Lavender Town: The Fear of Knowing

Preface
''It is advised that you read this preface to fully understand the nature of this story. It is not necessary to the story, but it details my subjective opinions on this encounter.''

Does anybody really believe in ghosts anymore? And if they do, surely they don't believe that they can cause any harm to you. This isn't a set of instructions on how to communicate with ghosts or otherworldly beings, so don't get your hopes up.

This is also not a 'creepypasta'. This is indeed real. I hope I can prove to you with the following story and video that there are things that are not of this physical world out there, and the marks they leave are very small, but can be found if you are looking. Whether you believe me or not is up to you.

Ghosts are widely documented around the world from various cultures that have had no contact with each other until recently, in this modern age. The idea of a 'spiritual plane' is very common too. Lastly, these separate societies all have very similar tales about encounters with spirits, often in vivid detail. So, the question today is, where are they now?

The point in history that sparked the revolution of information communication from around the world was the advent of electrical power. It was, not coincidentally, that reports of paranormal encounters started to dwindle.

What really happened? Where did all the ghosts go? You probably have guessed it by now!!!

Introduction
Many rumors and creepypastas has come out of the original Japanese Pokemon Red & Green versions. Suicides, murders, conspiracies, you name it. Most of them are based out of Lavender Town, a location in the game that is infamous for it's unsettling music and setting, which seems out of place for an otherwise happy, cheerful, and innocent game.

There is only one confirmed story about Lavender Town, and that is that many kids that played the game suffered nausea after playing in that area. This is due to the high frequencies that are present in the music, coupled with the fact that children usually have a higher hearing range than adults. When the game was ported to America in the forms of Red & Blue, the music was changed, and that was the end of it.

Or, it would have been, had it not been for the explosion of popularity in Internet use in the following years. On popular video hosting sites like Youtube, people began to upload their own myths and creepypastas about the Lavender Town music. None were even close to the truth, except one.

It is a relatively new creepypasta that explores the idea of hidden frequencies in the Lavender Town theme that the Game Boy's sound card couldn't handle at the time. When it was ported to the computer as a ROM, there were reports that the original Lavender Town theme from Japan had hidden, darker undertones that were audible in an HD sound system.

The story goes that a friend of the writer, who was a sound engineer, killed himself after adding the necessary frequencies into the Lavender Town theme that couldn't have been put into the original audio because of the Game Boy's audio restrictions. Of course, the story is not true, but the idea still stands. This is the closest story to the actual truth.

The Beginning
I mentioned to you before in this story that these are not instructions on how to communicate with the dead, or any paranormal force for that matter. This is, rather, a story on how I witnessed such incidents, and how you can too. I will explain later.

My childhood friend and former roommate Teddy and I are computer hackers. We don't belong to a group or organization, we don't create malicious software or any of that junk. The most we do is the occasional software crack or programming mods for various games. We don't have too much time to screw around, as we're both working full-time jobs and taking classes at school. I've got a social life, a girlfriend, and a very tight-knit family to attend to as well. But, being a sucker for creepypasta, and reading about the Lavender Town missing frequencies, I wanted to test it out. We knew (thought, rather) that it was merely just an urban legend, and we really didn't expect anything.

So, on a Thursday night, when I knew everyone would be free the next day, I called up my other friend Kevin, who works as a sound engineer to produce music for local bands (underground music, of course. Nothing too big). I invited him over to my apartment, and told him that I had a project that I needed help with. I didn't disclose what it was, I wanted him to be there when I tell him.

The next day, Kevin is over my house along with Teddy. I explain to them my interest in the Lavender Town story. I was expecting them to joke about it at first, or comment that I was wasting my time on a kid's game, but they almost promptly agreed to help. As mentioned before, at the time we thought we wouldn't find anything; we were doing this just for fun. We hung out for a few hours, and eventually they left. Probably forgetting about the project, I assumed.

That night, I fired up eBay and tried to find a mint-condition Japanese Pokemon Red or Green. I got one – a Green Version cartridge, that looked good for 25 bucks. A good deal, considering the condition of the game (it was barely even used) and the relative rarity of something like this.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">I had almost forgotten about the project myself until the cartridge arrived in the mail two weeks later. I immediately got to work porting it over as a ROM, and then copying it to a flash drive. If anyone's wondering, the reason I didn't just download it from the Internet is because I wanted to have the best, uncompressed game quality I could get. I made arrangements to meet at Kevin's house whenever all three of us had the opportunity. We all agreed on the next Saturday night.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">On that night, at Kevin's house, I spent nearly three hours isolating and decoding all the files associated with Lavender Town (including dialogue, side quests, and items such as the Silph Scope), and then eliminating all the useless data. The sound wasn't just what I wanted. I also had my eyes set on other notable parts that seemed to arise in other creepypasta, such as the ghost in Pokemon Tower. Although my main focus was the sound, I wanted to save the other code just in case it had something to do with the missing frequencies.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">We took the sound file to Kevin's home studio, which was equipped with the latest sound enhancement and manipulation systems of this time. Although I was never an audiophile, Kevin recommended that I save the sound file as a FLAC so that he could truly analyze the sound uncompressed and lossless. He was up all night, finding out and adding in the missing frequencies that were mentioned in the creepypasta.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">In the beginning, we were doing this just for fun. We were going to add to the aforementioned creepypasta, to try and further the story. The music of Lavender Town was always thought of as creepy, but there was never a solid reason why. The melody truly wasn't that disturbing on it's own, even when it was placed in the middle of an otherwise cheery setting. We found out, a month from then, why Lavender Town was so creepy.

The Creepypasta
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">Kevin wasn't done, and he invited us over for the next Friday night after he was finished. He was done for the most part, he said, but he wanted to make sure he had it exactly right. We agreed, and a week later Teddy and I were again at his house.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">This time, he was finished, and he had something very surprising to show us. He had a sound file of the Lavender Town music looping for about five hours and two minutes. The 'missing frequencies' were put in there, sometimes loud and obnoxious humming or screeching. For the most part, however, they were subtle, quiet, and nearly unnoticeable. The actual 'loop' did not actually complete until the large sound file ended.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">Really though, it was nothing more than weird, creepy noises inserted into already creepy music. We figured as much, as it was just a creepypasta. It was then when Teddy suggested that we write our own creepypasta about our experiences in the past week or so. We had to make it original, as well as giving a unsettling tone to it, so we decided that we write a story about converting the sound file into text.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">Teddy was the brains behind this. He was a writer, and wrote short horror stories for a webzine. His style was heavily inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, so I knew he would come up with something good in a setting like this. The story, in summery, went like this:

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">''The three of us were trying to recreate the creepypasta about the missing frequencies in Lavender Town. After doing this and finding nothing totally creepy or disturbing about it, Teddy suggested we convert the sound files into text. When we opened the text file and translated the long string of binary code in reverse, we uncovered a story about a young Japanese women getting raped and murdered by a serial killer.''

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">Of course, partly just for laughs and partly to validate our story, we tried to do just that. I converted the video into a text file, broke down the corrupted, cryllic characters into pure binary code, reversed it, and ran it through an English translator. Nothing unusual, just a string of random letters.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">And then I tried another thing, just for fun. I converted the code into a video.

What We Found
<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">At first, when I did this, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. A bunch of flashing lights, random beeping sounds, the usual outcome of converting pure audio into pure video.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">And then a picture flashed for a split second. So fast, that I couldn't see exactly what it was, but it was enough that I could distinguish it as different than the rest of the video. I then isolated the picture in a still frame, and found that it was a photo of a forest in late summer or early autumn. It was heavily distorted; some colors were missing, along with many pieces of the picture, and the whole photo was in terrible quality.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">I was both intrigued and freaked out at the same time. It was then when we began to realize that there is more to Lavender Town than just stories.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">I took the file home and began to manipulate the data some more. I began to add in the other isolated code that I previously shelved to try and see if it made any difference to the picture. It did. Some of the raw data from the Silph Scope quest (including Team Rocket's base), the scripted encounter with Marrowak's ghost, and some of the dialogue from the possessed Channelers in Pokemon Tower directly fit in to the data of the forest picture. Although the picture was still of bad quality, the color balances were fairly normal and most of the pixels were intact.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">As I was improving the quality of that one picture, more pictures began to show in the video. Most of them were of the same autumn forest, but taken at different angles and locations. One, however, was different. The picture was taken in a dark room, one that looked like a basement. There was a distorted humanoid figure staring past the camera. The only way I could put it in perspective is comparing it to Slenderman, plus a disfigured, pale head.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">This really freaked me out. But I was not one to quit when I came across something like this. I believed in ghosts, and have had some personal encounters when I was a child. I wasn't superstitious and I didn't believe in magic. I figured that there was a scientific explanation for everything, even ghosts. We just haven't discovered it yet.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">I showed Teddy, and his reaction was very different. He didn't want anything to do with the project anymore. He wouldn't answer my phone calls or my emails toward him, and he was the only one I knew that could help me from this point forward. So I drove to his house and forced him to talk to me.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">At this point, I kept uncovering more and more pictures, and by now I realized that they began to form into a video. The frames were all jumbled up in the sequence, though, so it would take some time, aside from the hours it would take to decode all the pictures and improve their quality, to assemble the video. I needed his help.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">After nearly an hour and a half of arguing, he reluctantly agreed to help me. He came from a deeply religious family, and naturally he was very superstitious, so I imagined this would be hard for him.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">I am not going to explain the month that ensued after that day in detail. What we did, though, was work hours on end, constantly decoding, compiling, and rearranging the still frames. We would spend entire weekends on our computers. We would take days off of work and school. We were sleep and food-deprived. We were just about to collapse from fatigue when we finished.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in;">I am also not going to try and explain the video to you. I want you to see for yourself. I will end my story with this: This is real. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.

Postscript 12/27: The new video is (somewhat) done
I have finished the video that I have been working on since Thanksgiving vacation. I have put up the first half of this video on Youtube (I am refining and putting the finishing touches on the second half)

As you can see, there is not much to watch on this one, as this is the first time that I encountered relatively uncorrupted sound bytes. I decided to piece them together, so the video itself (which is nothing much) is really not the focus here.

-Pat CreepyGames (talk) 21:47, October 14, 2012 (UTC)