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Broadcast Interruption



Estimated reading time — 4 minutes

You might already have heard of the TV broadcast hijacking in Seneca, South Carolina; the story’s gained pretty wide currency on the Internet, and part of the broadcast is available on youtube, assuming it hasn’t been taken down for whatever reason. For the uninitiated, the Seneca hijacking is one of the lesser-known broadcast signal intrusions. It was big news here, but the nation news media barely touched on it. Anyway, I’ve decided to jot down my impressions of the whole thing, even though other eyewitnesses have already described it more eloquently than I could.

I was home on winter break when it happened, making chemistry flashcards in front of the TV. No one else was around. After watching the umpteenth Law and Order rerun, I got bored and started channel surfing. A couple minutes later, I stumbled onto this shitty public access channel where, bizarrely enough, my old high school Latin teacher was reciting a poem while wearing this dorky three-cornered hat. I watched for a few minutes and had a good laugh—I remembered him as a pretty serious guy, not the sort of person who’d embarrass himself in public like this—when suddenly there was this static-y crackle and the screen cut to this multi-colored test pattern.

Before I had time to change the channel, there’s another crackle and this weird cartoon shows up on screen. The animation style was detailed, but kind of jiggly and rough—it reminded me of those old anti-drug PSAs. Anyway, it seemed “normal” enough at first—an ordinary-looking middle class family eating breakfast together at a round kitchen table. There was a mom with an old-fashioned hairdo, a dad, two cherub-faced kids, a boy and a girl—all very Norman Rockwell. The family is making banal small talk: the dad complains about his day at the office, the kids prattle on about soccer practice, and so on. Gradually, though, the scene starts to get slightly sinister—a green light is seeping through the open window, and the family starts to acquire a jaundiced, unhealthy look: their skin changes color and their eyes become sunken. In the background, a droning radio broadcast slowly becomes perceptible: the announcer gives the date as November 15th, 2017, and starts to go on and on about some strange crisis—you can barely hear what he’s saying. He says something about a green light, melting flesh, mutations, strange shapes emerging from the sea; again and again, the phrase “Report to the nearest shelter immediately” is audible. Still, the family keeps eating breakfast as if nothing was happening.

And here’s where it gets really macabre. The family finishes eating breakfast and the mom loads the kids into a minivan. By now they look *really* unhealthy: their bodies are skeletally thin, the whites of their eyes are a sickly yellowish color, and their hair is disheveled. The car drives through a landscape bathed in the green glow from before. Strange shapes bob in and out of the screen, but you can’t quite tell what they are, and all the buildings the car passes look weathered and deserted. Finally, the car stops at a playground and the mom drops off the kids before driving away. There are large, odd-colored rocks all over the ground and moaning can be heard in the distance. The kids hang mirthlessly on the monkey bars for a while. Eventually, the camera pans over the playground, and you see that the rocks littering the ground aren’t rocks at all but naked human forms, horribly disfigured. They seemed to be either growing into or from the ground—I can’t say which. And they are very much alive. Behind the monkey bars, a tree can be seen with a human face growing from the trunk—its features are writhing and contorted in agony.

The scene suddenly shifts to a white collar office where the children’s father is stooped over a desktop, typing away. His features are as sunken and diseased as that of the other family members, and the office is covered in a green glow. In the other cubicles, fleshless corpses sit upright at their desks, frozen in death.

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Finally, we see the family return home for the evening, walking through the front door together. Their skin is no longer simply jaundiced but actually melting off—dripping from their outstretched arms and running down their faces in drops. As they are literally falling to pieces, the family sits down in the dining room and begins wordlessly to eat dinner. Their flesh becomes more and more amorphous, ribbons of skin dangling from their bodies like the tendrils of an octopus. I can barely describe it, but they somehow begin to…merge with the chairs they are seated on—or rather, their skin grows over them. By now, their skin has the consistency of melted ice cream, and they are barely recognizable as human—except for their eyes, which somehow remain intact. The camera zooms closer and closer to the table, and finally their eyes all move directly towards the camera, conveying a feeling of unfathomable sadness. The screen goes black and large white letters appear on the screen: “Report to the nearest shelter immediately. Remaining at private residences is strictly prohibited.” And with that, the screen turned to static. I stared in stunned silence for a few minutes before the banal local channel switched back on.

And that’s all I know, really. I almost thought I was dreaming until the paper reported the story the next day. God knows what really happened: a ridiculously elaborate prank? An ill-advised viral marketing campaign? The crazier parts of the Internet have their own theories. You can look up the video yourself if you’re morbidly curious.

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Credit: 4chan

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69 thoughts on “Broadcast Interruption”

  1. Im really glad i finally clicked on this one. The writing is refreshing in that it has no glaring errors. The story is original(to me at least). I would like to read more from this author or at least more in the same style. Damn that was eerie.

  2. GREAT STORY I JUST WISH IT WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE IN DETAIL! KEEP IT UP YOUR DOING GREAT JUST! ADD A LITTLE MORE TO IT NEXT TIME IT DID GIVE ME CHILLS BUT NOT AS MUCH AS I WANTED AN I GET SCARED EASY BUT AGAIN GREAT JOB WAY BETTER PASTA THAN THE OTHERS I HAVE READ THAT I DONT EVEN KNOW WHY ARE ON THIS WEB SITE!!! BUT YOURS IS DEF DESERVED ON HERE GOOD JOB!

  3. Legendary stalker

    I’m not here for long, but let me just say that the nuke reactor, it’s decaying, it was a warning video

  4. xXPerfectXGenocideXx

    sometimes you just wish a little to hard for these things to be true, this is one of those times, for me anyway. the only creepypasta ive found to be loosley based on actual events however , is kagome, kagome. do to vary quick resurce and a bit of common sense, i found this :
    http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120611195340AACd2FF
    wether or not you balive this is up to you, at any rate, there are other creepypastas based on games or videos that though the story itself is untrue, there are things about them that have been pulled from reality , such as rap rat. though there was an actual bored game, and video , the origin that follows is untrue, and just for fun. after looking for this
    i have found that ( to my utter dissapointment) this is one that has no real base or any ties to a real event.

  5. This is one of my all-time favourite pastas. Nuclear apocalypse/disaster/war has always been terrifying to me (I also have a morbid interest in it so I love stories like these).

    The broadcast could be a warning from the future, signal somehow from another dimension or secret government cartoon.
    It reminds me of Fallout too, which is a plus for me.

  6. this scared the heck out of me please i need help finding out if this might happen and…..is it me or did the ad in this story tell how the simpisons were made here my feeling what happened after the family melted: after the skin fell off yellow skin growed on and the people and family became what we call the simpison and in 2017 you and i mean ALL OF YOU WILL BE YELLOW SO………WERE F**KED!…….

  7. I realize this pasta is a year or so old..but I just read it for the first time and fell in love!I immediatley reread the entire thing!it was just awsome!!great job!

  8. It may not be real but i would like someone (maybe a art student?) to make something for everyone to watch it would make it that much scarier :)

  9. Actually the Seneca Hijacking is a real broadcast interruption…. it just wasn’t like this,it was a 1-3 minute video of a guy in a mask swirling around in a chair saying and doing weird crap. But this would’ve been creepy as fuck!

  10. Who knows? When i really think about how realistic this is i get goosebumps, The government can be our own demise by a failed experiment of some sort, Please nobody bring up zombies.

  11. Hmmm… Something is making me want to make an animation of the cartoon, on my own… Anyone want me to, just for the sake of being able to see what the video might’ve looked like, had it been real?

    1. I was going to beg someone to do just that – and this is several months later, did you go for it?
      I loved this – genuinely creepy imagery without TOO much plot getting in the way.

  12. you know this is some good pasta when everyone is debating whether it is real or not. i’m so tempted to google this….you never know.

    great job.

  13. Pretty good, I liked the descriptiveness. 8/10
    @The Lone Wanderer
    It reminded me of Fallout as well!
    @Brianna
    THE GOVERNMENT IS ERASING IT FROM OUR MINDS!!!!!!!!!!!!

  14. Is there or is there not an actual video, because I really would like to see it. Post a link if you find it please.

  15. Yeah that makes since, they are covering it up… thats why the story is right here, but not on any news networks, video sharing sites, or thepiratesbay, seems legit CandleJack what do you have to say abo

  16. I actually got goosebumps reading this. A great story, but insanely freaky. If this was real I would start building a shelter in my garden right now. 10/10

  17. I found out, creepily enough, that a neighboring city has a nuclear reactor. Soooo. Kinda sounds as if it were a prediction. I wouldn’t doubt it being covered up

  18. This was actually really nice. I guess it might be because I live close to SC. I enjoyed it. Its awesome because its so realisitic

  19. This was a nice story and the Government COULD be covering it up.
    Face It. The world is a terrible place,everyone only thinks of themselves.
    10/10 I love how this pasta is “different”. Like Squidward’s suicide.

  20. @Help.. That’s funny, but it doesn’t matter human’s are meant to die and rot. Everyone’s going to die whether we think we’re not. I hate life. good bye fellow people.

    1. Bro, are you really saying stuff that that and meaning it? It isn’t cool man. You can be as pessimistic as you would like, but don’t try to poison another person’s happyness.

  21. I saw the same video… it was like a dream…only.. on television? I’ve been having strange nightmares ever since and… a man came to my door yesterday saying “The end is near! Seek Shelter! Gaseous percausions will take over!” Someone help me…

  22. I loved this more than words can describe. GREAT change of pace around here.
    I thought about this before I fell asleep, you know?
    Like I read it, forgot about it, and my mind drudged it up when I was all safe and cozy.
    That’s how you know it’s frickin’ good.

  23. Sweettooth-esque if you have read that series by jeff lemire. i piture the caracter how gus´ dad decayed in the first volume. Vertigo put the series out a while ago and is ongoing, trippy and i highly suggest it. love the imagry and it dragged me into the story quite well.

  24. Sweettooth-esque if you have read that series by jeff lemire. i piture the caracter how gus´ dad decayed in the first volume. Vertigo put the series out a while ago and is ongoing, trippy and i highly suggest it. love the imagry and it dragged me into the story quite well.

  25. I agree with the lone wanderer, this is very fallout-esque. An old fashioned family falls into a life of death and decay, and life on earth starts to vanish. This could be a metaphor or just a real life story. Either way, I’m lookin it up.

  26. The Lone Wanderer

    This reminded me of Fallout 3 for some reason…
    That aside, great story.

    @Anthony: there is no video. It’s just a story.

    1. It’s fake. Very well written and exactly what I was looking for (I love how without flat out saying it the story seems to imply an otherworldly origin to the broadcast with the alien visuals and the simple fact that no pranksters would animate something so complex) but a quick search on google reveals that the only mention of this “TV broadcast hijacking in Seneca” is on horror story sites like this.

      1. Looking up “seneca hijacking” mostly shows you to the Max Headroom broadcast, but that’s not it, either. There’s sadly no actual Seneca hijacking video, quite unlike other video-based pastas.

  27. This one I actually quite liked. This is refreshing in that the story teller (after viewing this oddity) doesn’t end up dad in a ditch somewhere or running for his life in the woods. I love how the narrator describes the surreal scene of the family slowly decaying and the cruel example of the message that follows. It might just be my overly vivid imagination, but I give this a 8/10.

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