I Found A Scrapbook From a Place That Doesn't Exist

This recording was recovered from the ruins of the historic Haywood Estate. 

Transcript

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You always edit your photos in the winter. No matter what time of year you took them, you’d only ever go through them in the months when you find yourself sorely missing the sun. And editing your pictures always gives you that glimpse of the world that you needed to feel less cooped up. It reminds you of the adventures you had, the adventures you’re going to have, and it gets you through those dark months. You always turn on the little fairy lights around your desk and pour yourself a hot cup of tea and make a night of it, and when you do, the little corner of your living room where you keep your desk feels so much bigger. 

Tonight you’re editing photos from an abandoned factory. You’d been there before, but for this shoot, you’d focused on the basement. Between visits, another explorer had pried open the door, leaving you with a whole new level to explore. Another explorer, or who knows, maybe the same one, had gone through and written edgy graffiti all throughout, and you had a laugh as you scrolled through the pictures. Between struggling vines, rotting wood, and old concrete pillars, you edited pictures of blood red spray paint, all saying things like “This is her home,” “you’ve made her mad,” and “she’ll eat you alive.” But as you start brightening the photos, sharpening the blurry ones, you start to realize you weren’t alone down there. One picture has a long pale leg with two knee joints. Another has a tired, blood-red eye peering around a corner. One has long, shiny black hair hanging from the rafters. Another has a blurry female form, way off in the distance, and as you look through more and more pictures, you become more and more smitten. You pause on one showing sharp fangs, a smile, the only thing visible in the very edge of a photo of a dark hallway. You think what a lovely smile it is. You check your calendar, and you plan a day to go back up there and find this dream girl. You won’t have time for months, but that’s okay; in the meantime, you have your pictures. You decide that you’ll go through the rest another time, when you need some cheering up, and you close the folder titled “The Podcast Inside Your House.”

I’m Andy Haywood, and if you’re listening to this, that means you’ve somehow gotten ahold of my audio diaries. So greetings to the homicide detective, or the kid from the future, or to the aliens who’ve invaded Earth and are now studying human culture. Whoever you are, I’m very happy that you’re tuning in. 

It’s October 10th 2025. This is the second journal today, I wanted to make a separate entry to catalogue what me and Lucy have been calling THE SCRAPBOOK. If this was a written journal, that would be in all capital letters because there’s no other scrapbook like it. 

I’ve been going through all of my uncle Dale’s old things this week. Dale was a cool guy, but also a very weird one. I’m sure you’ve gathered that from my other diaries this week. He was someone I always wanted to know more about, but someone I was always a little bit afraid to learn too much about, you know?

I’m sure I’ve told you this a whole lot this week, dear listener. But as I go through Dale’s thing’s I hear my mom’s words in my head over and over again. I always idolized Dale growing up, and when I talked too much about him, my mom always got annoyed. She’d bide her time until the family was all together, and she’d wait until Dale did something she didn’t like, or something a little rude, and she’d ask me, “How much like your uncle do you really want to be?” 

Anyway, the scrapbook is old-looking but in a manufactured way. Like Dale bought it at a Renaissance fair or something. It’s green leather, with a kind of copper patina stuck in the embellishments and the cracks. I’m looking through it in Dale’s old office, a really cool, but a weird place. I’m sure I’ve talked all about it already, but the guy was certainly cultivating a specific image in here. It’s very ‘old-timey adventurer.’

Lucy has looked through the scrapbook already, of course. She said it was interesting, but that’s about all I can pry out of her. Now we’ll get to what exactly is inside the scrapbook in a minute here. I’ve only looked at the first few pages, but it’s not a thing you describe as just “interesting,” it’s a thing that needs an explanation. It’s a thing that should be described as “an elaborate prank” or a very “avant-garde art piece.” But Lucy would not dismiss it as that; in fact, it seemed like she didn’t want to talk about it at all. 

Also, to whoever is listening, if you’ve picked up this diary first, Lucy is my uncle’s widow. But really she’s only like three years older than me, so we’re buddies. I’d also be lying if I said I hadn’t thought it was a shame he’d met her before I could. And trust me, listener, whoever you are, you wouldn’t be judging me for saying that if you could see her. 

Anyway, the fact that she wouldn’t dismiss the scrapbook as a joke, as something fake, was strange. And I feel like once I finish cataloging its contents in here, she’ll cave and she’ll admit it’s something my uncle made just to mess with me. To give me a bit of a laugh from beyond the grave. 

So hey, let’s get into it!

There’s a little window in the front cover of the scrapbook for a picture or a title card. In that window, Dale has placed a sketch of some kind of symbol. It looks a bit like a constellation, or a connect-the-dots picture. But the dots being connected each look to be a little smaller symbols. The drawing is pretty rough, so it’s hard to make out what they are. The overall symbol itself doesn’t really resemble anything, but it looks purposeful, like it’s meant to mean something, and I’m just not getting what it is, I guess. 

The first page does not have any locations named; rather, it lists ‘Parts Unknown’ as if Dale was some explorer of the ancient world. The dates listed are exact, though. Pencilled underneath that vague title is 12/30/2022 - 01/02/2023. 

The first spread is all pictures of the sky at different points in time. One is sunset orange, with wispy clouds. One is green, like the sky before a tornado, but incredibly saturated, like Dale had played around with it in Photoshop. One picture is a barren landscape below a yellow sky, like a storm is brewing right at sunset. And another is blue. And for a second, when you look at the pictures, you know something is wrong, but you don’t realize what. But after a minute, you realize that the orange picture shows the sun high in the sky at midday, and the silvery blue picture has the sun just before it dips below the horizon. 

Flipping to the next page, things get a bit more interesting. It’s another page with four pictures, and one looks to be placed sideways. Dale wanted to use every bit of space in here, I guess. There are no stickers or cards, or writing in the margins. It’s like he threw together the scrapbook quickly, just trying to cram in as many photos as possible.

The four pictures are all of the same barren landscape I’d seen beneath the yellow sky. It reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of the salt flats out west. Or maybe in the Mediterranean? You know I actually don’t know where the salt flats are. Anyway. There’s some kind of coarse-looking ground: salt, sand, dry dirt, I’m not sure. And it has kind of a pinkish hue to it. It looks almost iridescent, like it’s made up of pulverized quartz or something. 

The landscape looks huge, but it’s hard to tell because there isn’t much in the distance. Like the flats just go on forever. All four pictures show rocks, maybe boulders ( it’s so hard to get a sense of scale) that jut up out of the pink sand. All four pictures show trails left behind the rocks. I think that’s what reminds me so much of those salt flats where the wind moves the rocks, and it looks like they’re wandering through the desert on their own. 

These look to have caught the wind too, but they also look to have moved in all different directions, like the bigger ones catch the wind more often. It’s an interesting collection, but there’s nothing too weird about it, and the first time I looked at it, I flipped right past it. 

Moving on to the next page. It’s four pictures of similar things again, but this time they look to be cliffsides or canyon walls. The top two pictures mirror each other, like Dale is taking me on a journey into the place he went. They show the top of a great rock structure heading down into a ravine. The bottom two show different parts of the rock walls, and though the pictures are taken from a great distance away, it looks like there are fossils or something in the walls.

Turning the page again. These snapshots are all in different lighting. It’s all either yellow or green or some lime-hued combination of the two. The pictures are all the same, though, of little fossils embedded in the cliff walls. It’s hard to tell what they are; they’re definitely from land animals. I see what looks to be leg bones in one, and another is a ribcage. But skulls or appendages are all absent, so I can’t tell you what creatures they belonged to.

Turning the page again, and I’ll let you know right now, this is where I stopped before. Things get a little bit weird. Well, okay, they’ve been a bit weird this whole time, but they get weirder. 

There are just close-up pictures of gore on the next page. There’s no other way to describe it. I wish I could be more specific, but it’s hard to even tell what I’m looking at. There’s what looks to be some kind of intestines in one picture, and another has some kind of fibrous pink tissue. The bottom two both look to have membranes and tendons stretched over bones, and I can’t tell the scale, but they look small and curved like some kind of rib bones, maybe.

Now, before I recorded this, I stopped here. With Dale's possessions that I think are going to take up more time, that I might want individual recordings for, I’ll skim through to see how much there really is to them. And that’s how far I got before. I stopped and I told Lucy what I found, and we had some lunch, because it was about that time, and I figured I should eat before I lose my appetite.

I tried to pry from Lucy what she thought the dead things were. But she was evasive. She just told me to finish looking through the scrapbook. And I know it’s never any good trying to get Lucy to open up when she starts being distant and weird. And when she gets like that, like she’s thinking about so many things but so afraid to talk about them, I can’t help but worry about her.

And I’m not the only one. Mom and a few of my cousins have noticed it too, mainly the girls. I know they’ve pulled her aside to try and see if Dale was treating her right. I also know that more than once, someone in the family has tried to question her about weird cuts and bruises before, but those I’ve never personally seen. 

Over the years, those little glimpses I’d get into Dale’s dark side kind of added up. But never fast enough to fully outpace my admiration of him. Most of the time, Lucy was so happy that you could almost forget the times she’d get quiet and secretive. 

Dale was plenty secretive, too. The stories Dale told always toed the line of making me desperately want to know more about him, but also a bit afraid of what he’d say if I asked. I never really knew what Dale did for a living, how he got this fancy ass house I’m in right now, how he spent so much of the year traveling. He hinted at being involved in some shady things, but he’d never outright say. He was so fascinating, but kind of scary too. I wonder if that’s why Lucy stayed with him, because even if things were scary sometimes, she would never get those adventures anywhere else. 

Let’s get back to it, I guess.

The next page is more of the same, though this time there appears to be a lot of freshly cut muscle in all of the pictures. Like he had so many shots of that, he picked the best four for this spread. Let’s move on.

The next page takes me through a new landscape. From left to right, top to bottom, Dale is slowly approaching what looks like a forest in the distance, but like everything else in this damn scrapbook, it’s weird, of course. The trees look completely dead. Different shades of white and brown, and there’s only a smattering of leaves on some of them near the tops.

I flip the page and as Dale gets closer and closer, I get a better look at the trees. 

I know I shouldn’t be, but I'm scared to turn the page again. I'm fighting the urge to just close the scrapbook and leave it here. Hell, I could stop looking through the office if I wanted, let Lucy have all of Dale’s weird shit if she wants it. But we’ve come this far…

It’s hard to tell for sure, but it looks like there are faces on some of the trees. I guess we’ll flip the damn page and find out, huh?

Yep. There are faces in the trees, specifically on the trunks. It’s like he’s made this dumb thing to be as creepy as possible because the next page is just close-ups of various faces. They’re not exactly smooth like flesh and not exactly bark. It’s like a weird texture that looks like cracked dried flesh. Like old leather. 

The first one looks young, but its face isn’t exactly human. It’s got like really big eyes, and the features have been distorted as the tree has grown. 

The next one is older and has slotted nostrils. Though they’re only pictures, I definitely feel like all of the faces are stationary. There’s no surprise, no recognition that someone else is taking their picture. And all of them look distorted in their own weird ways, stretched or with noses or eyes that aren’t quite human. All of the eyes are open, but they don’t look wet or anything; they look like they’re made out of that same weird bark. I’m flipping through faster now; he’s got a few pages of just catalogued faces. 

Okay, here’s something new: it’s the upper parts of the trees, and I can get a better look at the branches now. And of course, the branches look like limbs, with random joints here and there. Getting into the upper bits, it’s harder to see cause it’s further away, but the ones with no green on them kind of look like fingers. The ones with green against the green sky look to have kind of split open, like the skin has peeled back to reveal thick, kind of succulent-type leaves underneath. That’s what they remind me of, plant-like but not quite tree leaves. 

Flipping the page again, and this time we’re getting, oh jeeze. Yeah, something different now. The first picture is a close-up of another face. The second picture is uh, it’s Dale's hand cutting it open with a scalpel, right down the middle. The third is him holding open the wound, but it’s not bloody or anything; it looks like a fruit almost. Like, there’s just some green water trickling out. The last picture on that page is a close-up of some of the tissue inside.

Okay, wait, I’m pausing for a minute here because outside the office window, Lucy is chasing one of the chickens, and I can’t tell if she needs help. Okay, wait no, they’re just playing. By the way, listener, Dale’s office is like really fancy, like the rest of his house, but he keeps a lot of his oddities in here. And looking over all his weird stuff; old masks and little taxidermied birds and whatnot, I’m starting to feel kinda silly. Cause Dale just loved collecting weird shit. I bet this is just another weird thing he bought or made. 

Okay, there’s only a couple more pages, let’s do this. 

Flipping the page now, and for the first time, there’s a collection of pictures that look to be from different places. They’re all little alien-looking creatures, and they all appear to be kind of rooted in place. Like, there’s one that looks like a frog sort of, but with little points all over its head. But it’s just standing on the ground, and it doesn’t seem startled by the camera at all. Another one kind of reminds me of a snail, and I guess for him it makes sense he’d be stationary. The pictures all look to have been taken in different places, one in the pink sand from earlier, one in a puddle that’s a rusty red color, and a lot of them have those awful trees in the background. And all of the creatures pretty strongly resemble animals I recognize; one here looks a lot like a dog. 

I’m flipping the page, and it’s more creatures, all stationary. They all seem unaware of Dale or the camera, even though for one that looks a bit like a rabbit, he’s holding the ears up for the picture. All of them look equally unnerving, though under that alien yellow sky. 

Turning the page again and, oh. Okay, so it’s just a bunch of these things dissected. But there’s no blood. Really it doesn’t look like there’s any kind of structured internal anatomy; it’s just green and brown layers of plant matter. 

We got a few more pages of that, some of them even have Dale’s hands in them, like pointing to a certain bit of green. I’m not exactly sure what’s supposed to be standing out to me in the fleshy goo, but okay. 

Flipping the pages again, and we’re back to some more landscapes. This time, it’s four pictures of some mountains. No, wait, they’re all the same mountain, just like from slightly different angles. In the foreground, on some kind of orange gravel, is a rock formation. I’m trying to find out what was so important about this rock formation. It looks like the pictures were all taken on the same day, the sky is kinda the same shade of yellow, and the clouds even look the same. Yeah, the clouds are all relatively stationary. The rock formation doesn’t look too interesting, it’s kind of shaped like New Jersey, I guess, if I had to compare it to something. It doesn’t really look like anything. 

But wait. The rock formation is exactly the same in each picture, like he took the pictures from the exact same spot, pretty quick after one another, but the mountain in the back is different, that means- 

The mountain is moving. 

Okay, flipping the page again, and Jesus. Okay, we’re really close to the end here; they’re all pictures of some kind of carcass. I can’t tell what the animal was before, but the little bits of flesh I can see look kind of gray. The top two pictures are Dale kind of holding up different organs with one hand, the bottom left is him holding up a huge bone with both hands, and hang on. 

The last picture is Dale holding up the carcass next to him like a trophy. That’s the first picture where it looks like he definitely didn’t take it. I guess maybe he had a tripod, or, well, he’s looking at the camera really fondly, though. Like maybe it’s not a tripod taking the picture. Like he’s looking at someone he loves very dearly. 

Flipping the page. Okay, this is the last page. On one side, we’ve got a note for the first time, no pictures. The note says ‘directions to Parts Unknown’. On the last page, across from that, we have a big picture taped down over the whole page, and it’s one of Dale’s chickens, but it’s been cut open and dissected. And the organs are all arranged on a tile floor. It looks like the tile in Dale’s basement, and the way the organs are arranged looks kind of familiar. Hang on. Yeah, the organs match the symbol drawn on the front of the book. 

Flipping back now, just to note something. In the last picture, it’s not Dale’s hand in the photo. At the very top of the picture, there’s a smaller hand with pink painted fingernails cradling the head of the dead bird.

I want to think out loud for a bit here. Just for a bit, about the possibility that this scrapbook might be real. It shows an adventure Dale never told anyone about. Maybe an adventure Lucy never told anyone about either. I know that’s silly, but let's entertain it for just a second.

If this is a real place, the kind of place that Dale unearthed looking for strange and new things, is this a place I’d want to visit? It looks horrifying, but isn’t there some kind of merit to going to a place that people have never been before? Exploring new places, seeing that there’s more to this life than we thought, even if it’s scary? Is that why Lucy stayed all these years? If you could see something new, otherworldly, to live a life unlike anyone else has ever lived before, wouldn’t you want to? If you could reach out and touch the sun, wouldn’t you try to even if you knew it would burn you?

I’m getting off track here. Closing up the book now and wrapping up the diary with some thoughts.

Dale left his will really open-ended on the stuff that wasn’t money-related. He told me and Lucy to split up his oddities however we wanted. And Lucy told me that I could have whatever I wanted. With the house being left to her, Dale’s fortune, she was set for life, and she wanted me to have whatever I needed for closure. You know, now that I think about it, she said it kind of weird. She said, “Whichever of his projects you want to take on, you can have.” 

I’m looking out the window again, and she’s sitting in her little sun chair by the chicken coop, with a book in her lap. But she’s not reading, she’s watching me. It’s not the first time I’ve caught her looking at me. Sometimes I’ve caught her checking me out, I think, but this isn’t one of those times. No, it’s like she’s studying me as I finish the scrapbook, trying to gauge my reaction. She doesn’t look away now, either. She doesn’t smile, she doesn’t do anything, she just waits. I hold up the scrapbook, showing her I’m done reading it. 

I just gave her a big smile, and finally, she smiled back. 

And as I close out this diary, I’ll leave you with the thought that has been running through my mind this whole time, the words my mom used to say so often. “How much like your uncle do you really want to be?” 

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the podcast inside your house! To hear every tale of terror as they are released, subscribe to our show on your podcast app or on Youtube or follow us on Facebook and Bluesky. 

Until next time, remember that the worst thing about looking for answers is that sometimes, you find them.