About a week after I was kicked out of my house by a creature that I knew nothing of, a creature that was now in the complete hold of my body, family, and life above all, I discovered this strange sensation of freedom

Leaving everything behind to know that there is nothing certain about tomorrow gives you this... certain strength I would call it, something similar to a limited state of freedom, where you can do anything, but not all the time. A state in which you're both afraid and excited. This I think, is how truly being free feels like.

You would probably think that I was mad to think this way, given the circumstances. But that was probably the only thing that kept my sanity intact while spending all of my time looking for a solution, after all, and as impossible as it could sound, I still believed I was able to handle this problem on my own.

You see, when you find yourself in this type of situation, things like breaking into other people’s houses don’t seem like a problem anymore, you just can’t think of yourself as a bad person, and many other things become easier to do in order to survive. For me, the first one of those was to break into someone else's house, a summer flat about the end of Irvin Street, a place that I had put my eyes on while exploring the neighborhood, and that I quickly began to use as a shelter.

During this time, I discovered that I wasn’t able to Nightwalk anymore, instead, I had gained the ‘ability’ to see these spiritlike memories I used to in the form of visions, gazes, or feelings, by having contact with a certain location or object. Sometimes it was on purpose, others was by a complete accident, either way, it was a trip every time.

If I had to describe it in some way, it was like having access to the story of anything I could get my hand into, sort of speaking. That was how after getting into one of my neighbor's houses to steal a laptop I was able to unlock it and gave myself enough resources to begin with my research.

Demonic Possessions, Bilocation Phenomenons, Exorcising, and Doppelgangers, remembering the story about Dr. Jekyll and Hyde I focused the goal of my roundabouts on finding an answer to three main questions.

One, was I still I? Two, what was Him? and Three, how to go back to my true self?

My general hypothesis was then that I had become a phantasmagoric double of my own the same morning I didn’t make it on time into my room. That moment had been the perfect opportunity for this strange being to steal my body and own it.

Now, there is plenty of information online about doppelgangers, the evil twins, split personalities, or even clones. The original myth remounts back to a specific type of spirit in German folklore, a sort of evil entity who would take the form of someone while trying to still his life. So the next thing that I did, despite my skepticism and usual reluctance to lean on strangers, was to ask for help and to do so, I leaned on Chan communities.

To give you a brief summary of these sites, I would say that they are mainly online discussion forums, some very specialized towards certain areas of knowledge. Usually, they would gather a wide range of users very famous for engaging in some of the most strange happenings on the internet, all under an anonymity flag.

It was when I had dived into this type of website, that I decided to take the little articulated range of thought that I had at that moment and posted a thread under the title of “My body has been taken hostage by an unknown spirit”. To my luck and surprise, after a night's sleep, I reached the top list of the community threads with over a hundred entries. I had been a total success.

A mix of mocking, memes, and answers that vary between quasi-skeptical believers and complete freaks had taken it as a hypothetical case in a sort of game, closer to roleplay than the serious matter I had intended first. Even though it flawed nature, as more and more answers were added to the thread, it quickly became the thin thread between me and losing hope.

One morning, while I was in the middle of my research, I woke up to discover a new series of answers on the topic of exorcizing inside my thread. A set of back-and-forth between users developed into a discussion during my sleep time, and by the time I was able to read them all, they had jumped into a real-time chat.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Raising my interest, I followed them as a consequence.

The chat was hosted on a site called UnknowsArchive, a place where I ended up lurking from tip to toe that same night.

The object of the Archive as their users called it, seemed to be a group of common shared experiences related to paranormal phenomena. Tightly organized in a series of sub-forums filled with testimonials and intricate explanations of its causes. I would say that the main difference between this place and Chan forums was that these people seemed to know what they were talking about, much as if they were working over the same logic system.

For example, that same day while talking in a chat with a group of users of the Archive, Miguel, who claimed to be a years-long user of the site, told us the story that brought him in the first place. It went more or less like this.

Miguel’s aunt Martha had suffered an extreme case of schizophrenia since he had memory. The troubles his family had passed through to take care of her as she wasn’t able to fit into an institutional care program, partly due to her special needs, and partly due to their economy, were what ultimately led them to depend on the assistance of independent care-workers, same that would change frequently due to her delicate state.

Hallucinations, psychosis, and compulsive disorders were part of her daily life. One day, they’d reached the end of their willing suspension of disbelief when the police reached Miguel's mother in the middle of her shift. Aunt Martha's caretaker had called 911 because the old woman had started to levitate in the middle of the hall. When they came by, the walls were filled with unintelligible words splattered in her blood.

It went to a point when they couldn't ignore it anymore and had to admit that something... evil, was possessing Aunt Martha.

What came after that, Miguel described, was an endless parade of scammers and so-called ‘experts of the paranormal’ phenomena, more drawn to human, monetary interests, than to solve supernatural affairs.

No matter the less everything concluded when a man suited in black looking more like a CIA agent than an "expert" came by. In Miguel’s words, the man just put his hand on Aunt Martha’s neck leaving a mark that remains to this day, and all went quiet.

He didn’t charge them with money, nor gave them his name, he came and left, so simple as that.

Of course, after all that story, Miguel posted a picture of the mark on Aunt Martha’s neck. It was, in a few words, a few inches circle containing various unknown symbols.

Another post tagged under the sub-forum “case studies” talked about Arwan’s Agency experience within his work field.

In the Archive, there were a few seemingly normal people who spent their time and resources out there actually trying to find supernatural things, and there were even fewer, like Arwan, who had managed to use others' time and resources to do the same.

Arwan story about Lucy, like many of his other posts that I managed to solve later, was written to clarify many of his findings after closing a case.

Lucy's story developed pretty much like Aunt Martha’s, this time a young girl affected by a so-called health problem was put aside by her family until a strange event made them realize that they were probably dealing with something evil beyond their understanding.

Arwan’s Agency was reached after she ran into a wooded area in Nebraska, refusing to go back home.

Arwan started his story by depicting the procedures, precautions, and instruments he and his team used to face such a situation. After a few days of trying to solve what Arwan believed was an extreme case of psychosis or other type of mental disorder, the girl appeared out of nowhere and ripped the head of one of his helpers.

It was then, when all went south, that Arwan relied on one of his oldest friends, a man he described as a sort of aloof mentor figure. So in the best of his words, Arwan described the next couple of days as a hunting experience led by someone far more experienced than him.

When they managed to catch the girl through a combination of wit and raw strength, the mentor figure put her down using what he described as an artifact covered in rune-like scribbles made of ancient symbology references.

It didn't take Arwan that much to get more interest in the way in which the girl had been captived, instead of the girl itself. Shortly after, despite the reluctance of his friend, Arwan tried to reproduce a few of these symbols and their effects for his own study afterward.

The drawings on his notes published in the forum were far from the little mark on Aunt Martha’s neck, but very similar in essence. They were all circles inscribed by complex symbols, following a sort of indistinguishable logic.

I would eventually discover that there were many stories alike, but very few as insightful as Arwan’s. This made people like him very popular in the community, a sort of celebrity or legend, that you'll end up hearing about if you stayed around enough. It was about then when I met Jun-0.

You see, how the Archive worked was very similar to other sites, where although having all the freedom to say and post about everything following very few rules, there was a group of people supervising the whole activity, who also knew better than anyone else the topic there found.

They were both rare to find online and speak with, and RPK was one of them. He seemed to have caught who I was at some point in my research, and one day, I found myself talking to him through private messages.

After a brief interchange, he added me to a group tagged “Tier members” inside the forum, which opened a new set of sub-forums to lurk in. It was there where I found it.

This thing, this very thing was, to say the least, the mecca of my discoveries, and what ultimately gave sense to all of this digging into the rabbit hole of online research accountancy.

A simple document hosted on someone’s clouding service claiming to have all the answers to this unexplainable phenomenon.

It was called: “Arwan’s Comprehensive Guide for Sympathy Users”

It was about three in the morning when I bumped into it, and the lights were long-time off. There, inside the darkness, with only the sound of the laptop's fan accompanying me, I opened it and started reading.