How Reddit published the most disturbing horror story ever
Equal parts flash fiction, conspiracy theory and trolling, _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 was an anonymous masterpiece of viral Lovecraftian storytelling
I’m usually a little sceptical of content warnings, but I think today’s post is worth a quick heads-up: there’s passing but substantial mention of both the Holocaust and violence against children in the next 3,000 words.
In retrospect, the fact that the first section of what would become _MOTHER9HORSE9EYES was posted as a comment on r/mildlyinteresting – Reddit’s most milquetoast and self-consciously banal corner – seems like a cruel joke. The 130-word missive sat under a picture of a battered copy of 1984, whose “redacted” title and author name had supposedly worn off after much use. “The cover of George Orwell's, "1984," [sic] becomes less censored with wear”, the poster had oh-so-cleverly captioned it.
1984. The touchstone of people who don’t really read many books – who don’t really have the attention span – but reckon themselves a little smarter than average, conspiratorial free thinkers, perhaps; who think the Home Office somehow has the resources to read their emails and – yes – the sort of person who might spend a lot of time on Reddit. It was a good choice, even if the original post did little more than speak to a marketing ploy by Penguin Books.1
_MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 began mid-stream of consciousness, essentially gibberish to anyone reading it at the time:
a unite a stage a coup a revolution a bring a genocide a new world a
In the MKULTRA experiments, the CIA dosed unwitting subjects with LSD to see how they would react. What has not yet come to light is that MKULTRA was an intra-agency project. The CIA created new departments within the CIA and fed them steady doses of LSD and other psychoactives to see how the departments would diverge and mutate away from normal departments. Whole projects and hierarchies were created with everybody involve being more or less unwittingly under the influence of LSD. This is how the "restraint bed portals" and "flesh interfaces" were first created i.e. from a heavily psycho-mutated hierarchy. The entire thing had to be eliminated, but the technology it created has been revolutionary.
It was the first of 100 rambling comments that would appear, at random, under posts on different subreddits over the next month. (For the uninitiated, a subreddit is essentially a self-regulated, hyper-specific mini-forum hosted on the largely anonymous social media site Reddit. These mini-forums can focus on almost anything, from memes to politics to porn to gaming to art; there are more than 100,000 of them active at any one time). The second post appeared on r/tifu (“Today I Fucked Up”, where people share stories about things going awry in their lives), the third on r/todayilearned, the fourth on r/dataisbeautiful… A few hundred words at a time, always posted by the same account, which had been opened on the day of the first post, 21st April 2016. They’re still all there.
If you read these comments in the order in which they were posted, a story began to emerge.
_MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 (henceforth MHE, because there’s no way I’m typing that bloody name out every single time2) gradually developed into an extremely nihilistic novella-length story with a dual narrative. On the one hand, it followed a long and dispassionate history of human experiments and conspiracies involving LSD stretching from the Holocaust to the present day, and on the other, the story of a desperate fight against a futuristic superintelligent entity known as Q, which takes over the world somehow through the Internet. It’s also implied that Q has been empowered by the experiments with acid sketched out loosely in the first narrative strand. These have created trans-dimensional portals called “flesh interfaces”, which take the form of long tunnels lined with – you guessed it – living, pulsating human flesh. Later on, there is a (possible) twist and the story takes on a more metafictional slant as it follows a failed writer and alcoholic named Nick; if anything, things get much odder and much more depressing.
It probably goes without saying, but MHE is weird. Reddit is a website stuffed full of freaks and perverts, the dark corner of a metaphorical high school where the cheerleaders gather on Instagram and the valedictorians on Twitter; Reddit is the online alley round the back of the bike shed where kids poke at dead birds with sticks. Its anonymity is both its strength and its weakness, as it allows people to reveal and share many of their darker and less socially acceptable thoughts and impulses without judgment. It’s not generally a place where people are easy to shock.
And yet Reddit’s reaction to MHE was one of creeped-out fascination, in places wary and in others, excited. “For someone whose account is a few hours old, you have some fucked up comment history”, says u/SadBlueChin under an early MHE comment. “the hell are you talking about...” drawls u/Sneaky_Stinker. Likewise u/TheHaleStorm: “Ok. What the fuck are you talking about.” But then: “DUDE, Follow this guys posts. Its like falling down the rabbit whole. Go back to the start of his submitted. Its insane” says u/1Darkest_Knight1, a little breathlessly. In one of the most intriguing responses, a user called u/aardy replies to a MHE post which references Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and – it’s genuinely difficult to tell – either doesn’t realise the comment is stealth fiction and replies sincerely, or plays along with the narrative perfectly.
In any case, a readership quickly coalesced, and soon, MHE had its very own subreddit, r/9M9H9E9, which helpfully tracked the story posts across the website and stuck them together in a single thread to make them easier to read, as well as playing host to a dizzying array of theorizing and attempts to guess the (as yet still anonymous) author’s true identity. By the time the author reached his 30th post, people had cottoned on, and the replies were pointing people in the direction of the full, assembled story. Today, in 2024, the r/9M9H9E9 subreddit has 18,000 members.
Perhaps it was the pseudo-medical imagery, all wires under the skin and hair and teeth growing in places they shouldn’t. Not since Hellraiser had a work of fiction done mephitic body horror so painfully, so viscerally. In one early section, MHE describes what happens if someone is “segmented” by one of the “flesh interface” portals described in the story:
In one incident, a large group of migrant workers was segmented in an underground facility.
Perfect cross-sectional segmentation along the frontal plane.
You could see their lungs working, food being digested, blood pumping on the inside of the heart, everything.
They live for almost 5 months in this condition.
Absolutely fascinating to see in person.
It’s like reading a papercut. The flesh interfaces of the story are essentially “incident zones” or spaces in which objects are “spontaneously segmented”, wherein parts of them – such as the entire front of a human body – just disappear, but the rest of the object continues to operate as though nothing is missing. “Complex tunnels” known as “ant farms” appear in the earth nearby when a flesh interface is created, too. These interfaces are an unnerving and inspired invention of MHE, playing perhaps on the widespread human fear of small holes, trypophobia, but it’s the eye for detail in the story that makes it feel so oppressive, so nihilistic and believable despite its Lovecraftian scope. Historical conspiratorial detail is rolled into the narrative: here, Elizabeth Bathory was trying to open a flesh interface when torturing her victims in the 16th century. MKULTRA was a conspiracy to create them, too. Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear explosion in history, was actually a successful Soviet attempt to close a human-flesh portal over Siberia which had grown far too large.
At one point in the narrative, an American G.I. describes finding the entrance to a flesh interface hidden under an altar in a Viet Cong village during the Vietnam war:
It was a pit made of flesh. Maybe five feet across and going down about twenty feet before curving out of sight. When I say, "made of flesh," I mean, it looked like the inside of somebody's throat. Wet, reddish flesh-looking stuff. We had heard of them building tunnels, but this was... We really couldn't even understand what we were looking at.
It was breathing. The flesh kinda rippled and this hot air came out, and it felt and smelled just like somebody breathing right on your face. Enough to make you sick.
Later, the “mother” of the story’s title is introduced: a sort of demonic entity of stitched-together, wet animal body parts and burlap, with the cheeks of a pig, a goat’s jaw, and the eyes of a horse.
If it all sounds a little too Blumhouse, a little too Eli Roth, know that there is also enough real-world pain and suffering woven throughout to keep MHE from tipping fully over into camp. In arguably questionable taste, a section of the narrative takes place in Treblinka, the World War Two concentration camp:
We move them through the long tube to the gas chambers. The men can go first, as their hair does not need cutting. Then the women. The women panic. Screams everywhere. You watch the mottled haunches of the old women shudder and ripple as their legs shake like newborn calves. They realize that we will not be wasting any time, that it will all be immediate. Streams of fresh shit run down their legs, and now the helpers must club them every step of the way or they will turn back.
Marchenko carries a sword. He thinks it is an Imperial cavalry sword, but it is just an imitation. Still, it is an actual sword, and in his hands, it is more effective than the clubs. He hacks at the crowd like jungle explorer in an American film. He makes all sorts of sneering, dramatic faces as he works, and whenever he scores a particularly impressive blow, his whole face red with delight. Once he sliced an old woman's tit clean off. He picked it up and showed it to me. The inside was made of corn-colored pearls of fat. I let him take it to the work camp and have a good chuckle watching a prisoner devour it, and I had a good chuckle watching Marchenko's face.
Whoever wrote MHE had a real talent for coming up with an offensively nasty turn of phrase; for creating an image that’s hard to shake for days, weeks, months afterwards. From time to time, my mind flicks back unbidden to that phrase “corn-colored pearls of fat” – eight years after I first read it.
The story understood how to make its readers’ skin crawl. It’s unstinting. One of the most horrible scenes, which I’m not going to quote in full because it’s a little too long, but which you can read here (if you must), relates the CIA sending an eight-year-old girl through a flesh interface, as an experiment.3 They’ve named the girl “Jingles”, having been told by Army psychologists to give the children they are experimenting on dogs’ names, “to depersonalize them, to assuage the guilt.” Dogs’ names. Jingles comes back out of the portal several minutes later, encased in “a large organic sac lined with veins, vaguely resembling a human lung, about 4 feet long.” She comes back entirely hairless and attached to “a sort of placenta” by the belly button, and with the mind of a newborn baby. The girl’s blood contains small amounts of LSD, causing those who touch her without gloves to hallucinate. She lives for a more few hours, and then quietly dies.
Whoever came up with this was surely not right in the head.
So who did come up with it?
After 15 posts, the author of MHE broke the fourth wall: he posted a letter to his readers in a since-deleted subreddit. In the letter, he apologised for posting to Reddit, and gave away a few possible hints as to his identity. “I am 30-something American male,” he wrote, “without the benefit of a college education or a stable job. Sadly, I have spent most of my life drunk.” And yet, other parts of the 950-word piece suggested that the truth was still blended with fiction. The author claimed that what he was writing was neither fiction, nor entirely true. Instead, he said he was trying to open the eyes of his readership to a globe-spanning conspiracy, and a risk that the world would become a totalitarian super-state – one he outlined in his writing. “Soon, technological advances in the field of information technology and bioengineering will fundamentally reshape human existence,” said the MHE writer. “There are a number of possible outcomes, and I believe that most of them will result in the human race entering unending era of absolute slavery.”
Later, the writer told Gizmodo that his favourite author was sci-fi novelist Jack Vance, and agreed to give BBC Trending an interview over email, in which he once again said he was male, in his thirties, lived in the USA, and was at some point a heavy user of LSD. He also added a new detail: that he was a freelance translator. When asked what his writing was about, the MHE author said that, “At the distinct risk of sounding like a grandiose crackpot, I would sum up my story as a warning to humanity. I believe we are rushing headlong toward a focal point at which the future of our species will be decided.”
Most interestingly, the writer explained why he had chosen Reddit as the platform on which he wanted to launch MHE:
“I realized that on the internet, and especially on Reddit, it is possible to intrude on people’s realities in a very unexpected way. If you have a bit of a knack for storytelling, you can redirect the thread of a conversation in any direction. With a single, strategically designed comment, a simple debate about cookware can become Klingon erotica. A discussion on urban planning can morph into an Edwardian romance with gay seagulls.4 The sky is the limit, really.”
But that was it – no more interviews, and no revelation of his identity. And, in the absence of concrete biographical details about the author, conjecture began to fill the blanks.
Was the MHE writer really an addict? Was his writing a publicity stunt? Did he even want to be found? The fact that he gave interviews with major outlets, including Gizmodo, the BBC and Vice’s tech vertical Motherboard, suggested that he did – but he abruptly broke off communication as soon as journalists had been fed just enough to quote him in a 400-word news piece, and as far as I can tell, he never gave an interview over the phone.
In many ways, it spoke to a clever marketing campaign, and many Reddit users speculated as such. When the first episode of Stranger Things aired four months after the debut of MHE, a lot of readers – me included – immediately noticed the similarities between the idea of children being sent through the flesh interfaces in MHE and the Netflix series’ alternate reality, the “Upside Down”, where the 12-year-old boy Will Myers goes missing in the first season’s inciting incident.
But usually, a guerrilla marketing campaign comes with a reveal. The agency who created it wants to take credit, publicly. No such reveal, whether for Stranger Things or otherwise, was forthcoming.
On Reddit, users set their minds to identifying the author. This is basically Reddit’s speciality, solving pointless mysteries the entire network’s raison d’etre. Suspicions quickly fell on a user called u/Anatta-Phi, who had been active since 2015 on several conspiracy- and psychedelics-related subreddits and whose interests aligned with much of the subject matter of MHE. Anatta-Phi is still active on Reddit. He hangs out a lot in r/Drugs, r/Psychosis and r/Buddhism, and is a moderator on the subreddit r/ShrugLifeSyndicate, a sort of free-association forum where members can post pretty much anything they like, ranging from theories that the Dalai Lama is the second coming of Christ to pictures of cats. (The main requirement seems to be that you have to be high as shit before you post.) Anatta-Phi is also an advocate of kratom tea, a psychoactive natural high. And, most importantly, he’s one of 11 moderators of the official MHE subreddit.
And yet. There are any number of conspiracy theorists turned budding authors out there, particularly on Reddit. There’s no real reason why u/Anatta-Phi has to be the writer of MHE. When I messaged him over the site’s mailing system asking if he was the author, he replied within an hour. “Haha, no,” he said, “sorry just tangently related [sic]. I might be able to get them a msg but we don't talk about it really.” I replied asking if I could ask the real writer some questions; there was no further response.
In essence, it doesn’t matter who wrote MHE. Speculation might be a lot more fun, anyway. (Personally, I reckon the author of the story might just be someone like Sam Kriss, or possibly a Robert Kurvitz type.) It’s cool that it has an anonymous author, and that it has spawned a community of people who try both to mimic it and to puzzle out some of its tighter, weirder angles. Even now, years after the fact, r/9M9H9E9 has become a place for people to post their own takes on the story, or to share their own general machine-body “flesh interface” content like GenAI art, or speculative fiction.
Perhaps it’s better that we don’t know who wrote _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9. His creation – not unlike those flesh interfaces and the CIA’s would-be experiments in psychedelics – has outgrown him, has spawned something over which he no longer has control. And, presumably, he’s still out there somewhere. After all, we all knew that kid in school, the one who wore the Korn t-shirt and kept to himself, and drew pictures you quickly learned not to look at too closely. The one who was a bit too interested in the roadkill at the side of the lane on the walk home at 4pm. He grew up and he’s still somewhere out there. Or, hey – maybe he was even you.
Penguin published Orwell’s novella with his name and the name of the book “redacted”, which is a cute little trick until you think about it for even a moment: if the name and author of a book were that dangerous, wouldn’t the censor simply destroy it?
Because the author is anonymous, both the story and its writer are generally known as _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, though some also call the story The Interface Series.
This scene and all the comments following it has, I think understandably, been deleted by moderators on r/movies, where it was originally posted, but is still archived with all the rest on r/9M9H9E9.
At points, it appears the author of MHE can’t quite escape the very Reddit compulsion to be flippant, even as he tries to pretend he is some sort of mentally scarred, alcoholic truth-seeker who happens to have a significant messages to share with the world through his fiction. I mean, cmon: gay seagulls? Really?
Another reason why reddit is the best place on the internet