The aftermath.

This was going on to some extent before the cancellation, but I figured it'd be best to place it here as it's still affecting people today.

The project has affected many of us involved mentally, it seems. I personally experienced a short bout of night terrors, but still have aural hallucinations and, quite rarely, visual hallucinations.

The most constant aural hallucination is one I must wake up to everyday. It's a sound of screaming outside of my bedroom door, one that sometimes articulates itself as a repeated cry of "Why?" It still upsets me to hear, but my recovery time from it is much more quick nowadays. The other day I actually responded to the familiar question with, "I don't know."

Another common aural hallucination is the distant sound of my name being called out. This usually occurs sometime during the evening, I have heard sounds of laughter, footsteps on the roof of my home, someone reading what sounded to be an excerpt from a book, groaning, classical music, strange humming and pitches, and a large number of other, equally mundane sounds. My family never hears any of it. I am aware of the fact that these noises are all in my head, and I'm learning to accept it.

Sometimes I see the figure from the video. Sitting on my back porch this summer, I saw him in a field behind my house. He watched me. I watched him. As fog rolled in, he disappeared. I do not like doors cracked open in my home anymore, as I can always sense and half-see someone looking out of them. A vivid experience was walking into my bathroom in the middle of the night to find it absolutely caked in a muddy, black substance. Because of my tiredness and the amount of detail, I was unsure if it was even a hallucination at the time. Moving closer to clean some up, it faded away.

Some of my former coworkers also seem to be experiencing all of this. There is one group I try to keep in touch with and meet every three or four months. We get together, have dinner, and, inevitably, someone begins to mention... it. We all nod and mumble in quiet acknowledgment of the fact that there is something wrong - not something entirely destructive, mind you - just something that's changed and unusual. Our conversations always have an edge of quiet paranoia to them, and this is something I think we all carry around in our daily lives now. Some of them are moving away from their cities and towns. They're isolating themselves. I lived out in the countryside long before the project, so I have not been affected in this way at all. Still, we've all lost and gained something not at all properly explainable.

Was this project worth it?

Without a doubt.