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a research page maintained ALONE, by one person, with no help, since 1997
GONE ISLAND:
THE TRUTH THEY BURIED
nobody reads this anymore and that is exactly how they want it
✦ the island that isn't on any map made after 1962 ✦
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first thing, before anything else: i don't have a real name for this place. i have looked. every chart, every registry, every old-timer i've cornered on the subject, and nobody has ever given me the same answer twice, if they give me one at all. so i started calling it what it did to every chart that ever tried to hold it. i call it GONE ISLAND. that's not official. that's not on file anywhere but this site. that's mine, and i'm done waiting for someone to hand me a better one, because i don't think anyone still living has it to give.
okay. OKAY. pull up any nautical chart printed before 1962 and it's sitting right there, unremarkable, a few miles off the shipping lane, no label worth trusting, just a shape. pull up a chart from 1963 on and it is GONE. not renamed. not folded into a bigger landmass. gone, the way a word gets gone when you say it too many times and it stops meaning anything. i have stared at this so long the word "island" doesn't look like a real word anymore. does it look like a real word to you. write in and tell me if it still looks like a real word to you.
i have talked to two retired surveyors and one harbor pilot and they will not go on record but off the record they all say the instruments read the island is there. boats that go looking for it come back and say they never found it, no fog, no storm, nothing, just — didn't find it, sir, sorry sir. one captain's log, which i am not going to explain how i got, logs six hours of "fog" on a day that was clear on every satellite pass i could get my hands on, and i got my hands on a LOT of them, more than i probably should have access to, and i'm not going to apologize for that.
i used to update this page every week. i can't remember the last time anyone new showed up. if you're new — hi. please stay. please just read the whole thing before you close the tab.
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the missing (this is not a joke)
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this is NOT a complete list. i want to say that up front because someone in 1998 emailed me and said i was "playing detective" and honestly? fine. i'll play detective. somebody has to.
| NAME |
LAST SEEN |
NOTE |
| Eli Corbin, dock hand |
Sept. 1931 |
boat found empty, engine STILL RUNNING, three miles off the last known position of the island. the same mark you'll see under "the cult" below was scratched into the console. i have a photo. see evidence room. |
| Hannah Vess, schoolteacher |
June 1958 |
left a note that just said "i heard it too." i think about this note more than i think about most living people i know |
| Unnamed fishing crew (4) |
Feb. 1974 |
coast guard closed the file after 90 days like that's supposed to mean something. no wreckage. ever. found. |
| R███████ (i said i wouldn't print it, i'm not printing it) |
1988–1990, on and off |
family disputes the "voluntary commitment" story the local paper ran and so do i |
| Priya ██████ |
2001, ongoing |
a recording surfaced with her voice on it. two words. over and over. i have listened to it more times than i will admit and i am NOT typing the words here, i don't care who asks, i don't care if you think that's dramatic |
names with no surname are withheld at family request. one name is withheld because i am scared to type it. you can decide which.
and then there's the other list. i want to be honest that i did not find these people. i went looking for them, after i noticed something i couldn't unnotice.
none of these four ever set foot on this island as far as i can prove. different countries. different decades. nothing on paper connects any of them to this place or to each other. i only found them because i started pulling old newspaper archives and a couple of half-dead fringe research forums, looking for anything that rhymed with what happened here. and it kept rhyming.
| NAME |
LAST SEEN |
NOTE |
| Edmund Vale, antiquarian |
1875 |
left to meet another collector about a piece he wouldn't describe in his own letters. never arrived. never turned up dead either, which somehow feels worse |
| Clara Weiss |
1883 |
vanished out of a locked apartment in Vienna. locked from the inside. i have read that police report three times and it does not get less locked |
| Samuel Okoye, archaeologist |
1942 |
gone mid-dig, in the field, with his whole crew apparently still right there. nobody on that crew agrees on what they saw, or admits to seeing anything at all |
| Martha Manilla, journalist |
1994 |
freelancer, chasing something she told an editor was "bigger than the byline." last confirmed in Taipei. i keep coming back to her specifically. i don't fully know why yet |
i am not saying these four are connected to this island. i am saying i went looking for a pattern and found one, and i don't know what to do with that except hand it to you and let you sit with it the way i have. and for what it's worth: i am apparently not the only person who's been keeping a list like this. somebody out there has a much bigger one than mine.
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THE CULT — THIS IS THE PART PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO HEAR
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there is no deed on this place. no census, no county file, nothing with a stamp on it, because nobody who found it ever lived long enough to do the paperwork. that's not a gap in my research. that IS the research.
what exists instead is a rhythm, not a document: old harbor logs, a few lines in a defunct mainland paper, dockhands and shopkeepers all describing the same thing without comparing notes. a family, never named the same way twice, came ashore every three moon cycles like clockwork to trade for supplies. every single time, more of them stepped off the boat than had gone out on it. no one filed a report, because as far as the mainland could tell, people had simply joined a family. walked off smiling, sometimes. no crime happens in front of anybody. that's the whole reason none of this exists anywhere official.
i've spent way too long trying to guess what "trade" actually meant on that schedule. three moon cycles isn't a number i picked, it's the number in every single account, and it lines up close enough with older ritual calendars that i don't buy it as coincidence. every fragment that uses the word trade also uses, somewhere in the same sentence, a word that gets translated as cutting, or giving, or paying, and no two translators agree on which. i don't love what that implies. i don't think it was cargo they were trading.
whatever they believed, it wasn't complicated. they worshipped something they called Radduk, directly, no saints, no middlemen, nothing standing between them and it. i have said that name out loud exactly once, to test something, and i am not doing it again, and i would ask you not to either, and i know how insane that sentence sounds typed out and i am leaving it in anyway.
and then, one cycle, the boat didn't come. nobody panicked at first, because nobody had ever been counting closely enough to panic. no boat, no family, no fuller crew stepping onto the dock. no burned structures, no scene, no bodies, nothing left to investigate. that's what i used to call the ending.
here's what keeps me up now: i have proof the BOAT stopped. i do not have proof the FAMILY stopped. those used to be the same sentence to me and i don't think they are anymore. if the whole point was always slipping in and out of the record unnoticed, a family that's had generations of practice at not existing on paper doesn't need this specific island to keep not existing on paper. it just needs a coastline nobody's bothered to chart carefully, and a schedule nobody's counting. i can't prove it's still happening. i also can't tell you why that isn't the same thing as proving it isn't.
✦ i know how this sounds. i used to think so too. ✦
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STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION, SORRY, I DO EVERYTHING ON THIS SITE MYSELF AT 2AM |
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[ scan pending — box, unopened, i'm sorry the picture is so dark ]
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reader submission, 1999. locked chest, two separate locks. owner would not open it on camera, would not tell me why
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[ scan pending — lid detail, blurry, camera was shaking ]
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close-up of the carving on the lid. looks scratched out and re-carved at some point, more than once maybe. owner's translation, UNVERIFIED, do not take this as fact: "NEVER SPEAK IT."
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this is not a scan, i redrew this myself, carefully, from three separate photos, because i could not get anyone to let me post the originals. circle, triangle, and three lines carried past both ends of the circle. i have now found this same mark carved into a boat console, scratched into a doorframe on the mainland dock nobody will admit to owning, and burned into the cover of a trade ledger from a supply shop that closed decades ago. three unrelated sources, decades apart, identical mark every time. tell me that's a coincidence.
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if ANYONE reading this recognizes the script in that second photo, or the mark in the third, or has seen anything like either one before, please, sign the guestbook, i am begging, i will not post your email, i will not post your name if you ask me not to, i just need to know i'm not the only one who's seen it.
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2 entries. TWO. i had 40 in 1998. i don't know what happened. did the ring die. did everyone just leave.
03/11/98
SkepticSam
this is obviously a creepypasta or an ARG, cute effort with the fake newspaper scans, but decent bedtime story i guess
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— · — · — 11 MONTHS PASS WITH NO NEW ENTRIES · — · — · —
01/29/99
HOT_SINGLES_NEAR_U
click here for amazing deals!!! [this entry may be spam, i left it up because at least it means someone's script found this page]
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— · — · — 9 MORE MONTHS · NOTHING · — · — · —
11/02/99
WEBMASTER (me)
i know almost nobody is reading this anymore. i'm leaving the form up anyway. if you're out there and you know something, ANYTHING, please use it. i check every single day. i have checked every single day for two years. please.
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COOL SITE
OF THE DAY
(site now
defunct)
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PARANORMAL
NET AWARD
(link broken)
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you are visitor number 000112 since Nov. 1997. that is not a typo. two years. one hundred and twelve people. i have refreshed this number more than the number itself.
webmaster: goneislandtruth@geekmail.example — please, no work emails, they get read by other people, i promise i am not being dramatic about that
i taught myself html from a library book so sorry if some of this page looks broken, i don't really know what i'm doing, i just needed somewhere to put all of this. best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4.0 at 800x600. some images may take a moment, please be patient, i am on a modem too. last updated 11/02/1999. i will keep updating this even if it's just me here.
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