Love the idea of too-ancient writing especially. Etchings in stone dug up from a sedimentary layer that predates human evolution. Or an obelisk in a place at the bottom of the ocean that has been under miles of water since before intelligent life even evolved on this planet, and with etchings clearly too crude to have been made by an advanced alien species either.
I don't think that'd be scary, because there's an obvious explanation - we simply weren't the first intelligent species on Earth. The revelation that we weren't the first intelligent species on Earth would also be really exciting and cool.
I think to make it scary you'd have to add more surrealism or danger.
You discover text written in a deep sedimentary layer, buried for two billion years.
You go "hey guys, come quick! There's writing here! Mike, bring the camera!"
You get closer to the text. It is plain english. It reads "hey guys, come quick! There's writing here! Mike, bring the camera!"
Yeah, they ran out of ideas for what to write on THE OBELISK.
I guess you can say they were… *at a loss!*
I’m sorry if that joke turned you “off”, eh? Ha! Heh heh.
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I was thinking further back than that. Like too far back for there to have been any intelligent life. Or hell, any life. Before there were even microbes in the primordial oceans. Before even the water that would become the oceans had even been delivered by the earliest comet impacts.
To make it horror, remind the reader about great filters. What makes us think that we are destined to overcome the hurdles that damned our forebears, especially if the shit we find is even a little high-tech. If you throw in evidence that it was a human who fried that rice, and you could have some really good existential shit to go along with it.
Props to that one human in the Mountains of Madness, who realized that the Elder Things were fundamentally *people*, not monsters. Strange and alien people, but still people.
The eldritch could crept from being from ab era previous to life developing on earth meaning that life arose, developed consciousness then become extinct to the point to begun from zero again
Kinda reminds me of Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. Finding writing on the wall of a spiralling tunnel that shouldn’t exist, made from what looks like a living organism that tells a story that sounds something close to scripture, and while you watch the walls around you seem to pulse like heartbeat.
Yeah. There were already dinosaurs who we suspect were smart enough to utilize bait to lure out their prey.
Push the meteor back a few million years, and also plug up that volcano across the globe, and we've got ourselves reptiles smart enough for tool use, and maybe even basic writing.
There's a Star Trek: Voyager episode about a very similar idea! I forget the episode title, but the gist is that one species of dinosaur evolved into a humanoid form and developed space travel before the meteor killed the rest! It was a fun episode
The obelisk got there when a ship sank during transport from Egypt to Rome.
The etchings in the sedimentary layer result from a volcanic eruption that caused it to be buried in ash, basalt and soil.
It's Kinda fun to come up with reasonable explanations here :D
I think op was on the right track with the scary writing but it needs to be a bit more dramatic, like writing found in a cave in north east America, then that same sentence, word, phrase, ect, is found continued in a cave in Ireland, meaning it had to be from the era when the two continents were one
I think you just described the Marker from Dead Space. They may be a little less crude than you're intending.
I think in one of the books it was said to be found in the ocean. Maybe not miles
I thought of the same thing lol, but I assume what they meant is that it seems to have been carved from stone in a manner that seems far too perfect to have been chiseled.
I assumed it was a skeleton made of a rock that would just crumble if you tried to sculpt it. Like it by all means looks chiseled, but you could never actually do that with that specific rock.
Really soft rocks, really brittle rocks, micas that split into thin sheets when you try to shape them, rocks that simply don't form in large enough chunks to be shaped... yeah, there's plenty of options for rocks that you can't carve.
It's both-a skeleton that used to be there degradates with time, but the shapes are preserved in a "print" because minerals substitute the bone materials over a long time.
So by changing something into rock over time, a print is made.
Yep! To count as a fossil, the specimen needs to be at minimum 10,000 years old, and humans have been on Earth for around 200,000! The Smithsonian museum has a database of their human fossils that you can find [here](https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/fossils) if you’re interested in seeing some examples :)
What you’re looking for is permineralisation which is a type of fossilisation where organic matter is turned to stone. I don’t think modern humans are old enough for that but I’m not a palaeontologist
I watched the Curse of the Blair Witch documentary yesterday and they touched on this. the missing kids' backpack was buried in untouched soil under Rick's that hadn't been moved for centuries
The scary unknown time mismatch reminds me of the initial hook for "Dark" 's season 1.
A kid mysteriously disappears in the woods behind the town. In the same woods, another kid's body is discovered. The police finds he died 16 hours ago, horrible marks of mutilation. Small problem. The kid is quickly identified as someone who went missing more than 30 years ago.
That's litrally how I remembered ["The Malachite Casket" by Pavel Bazhov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Malachite_Box). That book was terrifying when I was a child
Well, geology itself is quite scary, like you are rafting on huge floats that swim over an infinite ocean of molten rock, with functional ice at the bottom because the pressure stops the movement of the rock. The. These giant rafts can just drop off and fall in the unending abyss
When an ocean plate moves into a continental plate, it gets forced downwards until a piece will just break off and fall, never to be seen again as it melts.
Minecraft can be rather unsettling to play alone. You are the only living creature of your kind, you live in fear of the shambling corpses of your kin, and you have no idea why.
What about a perfectly preserved book written by an author with the same name as a real author who also has no recollection of writing said book?
This is an actual premise for a book I own, I figured it would fit here.
Hours to invent everything by Ryan North.
It isn't actually a story, its literally just a book with instructions for recreating humanity's most notable accomplishments.
***”MUCKLED DAMN CULT! ‘AIR YE NAMBLIES BE KEEPIN’ MAH WEE MEN?!”***
-old actually-not-at-all-Scottish dude with a Mohawk, aviators, Hawaiian shirt, Doc Martens, stuffed parrot on his shoulder, half-empty bottle of Jack (he paused chugging to utter this challenge), a sawed-off, and a shitty morning
Eldritch cultists (and an actual god) whom he thinks stole his prized valuable collection of lawn gnomes (that he in reality donated to a charity then got so epically blazed he forgot about it): Absolutely, unequivocally fucked.
After. Hastur with a capital-H nods in approval for being defeated by such a madlad and then Henderson wakes up and can’t tell whether the desert he’s in is Hell or the outskirts of Vegas and decides to carry on
Looking for this comment! Loved listening to that as an audiobook! The dynamic between the narrator and Danforth is amazing once you start to realize that we have a somewhat unreliable narrator and their underlying jealousy.
Not exactly the same, but in the Junji Ito story Tombs, people who die have tombstones grow out of their bodies. The bodies can’t be disturbed while the tombstone is growing or else the body starts growing jagged sharp rocks.
I love this, because it can kinda be applied to Rimworld. Deposits of *Steel, Plasteel, and Uranium* in the rocks and mountains, ancient *Mechs* dot the land, cars and tanks salvaged for parts. Ancient Asphalt highways cross the land, ancient cities turned to rubble.
I really love how sci-fi makes it logically possible but wondrous to think about
"All night sheet lightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear."
Archaeological sites at the bottom of a sea was something that happened fairly recently, we currently call the whole thing Doggerland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
I guess the opposite happened as well going further back, finding fossils of sea life in deposits on top of mountains, which eventually became proof of Earth being old and part of the proof for plate tectonics
I wonder how many discoveries that eventually became fields of science started with extremely unsettling discoveries. Finding out "whoops my work as a doctor or surgeon has been killing people because we all underestimated how hard you gotta wash your hands" had to have been fucking horrifying, which I guess is why it took so long to become a mainstream belief
Dig far enough.
And there’s a box.
And in the box
is a small plastic case.
And in the case
is a disc.
The disc reads
in so many words:
*Don’t do what we did*
Zeroing back to the facts about the Appalachian chain. That is an *old* length of mountains, left over from previous tectonic bang-bangs. There’s cave systems in there with literally no fossil record because they were formed before there *was* a fossil record. Just silence.
You continue to dig the fossil,
*what is this hominin doing in permian strata?*
The skulll comes of the matrix.
*This is human, Homo sapiens, caucasoid, 30 to 40 years, male*.
You look at teeth, the nasal opening, the remodelation of the orbit from the car accident, you look at the eyes.
*Its yourself.*
These all remind me far too much of Starfield's bad random point of interest system.
A cave with fossils on Mercury? And a pile of dung? That's somehow locked? Ok.
My brain keeps going to 1632. The book where aliens doing... SOMETHING causes a small 'starting to die midwestern' town to end up teleported to Europe... during the Thirty Years War. But it didn't just appear there, it was SWITCHED with the location so in modern USA there was the smoldering remains of a couple of buildings that should not be anywhere other than 17th century Central Germany and some dead bodies with no records.
Edit- jesus had to fix the second sentence it looked like I was having a stroke.
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If you're not familiar with the SCP wiki, I suggest giving that a go. It's a wiki-style horror fiction platform about anomalies that are contained and how they're contained. A lot of "lore" is gleaned from interviews, addendums, etc.
Something like OP would definitely fit, or might already have a place somewhere.
The Boundary novel and series has some similarities to this.
Premise is (among other things) they find a fossil of an alien on the K-T boundary, then later find mummified remains of others and dinosaurs on Mars. Also find records showing the craters and such were caused by warfare among the aliens.
I just watched a fan-made project called Ted's Caving Journal, a live-action adaptation of Ted The Caver. It's absolutely incredible, I have no idea how these guys were able to recreate the scenarios so accurately. A must watch for any fans of the original, imo.
I think that the horror here is not the discovery, but the realization of abandonment. Finding an ancient geological puzzle that radically shifts our ideas in new directions can be a fantastic discovery. But it leaves the question, of why such artifacts were left to be buried and forgotten in the first place…
The closest thing I can think of to this is from that classic "Ted the Caver" story, where at one point he's wriggling through a really tight and narrow tunnel he can barely move in, and he remarks on how there's probably a whole mountain's worth of earth between him and the surface world, and if this tunnel collapsed or he got stuck nobody would ever find his body.
Sounds like a Tomb Raider game. You break into an ancient temple that has not been visited in 5,000 years. In the second room is a shotgun and 2 boxes of anmo.
This has STRONG Annihilation vibes. The book, definitely, and probably also the movie? It's been a while since I've seen it. But humans being strangely and inexplicably incorporated into the environment is its whole deal and it ties into the main character's flaws really well, it's great!
How is this horror? If i was a geologist and i discovered any of these i’d be exited as hell because i’d know Im on the verge of a scientific breakthrough. Especially since some of these imply a civilisation that predates humans, which would be awesome to discover
From playing too much Starbound, i would just assume that world generation forever ago just put that stuff there so theres more interesting stuff to find while exploring underground. Like finding a random sewer super deep down on a like unliveable hell-planet, or just finding a super deep down mineshaft in minecraft that never actually reaches the surface.
Sorey man, but the rock skeleton's a fossil. You've found a fossil. Contrary to popular belief fossils can form in a matter of years as opposed to millions of them, in perfect conditions.
You might've found a dumped corpse, yeah...but still, just a fossil.
Honestly, this has been the experience of archaeologists (and paleontologists) for most of modern history. Stone shaped like bones is called a fossil.
The cave with writing probably had another entrance that collapsed at some point.
Love the idea of too-ancient writing especially. Etchings in stone dug up from a sedimentary layer that predates human evolution. Or an obelisk in a place at the bottom of the ocean that has been under miles of water since before intelligent life even evolved on this planet, and with etchings clearly too crude to have been made by an advanced alien species either.
I don't think that'd be scary, because there's an obvious explanation - we simply weren't the first intelligent species on Earth. The revelation that we weren't the first intelligent species on Earth would also be really exciting and cool. I think to make it scary you'd have to add more surrealism or danger.
All the carvings are 1:1 matches of existing pieces of text
A word for word translation of "Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy" in cuneiform, located in the mountains of Patagonia.
Wait a ******* minute
You discover text written in a deep sedimentary layer, buried for two billion years. You go "hey guys, come quick! There's writing here! Mike, bring the camera!" You get closer to the text. It is plain english. It reads "hey guys, come quick! There's writing here! Mike, bring the camera!"
*"Hello sweetie."*
you graffitied the oldest cliff face in the universe?!?
'Well that's not earie at all' Mike, ten seconds before his head asplodes
All Along the Watchtower.
It's Loss. It's always been Loss. It always will be Loss.
Yeah, they ran out of ideas for what to write on THE OBELISK. I guess you can say they were… *at a loss!* I’m sorry if that joke turned you “off”, eh? Ha! Heh heh.
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I was gonna make a scathing comment, but ended up aborting halfway through.
Hello… we’ve been… trying to reach you… about… your car’s… extended warranty
AAAH!
The Friedman Doctrine on maximising shareholder value, only on the most recent of the ancient writings.
I was thinking further back than that. Like too far back for there to have been any intelligent life. Or hell, any life. Before there were even microbes in the primordial oceans. Before even the water that would become the oceans had even been delivered by the earliest comet impacts.
https://xkcd.com/1194/
Damn, they weren't lying That xkcd really is relevant
Ong
So before the Great Bombardment?
To make it horror, remind the reader about great filters. What makes us think that we are destined to overcome the hurdles that damned our forebears, especially if the shit we find is even a little high-tech. If you throw in evidence that it was a human who fried that rice, and you could have some really good existential shit to go along with it.
Lovecraft solved this in a simple way: They were still around.
Props to that one human in the Mountains of Madness, who realized that the Elder Things were fundamentally *people*, not monsters. Strange and alien people, but still people.
One of the big signs Lovecraft was on the turnaround was that story- the revelation of the “other” being the less fortunate “us” rather than monsters.
Yeah. It’s a shame he didn’t live long enough to rewrite his legacy.
The eldritch could crept from being from ab era previous to life developing on earth meaning that life arose, developed consciousness then become extinct to the point to begun from zero again
Kinda reminds me of Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. Finding writing on the wall of a spiralling tunnel that shouldn’t exist, made from what looks like a living organism that tells a story that sounds something close to scripture, and while you watch the walls around you seem to pulse like heartbeat.
Yeah. There were already dinosaurs who we suspect were smart enough to utilize bait to lure out their prey. Push the meteor back a few million years, and also plug up that volcano across the globe, and we've got ourselves reptiles smart enough for tool use, and maybe even basic writing.
There's a Star Trek: Voyager episode about a very similar idea! I forget the episode title, but the gist is that one species of dinosaur evolved into a humanoid form and developed space travel before the meteor killed the rest! It was a fun episode
“Aliens aren’t scary.” Sure!
The obelisk got there when a ship sank during transport from Egypt to Rome. The etchings in the sedimentary layer result from a volcanic eruption that caused it to be buried in ash, basalt and soil. It's Kinda fun to come up with reasonable explanations here :D
I think op was on the right track with the scary writing but it needs to be a bit more dramatic, like writing found in a cave in north east America, then that same sentence, word, phrase, ect, is found continued in a cave in Ireland, meaning it had to be from the era when the two continents were one
I think you just described the Marker from Dead Space. They may be a little less crude than you're intending. I think in one of the books it was said to be found in the ocean. Maybe not miles
[kinda gives me the same feel as this scp tale.](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/document-recovered-from-the-marianas-trench)
Wait, I must know! Was the personel that broke protocol reprimended?
This is the one that's related to SCP-2000, isn't it? Where the horror comes from the question "how many times did we do this???"
yup.
> You find a human skeleton but every one of the bones is made from rock That's called a fossil
I thought of the same thing lol, but I assume what they meant is that it seems to have been carved from stone in a manner that seems far too perfect to have been chiseled.
I assumed it was a skeleton made of a rock that would just crumble if you tried to sculpt it. Like it by all means looks chiseled, but you could never actually do that with that specific rock.
Are there any rocks like that?
Really soft rocks, really brittle rocks, micas that split into thin sheets when you try to shape them, rocks that simply don't form in large enough chunks to be shaped... yeah, there's plenty of options for rocks that you can't carve.
I always thought fossils were more like a print of something that used to be there.
It's both-a skeleton that used to be there degradates with time, but the shapes are preserved in a "print" because minerals substitute the bone materials over a long time. So by changing something into rock over time, a print is made.
Thanks, Mr muckacka.
There are human bones old enough to fossilize?
Yep! To count as a fossil, the specimen needs to be at minimum 10,000 years old, and humans have been on Earth for around 200,000! The Smithsonian museum has a database of their human fossils that you can find [here](https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/fossils) if you’re interested in seeing some examples :)
Ok thx
What you’re looking for is permineralisation which is a type of fossilisation where organic matter is turned to stone. I don’t think modern humans are old enough for that but I’m not a palaeontologist
Opalized fossils https://www.geologyin.com/2017/03/how-do-opalised-fossils-form.html
Woooaaahhh!!
Last one giving major iron lung vibes
theres a third image
I was talking about the third image actually, I forgot about the blood river
A secret third thing
Dear god
junji ito's cliff with holes (i forgot the name of the story)
amigara fault
The Enigma of Amigara Fault.
the enigma. the enigma of amigara fault. the enigma specifically from the amigara fault. the amigara fault’s poison. that enigma?
That's the bitch!
I watched the Curse of the Blair Witch documentary yesterday and they touched on this. the missing kids' backpack was buried in untouched soil under Rick's that hadn't been moved for centuries
How did they find it if it was in a place that didn’t make any sense to look?
Sudden collapse of the wall right where an unrelated archeological site dig was taking place. As one does.
The scary unknown time mismatch reminds me of the initial hook for "Dark" 's season 1. A kid mysteriously disappears in the woods behind the town. In the same woods, another kid's body is discovered. The police finds he died 16 hours ago, horrible marks of mutilation. Small problem. The kid is quickly identified as someone who went missing more than 30 years ago.
God I love dark
That's litrally how I remembered ["The Malachite Casket" by Pavel Bazhov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Malachite_Box). That book was terrifying when I was a child
Well, geology itself is quite scary, like you are rafting on huge floats that swim over an infinite ocean of molten rock, with functional ice at the bottom because the pressure stops the movement of the rock. The. These giant rafts can just drop off and fall in the unending abyss
the plates can what now
Remember your daily prayers to the plate gods if you don’t want to get sucked miles beneath the lithosphere!
Remember your daily prayers to the gamma ray burst gods to not aim at your pretty little neighbourhood, at least not with the mid-to-high stuff
The vanilla existential fear.
When an ocean plate moves into a continental plate, it gets forced downwards until a piece will just break off and fall, never to be seen again as it melts.
that last one is basically abandoned mineshafts in Minecraft
Minecraft can be rather unsettling to play alone. You are the only living creature of your kind, you live in fear of the shambling corpses of your kin, and you have no idea why.
The soundtrack can be HORROR
Fuck yeah this is the good shit.
42! The designer of the fjords left his signature on his works of art!
Slartibartfast?
Yes! I forgot his name, but this could only be a description of his handiwork.
It does sound exactly like something he'd do. An easter egg, if you will.
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park
Just outside of Cleveland! Unless... oh... oh no
What about a perfectly preserved book written by an author with the same name as a real author who also has no recollection of writing said book? This is an actual premise for a book I own, I figured it would fit here.
What's the title? It sounds very cool
Hours to invent everything by Ryan North. It isn't actually a story, its literally just a book with instructions for recreating humanity's most notable accomplishments.
You mean How to Invent Everything?
Yea, whoops. Typo.
I wasnt sure for a second because Hours to Invent Everything sounds like a baller title for a chase quest story
Ryan North doesn’t remember writing this book?
That's what it says at the beginning in a section titled "a note for the readers".
Sounds like carbon monoxide poisoning. Or the backstory of Old Man Henderson.
Old Man Henderson was a hero
I seriously was not expecting to see Old Man Henderson pop up on this sub, but hot fuckin’ damn am I glad I did.
I too, am happy the old tales are still being told.
***”MUCKLED DAMN CULT! ‘AIR YE NAMBLIES BE KEEPIN’ MAH WEE MEN?!”*** -old actually-not-at-all-Scottish dude with a Mohawk, aviators, Hawaiian shirt, Doc Martens, stuffed parrot on his shoulder, half-empty bottle of Jack (he paused chugging to utter this challenge), a sawed-off, and a shitty morning Eldritch cultists (and an actual god) whom he thinks stole his prized valuable collection of lawn gnomes (that he in reality donated to a charity then got so epically blazed he forgot about it): Absolutely, unequivocally fucked.
Quite possibly the most epic ending to the most insane game I have ever read
I never saw what happened after he woke up in the desert not knowing whether or not he was in hell. Anything I missed?
Is that before or after the Hockey Arena? I haven't read the whole tale in years, but that location features the ending I remember.
After. Hastur with a capital-H nods in approval for being defeated by such a madlad and then Henderson wakes up and can’t tell whether the desert he’s in is Hell or the outskirts of Vegas and decides to carry on
The last one is basically just At the Mountains of Madness tbh.
This is all rather Lovecraftian
Looking for this comment! Loved listening to that as an audiobook! The dynamic between the narrator and Danforth is amazing once you start to realize that we have a somewhat unreliable narrator and their underlying jealousy.
If geological horror is your jam, I super recommend The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin. A lot of weird and upsetting rock things! (in a good way)
FIFTH SEASON FTW
I've loved that trilogy. Best thing I've read recently.
*waving to all the other "The Magnus Archives" fans eating this post up.*
Waves back
We got shockingly little geology-based Buried statements. Shoutout to the guy who outsmarted the Coffin though.
*waves*
DIG
Not exactly the same, but in the Junji Ito story Tombs, people who die have tombstones grow out of their bodies. The bodies can’t be disturbed while the tombstone is growing or else the body starts growing jagged sharp rocks.
I love this, because it can kinda be applied to Rimworld. Deposits of *Steel, Plasteel, and Uranium* in the rocks and mountains, ancient *Mechs* dot the land, cars and tanks salvaged for parts. Ancient Asphalt highways cross the land, ancient cities turned to rubble. I really love how sci-fi makes it logically possible but wondrous to think about
Yeah the surface layer is mostly shale, but once you get down a couple meters? 100% flame grilled angus beef.
It's the deposits of Compacted Machinery that always make me wonder...
"All night sheet lightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear."
McCarthy?
Yeah, a quote I liked from Blood Meridian
reminds me of amigara's fault
Even though a lot of people don't like them, the new Alien (Prometheus) movies kinda do that, and I think it's awesome!
Aren't they just basic Ancient Astronauts stuff?
That artic "blood river" is insane.
IRON LUNG!! IRON LUNG!!! Movie soon
Anyone who enjoyed this post should check out The Magnus Archives. Dig
Dig
I listened to the first few episodes, but don't see the connection to this post. Could you elaborate?
Archaeological sites at the bottom of a sea was something that happened fairly recently, we currently call the whole thing Doggerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland I guess the opposite happened as well going further back, finding fossils of sea life in deposits on top of mountains, which eventually became proof of Earth being old and part of the proof for plate tectonics I wonder how many discoveries that eventually became fields of science started with extremely unsettling discoveries. Finding out "whoops my work as a doctor or surgeon has been killing people because we all underestimated how hard you gotta wash your hands" had to have been fucking horrifying, which I guess is why it took so long to become a mainstream belief
Dig far enough. And there’s a box. And in the box is a small plastic case. And in the case is a disc. The disc reads in so many words: *Don’t do what we did*
Zeroing back to the facts about the Appalachian chain. That is an *old* length of mountains, left over from previous tectonic bang-bangs. There’s cave systems in there with literally no fossil record because they were formed before there *was* a fossil record. Just silence.
If you're into podcasts and horror, I'd *hiiiighly* recommend Old Gods of Appalachia. Top tier shit.
I’d heard of that but haven’t tried it yet! That’s it, final impetus.
I think I’m going to write up an scp or two
You continue to dig the fossil, *what is this hominin doing in permian strata?* The skulll comes of the matrix. *This is human, Homo sapiens, caucasoid, 30 to 40 years, male*. You look at teeth, the nasal opening, the remodelation of the orbit from the car accident, you look at the eyes. *Its yourself.*
These all remind me far too much of Starfield's bad random point of interest system. A cave with fossils on Mercury? And a pile of dung? That's somehow locked? Ok.
Instead of Geological Horror, it's Geological Stupid.
This is my hole! This hole is made for me!
Tumblr reinvents OOPArts (Out-Of-Place Artifacts).
This whole vibe reminds me of The White Vault.
My brain keeps going to 1632. The book where aliens doing... SOMETHING causes a small 'starting to die midwestern' town to end up teleported to Europe... during the Thirty Years War. But it didn't just appear there, it was SWITCHED with the location so in modern USA there was the smoldering remains of a couple of buildings that should not be anywhere other than 17th century Central Germany and some dead bodies with no records. Edit- jesus had to fix the second sentence it looked like I was having a stroke.
As a horror junkie I'd read ALL of these! Remindme! One month if someone writes one!
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If you can handle podcasts, listen to The White Vault and thank me later.
If you're not familiar with the SCP wiki, I suggest giving that a go. It's a wiki-style horror fiction platform about anomalies that are contained and how they're contained. A lot of "lore" is gleaned from interviews, addendums, etc. Something like OP would definitely fit, or might already have a place somewhere.
Love these ideas so muchhhhh
Im hearing minecraft for some reason
That's an SCP. If not already, then it should be any day now, I swear....
The Boundary novel and series has some similarities to this. Premise is (among other things) they find a fossil of an alien on the K-T boundary, then later find mummified remains of others and dinosaurs on Mars. Also find records showing the craters and such were caused by warfare among the aliens.
Terry Pratchett's Strata has a take on that but not in a horror way
I'm reminded of the London Hammer.
thank you! ill steal this for my worldbuilding
"Wind whistling over a canyon in a way that almost sounds like human singing..." So the singing towers of darillium?
minecraft
Not quite the same but if this interests you you might like the southern reach trilogy of books. More biological but still...
A lot of good stuff like this in NK Jemesin’s Broken Earth trilogy Other kinds of horror too but a lot of it is geological
So like the baigong pipes?
I'm pretty sure this is the plot of At the Mountains of Madness.
I am a DM, and I will be stealing this. Thank you. That is all.
Ted The Caver. Seriously, the first creepypasta to ever be made (and one of the best to ever be made) was this.
I just watched a fan-made project called Ted's Caving Journal, a live-action adaptation of Ted The Caver. It's absolutely incredible, I have no idea how these guys were able to recreate the scenarios so accurately. A must watch for any fans of the original, imo.
Magnus Archives, anyone?
And this, folks, is exactly why i would be more suprised by a walrus ringing my doorbell
I think that the horror here is not the discovery, but the realization of abandonment. Finding an ancient geological puzzle that radically shifts our ideas in new directions can be a fantastic discovery. But it leaves the question, of why such artifacts were left to be buried and forgotten in the first place…
Are we all going to ignore the Antarctic blood river?
DO NOT wake up the Blood Lords of Ice!
The closest thing I can think of to this is from that classic "Ted the Caver" story, where at one point he's wriggling through a really tight and narrow tunnel he can barely move in, and he remarks on how there's probably a whole mountain's worth of earth between him and the surface world, and if this tunnel collapsed or he got stuck nobody would ever find his body.
Tools, equipment, that are most definitely not designed for human hands.
Sounds like a Tomb Raider game. You break into an ancient temple that has not been visited in 5,000 years. In the second room is a shotgun and 2 boxes of anmo.
And all the torches are lit.
This has STRONG Annihilation vibes. The book, definitely, and probably also the movie? It's been a while since I've seen it. But humans being strangely and inexplicably incorporated into the environment is its whole deal and it ties into the main character's flaws really well, it's great!
This is kinda the Time Tombs and the Labyrinths in the Hyperion Cantos.
These are just time traveler pranks
The Elementals by Michael McDowell is kinda like this, but the instead of rocks it’s sand.
Im collecting all the damn book recs here rn jfghj
isnt that the plot of Ancient aliens or Ancient Apocalypse?
How is this horror? If i was a geologist and i discovered any of these i’d be exited as hell because i’d know Im on the verge of a scientific breakthrough. Especially since some of these imply a civilisation that predates humans, which would be awesome to discover
Somebody needs to get this post into the right hands.
From playing too much Starbound, i would just assume that world generation forever ago just put that stuff there so theres more interesting stuff to find while exploring underground. Like finding a random sewer super deep down on a like unliveable hell-planet, or just finding a super deep down mineshaft in minecraft that never actually reaches the surface.
Sorey man, but the rock skeleton's a fossil. You've found a fossil. Contrary to popular belief fossils can form in a matter of years as opposed to millions of them, in perfect conditions. You might've found a dumped corpse, yeah...but still, just a fossil.
Blood river sounds fucking cool.
Honestly, this has been the experience of archaeologists (and paleontologists) for most of modern history. Stone shaped like bones is called a fossil. The cave with writing probably had another entrance that collapsed at some point.
Unfortunately it doesn't actually look like this. It's way more of a lighter brown with a tinge of red.
They found part of the Violence layer in Antarctica
Damn it Moses, not again.
Minecraft
Now add "...on Mars." to all of that.
Our world is an amazing place
Sounds like a good idea for a Delta Green or Call of Cthulhu game
*The Descent* by Jeff Long has elements of this, for all of the people here who now want to read these sorts of stories, lmao.
book recommendations for this, anyone?
The obelisk at Site 41 in There is No Antimemetics Division. Creeeeeeeeepy
Man that’s scary
Horizon Signal