Please note: this story was provided by the author and published as is.
It’s a terrible habit –doomscrolling. Not something I’d happily admit to doing in any normal circumstances, but in light of all that’s happened, I think it’s important that people know this.
This is how I found ferryman0.
I was a late adopter of Tiktok– loyal to an old phone that could barely receive text messages. Once it died and I was forced to upgrade, the world changed for me. I became instantly hooked. The snappy train of videos began to occupy the pockets of boredom in my life. Those pockets seemed to stretch as I dove head first into the never-ending rabbit holes that existed on the platform. Your experience could be anything you wanted it to be—a comedy reprieve, a learning pow-wow, a place to vent. And best of all, everything was tailored to you. Force fed by this magical algorithm that no one understood, it knew you better than you knew yourself.
And apparently I wanted tragedy.
It didn’t start out that way, no. First I tried to leverage the app. With the tightened job market and my general lack of employable skills, my parents suggested that I start my own podcast to help fill the void. They even spotted me the equipment. Pops sold his construction company in the early 90’s as his mobility began to deteriorate. They had me later in life and both seemed generally happy. Two prime examples of having your shit together. I took them up on that idea with very little passion or direction of my own. I decided to just start doing it, ‘fake it till you make it’, as they say.
My content was mainly interviews at home with local artists and entrepreneurs. I hosted pop up shops in my neighbourhood in order to showcase local businesses. The goal was to put their brand on notice and my name out into the community. It’s all about connections, my father used to tell me. You need opened doors first before you can close them. As a prospective business major, it made sense.
I clipped the full-length videos and uploaded them with carefully curated hashtags. I stitched, dueted, and reacted to as many trending start-up clips that I could find. Think Garry Vee to Grant Cardone to every viral TikTok sensation peddling business courses online.
My early watch history would have consisted solely of business advice– entrepreneurship, sales strategies, and the glamorous side of hustle culture. Dry, a little cringe, but somewhat constructive.
And then somewhere along the way…it changed.
Tanya and I had called it quits after living on the same block since we were six, dating all the way through junior high up until most of senior year. We were due for college on separate coastlines the following fall, and as Tanya helped me recognize, not everything was meant to work out perfectly, sometimes practicality and a longing for what’s out there just bore more weight. Match that with the dwindling success of the podcast and my father getting sick, and everything I ever knew began to crumble before my eyes.
I was lonely…to say the least. Late at night with nothing to do, I spent hours and hours combing through a flurry of videos. News stories, political debates, and conspiracy theories began to take over my feed. All with the general consensus that we were all fucked.
Then, slowly, I began to gravitate towards stories of people who had suffered great loss. The grieving parents of passengers trapped on a commercial airliner found in pieces. Personal testimony from survivors of school shootings. Drone footage from a distant war. It’s shameful to admit that such misery could provide me comfort. A shared suffering that I could relate to on some tiny, miniscule scale. Or, maybe, a distraction. Some sad attempt at feeling something. Real shit was going on to real people every day, and my life was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. Clearly I was far from alone based on the sheer number of comments and likes these videos were generating. These sort of disasters….they resonated.
And, eventually, the algorithm led him to me.
The unassuming wooden skiff floated through a calm body of water. The first emergence of light bled through the wall of clouds above. A figure, nothing more than a shadow, clasped the oar amongst the fog. The only audio was the calm splash of waves created by the rowing.
The caption read:
We all travel the river alone.
Creepy….and seemingly random. The dreary setting and rocking motion had a dream-like feel to it. Like I couldn’t tell if it was real or some sort of cryptic A.I. rendering. The splashing was calm, almost hypnotic. It wasn’t like anything I had viewed before.
After a couple of loops I swiped it away, in search of the next video.
Another half an hour of scrolling went by before a second video hits my feed that feels out of place. This one was simpler, but just as strange. The low-res camera was zoomed up to a shot of a spinning coin. There was the rhythmic sound of metal as it scratched against the surface of the concrete. It circled past a web of cracked pavement, past an outcrop of weeds that crept in through the rubble. As the blur of movement faded, you could tell the coin was old. The metal was oxidized along the edges, chipped and brittle around the ornate vines that bordered the stern face of a monarch. It looked like it belonged to another country, another era.
The caption: The toll to pay
I was astonished by the videos simplicity and the amount of interest it had generated. None of my videos had ever received a fraction of that attention, and they certainly required a lot more effort than spinning a damn coin.
Most of commenters seemed lost, like: what the hell are we watching?
The reactions sparked my interest, and I began to dig into ferryman0’s profile.
It was the weirdest account I’d ever seen.
The videos weren’t tragic in any sense…just utterly strange. Eerie. Like some bored emo kid’s art project eagerly released into the wild. None of the videos resembled the first one on the boat, but each had its own underlying mystery that drew you in.
A blurred flurry of branches and dirt as the camera bobbed up and down uncontrollably. All that could be heard were the laboured breaths of running.
Created by: Danny Ingrassia
I swiped, each one more unusual and out of place than the next:
A pano shot of what looked like a construction site after dark.
Swipe – the grainy video of a modest bedroom, the sound of snoring.
Swipe- the sounds of the city, streaks of light from the nearby high-rises and apartment buildings, and the sound of pattering rain.
Hundreds of people were leaving comments. It all felt like a puzzle waiting to be solved. People speculated about the whereabouts of the videos. Where was he going to pop up next? And, of course, the ever illusive – why?
Others claimed they started to see him floating the river in their dreams. Some alleged that it was their grandmother, their aunt, their best friend, lying in that boat. Claims were being made from all across the world. It drew me to revisit the first video. Toward the foredeck there was a brief pause where you could make out a vague shadow of black, like something was laid along the floor. Some broken pixels along its edge were being interpreted as toes.
I soon became immersed in the lore myself, but I couldn’t deny that I was a little jealous. For every comment that I left filled with my own theories there were two or three from me shitting on the videos.
Potato quality. Low effort. Lame. Fake.
I even sprinkled in some playful lies to feed the enigma. Fake names of victims. Fake locations. Fake links of unsolved cold cases. It had become a little game, and all of my friends were sent links.
Weeks passed before, out of the blue, ferryman0 went AWOL. I caught myself stalking his profile, re-watching his old videos. Then months went by, and I finally accepted that the account had gone dead. Maybe the creator had grown bored and found better things to occupy his time.
By summer I had found work at a nearby sandwich shop. With a steady paycheck now, I could justify going out on the weekends with friends.
One night, on my taxi ride home, a video that could only be ferryman0’s popped up on my feed. It was dark, but I could vaguely make out the decals on the wall: glow in the dark stars, a red sailboat, and smiling sea creatures beneath the glow of a dim nightlight. The crib was empty. But you could hear the shrill cries coming from the dark room. Fifteen seconds at most.
Part of me was excited that he was back….but another part of me felt off about the video…like where was the baby? And why was it not being tended to?
Somewhere within the whirlwind of summer and part-time employment, I had stumbled across a girl I really liked. Things had been going good, and I found myself being more present. I hadn’t opened up the app in weeks until that very moment.
Drunk and out of sorts, I pushed the thoughts away and fell into my bed.
But the video the following night I couldn’t ignore.
The screams howled through my phone’s speaker- deafening and desperate. The blackness swayed in tiny ripples, like you expected at any moment for hands to claw out from beneath the veil, flailing and kicking and scratching for dear life. But nothing ever broke through. The cries continued to loop and loop.
I had to place my phone down. After a moment to collect my thoughts, I returned to the screen and did what any rational person would do: I reported it. This one had gone too far…the pitch in the voice, the agony in it. This one felt all too real and intense and something urged me to make it stop.
Maybe I had finally out-grown it all, I guess. I clicked un-follow, flushed the toilet, then gave my hands a quick scrub before returning to bed.
A couple of hours passed, and lying awake at 3AM, I decided to revisit ferryman0. The video was still up, generating thousands and thousands of views. Surely it had to have violated the apps community guidelines. No one ever read those terms and conditions. But there was no denying those screams were real, coated in distress, maybe torture. And…I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t as evolved as I thought. I just couldn’t walk away.
The overlay was of me, lying in bed, ranting for ten minutes about how disgusting the video was behind me. A floating head with a cowlick, the epitome of low effort. I removed the jarring audio from the original video and just spoke with raw honesty. I was sick of people giving jump-scare, C-level horror the time of day, and when did it all go too far?
That one video garnered more views than any of my past videos combined. I went to bed feeling satisfied for once, thinking maybe I had done a little good. There was pushback, sure, but there were also many others who shared my same sentiments.
The video lingered in the back of my mind until nearly noon. I awoke to a series of pings. The notifications flooded my phone in a flashing frenzy. ferryman1, ferryman2…Suddenly I had hundreds of followers I had never interacted with before, all with the same profile picture as the man on the boat.
ferryman0 was gone.
I jolted upright. Wide awake, I waited for something– a flood of messages from the endless wave of bot accounts that kept popping up. But nothing came.
I deleted as many as I could before giving up and hopping into the shower. The late night escapades had left me groggy and I was dangerously late for work, but my phone kept going off on the counter. So much so, that I decided to delete the app. I was freaked out and done with social media for good. The cravings still arose from time to time, but I tried my best to keep myself preoccupied with real life.
But I couldn’t escape my friends.
The text from my buddy, Paul, came in around midnight, during the hottest night of summer.
Jaden, have you seen this?
Another from Alicia:
Is this real?
I clicked the links and panic shook me like a ragged doll. The video started to pan from the yellowed vinyl siding of a house. A basement window floated into frame under the beam of a flashlight. Then a deserted cul-de-sac emerged as the video bobbed up and down with every step. The wind howled. The cameraman roamed the sleepy street, past parked cars and scattered recycling bins, past the flickering light post that had never been fixed.
And before he got there, I knew. I saw the cherry stucco and the warm glow of my porch light in the darkness.
I froze under the sheets, scrolling through the messages I had received, each one just as concerned as the next:
Are you okay?
I tried to work up the nerve to get up and check the locks on the doors. I peered out my bedroom window and detected no movement past the flickering light post at the center of the cul-de-sac. But I wouldn’t be comfortable until I knew for sure.
The squad car arrived swiftly and searched the property. My parents, dazed and confused, stood by my side with freshly brewed coffee. I showed them the video posted by one of the many ferryman accounts. The officers noted the strange nature of the footage, but weren’t entirely convinced that this was anything other than a prank. They weren’t even sure this was the same place in the video.
When I exhausted all of my pleas for help, they suggested taking up my concerns directly with the app and having the accounts closed.
I sighed as I watched them leave, the neighbourhood still silent and listless.
It wasn’t until morning that I discovered it, twinkling in the morning sun.
A faded schilling, rested upright against one of the spindles on my porch.
My heart battered my chest, my eyes searching the neighbourhood.
The words that I couldn’t keep out of my head:
Pay the toll.
***
I kept finding the coins everywhere. First at the house, then the gym, then the counters at the sandwich shop. I’d never seen so much loose change in my life.
And…I know…it seems silly. But I’ve just found one in my dorm room, half-way across the country. It’s not funny anymore. I’m serious.
Has anyone seen ferryman0?
Does anyone know if it’s real?