following the
sound of the voices, they noticed that the halls seemed to stretch on forever. But they didn’t seem to notice the watching,
featureless faces, who observed the agents from the window panes in the doorways. As the agents came to the auditorium doorway,
Agent Haskel let out a scream, and his voice recorder disconnected. At this point, what occurred became nearly
impossible to make out on the Foundation’s recording. The voices grew louder. Haskel’s camera shifted perspective to the
floor. Nine female entities appeared around Agent
Ellis, contorting their bodies into impossible positions. Haskel ran, but the entities pursued him. He screamed for help. Eventually, the figures hung in the air, unmoving. Haskel slowed down too, and slowly turned
around, coming face to face with the small, black humanoid entity sitting upside down
on the ceiling of the hallway. It whispered one word, “Hello”. The feed cut out to the choppy sounds of audio
distortion. A snapping noise was heard. And then, silence. And then, all three agents’ feeds returned. For the duration of the exploration recording,
Haskel, Ellis, and Porter lost their minds in the depths of SCP-3935. In between periods of silence, they laughed,
screamed, and shouted incoherently. Rambling on about how dark it is, and how
they can’t go down any further. Below. Below. Where it goes on forever. Where they can be a part of the nine. Be a part of Salvation. Where they can fall forever. And after that, silence. The feed was cut out completely, and neither
the trio, nor the contractors, were ever recovered. After this failed, horrifying exploration
attempt, more anomalous activity occurred in the town during the Foundation’s occupation. Sightings of the nine faceless entities in
the streets and the trees. An agent who saw the black figure constantly
in his peripheral vision. Sounds coming from a grove of trees near the
school, which led to a cabin and nine corpses of former Salvation high school students in
the backyard. But before they could investigate, the female
entities appeared once more, and they were unable to locate the grove again. The Foundation’s investigation of Salvation
continued throughout the decades, interviewing former staff members of the school and residents. They were trying to piece together any semblance
of a coherent story. To find a way to connect all of these dissonant
elements into something understandable. The black figure, the corpses, the buried
secrets, and the nine female entities. How did it all connect to the school? In 2002, a Foundation agent interviewed Mrs.
Fletcher, an English teacher at Salvation High School during the period of anomalous
activity in 1976. The interview started out ordinarily enough. Fletcher, in her old age, couldn’t remember
much. She remembered the town was quiet, with a
tight-knit community. They didn’t even need a police force because
there was so little crime. She remembered students would go into the
woods and chase ghosts, or claim they saw things, but it was never anything too strange. But as Fletcher continued to talk, she let
her mind wander more and more. She recounted how there was a disappearance
at the High School. A girl who was last seen by the school’s
pool. The town assumed she ran away. After all, there were some individuals who
held strong opinions in Salvation. The kind of opinions that didn’t sit right
with some of the younger residents. The church was important in Salvation. Nearly everyone went. Fletcher opened up some more. There was a scandal, she recalled. A teenage girl on the school cheer team who
ended up pregnant out of wedlock. She couldn’t recall her name, or what she
looked like, but she remembered the town’s inner circle was in an uproar about it. She didn’t want them to know. She didn’t want anyone to know. It was a secret she could barely keep from
spreading. It must have been destroying her, Fletcher
explained. She couldn’t remember much else about the
girl. But she did remember that the girl would always
say “hello” to her. Too many times, in fact. Eventually, the girl was found hanging in
the woods, right outside of a log cabin. They found a note in her hand, which contained
a drawing of a building that resembled the High School, and on its back the repetition
of the same word, over and over again, but Fletcher couldn’t recall what word it was. The Foundation agent was about to close the
interview out, but he had one last thing to ask. He produced a picture of the unidentified
nine female figures that were haunting the town and showed it to Fletcher. She became noticeably pale and short of breath. “Do you know anything about this, Mrs. Fletcher?” the agent said. She collected herself and examined the image
as best as she could, her hand shaking. “Well… yes, I do. Those are the, uh- that's the cheerleaders. There were, uh, well, let me think… there were ten of them, though, I think. Unless something happened to one of them,
there were definitely ten.” The Foundation didn’t have to ask what happened
to the tenth. Now go check out “SCP-1337 - The Hitchhiker”
and “Revenge of D Class Ghosts SCP-4973 - Dead Men Walking” for more ominous hauntings
that keep the horrors of the past alive and well!
