Mary Phillips-Sandy: Okay, we’re recording. Let me know if you want to stop or take a break at any point, there’s no rush. By the way, I’m proud of you for doing this. I know it wasn’t an easy decision. It takes a lot of courage to share your story with a world full of strangers who may or may not believe a word you say.

Tamra Wulff: I appreciate that. I wish I felt courageous. I don’t, though.

MPS: No? How do you feel?

TW: Like I have nothing left to lose.

MPS: Well, on that note, let’s start at the beginning, or the middle, I guess, the inflection point. Fall of 2018, when you last saw your boyfriend, Mark Cambria. He left under unusual circumstances, and not voluntarily. Something happened to him in the basement of Randy Wane’s piano shop—as most people would say, he disappeared. You don’t use that word. How come?

TW: “Disappeared” means he was erased. Like he doesn’t exist anymore. Which isn’t true. He left, he’s gone away, he’s not here, but I believe he is somewhere, and he can come back.

MPS: He’d gone to the shop alone because he was convinced it had something to do with the White Tapes he’d found. The tapes that made him sick every time he watched them.

TW: Initially, I thought those tapes would just be another one of Mark’s projects. He’d always wanted to start a podcast, and here was this topic that seemed interesting, at least to a certain audience. It struck me as— Maybe I shouldn’t say this.

MPS: No, now you have to say it.

TW: It struck me as childish. The whole thing, the tapes, the rumors, these weird people he was talking to on the phone. Like, come on, you’re a rational adult human! It’s one thing to enjoy ghost stories. It’s another thing to start acting them out.

MPS: You guys argued about that.

TW: Oh, constantly. From the beginning. You heard the arguments that were in the podcast? Believe me, there were a lot more that didn’t make it in.

MPS: But eventually you decided to help Mark with—

TW: Wait, can I say one more thing? I wasn’t the henpecking girlfriend. You know, that awful girl who’s in every bro comedy ever made. “Don’t go out! Stop wearing that T-shirt! I hate your friends! The thing you love is stupid! If you walk out that door, you’re never coming back!” It’s obvious from the minute she walks on-screen that she sucks, and as soon as her boyfriend dumps her, his life will be awesome.

MPS: Good lord, no, that’s not who you are. Your relationship never worked that way.

TW: You know that. I want everyone else to know, too. Mark always led with his heart, or his gut. When he cares about something, no matter how trivial it seems to anyone else, he goes all in. That’s part of what made me fall in love with him in the first place. I wouldn’t say I’m overly cautious, but I am analytical. I want to assess the situation and see if it stands up to scrutiny.

MPS: There’s value in both approaches.

TW: I agree. So, me being me, I wanted to stay out of it, mostly because I knew that if I got involved, we’d both get frustrated. The problem was, there were all these things happening that I, a rational adult human, couldn’t explain. Mark’s sleep-talking. Whatever, lots of people talk in their sleep. But do they sound like that? There were the sounds outside our door. The message from Thurman Mueller saying he was going to give a tape to Mark Cambria, even though the message had been recorded over twenty years ago, long before Mark knew Mueller existed. I kept thinking there had to be a logical explanation, but there never was. I just wanted to make it all make sense.

MPS: So you decided to help Mark pursue the answers, at least for a while. Eventually you asked him to stop.

TW: Of course I did! Someone broke into our apartment. Everything related to the White Tapes project was stolen, but nothing else. Who did it? Why? Nobody knows! That same day, our friend Cat, who’d been working with us, was nearly killed in a brutal car accident. Could be coincidence. People get in car accidents. But somehow Cat was the only one who got hurt? I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t care. We were in danger. We had to stop.

MPS: Mark disagreed with you. He wanted to keep going.

TW: He had to keep going. He was compelled. That’s what I’ve been telling myself, anyway, because otherwise I go down dark holes of thinking, I should have said this, I should have done that.

MPS: There’s nothing you could have said that would have changed his mind.

TW: No, probably not. He snuck out while I was sleeping and went to the piano shop by himself. From the recording, I know Randy Wane was there. And some others. I don’t know what they were doing or what they did to Mark. I just know he screamed, “Ota Keta,” the same weird thing he’d been saying in his sleep—and then the recording stopped.

MPS: The next day, you had a package at your door: a new White Tape.

TW: I should’ve thrown it away, or pretended I didn’t see it. At the time, I just wanted to know where Mark was, and I thought maybe the tape would tell me.

MPS: You watched it, you even managed to isolate a voice—

TW: It sounded like Mark, saying that phrase: “Ota Keta.”

MPS: You think it was him.

TW: I know it was him. That’s when, I guess, my perspective changed a little. At an intellectual level, I still had a lot of trouble believing things I’d seen with my own eyes. Then I realized that skepticism wasn’t going to help me or Mark. I had to find out what all of this meant, even if I had to do it myself.

MPS: I want to talk about those first few weeks he was gone. For me, as your friend, it was terrifying. You were barely functioning. I’ve known you a long time, and I’d never seen you so upset. You kept talking about evil, something was evil, “they” took Mark. Nobody understood who you meant by “they.” Many of our friends were under the impression that the podcast was a War of the Worlds thing. But Mark was really, in reality, gone. You tried to explain—

TW: At first I thought it was important to tell people everything. I knew how unbelievable it sounded. But as I’ve learned, things can be both unbelievable and very, very real.

MPS: To be clear, you believe in the White Tapes.

TW: Yeah. I guess I do.

MPS: What exactly do you believe?

TW: [long pause] I believe the White Tapes are a system of some kind. Individual elements, and together they add up to something. What that is, I’m not sure. That’s what you and I have been trying to figure out. I believe it involves— It’s weird to say this out loud.

MPS: I know.

TW: I believe the White Tapes are connected to something that isn’t part of this world. God, I sound crazy.

MPS: No, you don’t. That’s what I believe, too.

TW: It’s something evil, something that’s capable of destroying people. I think that’s what it wants. Mark put some of the pieces together, so either he had to be taken away because he was a threat, or—

MPS: Or what?

TW: Or he was one of the pieces, too.

MPS: Right.

TW: You were one of the only people who didn’t think I had lost my mind.

MPS: Well, no offense, you’re not a great liar. You played me the recordings you guys made, even the stuff that didn’t make it in the podcast. For me, even as a fellow skeptic, that was all the proof I needed. And, bottom line, Mark isn’t here. We’ve gone over every plausible explanation. That leaves the implausible explanations.

TW: I’ve lost friends over this. People drifted away.… I knew they were saying things about me.

MPS: They didn’t know how to process it. There’s no context for this. Humans tend to shut down when we can’t make sense of things.

TW: Remember that grief counselor I saw? After our first session, she said I had PTSD. A week later, she said, no, I was experiencing a break with reality. I screamed at her: “I told you the reality! You won’t accept it. You’re the one who’s not in touch with reality.” I didn’t go back after that. I started keeping more to myself. I’m grateful you stuck with me—and Cat, of course.

MPS: We should give an update here about Cat. When the podcast ended, she was just starting to recover from that massive car accident.

TW: Yeah. God, she’s been so strong. Becca, too. Thank goodness Becca’s job has health insurance; they would’ve gone bankrupt otherwise. Cat’s doing better, but it’s been a long road. Traumatic brain injuries can leave you with symptoms for the rest of your life. She gets dizzy spells, headaches. It affected her hearing. She can’t use headphones, or listen to anything above a certain volume, or tolerate certain frequencies. If she’s in a restaurant that’s playing music, she has trouble isolating conversations—same with loud soundtracks and movie dialogue. It all blurs together.

MPS: Which would suck for anybody, but for Cat, it meant giving up her career as a composer.

TW: Everything she’d worked for. Her whole future was taken away, just like that. She’s collecting disability now, which she needs financially, but it’s been hard for her to accept.

MPS: She’s started volunteering at that senior care center, which seems like a healthy step. It gets her out of the apartment, gives her something to feel good about.

TW: The old folks love her. It’s quiet there. They tell her all their stories; they like having someone who listens to them. You know Cat: she always does things for other people. Even before she got home from the hospital, she was apologizing to me for not being able to help with the tapes. It was impossible, given her hearing issues, and it broke her heart.

MPS: Speaking of not being able to help… the police?

TW: What an infuriating experience. There was one officer who went to the piano shop with me, the day after I last saw Mark. The basement was totally empty. He was nice, but I think he was like, “You’re wasting my time, lady.” A few days later, you and I went to my local precinct and asked to speak with a detective. They took down Mark’s information: date of birth, what he looked like, where he worked, what he’d been wearing. Did he have health problems, did he take any medication? Did he drink or use drugs? Even before I had a chance to explain how he’d gone missing, I could tell the detective didn’t think this was particularly urgent. So instead of giving all the details, I just said Mark had gone to visit someone on Staten Island, he uploaded a recording of himself in distress and then he hadn’t come home.

MPS: I said we suspected a crime. It can’t be a lie if you don’t know the truth, right? I’ve watched enough Law & Order to know that unless a missing person is very old, very young, suffering from mental or physical conditions or a crime victim, the police won’t bother starting an investigation.

TW: He asked more than once if Mark had “some type of mental problems.”

MPS: You could’ve said he’d been experiencing delusions, hearing voices, seeing things that weren’t there. Everything would make sense that way, right? “He made up this story about a piano shop on Staten Island, a cult, weird voices, these white videotapes. He was fixated. He genuinely thought it was real.”

TW: I know. Trust me, I’ve thought about that. If I had chalked it up to mental illness, maybe they would’ve prioritized his case.

MPS: Why didn’t you?

TW: Because it’s not true. Even if I can’t do anything else, Mark would want me to tell the truth. That’s the one thing I know for sure. I owe him that much.… I’m sorry.

MPS: Do you want to take a break?

TW: Sorry. I just— Yeah, let’s take a break.

MPS: All right. We’re back. When we left off, we were talking about the police investigation, or lack thereof. I was determined not to let the case get lost in the system.

TW: You kept after them. I was in no shape to make calls and take down notes about how many messages we’d left, who called back, who didn’t.

MPS: About a week after we filed the initial report, the detective assigned to the case got transferred to a different precinct. So the file got passed to someone else. The new guy had a huge backlog of cases already. I left so many messages. Eventually he called back and talked to you for, what, fifteen minutes?

TW: Something like that. I knew it was a lost cause. Before I’d even finished what I was saying, he cut me off and said it sounded like Mark had ghosted. That’s the exact word he used.

MPS: Because you mentioned you’d had an argument.

TW: He was like, “Well, guys do that, if you put too much pressure on them.” What was I supposed to say?

MPS: I thought of some things I wanted to say. I was furious. I tried contacting his commanding officer, but he never called back.

TW: We made one last call to the detective, and he said he’d closed the file. And that was that.

MPS: We knew we were on our own. I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. So the next thing I want to talk about is the podcast.

TW: He was so excited about selling it to Shudder. Mark isn’t the most—He doesn’t always give himself enough credit. But he was proud of that deal, and he wanted the podcast to be a hit. It deserved to be.

MPS: It’s got a niche, which is really the only way to stand out in this world of a million podcasts. I mean, fourteen new podcasts have launched in the time we’ve been talking. And true crime is one of the most popular genres there is.

TW: I used to listen to true crime podcasts myself, although I haven’t been in the mood for them lately. They can be downright addictive. If that’s what you’re into, you always want more, and there’s a whole community of people who feel the same way. There are people who go out and try to solve cold cases on their own. Conspiracy theorists. It can go far, far beyond the podcast itself.

MPS: You might even say that some people become obsessed.

TW: Yes. That’s the part I hadn’t expected. Maybe I should have. I didn’t anticipate the level of interest that started to build up in certain corners of the Internet. Initially, it seemed like a positive thing. Maybe someone would hear the podcast and come forward with information. Mark spoke to all those people who knew about the White Tapes, right? Surely there are more people out there. I thought one of them might find us and be able to help.

MPS: Except that didn’t happen.

TW: No. No. I’m trying to think of a polite way to say this. There were plenty of normal—not normal, just—people who listened and thought it was interesting enough to discuss online. “Normal” isn’t the right word; I don’t want to offend anyone.

MPS: What you’re getting at is the subset of people who took it too far.

TW: You found those reddit posts.

MPS: There was a whole subreddit about the podcast. Several Facebook groups. And long threads on conspiracy forums, some truly weird ones.

TW: I couldn’t believe the stories people came up with. There was a theory about Mark working for the NSA. Someone posted photos from his Facebook account next to photos of another man, saying they were the same person, but Mark had gotten a nose job to disguise himself. They said the White Tapes were part of a government experiment to link people’s minds to surveillance satellites. There were thousands of comments about that. They figured out that someone Mark went to college with worked for an intelligence contractor and had top secret security clearance. They got this poor man’s address and phone number; they called his house. He had no idea what was going on.

MPS: There was the one with the newspaper story.

TW: Oh, that was ridiculous. It turns out there are several Randy Wanes in the world. One of them lives outside Chicago, and in the 1980s he owned a VCR repair business. He was interviewed for a Tribune story about small business owners, and they ran a photo of him in his office. He’s leaning against a desk with a window behind him, looking out on the store. There was a vertical shadow barely visible against the back wall, half obscured by Randy’s shoulder. Some people said it looked like Mark in profile. Other people said it was the Eyeless Man reaching toward the window.

MPS: I’m pretty sure it was a coatrack.

TW: The worst one, though, was the story about Mark being a serial killer. They said he’d killed the Klims in 1998. How could he do that? He was in high school. But that was the idea, that he started young and used different identities, and then he made the podcast as a way of luring more victims. They said he killed Thurman Mueller and Jacob Manders and a woman who worked at a horror film festival in Atlanta. And he faked his disappearance so he could escape his crimes and resurface later as someone else. Some of them even said he’d killed me.

MPS: Can I confirm that you are alive?

TW: Yes, I am. That’s an exclusive.

MPS: Mark’s classmate wasn’t the only one who got doxxed. People tracked you down, too.

TW: You read about these kinds of things. I didn’t understand until it happened to me. I started getting mail—letters, packages, big envelopes. I was scared to open any of it. But what if there was a clue? What if someone found something useful? We opened everything together.

MPS: Wearing gloves and face masks.

TW: It seemed safer that way. Who knows? It was the same garbage I saw online, just taking up space in my apartment. People sent blank videotapes, tapes of themselves ranting. I made you watch. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

MPS: There were a few fake White Tapes made by people who’d obviously never seen a real one.

TW: I got phone calls, too. I had to change my number. I don’t know how they found the new number, but they did, so I changed it again. The calls were worse than the mail. I never picked up if it wasn’t someone from my contacts. Most of the messages were dumb, like, “Hey, Tamra, uhh, I got your number.” But sometimes there’d be creepy voices saying, you know, “Tamra, you’re next. I’m watching you.” Heavy breathing. One guy called and pretended to be Mark. Who would do something so cruel?

MPS: The final straw was when they started showing up at your apartment.

TW: It was surreal. I’d find notes under my door. Or people would knock and run away. One time I left my building and there was a tall guy standing at the end of the block. He was wearing a long coat with layers underneath; he had scarves wrapped around his face and head. He started coming toward me. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t; my whole body went cold and wouldn’t move. I heard myself scream. Luckily a neighbor walked by with her dog and yelled at him to leave me alone. The dog barked up a storm. The guy took off, and when he turned around, he dropped one of the scarves, so I got a look at his face.

MPS: It wasn’t the Eyeless Man.

TW: Not even close. He had eyes. Also a nose ring and a stupid goatee. But he sure was trying to make me think he was the Eyeless Man.

MPS: You decided to move. We’d discussed it for a while; you just didn’t want to leave.

TW: I loved that apartment so much. We’d been there for two and a half years. Moving into a studio by myself was like, oh, okay. I am alone. My biggest worry was that Mark would manage to find his way home and I wouldn’t be there. I still think about that.

MPS: It was the right thing to do. You had to put your safety first.

TW: I know. And I really couldn’t afford to stay there anyway. I figure if—when—Mark gets back, we’ll find another place. Bigger. Maybe I’ll finally convince him to get a dog.

MPS: When I look around here, I see a lot of his stuff. Those shelves are all his books. Those posters. You have his sweaters in the closet.

TW: I didn’t have room for everything. Mark was an… avid collector, if you will. Some things had to go to a storage unit. The rest, what was I going to do? Throw it away?

MPS: It’s a strange kind of purgatory you’re in. At least when people die, when you know they’ve died, that’s the end. All you have to do is accept it—which, I’m not saying that’s easy, but there’s clarity. You don’t have that.

TW: None whatsoever. That’s why I spend almost every waking moment thinking about where he might be. It’s the last thought I have before I fall asleep; it’s the first thing I think when I wake up.

MPS: I want to ask you a hard question, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. We’ve never really talked about this. Is there any part of you, any at all, that thinks he is dead?

TW: No.

MPS: No?

TW: If I thought that, I wouldn’t be able to do the work we’ve been doing. How many hours have we spent—you, me, both of us together?

MPS: I can’t even guess. Hundreds. Many hundreds.

TW: I’m happiest when we’re working. Staying up late, researching noise colors and frequencies. Going through Mark’s recordings again, looking for clues online. It’s the only thing that makes me feel human. The rest of the time, I don’t know what I am.

MPS: We took a couple of field trips to Staten Island, which turned out to be pointless. The Internet gave us more to go on.

TW: I found a post on a message board from the early aughts where people wrote amateur movie reviews. Someone made a post with the address of Randy Wane’s piano shop. Just the address, nothing else. The poster deleted their account, so their profile was gone, and the post replies had been removed, too. When I tried to contact the board admins, my emails bounced. It seems like a minor thing, but why would someone post a random address in Staten Island on a movie review board? That’s no coincidence. It has to be connected.

MPS: Connected to—

TW: To Randy. To the White Tapes. I don’t think Randy made the White Tapes, but I do think he’s part of whatever they’re trying to accomplish.

MPS: What about Thurman Mueller? Let’s talk about that little adventure.

TW: Well, I worked up my chutzpah and called his wife, Bets. She almost hung up on me when I mentioned Mark’s name, but then I told her, no, no, he’s gone. I think she felt sorry for me—after all, she’d been through the same thing. Losing the person she loved, not knowing what happened. I said something like, “I lie awake every night wondering where he is,” and she said, “I know, dear, I did the same thing until Thurman came home.”

MPS: Record scratch!

TW: Yeah. I was not expecting that. I asked if we could visit, if we could meet him. She wasn’t into it. She kept saying he wasn’t well, he wasn’t himself. I promised we wouldn’t stay long. I was dying to know all the details, what he’d told her, what she meant when she said he wasn’t well, how he came back. But I knew if I kept asking questions, she’d never say yes. Finally she agreed to let us visit, on one condition: no recording of any kind. It seemed like a pretty good deal. She told us to drive up on a Saturday when Shane, their son, wouldn’t be around. She said he didn’t like people coming around to bother his dad.

MPS: What were you thinking when we pulled into that driveway?

TW: I was thinking that Mark had described the place perfectly. I’d never been there, but it felt familiar because I’d heard him talk about it. There was the porch, the screen door; we could hear the dog barking when we got out of the car. Going up the front steps, it hit me: Mark had been here. He’d stood on this doorstep without me, waiting for Bets Mueller. And there I was on the doorstep, without him.

MPS: I was expecting Bets to be more wary and the house to be more cluttered inside. That was a surprise. She didn’t seem thrilled to see us, exactly, but she was very polite.

TW: They must’ve cleaned things up since Mark was there. I remember him telling me the living room was piled with old newspapers, cardboard boxes, all kinds of junk. It looked tidy to me. Run-down but well kept. And you’re right, Bets was being a good hostess. She offered us coffee. We chitchatted about the drive. I was getting antsy. Enough small talk, let’s meet your mysterious husband!

MPS: Honestly, I got the sense that she was enjoying having someone to talk to.

TW: Right? I thought that as well. Then you said something about not wanting to take up too much of their time, and she seemed to remember why we were there.

MPS: She led us down the hall to the den. Which, again, was exactly the way Mark had described it, although it looked better, the top of the desk was clean, everything had been dusted.

TW: The whole movie collection was there. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, completely full. I was so distracted, I almost didn’t notice Thurman asleep in the recliner. He seemed small and frail, curled up under a blanket.

MPS: Bets woke him up very gently. She said, “Some friends are here to see you.”

TW: He jerked his head around, all disoriented. His eyes were clouded with thick cataracts, and there was a weird strip of skin over his eyes, or something. I don’t know. I didn’t want to stare.

MPS: It looked like the pink bits at the inner corners of his eyes had grown up and over the white part of his eyeballs.

TW: Bets had warned us that he was basically blind and had lost the ability to speak. She said they’d gone to the hospital at Dartmouth, but none of the specialists could decide what had caused all this damage. The consensus was that he had suffered various traumas, and the damage was permanent, so there wasn’t much to be done except keep him comfortable.

MPS: He turned toward us when you introduced yourself, so his hearing was okay. He kind of grunted.

TW: Bets said, “That’s his way of saying hello!”

MPS: She was trying very, very hard to keep the tone light.

TW: I asked if I could talk with him about his movie collection, about some movies he’d seen, and he groaned. Bets was like, “He says that’s fine! He loves movies! You do love movies, don’t you, dear?” He pulled himself up in the chair and groaned louder, like he was trying to tell her something.

MPS: She said he had just reminded her to take her blood pressure medication.

TW: Who knows, maybe he had.

MPS: So Bets left. You were just about to ask Thurman another question when he leaned forward and stared at you. I thought, well, he must be able to see shapes or shadows. It was like he really wanted to get a good look at you.

TW: I came closer because I thought that would help him. He was shaking a little. He sort of squinted and strained his eyes, and they rolled back in his head, like he was having a seizure.

MPS: I was just about to run down the hall and find Bets when he grabbed your arm. He was looking right at you, and he must’ve seen you too, because the membrane over his eye had slipped away. The only thing I can compare it to is when I wake up my cat and she’s still half asleep. Cats have that little inner eyelid that retracts.

TW: I was too startled to move. I didn’t think he was strong enough to hold on to anything, but there we were. He tugged at my wrist, and his lips were moving, so I leaned down.

MPS: And what did he say?

TW: He said, “He’s not all gone yet.” Then he collapsed into the chair and closed his eyes. Bets came back a second later, and when she called his name, he looked toward her voice, and his eyes were all clouded over again.

MPS: We spent about fifteen minutes with them after that, awkwardly asking Thurman about his movies while he lay there and ignored us.

TW: There was no point in staying. Bets said he was getting tired, which was our cue to leave. Besides, I wanted to get back in the car and talk about that crazy thing he did when we were alone.

MPS: “He’s not all gone yet.” How do you interpret that?

TW: Well, call me an optimist, but it has to be a good thing, right?

MPS: I hope so. We got back to New York and tried researching the Muellers some more, but we didn’t find anything. And when I called again, they didn’t pick up.

TW: So, fine, forget them. Thurman told us all he could. I realize this sounds woo-woo. I just have a sense, a very strong sense, that when we hit a dead end, it’s because we’re not going in the right direction. Maybe I’m delusional. I don’t know. I think everything we need will find us eventually, as long as we keep looking for it.

MPS: Well, and that leads us to our latest clue, or what we assume is a clue. Last week, my friend Jessica posted a photo on Instagram. She’s from Maine, where I grew up, and she’s a librarian, like you. She recently started a job at the Portland Public Library, and this photo was taken at the library’s off-site storage building. It was a pile of old videotapes, hashtag LibraryLife, hashtag ArchiveFinds. I almost scrolled by until I noticed a white case sticking out from the bottom of the pile. There was no title on the spine. So I DM’d and asked if she could send a close-up of that one white tape and tell me where it came from.

Turns out, the tapes in the picture were from the Videoport collection. You know it takes a lot to make me cry, but I get choked up thinking about that place. Videoport was a Portland institution for almost thirty years. They had the best selection of movies I’ve ever seen—new, old, obscure, weird, really weird. The people who worked there were opinionated in the best way. I missed it when I moved to New York, and I was heartbroken when I heard it was shutting down. I assumed rent hikes were to blame—that part of town gets bougie-er by the day—but the owner said streaming services did him in.

TW: Makes sense. They can’t compete, there’s no way.

MPS: I know. And I’m part of the problem. Watching Net-flix is so easy, you hardly notice you’re doing it. When I stop and think, though, like when I remember running my fingertips along a shelf of staff picks, or leaning on the counter arguing about whether or not Lars von Trier is overrated, I do feel a little guilty.

TW: Now that you mention it, I guess I do, too. And he is overrated.

MPS: Correct answer! Anyway, after Videoport closed in August 2015, its entire collection—some eighteen thousand titles—was donated to the Portland library. Jessica explained that a selection of the most popular movies went into regular circulation. Everything else was put in storage. She was working to inventory the off-site titles, checking their condition and prioritizing preservation needs. Then she sent a second message with a photo of the tape in the white case, and my heart almost stopped. It had a handwritten label on the front. Sans L’Oeil. Which is French for “Without the Eye.”

TW: You forwarded it to me, and I was like, that’s it. We’re going to Portland. Whatever this is, we need to see it ourselves.

MPS: We headed up a couple days later. I should mention that I’d noticed something else about the Sans L’Oeil tape. It was bigger than a normal VHS. I’d gone down a rabbit hole over the summer, so I recognized it right away. It was a U-matic, the first video format that stored tape in cassettes. Before that came along, tape was on open reels. Jessica hadn’t been able to watch it because the library didn’t have a U-matic machine.

Luckily, I knew someone who could help: my friend Rich is obsessed with old electronics. You name it, he’s bought it from eBay. His house is full of tube TVs, video game hardware, broken printers, homemade effects pedals, Frankensteined circuit boards.… He tinkers around and makes cool blippy music with it. He had a U-matic video player circa 1974 in his basement, because of course he did. He agreed to meet us at the library’s storage facility.

TW: You played some of his music on the way up. It’s surprisingly catchy.

MPS: I have to say, though, that drive felt like forever. I was running on pure adrenaline. By the time we crossed the bridge from Portsmouth to Kittery, I couldn’t tell whether I wanted the U-matic to be part of the puzzle or not. What about you? How were you feeling?

TW: [long pause] Hopeful.

MPS: Not nervous? Or scared?

TW: The only thing I was afraid of was that we’d get there and find out it was just a student film or an old TV show.

MPS: You wanted it to be part of whatever the White Tapes are.

TW: I did.

MPS: Even though the White Tapes are directly connected to whatever or whoever it was that took Mark.

TW: Look, the White Tapes frighten me. The more we learn, the more frightening they become, but nothing is as terrifying as not knowing what happened to Mark.

MPS: Talk me through what we did when we got to Portland.

TW: Well, we met Jessica at the storage facility a little after five p.m. It’s a warehouse in the middle of nowhere, behind some office parks. Everyone else had left for the day. Rich showed up a few minutes later with the U-matic player, this clunky metal box with a separate power unit. It must’ve weighed forty pounds. We lugged it inside to an office where the archivists work. You hadn’t told your friends the real reason we were so interested in this old tape.

MPS: I said it was for a story I was writing. It seemed easier that way.

TW: Rich hooked up the player to a TV/VCR combo while you and I examined the tape. There were no markings, nothing; the tape itself wasn’t even labeled. Just the label on the front of the case, old-fashioned cursive handwriting on yellowish paper. We put in the tape and pressed play. At first there was nothing but static. No sound.

MPS: I had a sinking feeling that the tape was damaged.

TW: The static went on for a few minutes. We were just about to stop it when an image came on the screen.

MPS: Describe what we saw next.

TW: The picture was a little fuzzy, but not too bad. Black-and-white. There was a young woman sitting on a chair in front of a television set. The room was otherwise empty. No doors, no windows, at least not in the frame. She was wearing a cardigan, and her hair was curled, very 1950s style. The way it was shot, we could see her face and torso and the back of the TV, but we couldn’t see the TV screen. She looked… I don’t know, out of it. Dazed. She just sat there blinking at the screen in front of her.

MPS: Rich was like, “Is this a movie? Is she acting?” We couldn’t tell.

TW: After a few moments there were footsteps off camera. A door opening and closing—someone entering the room. Then we heard a man’s voice: “Begin.”

The TV came on. You could tell because light flickered across her face. She focused on the screen. She raised one arm over her head, then her other arm. She wiggled her fingers, threw her head back, laughed hysterically, then stopped. She tapped each elbow four times. It seemed like she was mirroring whatever she was watching.

All of a sudden, she sat bolt upright and pulled a pair of scissors from her skirt pocket. Just like that, she cut off a chunk of her hair, a good five inches, right in front. And then she froze. The vacant stare broke for a second, she had this look—I’ve never seen anyone look like that.

MPS: Like an animal. Sheer terror.

TW: She was struggling to stay in her chair. And then—fuck. I haven’t been able to get the image of this out of my mind. Her arm flew up. She jabbed the scissors into her right eye. Over and over and over. No hesitation. In complete silence.

I looked away when I heard you stumble against the wall. Right before Rich turned off the TV, I heard a laugh, a little chuckle. It was the man off camera.

MPS: For the record, I didn’t faint, but I came close. If I hadn’t sat on the floor, I would have blacked out for sure. I can’t handle sharp objects and bodies. I have to take Xanax just to get a flu shot. Real life, TV, it doesn’t matter. And this came out of nowhere. It was so shocking—worse than that scene in Pulp Fiction.

TW: You passed out then, too.

MPS: I did. And then there was an awkward moment. Jessica and Rich wanted to know how this awful tape was going to help me with a story.

TW: We ended up telling them everything, or almost everything. I was expecting them to be confused, or weirded out, but no. They both offered to help.

MPS: I have this theory that growing up in Maine makes you more predisposed to accept certain ideas. We’ve all seen things in the woods, or heard things. My dad’s office building is a hundred and sixty years old; there’s at least one ghost that I know of. I always say Stephen King is eighty-five percent fiction, fifteen percent just driving around Maine.

TW: And that is why I live in New York. Anyway, Rich volunteered to take the tape home with him and transfer it to a digital format. We went to Jessica’s place and talked some more over dinner. That U-matic tape was nothing like the White Tapes. Was it related to them? I thought it must be. But how? We stayed up until almost two in the morning. I had trouble falling asleep, even though I was exhausted.

MPS: Me, too.

TW: We got up early to drive home. You drove the first leg so I could sleep, we switched in Worcester, you dozed off. And then—I don’t know how this happened. You tell this part.

MPS: When I woke up, we were back in the city, but not here, where you live now. You’d driven to your block on the Upper West Side and parked in front of your old building.

TW: I don’t know what I was doing. I guess I was on autopilot.

MPS: Old habits die hard. Plus, you were operating on two hours of sleep.

TW: Yeah. We laughed it off. What else could we do?

MPS: And that was two days ago, so we’re all caught up, at least for the purposes of this conversation.

TW: I’m going to sound like a broken record, but I really wish Mark were here.

MPS: I know.

TW: He’d be so excited about that U-matic thing. He’d take it apart frame by frame. It still feels weird doing this without him. Life in general feels weird without him, but this especially. I do the dumbest things. Have I told you this? Every night I watch a video of him on my phone. I went through my camera roll, years and years of pictures and videos, and I put them in a folder so I can look at them whenever I want. Here. See? This is us at the Jersey Shore a couple summers ago. Remember I forgot to wear sunscreen?

MPS: Oh, my God, yes.

TW: Mark looked up all the ways you can treat sunburn, so every night he’d cover me with aloe gel and cold tea bags. Wait, go back, that’s a good video.

MPS: This one?

TW: Yeah. From his birthday in 2016. It’s him doing his karaoke song—

MPS: “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”

TW: Let’s watch.

[Faint sound of a man’s voice singing, horribly off-key.]

MPS: Please, I can’t take it anymore. Make it stop.

TW: I also have pictures from our— Hold on.

MPS: What?

TW: Rich just emailed. Do you want me to read it out loud? For the interview, in case it’s helpful?

MPS: Sure, go ahead.

TW: Okay. [pause] He says that, based on the signal loss and sync issues, the U-matic tape is from the early 1970s. And it’s a copy of a sixteen-millimeter original that was probably a few decades old by the time it was duplicated.

MPS: That puts us in the 1950s, or thereabouts.

TW: He sent a link to the digital version. He says it won’t look the same as the tape, it’s degraded, but at least we have it for reference. We should check to make sure it plays properly.

[The distant sound of static, for nearly two minutes, followed by a muffled voice saying, “Begin.”]

TW: It works. We don’t have to watch the whole thing right now.

MPS: We can do it tomorrow. I promise I won’t faint! Hey, we’ve been talking since five o’clock; I have enough for the interview. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

TW: No, I’ve said what I wanted to say. It felt good to get it all out, actually.

MPS: I’m glad. You did great. I’ll pack up my recording stuff in a minute, I just have to pee.

[Pause]

TW: Hey, Mary? Did you move anything around in my phone?

MPS: Just a sec, I can’t hear you. I’ll be right there.

[Pause]

TW: When you were looking at my phone. Did you change anything? Or rename the album I showed you?

MPS: No, why?

TW: Look.

MPS: What?

TW: My photos app. See the list of albums? It’s gone. The album we were looking at just now was called Mark Favorites. It had all my pictures of him. All the videos. It’s gone.

MPS: Did you delete it? Scroll down, there’s a recently deleted folder. Open that.

TW: It’s not there!

MPS: You must’ve tapped something by mistake. Don’t worry. Deleting an album doesn’t delete the photos. Here. Go to all photos. Actually—jump to 2016. Scroll down. The birthday videos will show up in April.

TW: No. They’re gone.

MPS: Are you sure?

TW: Yes! See? April, April, April, and then nothing until May. How could this happen?

MPS: I don’t know. You back up your data somewhere, don’t you?

TW: Yes! Oh, my God, I almost forgot. My camera roll backs up to my cloud storage account automatically.

MPS: So you can use that to restore the photos and re-create the album.

TW: Hold on, hold on, here it is—camera uploads. This is a mess, it’s every photo and video I’ve ever taken, I never bothered to organize it.… There should be… oh, no. No no no—

MPS: Is the—

TW: This can’t be. No. They’re not here. The pictures we saw five minutes ago.

MPS: Do you have another uploads folder?

TW: Mary, listen to me, they’re gone. All my photos and videos of Mark are gone. They’re not on my phone. They’re not in my cloud backup. They don’t exist anymore. What the fuck? That’s not an accident, right? It can’t be an accident.

MPS: Okay, okay, let’s think.… Wait, I’m just turning this off.

TW: Fuck.

Postscript: I’m doing a final edit of this transcript two weeks after Tamra and I spoke. Prof. Wills suggested I add an update about the lost photos. Update: they’re still lost. Tamra took her phone and computer to a repair shop, but they weren’t able to recover anything. Luckily, she has some framed photos of Mark that she’s hanging on to. And I had a couple of cute photos of the two of them together on my phone, so I printed them out and made a little collage. We know that whatever happened to Tamra’s photos is another piece of the key that unlocks this whole mystery. We’re still trying to put it together. I suspect we’ll be trying for a long time.

I want to add one last thing. I haven’t told Tamra this yet, and part of me thinks I’m being paranoid, but an even greater part of me wants to write this down in case—well, just in case. I came home this evening and found a small package outside my apartment door. I knew what it was. I didn’t even need to pick it up and see that there was no return address. I knew from the weight and the shape of it. Just under seven ounces, four inches wide and about seven and a half inches long. I could have ignored it. Nothing made me pick it up and bring it inside, yet that’s exactly what I did. I put it on my desk, where I’m writing this now. For the past half hour I’ve been sitting here thinking about choices—why we choose one action over another, why we regret the things we haven’t done, why we think we know what our choices even are.

There’s still time to get rid of this package. To toss it down the garbage chute and pretend I never saw it. But you know I can’t do that, right? You understand.