u/11velociraptors

First Post

Previous Update

It was a letter. It had to be a letter. The words were indecipherable, but the shape of the message, the structure, was recognizable enough. [addressee] : [message], valedictory dash followed by a name. "Tsövel"? That sounded vaguely name-like, right? Either that or some Swede with dyslexia was trying to sell me a pair of stövel, or suede boots. 

I figured there was one way to know for certain what side of First Date it came from: I would send a letter of my own back into the cavern. I'd toss it into the crevice, deeper than any person could reach from my side. If I got a message in return, I would know that I had truly contacted someone on the other side, and that I wasn't simply on the receiving end of a very elaborate joke. 

My letter read: Hello. We are two brothers from [our city], Kentucky. We received your message, but couldn't decipher it. Give us a hint? I signed the letter with mine and Jacob's first names. I folded it up neatly and tied it with white thread, and on the morning of May 7th, I entered the caves from Lucy's farm. Needle is becoming a second home to me; I'm starting to feel like I could traverse it with my eyes closed. I sidestepped as deep as I could into First Date, my forward hand clutching the letter tight. Then, when I couldn't comfortably wedge myself any deeper, I flicked the letter into the other side of the pinch point like I was throwing a frisbee. Just for kicks, I tossed a pen in there as well, on the off chance that my correspondent didn't have one already. With any luck, I hadn't just tossed it down a gorge or into a puddle. 

I hope my explanation of all this makes sense; I've had a hard time putting pen to paper recently. Actually, I've had a hard time focusing on anything since my most recent find. This awful pit in my stomach seems to grow by the day. I figured it was just nerves at first, but the more it grows the more it feels, strangely, like guilt. I feel like I've been caught doing something I shouldn't have, and now my every move is being surveilled. 

Just the other day, I walked down Meadow Lane again, trying to glimpse inside the corner house as I passed by. The first floor had all its curtains drawn, and no filthy, cave-dwelling strangers grinned at me from the windows of the second. But as I continued my walk, I briefly made eye contact with one of the residents a few houses down. She was sitting on the steps of her house as a group of kids, presumably hers, played soccer on the lawn. I expected her to look away after a few seconds, but her suspicious gaze lingered on me long after I'd passed her by. Maybe it was nothing. She probably just knew I didn't belong to one of the beautiful mansions on her block and wanted to make sure I wasn't loitering. Still though, it left a bad taste in my mouth, and I can't help but wonder if there was more to it. 

Anyway, back to the letter. I went back to Needle on the evening of May 8th, this time with my buddy Noah. We took the Redding Street entrance, which meant it took double the normal time to get to First Date, but I was happy to put up with a longer crawl if it meant having some company. It had been a while since I'd entered the stalactite-rich cavern from the Southern entrance. 

On the East wall of the cavern that hosts First Date, there is a small, tight corridor. If you bend down and shine a flashlight into the passage, it looks like it dead-ends after a few meters. However, if you get down on your elbows and knees and worm your way inside, you'll eventually notice a hole on the ceiling of the passage that is impossible to see from the outside. This is the literal drop-in that Jacob and I have been using for years. You have to be in the know (or willing to get your hands dirty) just in order to see it, which I assume is why the cops haven't found Aunt Lucy's entrance into Needle Caves yet. 

When I looked inside First Date, it took me a few seconds to spot another message. This one had been neatly folded into a little square and tied against the rock instead of wrapped around it—more akin to my own technique than what I'd previously found. I practically dove inside the claustrophobic passageway in my eagerness to grab the message. Noah and I made our ascent in record time. Even after I'd gone home and changed out of my dirty clothes, my hands were shaking as I sliced open the bindings and unfurled the thin, yellowed paper. The message, this time written in pen, read: 

SAVE
Mason brother Jacob?
Tsövel nöwë Tzäni 
Tzäni river 
Tsäni-ke lo-nöld-tso äwa-nold-we-duwë-thël.
—Tsövel

Between the fourth and fifth lines, there was a small, hastily drawn picture of a person pinned between two curved lines. 

Even in the safety and warmth of my childhood home, surrounded by my parents and siblings and family pets, reading that message gave me an overwhelming sense of unease. There was no longer any doubt that I was communicating with someone on the other side of that passageway. Someone who is either encoding their messages or who only speaks a language that doesn't seem to exist. Someone who seems to reside in a space that shouldn't even be accessible for humans, let alone livable. Someone who, based on the urgent first line of their message, seems either to be asking for help, or communicating their resolve to help someone else. 

All I know for certain is that my correspondent, whoever they are, seems to know at least a few words of English, and interestingly, the punctuation marks in their language seems to mirror ours. I wondered if lines two and three, close together and similar in structure, were meant to parallel one another—to serve as some attempt at translation. As for the fourth line, well … Was I crazy to think that the "river" depicted looked a hell of a lot like First Date?

I mulled over the letter for days with little to show for my efforts. When I became sick of researching ciphers and dead languages, I walked or biked around my town, searching for hidden entrances into Needle. That effort also yielded little. Jacob and I had done a pretty good job on our survey; when I overlaid our route on a Google Map of the area, I was able to pinpoint the coordinates of First Date. The problem was that it sat directly beneath what had once been a tobacco field—now just a broad, flat expanse of dead weeds stretching in every direction. There was nothing to suggest that anything lay beneath it: no cave mouths, no depression, no jagged limestone outcropping poking through the soil. 

I went back to the field yesterday afternoon, ducking beneath the old barbed wire fence at the property's edge and walking the perimeter, scanning for something I might've missed. There was not so much as a promising divot in the earth. At a certain point I stopped meandering and just stood there amidst all that flat, indifferent nothing, wishing a sinkhole would open beneath my feet so I could be done with the whole thing already.

It was as I stood there feeling sorry for myself that I considered the buildings in the distance. They were clustered together at the northern end of the property, half-swallowed by the tree line. There were three of them: two large, slatted wooden structures, and a smaller building set a little apart from the others. I thought about the man with the rebar, his face framed in the warm glow of a chandelier, and it occurred to me that I had spent days scrutinizing every inch of my town's floor without giving much thought to its buildings. I started walking north.

The two larger structures were tobacco curing barns. Both were padlocked at their main doors, and a brief inspection confirmed they were sealed well enough that getting inside without tools would've been impossible. The smaller building was a different story. Its main entrance was also padlocked. But on the south-facing wall, there was a window (or what had once been one) now covered by a sheet of plywood that had warped badly along its lower edge, pulling away from the frame and leaving a small gap at the bottom. I crouched down and shone my phone flashlight inside. Concrete floor. A few collapsed wooden shelves. The dense, sweet smell of rot and old timber. I took off my pack, fed it through the gap, and then went in face-first the way I'd gone into a hundred tight cave passages before. The plywood scraped against my back and I collected what felt like a decade's worth of grime in the process, but I was through in seconds.

The building was dark inside, the only light coming from the gap I'd just crawled through and a few thin blades of late afternoon sun slicing through gaps in the siding. It was a stripping room—the place where the cured tobacco leaves would have been sorted and prepared, back when anyone was still doing that. The shelves along the walls had mostly given up. In the far corner, beneath a collapsed worktable, was a trapdoor, its recessed iron pull handle had gone the color of old blood. I dragged the worktable aside, got my fingers under the handle, and hauled. The door resisted for a moment, then came up with a sound like a long exhale.

Wooden steps led down into a root cellar. The smell that came up was cool and mineral and familiar. Jacob says I'm crazy for this but I've climbed through all sorts of caves across the South and I maintain that they've all got their own unique smell, even the ones that share the same climate and rock composition. The waft that hit me from that cellar felt distinctly like Needle. It was comforting somehow, like I was being greeted by an old friend. 

The cellar was low-ceilinged and roughly square-shaped, its walls fieldstone and mortar, and it was completely empty except for a few broken mason jars and a rusted metal shelf bracket hanging from a single remaining screw. My flashlight found the south wall, and then it found what was wrong with the south wall. Someone had removed a section of the fieldstone, leaving an opening roughly oval in shape, maybe six feet tall and four feet wide. Beyond it was a passage, angling downward into the earth at a slight decline. This was clearly not something that had been made by time alone.

Gazing into that abyss from the top of the stairs, I found my mind drifting to the letter, and more specifically, the fourth line. Tzäni river. Most caves in this part of the country were made by water—millennia of it, threading through hairline cracks in the limestone until the rock dissolved and the dark opened up. I thought about the corpse in First Date, about how it had been suspended by the rocks. How awful that must've been, to die in a place that used to be a river. At least water moves. At least it would've carried him somewhere. Would my dead man have preferred to drown than to die alone amidst all that perfect stillness? 

Would you? 

I don't know how long I was crouched there at the top of those stairs. Long enough that when that skin-crawling certainty of being watched began to claw its way up my spine again, the sun had already started to set outside. I turned around.

There was nobody behind me, but I swept my phone flashlight into every corner anyway. I was alone in a derelict stripping room on an abandoned tobacco farm and I was frightening myself like a child. Not wanting to remain there after dark, I stood, carefully pulled the trapdoor shut, and headed home.

I'm certain that I've found the entrance I've been looking for. This means that whatever comes next needs to be approached with considerably more care than anything I've done so far. No solo runs. I'll go in with a group, and I'll go in armed. And perhaps, before I do either of those things, I'll send "Tsövel" my best attempt at a sketch of the Needle Caves system as I know it. If this new passage connects to wherever he is, he might know something about it that I don't.

I went home. I ate dinner with my family and did a reasonable impression of a person who hadn't spent the afternoon crouched over a hole in the earth. I brushed my teeth and got into bed and stared at the ceiling.

It wasn't until I was nearly under that the thought surfaced, quiet and awful, and wouldn't go back down. In the cellar, I had turned around to look behind me. It hadn't once occurred to me to wonder what was standing in front of me, just beyond the reach of my light.

Link to OG Post

I wanted to begin by thanking everyone for the insights and concerns shared on my last post. While I understand why many have advised me against returning to Needle, I assure you I'm taking all necessary precautions to keep myself and company safe while underground. 

In my rush to post my first entry to this saga, I left out a lot of context, particularly about the caves themselves. I figure I should amend that now, so as to make the rest of this account easier to follow, and to that end I've included some diagrams in this post. 

Needle Caves is generally thought of in terms of two distinct subsystems. On the only official map I could find on my town's website, the two halves are referred to as the "Hill Park Corridor" and the "Redding St. Corridor, named for the location of each half's entrance. The portion of Needle pictured on the map isn't particularly relevant, but I should mention that both entrances have giant iron gates that the city will close when performing maintenance on the caves. When I say Needle is "blocked off", I mean that the entrances have literally been shut and locked. 

Map of Needle: https://imgur.com/a/old-map-of-needle-U0mSCEP 

The most interesting part of Needle isn't even on the old map. As I tried to show in my crappy annotations (I'm working with Preview and a trackpad here, sorry), there's a whole other section that few know about. The unassuming entrance is located on the farm of an elderly woman who also happens to be an old family friend. The point where this stretch drops into the rest of Needle is pretty hard to spot. I'm sure a few others have found our "Northeast Passage", but I've never run into anyone else while caving in that portion. All this is to say that I don't think the city knows about this route in and out of Needle—something which might come to benefit me in the coming weeks. 

Annotated Map: https://imgur.com/a/map-of-needle-annotations-2P3hfVa 

I returned home on May 1st. Never in my life have I turned in all my assignments so early before the end-of-semester deadlines, but I was in a rush to get home. I've spent the past two weeks thinking about First Date, about the people I saw inside, and about the dead man. They still haven't identified him. In fact, I don't think his death or discovery was reported on any local news outlet. I understand not wanting to cause a panic, but this level of secrecy is bizarre. 

My theory at this point, which I'm sure I shared with many of you, was that there was a group of people living on the other side of F. D. Since the passage is too small for a human to squeeze through, there must be another route to the other side. My goal was to find this hidden entrance, in part to satisfy my own curiosity, and in part because I'd like to tell my younger siblings where to avoid if they don't want to be shish kebab-ed by a rebar. 

I returned to Kentucky last Friday with a plan. As you can see from my attached images, the map of Needle Cave is not only outdated but also missing a legend. I figured that if I could get some data on the length of the system, then I could pinpoint the location of F.D. above ground. I have a general sense of how Needle intersects with my town, but knowing the exact coordinates of First Date would significantly narrow my search area for hidden passages to the underground.

Now, I'm not exactly a licensed cartographer, so if the process I'm about to describe makes no sense, please someone for the love of God tell me so I don't make a fool out of myself in the future.

Our surveying process would rely on a modified station-to-station compass and "tape" method. We planned to establish a series of stations, aka markers we'd leave behind at every major bend or junction. For the stations, we'd use numbered reflective masonry nails and a bit of flagging tape. For the actual data collection, I bought a Bosch laser rangefinder off of Amazon. I also "borrowed" a Brunton Pocket Transit from my Dad's old field gear (thank God he had one, because those things cost a fortune.) 

For every leg of the trip between our stations, Jacob and I planned to record the distance with the laser rangefinder, use the Brunton's compass to take an azimuth reading for our horizontal direction, and use the clinometer to measure the inclination. Once we had the full set of vectors, I could plot the cave's skeleton and overlay it onto Google Earth to see exactly what surface landmarks sit directly above the First Date pinch point.

On Sunday afternoon, Jacob and I entered Needle through the farm entrance. It typically takes us 45 minutes to get from the cave mouth to the cavern that hosts First Date. The quickest route is only around 600 meters, but there are some tight squeezes that take a long time to traverse. I thought it would take us three hours to finish our survey, but that turned out to be a gross underestimate due to our inexperience and to the number of twists and turns in the passageway. 

After three hours, we were maybe 60% done. We had just reached a wide, steep pothole that would take us down to the deeper sections of Needle. The drop is about 11 feet, and the smooth rock made it a real painful (and dangerous) feature to scale back when I was younger. In 2023, me and my best friend from high school decided to make the descent more manageable by installing some permanent hardware. We hauled in a hammer drill and a few stainless steel expansion bolts, anchoring them directly into the ceiling's solid limestone and then rigging a length of rope. It transformed a sketchy chimney-climb into something much simpler, effectively bridging the gap between the upper cave sections and the more technical passages below. 

On Sunday evening, when I turned the corner to that pit, I saw something that gave me pause. The rope was swinging back and forth. The motion was minimal, just a matter of centimeters, but in a setting so still, it was impossible not to notice. Obviously, there was no draft at that point in the tunnel. I motioned for Jacob to stop talking and the two of us crouched in silence, straining our ears in vain for the sounds of another caver. After a minute, I called out a "hello" and waited, but the cave was as silent as ever. 

The notion of someone else in the darkness ahead of us was a little disconcerting, but not so much that I felt compelled to turn back. I'm sure that sounds nuts to some of you, but I'd like to point out that a) I was carrying a gun, and b) the reason for this whole cartography sidequest was that the threat I was looking for was in an unreachable part of the caves. I figured we were fine as long as we stayed out of spear's-reach of the F.D. pinch point. Jacob was even less concerned than I was. He's been a surprisingly good sport about the whole cave-people thing, probably because he doesn't believe me. I think he just feels bad about me retrieving his phone from a tunnel with a corpse in it. 

It took us just under six hours to get to First Date, mostly because we kinda half-assed the last quarter of the route. Despite the motion in the rope, we neither saw nor heard any other cavers for the duration of our descent. At one point, not far from our destination, I thought I heard a clattering noise from ahead of us, like someone had dropped something small onto the floor. 

When we got to F.D., I peered inside, trying to estimate the length of the passageway. As my light fell upon the pinch point, it illuminated a dark stain on the wall. I remembered how the corpse had been violently forced through the tight opening, how its skin had split open on the jagged rock. If the cops had been inside the cavern at all, they'd performed a poor excuse of a crime-scene clean-up. 

I lowered my gaze and found, about halfway between the pinch point and the mouth of First Date, a small, beige rock on the cave floor. Taking a closer look, I realized that it wasn't a rock at all, but actually a crumpled-up piece of paper. Intrigued, I shrugged off my pack and squeezed my way into First Date, doing my best not to think of what had happened the last time I'd been inside. Luckily, the paper wasn't nearly as deep into the passageway as Jacob's phone had been. I got to it pretty quickly, then stepped over it and used my feet to kick it back towards the entrance, since the passage too narrow to bend down in.

Fast forwarding a bit, Jacob and I made our ascent without incident and I took our measurements, along with our surprise find, back home. What I found turned out to be two pieces of paper, seemingly torn from an English translation of Racine's Athalie, tied with black thread around a small chunk of limestone. I initially discarded the torn pages altogether, thinking that they were simply protective wrapping for the rock. When I took a closer look, however, I saw a message scrawled onto one of the papers. I've uploaded a photo of the paper if you want to try to decipher it, though I doubt you'll have any luck.

Both Pages: https://imgur.com/a/both-pages-bIVR8Rh 

Close-Up of Message: https://imgur.com/a/handwritten-note-close-up-aVfHnF9 

The message, as far as I'm aware, is complete gibberish. I initially thought it was German because of all the "ö"s, but I'm pretty sure it's a made-up language. Maybe some kids playing pretend or trying to do some witchy shit like summon the dead man's ghost. Who knows. Anyway, I think the following is an accurate transcription of the message, just in case any of you happen to know it's language: 

Tlakwé-nöli-öm, wel tláwen: wolüen khö-tlösh-em. — Tsövel

There's one more notable detail from Sunday evening, though I'm hesitant to bring it up out of concern that I'm finally losing my grip. However, even if I've hallucinated the whole thing—and what I saw in First Date was just some side effect of a gas leak—I figure I should probably jot it down for my future psychiatrist anyway.

It was dusk when Jacob and I finally emerged from Needle. It was a beautiful evening, and it was so nice to breathe in the fresh air again that we took a longer, more scenic route back to our street. One of the streets en route back to our house takes us into a wealthy part of the neighborhood. The houses here are those massive, old-money Kentucky estates—grand brick Colonials and Greek Revivals with manicured lawns and thickets of blooming dogwood. The air smelled like cut grass and honeysuckle instead of wet limestone, and for a minute, the caves felt like they belonged to a different planet.

As we walked, the sky deepened into a dark navy, and one by one, the windows of those big houses began to glow. With the sun down, the interiors turned into bright, warm little lightboxes, making the whole street look like a series of dioramas. Since it was a balmy summer night, a lot of the families had their windows thrown open to catch the breeze. I could see a family gathered around their dinner table; a couple pouring glasses of wine in their kitchen; the flicker of a massive TV screen in someone's living room.

But despite the pleasant scenes unfolding all around me, I felt ill at ease. The closer we got to the end of the block, the more I felt that familiar, skin-crawling sensation of being watched. We were on a bucolic street with families just yards away on all sides, but I suddenly felt as though there was something horrible closing in on us. Something purely instinctual told me to look to my right.

In the final house on the corner, standing right against a front-facing window, was one of the men from First Date. There was no doubt in my mind that it was the one who'd jabbed that rusted rebar at me. He looked exactly as he had in the tunnel, grimy and out of place against the expensive wallpaper and the soft glow of a chandelier. He was leaning forward, his forehead almost touching the pane, staring directly at me with that same manic, jagged grin. Seeing that face peering out from a million-dollar home felt like a glitch in reality.

I grabbed Jacob and pointed frantically at the window. "Do you see that?" I remember asking, practically shouting right into his ear. "Do you see him too?" Seconds after the words left my mouth, the man reached an arm out of view, presumably for a lightswitch, and the house was plunged into darkness. 

"Uh, I saw someone," Jacob said. He offered to go knock on the door of the house, I told him absolutely not, and then the two of us booked it home; I didn't want to try my luck any further that day. 

I don't know what to make of what I saw that evening. I was able to dig up some information on the house and found that it is registered to a Mr. Ward, who may very well have been the man Jacob and I saw at the window. But if he was also the man I saw in F.D., well … that throws a bit of a wrench in my initial cave-dweller hypothesis. The only upside to seeing the man's nightmarish face again is that, unless I truly hallucinated his visage, it seems to confirm the existence of a secret entrance to whatever lay beyond First Date.  

I have my work cut out for me, between my updated map of Needle and my attempts to find more information on this Mr. Ward. Hopefully, by my next update, I'll have some more satisfying answers to this little dilemma. It would sure put my mind at ease to know for certain if there was some threat waiting for me out there in the dark, and whether it lay in the labyrinthine corridors beneath my feet or in the charming homes of my very own neighbors. 

Update 5/5: Forgot to mention, but I started TikTok account to post pictures and videos of the caves. Yeah yeah I know this is egregious self promo but I really need somewhere to share smaller updates between these longer Reddit posts. My user is masonchapman69 but no worries if you don’t want to follow—the stuff I post there is all “supplementary” and the important stuff will live here on Reddit.