due to darkharvest ending this year (as well as kind von der ritters comeback in the latest episode), i decided to make some fanart of one of my favorite guys ever 🤫
pictured: kind von der ritter’s initial look, his and chris’ encounter in ep 38, my design of marc mccomber (awesome guy), and a random doodle of the suited cultist guy from season 1 for fun
Log Entry #11 is uploaded almost a week after the previous video. Alex is helping Chris move his stuff back into his house. Just as Chris puts his bags down, however, Alex shouts at someone in the front yard. Chris follows Alex, who tries to apprehend the man dressed as the Slender Man, who shoves him off and runs away. Alex and Chris make chase.
As he’s chasing the cultist, Chris’s camera distorts heavily. The volume increases and the colours freak out.
There’s a cut. Chris is walking down an empty street. He seems to have lost both Alex and Alex’s quarry. Another cut. He finds a white piece of what looks like crumpled paper with two eyeholes cut into it.
Evidently, Alex pulled the rather cheap-looking mask off the man during the chase. Or perhaps, he tossed it voluntarily, hoping it would help lose Alex.
There’s another cut. Chris is calling for Alex, wandering the streets of his New Jersey town, trying to find his friend. There’s another cut, probably just for time. Suddenly, we get a different kind of audio/visual distortion. A deep rumbling sound, and the colours trending towards yellow-red. It’s very brief, but almost immediately after it ends the volume increases heavily and the picture blurs as Chris raises the camera from facing the ground to in front of him. The blur disappears as fast as it arrived, and the contrast is blown way out when he points the lens towards the first appearance of Gorr’Rylaehotep in any of their videos. (besides his hand, if you count that) The distortion is only brief, however.
He seems taller than what I’ve seen in both Noah’s videos and on the EverymanHYBRID channel. Chris seems to pause for a split second when he sees him, then starts shaking in fear, turns around, and runs away. The distortion returns when he runs, both visual and audible. The same deep, rumbling sound.
The next cut is Chris in an unnamed friend’s car. He thanks him for the lift and they attempt to find Alex together. It doesn’t take long before they can locate him, and they pull over to find him severely out of breath. Alex says he lost him, and that he tried to take off his mask. Note that he says “tried”, which makes me think the cultist DID discard his mask willingly.
They drive along where Alex saw the cultist flee and find a lake. Assuming he swam across the lake and got away, they decide to call it a day. Chris brings up the tall, faceless, suited man he saw, and the pair return to the site above where Chris found him. Of course, he’s vanished, and so has the car he was standing behind. Chris insists that he’ll just show Alex the video rather than tell him.
Log #12 goes up another week later. Alex and Chris are going to their friend Greg’s house, and Alex complains about Chris bringing his camera, but Chris insists that he never be without it. Greg lets them in and asks the old proverb, “why do you have a camera?” There is a distinct buzzing when Chris crosses Greg’s threshold, but it fades when he enters.
The next few cuts are mostly of just casual conversation with a few spots of strange silence on the audio track until Alex and Chris decide to leave. They say their goodbyes and leave the house, and are still chatting happily when they reach the road and spot Kind von der Ritter across the street from Greg’s house.
There’s another slight spot of silence on the audio track, and when sound returns Alex and Chris are trying to decide what to do. Alex tells Chris they should “rush him” because of their numbers advantage, and Chris replies that they “don’t know what he can do, though”. There seems to be a slight cut. Alex asks Chris what he wants to do, and Chris decides to simply approach him. The low buzz from earlier fades back into the audio track. The two approach McComber, calling out to him. Chris wonders aloud why he’s not saying anything, and the screen’s contrast gets blown into black, white, pink and purple. Alex asks what he wants, and Marc McComber pulls a knife from the front of his robe.
The buzzing becomes a loud hum that takes over the entirety of the camera’s audio. Chris spins around and the pair immediately run from McComber. They knock on Greg’s door in a panic and quickly explain the situation. They lock the house and attempt to call the cops. The phone doesn’t work, and neither do their mobile phones. Greg then brings up that he thinks McComber has been following him too. He asks if the guy has a “white face” and the two confirm that is the man outside.
There’s a cut, and they flee to Greg’s basement. They lock the door to the basement, and Greg tries to explain, but just as he says “I’ve...for the past-” there’s a cut. Suddenly he’s telling them to calm down and asking if Alex is okay. They check the windows and there’s another cut. Greg is talking, saying “if he wanted to hurt me, I’m sure he would have....done it already.” Apparently his stalker has been around his house. They hear a noise upstairs and the buzzing returns when Chris points the camera up. This happens twice, and Chris gets Greg to confirm that the doors are locked.
Chris then mentions to Greg that the “same guy” has been following them too, and Greg tells them he hasn’t seen their youtube videos. Chris points the camera at the entrance to the basement twice more, and gets the buzzing distortion both times. Alex begs him to turn off the camera, and there’s a hard cut. They’re agonizing over what to do, and the buzzing returns very briefly, twice. They try to grab some makeshift weapons and make their escape. As they face the basement entrance, the buzzing gets incredibly loud. They count to three, open the door, and storm the house. They find nothing, but Greg’s laptop distorts and plays the same buzzing noise that was on the camera’s audio, and they flee through the front door.
Despite what Greg and the pair were saying, I don’t think Greg was being stalked by Kind von der Ritter. Rather, they were confusing him with Gorr'Rylaehotep, who had been following Greg, and using descriptors such as “white face” to accidentally confuse the two. While the pair had mostly only encountered McComber and a few Order members that were interested in the Oracle’s activities, Greg had seen their God around his house several times. In fact, when we review his own recordings later on, more light will be shed on his situation.
I’d also like to mention the suited, masked cultist from Log #11. From the little research I’ve been able to do on the Order, this outfit is not really one of their practices. I’d be willing to dismiss it as a rushed mask for someone who was already wearing a suit for their job if he hadn’t also worn it in the previous video. It seems this cultist liked dressing up in a similar fashion to the god he worshipped. This type of thing seems like something the Order would find offensive, as if it were mocking their god. As we don’t see this person in a later video, at least, not in the same outfit, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possiblity that he was punished for his actions. Whether that means they killed him or merely reprimanded him, is completely unknown.
Distortion seems mostly logical in these videos. Seems to occur on a directional basis, when Chris moves the camera in the direction of some entity. Its possible Kind von der Ritter broke into Greg’s house to follow Chris and Alex, but I find it unlikely. Given the intense humming sound and distortion on Greg’s Macbook screen, I want to guess at the presence of Gorr'Rylaehotep somewhere in the house.
However, depending on how desperate McComber was to make contact with Chris and Alex, it’s possible he could have broken in too. If so, why let them run away? I don’t believe him pulling out the knife was done with malicious intent. Rather, I believe he was trying to pull off some symbolic gesture that was lost in translation. Later videos will affirm this hypothesis. Until we reach those, however, keep taking a closer look.
Before Log #8, KindVonDerRitter makes his first upload, “218″. It’s video footage of Chris’s room. Not something I expect to see on someone else’s channel. It may even be his camera, because we get red/green distortion just as The Oracle himself walks in. He looks around, looks at the camera, then it hard cuts to the word “Marco” written vertically. “218″ is Chris’s house number.
He wears a hooded robe not unlike the Overseer’s, and a white facemask that gives a similar look to the Slender Man. Keep this in mind.
Log #8 (we’ve dropped “Entry” for this one) is a week after #7. Chris pulls out a camera while Alex is playing Wii Sports and presses him for answers. Apparently Alex went missing for a whole day and woke up on his front lawn and claims to have no memory of the events. Chris tells him he’s lying, and Alex gets mad and storms off into the night. Chris gives chase. It’s pitch black, and not a lot can be seen.
There’s a cut. Chris is still looking for Alex and calling his name. Suddenly a loud, low distortion cuts across the audio track. It almost sounds like someone blowing through a tube.
Someone hooded walks past in front of Chris, presumably Kind von der Ritter. The camera jolts and goes all over the place. Nothing can be made out. It seems he’s running away
The only other time I can grab anything out of a frame. It’s a blurry mess, but it seems to be a face. Masked, of course. Chris falls over, on his back, and seems to be trying to crawl away. Hard cut.
The colours have gone red and green again. The buzzing from earlier is back. Then it disappears after the video blinks. Chris starts calling Alex’s name again. He finds him on the ground, out cold. The buzzing returns. Chris turns around, and there’s someone slowly walking towards him. It’s difficult to make out, so I hope you’re looking at this on a decent monitor.
Another cut. Chris is dragging Alex back into his house. Another cut. Alex vomits some blood into a sink, and the camera starts to buzz again. I’m going to assume the Sigma Radiation in Alex’s blood caused some kind of disruption to the camera, because it stops working. It also may have just ran out of battery, of course.
Chris ends the video with some text explaining he called 911 and Alex went to the hospital. The cops saw the video but couldn’t see shit, and they searched for the “suspect” and found nothing.
If you’re wondering if we have evidence this was Marc McComber and not something else, he provides it for us in video form. “Freundliuche fremde”, German for “friendly foreigner”.
He follows Chris, who turns to see him, stumbles over, then runs away. We see “project GABRIEL”, “Marco” again, followed by the O being removed to make “Marc”.
He’s literally signing his name. Then he gives some numbers and “VERITAS”.
This was the first real hint of something dangerous happening to the pair. Alex gets exposed to some kind of terrible aura coming from McComber and becomes ill, and Chris has to drag him into his house to try and help him. I’d hazard a guess that McComber is emitting Sigma radiation that’s causing health effects, but for it to affect Alex so badly and not Chris would suggest some kind of really bad exposure. I don’t want to suggest McComber attacked him, since he calls himself a “friendly foreigner” and doesn’t seem to be actively trying to hurt anyone, so I reason it’s an accident. Probably can’t control his power, or something.
The next DarkHarvest00 video is an update on the two from a low framerate webcam. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with Alex besides narrowing it down to something involving his nose. It’s possible it was just a nosebleed, and Alex was choking on his own blood, but that doesn’t really fit either. Chris and Alex are trying to find more information on Marc McComber and anything that ties him to mysterious figure they’ve seen, and the strange videos that are responding to their videos.
Kind von der Ritter is more German, this time for “Child of the Night”, an eerie yet apt title for the supernatural McComber. The code above from the last video decodes to “Michelangelo 1516″. This could be a reference to the “Dying Slave” or “Rebellious Slave” statues Michelangelo made during that time. I’m going to go with “Rebellious Slave” because it seems appropriate for McComber, who was a “slave” (Order member) who rebelled and left.
KVDR has a response, “Nearer Still”, and it’s chilling. He still seems to be warning the pair that Gorr’Rylaehotep is after them. There are a few seconds from Log Entry #9, repeated. The distortion is heavy, and absolutely terrifying. The text overlay of the video says “he watches he observes there is always one who's next”, referring to the monster. While the video was released after the events of Log Entry #9 takes place, it’s incredibly baffling how KVDR got the footage that was in the video before it was uploaded. He must have broken into Chris’s house (his old house, might I add) again to steal it.
Log Entry #9. Alex and Chris are searching for their mystery stalker. The snow is deep, and it looks cold as hell. Alex says it got to 28 inches, and Chris says it probably got more than that. They find tracks winding around a few different tree - deep ones, in a gigantic Operator symbol. They don’t realize it, but they’re still being warned by McComber. The tracks go off into the woods, and despite Chris’s protest, Alex goes in, and Chris follows. We start to get a slight buzzing noise, and they find a bag strung up on a tree branch filled with some kind of blood and organs. There is another Operator symbol on the snow, this time smaller, and in blood. Apparently, McComber didn’t think they were getting the message. He shows up, peeking around a tree as if he’s checking to see if they like his artwork. The distortion that appears here is also the few seconds that are looped in the KVDR video. When they see him, the pair flee.
Hard to make out, yeah. Apparently the cops showed up afterward and everything was gone. No blood, no bags. Also, apparently the distortion caused by McComber was so bad it turned off Chris’s camera.
9 days later, in the brand new future of 2011, Log #10 goes up. It’s still snowy, and it’s after the last video. Alex is having trouble with the camera, but he gets it on. He mentions the previous video having a large effect on the camera’s performance. This means it was recorded after the video was produced. Alex is having trouble with the zoom, and gets some lovely shots of Chris’s face. Alex asks what Chris wanted to tell him in confidence. Chris tells him he wants to go home and that he’s worried about Alex getting hurt. There’s a screen shift, and you can see what seems to be a child playing on the playground behind him. Chris decides to go back home, deciding it’s probably safe after the police searched the house.
Alex hands Chris the camera and he remarks on the zoom. Hard cut. Alex asks if it’s fixed, and Chris complains about the zoom. Suddenly, a figure can be seen behind Alex.
Looks like something you’d see from a bad Marble Horneys knockoff, right? Chris doesn’t seem to notice him. We get some more shots of him, but the two are more focused on fixing the camera. Another cut. Chris has fixed the camera, does a slight pan, revealing a familiar figure in the distance. It’s our ball-headed friend again.
Once again, Chris doesn’t see him. The audio distorts, the scren’s brightness and contrast flicker, and rumbling overrides the audio. The footage ends, and Chris makes note of it in text. He found this footage on his camera. He doesn’t remember it happening. He even points out an inconsistency - his parents aren’t home for another week, yet in the footage Chris himself claims they’ll be home very soon.
Very startling. For those who may be wondering about the man cosplaying Gorr’Rylaehotep, he’s a member of the Order, which will be made clear in a future video. We’ll pick up this analysis again at a later date, where we will be taking a much closer look at DarkHarvest00.
The youtube channel “DarkHarvest00″ was created on the 26th of November, 2010. Its first upload was “Log Entry #1 [11/26/2010 4:02PM]” which went up on the same day. It is a 1 minute, 24 second video filmed with some kind of handheld camera inside the channel’s creator, Chris. He is filming inside his house when a door slams behind him. He tries to open the door, but it is locked for some reason. He also hears something on the other side knocking. Spooked, he flees his house.
Apparently this was not the first incident. In the description, he mentions that there’s been “weird stuff” happening in his house for weeks. In the next video he’s taking a walk with his friend Alex, discussing whether ghosts exists. He also explains he’s beginning to record himself to try and catch paranormal events on camera, and Alex seems skeptical. His camera also turns itself off. The two of them watch the previous video at Chris’s house, and Alex agrees it’s strange. They have a look at the room together to try and figure things out. They mostly laugh it off, though.
Log Entry #3 is shot in absolute darkness with Chris showing a phantom email that somehow was sent to him by his own email account, attatched with a photo of his laptop on his desk displaying the latin words “mortem obire”, a blurry mess, and a picture of his room from the outside window. This seriously seems to have him on edge, but he isn’t ruling out his friends fucking with him. By the way, “mortem obire” means “going to meet death”. As the video ends, we hear a low rumbling, almost like wind. This sound effect will occur frequently - it’s a telltale sign of paranormal entities. I’ve heard similar sounds on other videos, so I’m thinking it depends on the camera.
My analysis will only really truly make sense if you’ve watched the videos before now. It’s not out of the question to posit that Chris was being watched even as he uploaded the video. The audio distortion points to that. It’s also safe to say that the email was sent by Kind von der Ritter aka Marc McComber - former Oracle to the Order and all-around magical man.
Log Entry 4 is mostly Alex and Chris discussing the previous video. They complain about the house being cold despite the thermostat being set to 75 degrees, but nothing really noteworthy occurs. Log Entry 5 is much more dire. The rumbling is back, and it plays behind Chris’s text intro to the video. After setting a camera to record his room while he slept, Chris woke up in the middle of the night due to the sensation of being strangled. Checking the camera, he sees his TV turn itself on. It makes some pretty horrifying noises, turns itself off, and Chris awakes. He leaves his room to check on the rest of the house, and everything’s normal - his parents are downstairs watching TV. I don’t have answers for this.
Alex and Chris talk about this but Alex doesn’t have any answers for him. Just as he’s about to offer Chris stay at his house, we get a slight screen tear on the right hand side of the frame (very common visual distortion from paranormal entities, especially the Administrator) followed by a loud banging noise upstairs. As the two get up to go check it out, the sound on the video is absolutely sundered, blown out to a ridiculous degree, and the colors on the video are obliterated by red and green.
We get some more screen tearing and a slight blinking of the video before returning to normal. The two find the attic’s ladder unfolded, and Chris bravely climbs up to investigate. He finds several old newspapers left for him, and checks outside the house to see if he can find anyone - but only finds more slight screen tears. Alex investigates the newspaper and finds it’s from 2001. He also finds marker scrawlings over a story about Marc McComber’s disappearance and the two find out he used to live in Chris’s house. We get an unholy buzzing noise on the audio track, and Alex decides to leave, spooked out. Chris leaves too, neither of them wanting to stay in the house.
Evidently, Marc McComber broke into the house and left the newspapers there as a clue to get the pair on the right track. The distortion on the video was likely caused by his presence - he was changed into a paranormal entity during the Princeton Experiment, and his appearance causes video equipment to have audio/visual bugs much like other supernatural entities.
Log Entry #7 is where some people began to cotton on to this involving the Administrator. Chris comes home to find none of the lights working, and goes upstairs to find his room floor covered in paper, each with insane scrawlings on them. Recognisable is the “Operator” symbol. This symbol’s usage can be traced back to the late eighties, but most people hadn’t seen it til the late 2000s when the internet truly began hitting the mainstream. It’s a common symbol used to represent the Slender Man as a base concept - a circle representing his head, and a cross over it to illustrate the absence of a face. The symbol saw widespread use by what I’ll hesitantly call “believers” of the entity during the 2000s, through which it gained enough cult notoriety to be used in the fictional webseries “Marble Hornets”, which it is most known for. “Marble Hornets” was based off of many of the eyewitness reportings and old stories of the Slender Man, and while it helped spread awareness of the monster, it also dulled people’s ears to the truth of its existence.
To this day, the symbol has mostly become a dated reference, its original purpose and function forgotton or abandoned. However, Marc McComber, being quite old and having been in the Order for a very long time, likely used this symbol for a very long time before its cultural adoption. As he most likely left these warnings in Chris’s room, it can be noted that he is trying to warn him about Gorr'Rylaehotep. As he is the Oracle, it can be inferred that he realized who his own prophecies were indeed about, and tried to get Chris to be wary.
At the end of the video, Chris leaves the room, the audio buzz blankets the video’s sound, and he turns to see a dark arm and hand reach out and shut the door behind him. Shaking, Chris flees.
To this day, it is impossible to tell if this is Gorr'Rylaehotep or Marc McComber. I lean towards the former.
I will continue this examining at a later date. There is very much to be gleaned from Chris and Alex’s findings, and I will be taking a closer look.
