SCP-6881 SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENT ‘JULIETT’

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SCP-6881 SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENT ‘JULIETT’

Project: SERAPIS » Supplementary Document ‘JULIETT’

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GALLIO: This is Agent Hector Gallio. The following is classified Level 5 under Project: SERAPIS — O5 EYES ONLY.

The project is continuing under instruction of a dissenting faction of the O5 Council. My emphasis has switched from learning the anomalous history of Shibbet’s Vale, to discovering what part of that history the O5 Council and the SCP Foundation wants hidden. I have yet to find evidence of such an event, but the fact Project: SERAPIS was launched at all suggests it must be hidden in the region’s past. The further back I go, the closer I feel I am getting to that smoking gun half the Council wants hidden.

The Shibbet’s Vale area of Southern Montana went unused between the decline of the local logging industry in the late 1930s and the establishment of the US Air Force base at Camp Whitetail at the beginning of the Cold War. For most of the forties, nothing strange happened there. At least, nothing that left a record. But I turned up something that might have been relevant prior to that, in the early 1930s. The more I looked, the weirder it got.

At the beginning of the 1920s, a logging camp and sawmill was established at Shibbet’s Vale. Most timber was hauled to Lake Apesawa and from there, floated down the Whitetail River. The rest was turned to lumber at the sawmill for local sales. A semi-permanent community of between twenty and fifty loggers lived in cabins and tents around the mill, and by contemporary newspaper and police reports, rarely interacted with the nearest town of Scarslow.

In 1933, Professor Milton Douglass Fitzwilliam, of the Columbia University Anthropology Department, embarked on a study of isolated communities and their folklore and religions. In the course of this study, assisted by his student Faye Weaver and a pair of local guides, Professor Fitzwilliam arrived at Scarslow and travelled to Lake Apesawa for the short journey to the logging camp. Neither Fitzwilliam, Weaver, nor the guides came back.

It looks like Scarslow police made only a truncated investigation of the disappearances. Possibly they were under pressure from the university to keep things quick and quiet; since, from the personal correspondence of the university’s dean at the time, they thought Fitzwilliam had suffered a mental breakdown in the forest and caused the expedition to vanish. It’s also possible the Scarslow police didn't want to risk angering the loggers. My guess is, though, the police knew something weird when they saw it, and had learned by then not to get involved in anything bizarre that happened in Shibbet’s Vale.

In spite of the police, the Foundation turned up evidence about what happened. It was in the form of journals and unsent letters sent to Fitzwilliam’s widow and then given to the university. It was kept and archived there, but never published. Foundation assets in academia have been primed to watch out for anything that might relate to Shibbet’s Vale and associated anomalies, and one of our people at Columbia dug it up. I got a set of facsimiles in the mail and used that to put together what happened in 1933, which has been transcribed here. As for who sent the evidence to the cops, no one wrote that down, but I can make some guesses.

Professor Fitzwilliam specialised in studies of comparative religion, while Faye Weaver was studying for a PhD in folklore and its relationship to the power structures of small or isolated societies. They were drawn to Shibbet’s Vale by anecdotal evidence of unusual religious and folk practices among the loggers of Southern Montana. This evidence has been lost to time, but thanks to the Foundation, what happened to the expedition has not.

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