SCP Foundation

Down in Mammoth Cave, is where his body laid,
The walls caved in, life could not be saved,
No man-made machine could see the things he'd seen,
Mr. Collins, you did not die in vain!
Black Stone Cherry - Ghost of Floyd Collins

Big heckin' scip here. One of the longer things I've ever written. Original draft was last Decemberish and I got a wild hair to go back over it this last week. It might still be a bit unwieldy, but this also feels like the best I can get it. Hope you all like it.

Thanks to Hippo (a year ago!) and BlueJones for giving me crit on the IRC. Hippo also gave me a much better idea for how to handle Floyd. Thanks also to my real-life buddies Carl and Rasheab for proofreading and feedback too.

The image of Sand Cave was borrowed from:

Original Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_Cave.jpg
Creator: Nicholas Frost

(The picture of Floyd has been reprinted in just about every book and article on the subject and I can't track down the original photographer. As near as I can tell it's public domain since it's 90+ years old at this point. I'll remove it if there's any evidence to the contrary.)

Aside from a few things (such as missing the Item #: SCP-3572 and Object Class: Euclid), it looks pretty good to me.

It says in the Vietnamese police report:

He was black-haired

but then a few lines later it says

The proprietors have promised to watch for a blond American

Overall, pretty good, though it's unclear if the cave in Kentucky is linked to the one in Vietnam, in which case the bit about "only accessible through a singular surface entry" doesn't make sense.

You know, I’ll say this isn’t the most intriguing anomaly, that it’s a bit long for the amount of provided intrigue, and the whole “ghost that roams these caves” bit is a tad cliche, but the article is engaging in its prose to me (I wanted to finish it), it gives us a really layered support for the cliche, is based on some real-life stuff, and I found myself thinking about this article fondly several days after I read it.

So all that indicates to me this is worthy of a +1, even if there are some intangibles as to my reasoning why.

Edit: I have a real fear of spelunking and falling down crevices in caves. Maybe that’s all that’s going on on my end here. But I feel like there’s more.

Also, I would’ve normally kept track of things like this to change them for you, but I know there were some syntactical and grammatical errors in this. Not many.

While out-right stating "SCP-3572-1 is a ghost" made me a bit wary going into this, the journal entries and the eerie mystery of the cave made up for it. Gave a good Ted the Caver vibe.

Quick question: was Floyd's inscription on the totem pole the same one that ends up on his grave?