DAVESPID'S SITE
DAVESPID'S SITE
I’ve been meaning to write something about what happened to my friend back in March. I finally have the time to write out an explanation, some sort of personal documentation of the Tooby Incident.
First things first. Tooby is the name of the entity that pulled a lot of crap against my friend Tom, it really threatened his life. Tooby is a VHS tape that Tom had since he was a kid. It’s essentially a haunted knock-off of Thomas the Tank Engine trapped in that tape to prevent it from causing Evil. Klaatu Barata Niktu and all that.
It apparently bit him once?? But you’d have to ask Tom about that yourself.
Well, in March 2023 Tooby… leaked out of the tape a little bit. It managed to siphon itself through Tom’s wi-fi and start messing with things remotely (like an evil AnyDesk). It ended up focusing most of its poltergeisty powers on Tom’s website, scattering a bunch of ominous messages and buggy code all around. According to my friend Calexta, the way this Tooby thing is able to mess with objects (and people…) is by honing its mental energy into psychic attacks.
So, like, this thing was the ultimate cyber bully, like some kind of mold spore seeping out of Tom’s wi-fi signal and mucking up his website and his head. Tom got ghost hacked!
Along with the stress of seeing all his work get glitched out without a known way to stop it, Tom also started getting headaches, nosebleeds… it kept getting worse.
We of the Tomtab Friend Group were on extremely high alert for weeks. It started with just a few little threats and website changes. Calexta was the most on top of things, checking up on Tom constantly and keeping the rest of us updated on the situation – she could tell the growing Tooby problem was no joke. As the local Computer Wizard she even found ways to undermine Tooby’s infiltration (doing digital exorcism-type stuff. Can you imagine having to do an exorcism on a Tamagotchi? Well it wasn’t like that, I just think that’s a really funny concept).
But yeah. After the climb came the drop – Cal’s attempts to hold off Tooby didn’t last long enough, and Tom started having bad panic attacks from the website stress and all the Tooby Energy covering his house. Tooby managed to completely take over Tom’s entire website, turning it into an incomprehensible mess of trains and body horror.
Synopsis over, here’s my personal experience of the day fit hit the shan.
March 3rd. Dave & Buster’s.
My boyfriend Joey and I were having a cute little gay-date – it’d been a long week for both of us, and we wanted a little time to relax and forget about everything that is neither Dave nor Buster’s.
I got a text from Cal midway through our air hockey match (I was totally winning BTW JSYK) – Tom was in trouble, and she needed backup at the Finch house (friend-group headquarters) ASAP. Off we went.
Joey drove the car as I tried reaching Tom – first via text, to no avail. Then I checked his website: completely trashed, the most recent post clearly Tooby threatening Tom’s life. Most of the communication that day happened in the comment section of Tom’s site, and I think you can still read some of it saved somewhere. Our friend Mouse picked Tom up from his own house and brought him to HQ for de-ghosting, while Joey and I picked up our friend Ariel. While in the car she discovered a way to distract Tooby and stall him from causing more mental harm against Tom.
Which was insults. Impressive insults. Ariel dissed a ghost to death. She was tapping away on her phone all the way to the Finch house, grumbling and growling as we went. Her data plan really pulled us through.
We reached the Finch house after Mouse and Tom (Cal was already there). Tom was covered in blood, weird burnt plastic-smelling goop, and was on the verge of a ghost aneurysm when we showed up, but Cal and Mouse were trying some real exorcism-y stuff that looked like it might work. There was some real spooky sounds happening in that room, intense swooshing sounds and digital groans which seemingly came out of nowhere. Ariel pulled up a kitchen chair and kept tapping away angrily on her phone, while Joey and I got to work helping Cal.
I’m not a good ghost expert, I’m learning as I’m doing, but maybe writing this exorcism info out will help a reader passing by who’s also got a ghost internet tape problem.
Cal had Joey and Mouse strategically arrange purify symbols around the room and around Tom. These symbols are integral to the protection and defense against Tooby. They were mostly scribbled on pieces of notebook paper, but Mouse also used the house’s HP printer to print off pictures of the symbol she found online, for extra protection. Cal also put the symbol on her computer screen, which helped prevent Tooby from trying to wiggle through the digital realm back up any wi-fi pipes.
Cal had me grab a plastic tub and fill it with cold water, then throw in 9 teabags, all different kinds (the Finch house belongs to Joey so he obliged to share his tea collection for this emergency). I stirred it up, which didn’t do much because cold water, but Cal zapped it with some sort of power and the water turned a deep, mesmerizing pink. Like a strawberry lemonade you could drown in.
That part took us about 3 minutes, not long. Tom was shivering by the time it was done, and Cal had him hold up this weird looking bone while she recited a long thing about how Tooby broke all the rules and was going into time out, telling the thing it was going to find itself asleep very soon. I don’t know the details about the bone but apparently (obviously) it had some kind of connection to Tooby – I heard it was from an amputated limb? Which is weird because I didn’t think VHS tapes have bones. Or limbs.
Next thing I knew the room was filled with a bright blue light emanating out of all the purify signs on the ground, and a lightning bolt-looking zap from Cal’s computer hit the Tooby bone. Which started smoking, and honestly smelled pretty bad on top of the bloody, plastic-y odors wafting off of Tom.
Tom held the bone tight between his hands, shouted that Tooby wouldn’t kill him, and then dropped the bone into the plastic tub full of pink wizard-liquid jungle juice.
Then a thick, pale blue fog started bubbling up out of the tub, filling the room. I couldn’t see squat between the fog and the glowing purify lights, and those weird digital groans and spooky sounds surrounding us kept getting louder and crazier.
But then it stopped. The fog was shattered into nothing and the ghostly sounds were smothered into silence. That moment made me breathe differently, man.
The purify symbols faded, the liquid tub was empty, the Tooby bone was somehow on Cal’s computer keyboard, and Tom was miraculously OK!!!
Well, he still reeked and was covered in gunk, but he wasn’t shaking and after a couple lookovers by everybody in the friend group (we all just wanted to make sure he didn’t have any signs of like, dying), we knew it was over.
We also knew it was over because Ariel was laughing. She had been taking up so much of Tooby’s mental energy by mocking him and arguing with him in Tom’s site’s comment section, and apparently during the whole exorcism thing, she watched the website’s green background turn a bright blue and purify symbols pop up all over her phone screen. Cal had stashed code in the site for a “purify bomb”, which went off on Ariel’s phone at just the right moment to tear apart the vestiges of Tooby’s attack – it kicked Tooby out of the website, making sure every part of him got locked up back in his VHS tape for the long sleep.
Do you understand why it took so long for me to write this all out? So many moving parts and also I’m still not sure what exactly happened. I kind of wish I got the chance to taste the wizard liquid though.
Anyway. Tom was fine. Joey made him go take a shower while he and Mouse cleaned up the house. Cal did some ghost analysis, reviewing everything that happened and making sure there were no holes in the operation. I drove to a nearby Publix with Ariel to pick up some chicken tenders and Gatorade (no doubt Tom was gonna be dehydrated after losing so much blood and being on edge for so many weeks). We didn’t talk a lot during our mission… But then we got back to the Finch house and Tom was un-stinky and the house felt safe and we watched Muppets Take Manhattan. Joey had it on VHS but I felt like we should be sensitive to Tom’s recent situation so we just pirated it instead.
