With the second EP they introduced the Callous Heart gang with the backpatches.
Their Halloween Homecoming show in 2015 was heavily themed and playing in the background all night was a fake radio show called CRPR radio playing old music (I don’t actually remember anything that played but I’m gonna go with 60s era because that’s the vibe it gave me and the Spectral Sceptic podcast says the majority of Callous Heart sightings have been in the 60s). The presenter kept giving warnings about the Callous Heart gang, describing their backpatches and appearance, and then before Creeper came on stage it had sounds of people breaking into the studio and taking it over.
The preorder for the third EP had the South Coast Coroners tshirt which had a phone number on it; when you called it, it would play a song that sounded like some sort of lullaby but it was too low quality to make out any words so we haven’t worked out what it is. Once the song finishes, you would receive a text saying “where is James Scythe?”. This was the first mention of him.
The third EP also introduced the character the Stranger, a cloaked figure that has various influences from sleep paralysis hallucinations and Pazuzu from the Exorcist to Tick Tock the crocodile from Peter Pan.
The night after they played Leeds Festival (August 27th), pictures of static kept being posted from their Twitter account and the tweets kept being deleted a couple of minutes later. The band tweeted saying they were being hacked and that they weren’t the ones posting the static and had been deleting the tweets. Then, all of their accounts went down, including all their personal twitters and facebooks and instagrams and the band’s accounts on all social media as well; everything to do with them was gone.
After the accounts disappeared, we called the South Coast Coroners number again and it played the same song but sent a new text with a link to a website: whereisjamesscythe.co.uk.
The website has lots of information about the disappearance of a man called James Scythe. You can look yourself, there’s a lot on there - missing posters, news articles, information about his life and job, evidence photos from the scene of his disappearance in the Dolphin Hotel in Southampton, and a video of the Stranger that seems to have been filmed by him and a link to his podcast The Spectral Sceptic.
The podcast has 20 episodes titled after famous urban legends and conspiracy theories. The point of the podcast seems to be to critically analyse the stories and explain/debunk their supernatural elements (similar to the purpose of his previous job). The first 19 episodes contain nothing but static noise, but the 20th episode talking titled The Callous Heart and The Stranger explains the stories of the two Southampton phenomena and how he believes they’re connected, and explains them through links to alien abductions, gangs and sleep paralysis - I’ve got a more detailed description of the podcast that I’ll throw in at the end or you can just listen to it: https://soundcloud.com/james-scythe
The video of the Stranger on the last page of whereisjamesscythe.co.uk was found in James’ abandoned hotel room and seems to suggest that the Stranger was involved in James’ disappearance.
Another evidence photo from the hotel room shows a scrap of paper with an address for the websitehttp://www.strangesouthampton.club/. This site contains similar information to the podcast about folklore in Southampton written by an unknown contributor. There are pages dedicated to The Callous Heart and to The Stranger full of information along with pages pages titled ‘Ghost Walk’, 'Tudor House’, 'Merchants Hall’, 'South Western Hote’ and 'UFOs over Southampton City Center’. This seem to be site or instances of supernatural events in Southampton such as hauntings or obviously UFOs but all of these pages redirect to a 404 error. The author of this website mentions in the page about the Callous Heart that it’s come to their attention that a former “Ombudsman of the Preternatural” arrived in Southampton and had been asking questions about the Stranger and the Callous Heart. We know this to be James as Ombudsman of the Preternatural is an apt title for James’ former job as described by whereisjamesscythe.co.uk, an OTP badge was found at the scene of his disappearance, and James would have been asking questions about these two subjects for his podcast. The author says they want to track down James to interview him as they believe James will be able to fill in the blanks of their own research on the Callous Heart and the Stranger. In an update the author says they failed to find James despite looking all over, but managed to photograph Callous Heart members after a day of door to door research. The author of strangesouthampton.club doesn’t believe the members of Creeper to be the immortal members of the Callous Heart, but instead “art crudely imitating life”, however his own photos of Callous Heart members appear to feature Will and Ian, as well as 'Madeline’, the girl from the Stranger album cover.
On August 28th, the band’s official Facebook page reappeared, and posted the missing poster for James Scythe as well as new missing posters for everyone in the band, claiming they had disappeared while travelling back to Southampton from Leeds. The bands Twitter reappeared later in the day, posting the phone number, James’ missing poster and an article about James’ car crash in 2006 in which his wife died.
All missing posters have a phone number to contact with information - the same number from the South Coast Coroners shirt. We tried calling the number again and instead of playing the song as it had been for months, it played a recording of what sounds like an artificially lowered voice, saying “on the second of October 2016, we’ll die holding hands”.
says he’s had a long week
podcast episode posted a “day late”
chose this subject for the episode because he’s received numerous emails about the cases
spent lots of time on the case
stranger case and callous heart are separate but both centred in southampton and he thinks they’re linked
covered southampton before in conspiracy theories about the sinking of the titanic
the mediaeval house and tudor house mentioned as having supernatural events
lots of ufo sightings in the city, mentions daily echo article about ufos and southampton group 'sufog’, oldest ufo group in the uk
youth gang named the callous heart has been in Southampton for over 100 years and has supposedly always been the same people not aging
documented earliest in newspaper in 1903
1930 newspaper article describes them as 2 girls and 7 boys with heart patches on their backs
appeared threatening but didn’t actually seem to commit crimes
no photographic evidence - account: saw 5 of them in his shop and kept a camera under the counter in case he saw them again, they returned 5 years later and he took photos of them, no images came out when they were developed, thinks they’re ghosts
Southampton proud of the stranger, offering a stranger walk like ghost walks
stories of the stranger involve a a visit from a tall stranger at night in a cloak with a skeletal face
people normally see him during sleep paralysis, seeing him in the corner of the room
sometimes speaks in a low voice
first account is from 1850, intruder in house in Shirley, man woke paralysed, saw a tall figure in the hallway, had too duck to get through the door frame into the room, didn’t talk just stared, purple mouth
another sighting in 1962 - woman staying with a friend and sleeping on the sofa, saw him staring through the window, seemed familiar and then she felt paralysed
tall genderless, long black cloak, painted face or mask, every report makes him sound intensely terrifying
always tied to themes of death - haunted a family after the death of a grandparent
james says that his whole life and show is about being sceptical and taking apart the myth
doesn’t doubt there was a gang, many gangs exist for a long time ie the scuttlers in manchester
thinks gang could have recruited younger members in the 30 years between first two sightings
thinks papers using fear to sell copies, exaggerating them
majority of reports in the 60s - birth of British counter culture
thinks it would have been an easy and appealing way for kids of that era to rebel
his explanation: gang members grow up and are replaced by younger people, camera that’s been under a counter for years wouldn’t work well
stranger mimics typical stories of ghost or alien sightings - visits occur at night when victim’s in bed
explains first ever alien abduction report as being influenced by media and pop culture - h.g. wells selenites, more ufo sightings while x-files was airing
thinks all people who have seen the stranger were experiencing sleep paralysis and hallucinating visions of the stranger
1850 first report of stranger, in 1843 Dickinson published Christmas carol, Scrooge visited by 3 ghosts, 3rd ghost described as scattering gloom and misery, tall, presence filled him with dread, didn’t speak, ghostly eyes, hooded phantom, suddenly disappears
thinks this character had a profound effect on the person, they therefore hallucinated the character during sleep paralysis, described it as a stranger in their house and the name stuck
word of mouth spreads the story, people become afraid of the stranger and he therefore begins to appear in their sleep psychosis episodes
people experience the same supernatural phenomena because people themselves spread it around
thinks they’re linked but are polar opposites of eachother - callous hearts never grow up and stay young forever whereas the stranger is a grim reaper who represents death and time ticking down
immediately after he says this about the stranger he starts to sound distressed and nervous and stuttering “i’m gonna …… i’m gonna have to go…… bye” and ends the podcast
James disappeared from room 309 of the Dolphin Hotel. The band had a “mysterious adventure” in room 309 of a hotel several months back which Will tweeted about the next morning, you can read a compilation of the tweets here: http://www.upsetmagazine.com/read/hotel-hell-creeper-story/. We’re now unsure whether this really happened or whether it was planned as part of the lead up to their disappearance. We can’t find any solid links between what supposedly happened to Creeper in their hotel and what has happened to James Scythe. Additionally, an evidence photo shows zener cards laid out for a zener test with evidence markers 2, 3 and 9. It seems out of place for the marker for 9 to be next to 2 and 3 as the rest of the numbers up to 10 are in order, so it has obviously been set up so that “309” is spelled out on the table with an out of place circle zener card not relevant to the test making up the 0 between 3 and 9.
Zener cards are use to conduct experiments for extra sensory perception (ESP), most often clairvoyance. James appears to have conducted a zener test by laying three cards face down on the right and then laying another three face up to the left of them as a prediction of what the three face down cards would be. An overturned card on the right shows that he predicted the square correctly. The band posted this evidence photo on Twitter on the 29th captioned with “+” suggesting that the next card to be overturned would be the cross which he would also therefore have predicted correctly. The results from this test therefore suggest that James had psychic abilities.
As shown in his podcast and by his former profession, James is supposedly sceptical of the preternatural and has spent his life logically explaining such things away, however the presence of a zener test and an EMF reader in his room suggest that he may have been beginning to believe in them; his obsession with the case of the Stranger could be explained by him believing it to be linked to his wife’s death. This would explain the photos of his wife in the room. Also, the EMF reader is in his bag which is purple, we think this might be signifcant because of the lyric in Astral Projection “purple and true, I do this all for you”. Alternatively, he states in his podcast that the Stranger sometimes begins to haunt people who have experienced grief such as the passing of a loved one, so the Stranger may have began to haunt James after his wife’s death.
The knocked over bin in his room, the incomplete zener test and the fact that all his belongings remain suggest that he either left in a hurry, or perhaps he was taken by the stranger
The video of the Stranger which was found in the hotel room has been posted from a YouTube channel under the name James Scythe. The description of the channel is “The Spectral Sceptic”, the same as the title of his podcast. We believe that this mystery is leading up to the release of Creeper’s first full length album, and that it will be titled The Spectral Sceptic. (This fits with the titles of the previous two EPs which have been about the Stranger and the Callous Heart. Its clear that their next release will be about James and as a former “Ombudsman of the Preternatural” you could say he was professionally sceptical of spectres).
There are many links to Peter Pan throughout the story thought none of them have helped lead us to anything which we think might be the next stage
- There are various lyrical references to Peter Pan in Creepers songs: Henley’s Ghost has the line “tell John I miss him, tell my brother of my love”. In Peter Pan, Wendy’s brothers are called Michael and John. Also, J. M. Barrie’s inspiration for the character Wendy was his friend’s daughter named Margaret Henley, hence the title Henley’s ghost. Creeper have also previously introduced a character Madeline, the girl on the Stranger album cover. She has only come up briefly so far in the James Scythe story; several photos of her appear on strangesouthampton.club where the author is excited to have finally taken his own photos the Callous Heart gang. She’s mentioned in the lyrics of Black Mass (“Madeline, your friends don’t understand the thing we have” / “Madeline, when you were young did you think we would wed”) and is believed to be tied to Wendy in the same way that the Stranger is tied to Tick Tock. There are therefore split ideas about whether Black Mass is from the perspective of Peter Pan or the Stranger. Finally, the ending of Astral Projection (“That place between sleeping and awake, that half dreaming space is where I’ll always keep you”) is almost a direct quote from Tinkerbell at the ending of Hook (“You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I will always love you Peter Pan”).
- Peter Pan was written by James Matthew Barrie. J. M. Barrie was born in Kirrimuir, Scotland before moving to London. This is described on whereisjamesscythe.co.uk as exactly what James Scythe did. J. M. Barrie married Mary Ansell, whereas James Scythe married Mary Darling, which is the name of the mother in Peter Pan.
- James Scythe checked into the Dolphin Hotel on the 23rd of December 2015. The original Peter Pan play began on the 23rd of December 1904.
- In photos of the scene of Scythe’s disappearance, evidence bags state that evidence was recorded by Matthew Barrie.
- As well as sharing a name with J. M. Barrie, he also shared a name with Captain (James) Hook. Last names are also similar, a scythe being similar to a hook. Captain Hook’s hook is always on his left hand, and a news article on whereisjamesscythe.co.uk describes James severely injuring his left hand in a car accident (note that the grim reaper in the callous heart logo holds the scythe in its right hand).
- The band have mentioned in several interviews that the Stranger is tied to Tick Tock the crocodile, and similarly represents the things that you fear as well as time ticking away. In Peter Pan, Tick Tock is to blame for Hook’s missing hand, so we believe that the Stranger may have been to blame for the car crash which injured James’ hand and killed his wife.
- the Callous Heart are supposedly immortal and never age, much like Peter Pan and the lost boys. The band themselves have previously described the Callous Heart as being a gender-neutral lost boys.
