Dark Harvest
dh000.jpg

4/18/1993 - 3/15/2011 Greg Benson
You will always be missed.
This channel is a video log of the paranormal activity I have been experiencing.

The Dark Harvest video account concerns two friends who find themselves condemned as harbingers of doom by a dangerous cult and stalked by its otherworldly object of interest. They become mindful of what information they release to viewers online so as to gain leverage above the cavalcade of conspiracies they uncover.

External: YouTube | Twitter | Alex’s Twitter | Children of the Knight | Black Book Download | Project Egypt | Daniel’s Twitter

Internal: Dark Harvest I | Dark Harvest II | Dark Harvest III | Project Egypt | The Black Book

Dark Harvest I

  • November 26, 2010 – a guy named Chris, whose parents are out of town, films his door slamming and locking on its own “after a few weeks of weird stuff happening”; most of his videos follow the “Log Entry #” naming convention
  • November 28, 2010 – Chris asks his friend Alex if he thinks the disturbance could be a ghost
  • November 29, 2010 – Chris receives an e-mail sent from his own account with photos taken from inside his house, including the open window to his room
  • November 30, 2010 – Chris and Alex discuss the e-mail and apparent break-in; Alex suggests that Chris film his now-locked window until he stops being paranoid
    • Chris wakes up that night with the sensation of someone choking him while the camera records his television turning on by itself and a loud, droning noise
  • December 12, 2010 – Chris and Alex hear footsteps from Chris’ attic and find a newspaper on the 2001 disappearance of Marc McComber from the same address; Alex is letting Chris stay over for winter break
  • December 13, 2010 – Chris returns to his own house in search of Alex and finds ominous papers strewn across the floor and someone’s hand closing a door
    • The “218” video on an account called KindVonDerRitter shows a figure with a blank white mask and black cloak entering Chris’ room; it has audio and visual distortion like some of Chris’ videos
  • December 14, 2010 – Chris finds Alex asleep on his front lawn, claiming that he can’t recall what happened
    • December 16, 2010 – Chris reports his 102 fever and insomnia on Twitter
  • December 21, 2010 – the masked, cloaked figure (“Kind von der Ritter”) seems to attack Chris outside in the dark as he finds Alex, who only regains consciousness to vomit blood; he is in stable condition at the hospital, and the police “seem to be taking us seriously now” but cannot find the assailant
    • December 22, 2010 – Kind von der Ritter video “freundliche_fremde” shows the attacker’s footage of Chris
    • December 23, 2010 – Alex is released from the hospital
  • December 29, 2010 – Chris and Alex update viewers on what Kind von der Ritter’s codes mean, assuming they are warnings
    • December 30, 2010 – Chris and Alex find a series of tracks in the snow leading to a garbage bag full of viscera, which the police do not recall finding afterwards
    • December 31, 2010 – Kind von der Ritter video “Nearer Still” includes the distorted ending of the last video
  • January 8, 2011 – Chris finds footage on his camera of a conversation he cannot recall between himself and Alex about the danger posed by their mysterious stalker; another man wearing a suit, tie, and blank white mask can be seen standing behind them
  • January 15, 2011 – Chris returns home and Alex chases the suited man from the driveway; on the way to find Alex again, Chris sees a much taller suited figure with no visible face (which we’ll call the Tall Man for now) that they are unable to find on the way back
  • January 22, 2011 – Chris and Alex see Kind von der Ritter outside their friend Greg Benson’s house with a knife, and Greg says that he has stalked him as well; the three ultimately escape unharmed, but apparently the police still disbelieve them
    • Kind von der Ritter video “Trauer mein Verlust” warns about time running out
  • January 27, 2011 – Greg tells Chris and Alex that Kind von der Ritter has stalked him since June or July, assuming that the Tall Man also stalking him is someone in league with the man; they advise him to film himself
  • February 5, 2011 – Alex, who is now filming himself and sharing the Dark Harvest channel, encounters the Tall Man outside
    • Chris tweets that Alex “seems pretty shaken by it. I'm trying to calm him down, but I'm scared myself”
  • February 26, 2011 – Kind von der Ritter video “Colligari” refers to things called the Fourth Dawn and First Dusk, its description linking to a blog called “Children of the Knight” with a countdown to the First Cycle’s completion
  • March 15, 2011 – Chris and Alex go to Greg’s house with some other friends, including two named Jesse Laurenzi and Matt Sharky, only to find the door, but not windows, locked; Chris finds Greg’s body eviscerated and encounters the Tall Man, falling unconscious by the time Alex arrives
  • March 24, 2011 – Chris and Alex update the audience to say that they were separately approached by one “Detective Amsel” who referred to the Tall Man as an organ-stealing serial killer active across the county for decades; Amsel reminded Chris more of FBI than local police but refused to identify himself
  • March 28, 2011 – the “Children of the Knight” blog makes its final update, still vague in its religious language
  • April 2, 2011 – Kind von der Ritter video “Legacy” shows clips of a black book and directs Chris and Alex to “the site of the Rite where Kinder gather”
    • April 5, 2011 – Chris, Alex, and Jesse go to the abandoned Rainwood Day Camp and Learning Center where they find graffiti left by Kind von der Ritter and a black book called “the Collective Knowledge”
    • The Black Book first contains scientific writing about a Rift between the Third World and Fourth World, and then that of a cult called the Order that worships a being called Gorr’Rylaehotep (the Tall Man); a burnt Department of Intelligence document from 1957 comes from something called the Princeton Experiment
  • April 11, 2011 – Chris, Alex, and Jesse explore the Atlantic Test Site mentioned in the document, encountering Kind von der Ritter and learning upon their arrival home that no time has passed since leaving
  • April 24, 2011 – Jesse thinks that Kind von der Ritter is following him as well, so Chris and Alex stay over at his house and learn that Kind von der Ritter has entered overnight, leaving them the knife and a message reading “TRAUEN” (“trust”)
  • May 1, 2011 – community college student Daniel Shipman starts a blog called Project Egypt to research a very obscure expedition (referenced only once in an old textbook he has since lost) by fringe theorist archaeologist Heinrich Kaufmann II in search of a legendary Tablet of Ancient Wisdom in Egypt
  • May 13, 2011 – Chris, Alex, and Jesse explore one of the Day Camp’s buildings and find graffiti from the Order, causing them to fight over whether or not they should keep looking; Chris spots a masked Order member on the way out
    • May 14, 2011 – Chris posts an image of the chalkboard they saw, an incomprehensible diagram of the Cycles
  • May 17, 2011 – Daniel posts an image of a newspaper he found on Heinrich Kaufmann, which deemed his discovery of the Tablet a hoax due to the anachronism of its information appearing in Ancient Egypt
  • June 6, 2011 – Daniel learns from his former professor that all information on Heinrich Kaufmann has been removed from textbooks since the 1990s for unspecified reasons and that during the expedition, locals chanted Gorr’Rylaehotep’s name and tried to warn Kaufmann against taking the cursed Tablet
    • June 8, 2011 – Chris makes an update acknowledging Daniel’s blog as a potential lead
    • June 18, 2011 – Daniel posts that he has received an e-mail from Chris and promised to research the two relevant locations from the videos
  • July 13, 2011 – Alex receives an e-mail from his own account with the video “my_final_betrayal”, a scene of Order cultists chanting and sacrificing one of their own at the abandoned Day Camp
  • July 17, 2011 – Alex sees three Order members watching him from his house
    • July 18, 2011 – Chris and Alex return to the Day Camp and find the doors and windows boarded up
    • July 19, 2011 – Alex tweets that the same three figures were back
  • July 31, 2011 – Daniel posts his research on the Rainwood Day Camp and Learning Center, finding that all 72 children in attendance disappeared in 1958, coinciding with the first “Tall Man” killings only miles away; a mysterious fire destroyed all documents but one photograph of Gorr’Rylaehotep
  • August 11, 2011 – Alex pursues the three cultists outside his house and encounters Gorr’Rylaehotep sometime after calling Chris, who enters the woods despite Alex’s warnings; they find three more bags of viscera
    • August 12, 2011 – Chris and Alex find the three cultists’ masks on the trees and encounter the suited cultist; Kind von der Ritter attacks him, but Gorr’Rylaehotep forces the two to flee and makes its way into Alex’s house
    • August 30, 2011 – after police find a pool of blood from the suited cultist, Alex proposes that they leave the investigation to Detective Amsel

Dark Harvest II

  • September 30, 2011 – Kind von der Ritter video “Trauen” shows him delivering a paper that reads “THIS ISN’T THE END” to Chris’ house in stopped time
  • October 28, 2011 – Chris attends Heather McComber’s garage sale and learns that Marc McComber is her grandfather after noticing a chest with the Order symbol that is not for sale; he is to interview her under the guise of a local history project
    • October 29, 2011 – in the secretly filmed interview, Heather tells Chris and Alex that her grandfather was an assistant researcher on the Princeton Experiment whose aging mysteriously ceased
  • October 31, 2011 – Kind von der Ritter video “Rainwood” contains audio of a scared little girl during the incident
  • November 13, 2011 – Daniel posts that his own investigation is resuming now
  • November 18, 2011 – during the next interview with Heather, Alex and Jesse distract her so that Chris can open the chest with a skeleton key and retrieve its Department of Defense documents from the late 1950s
  • November 25, 2011 – unable to legally release the classified documents, Chris tells viewers that the Princeton Experiment involved building something called the Construct and using death-row inmate subjects as “essential materials”; its information derived from the Tablet of Ancient Wisdom, and the government silenced Marc McComber through a pension and nondisclosure agreement at the end of it
  • December 22, 2011 – per Daniel’s arrangement, Chris and Alex meet with an employee of the Rainwood Memorial Elementary School –their friend Matt, who informs them that the school’s vacancy follows the disappearance of one of its students and it only stays open because some people rent out the dining hall; he gives them a box of floppy disks retrieved from the Day Camp for their investigation
    • January 20, 2012 – Jeff Benson, Greg’s brother, has burned the floppy disks’ contents to a CD; the only notable thing is a reference to the Day Camp owning a documentary called Unsolved Conspiracies
    • February 2, 2012 – Chris finds the unaired documentary on a torrent site and it describes the Princeton Experiment as an attempt to summon Gorr’Rylaehotep by Hans Freuhauf, a former Nazi who performed unethical elongation experiments on concentration camp detainees and was acquisitioned by the United States for Cold War leverage; the anonymous witness, apparently Marc McComber, describes how Gorr’Rylaehotep killed everyone on the site but him and that he lives with “the aftereffects”, knowing that at least two groups will go after him for revealing the information
  • February 24, 2012 – Order members break into Chris’ house and stab him in the chest, stealing the Black Book and documents by the time Alex arrives
    • February 28, 2012 – Alex tweets on the Dark Harvest account that Chris will soon be released from the hospital
  • March 4, 2012 – Alex posts “Log #23”, an interview with Heather from a few days prior in which Alex tells her the truth (“given the situation and Chris's injury she isn't going to press charges”) and she tells them that her father sent her grandfather to a mental institution (from which he escaped in 2001) for insisting that they leave their “secret society”; Chris has barely spoken since being attacked
  • March 15, 2012 – Jeff calls Chris (now recovered) and Alex to look at DV tapes that Greg made in 2011 per their request that he film himself
    • March 21, 2012 – footage from Greg’s tapes on February 12, 2011 shows him overhearing an Order meeting from the Day Camp across the street from his house
  • April 4, 2012 – Daniel posts that the institution where Marc McComber was admitted was to be shut down in 2003 due to its high rate of patient suicide and abuse by staff; Daniel, who lives in Rhode Island, will visit Chris and Alex on his way to meet friends in Florida
    • Chris gets annoyed at Alex for tweeting about this post without his permission but soon learns that the new profile image (Gorr’Rylaehotep in foggy woods) was not his doing
  • April 6, 2012 – Daniel tells Chris, Alex, and Jeff about the Amsel and Rainwood families’ involvement in a secret society called the Novus Ordo Europa; the disappearance of their family names from its records coincides with the Tablet’s disappearance from the British Museum, and the organization’s dissolution coincides with the Princeton Experiment
  • May 20, 2012 – after finding that Greg’s tapes include a Gorr’Rylaehotep encounter and a call Greg made to Jesse to tell him about the Order, Alex and Jeff end the video telling Jesse that they hold him accountable for not telling them
    • May 26, 2012 – they find that on March 5, 2011, Jesse had Greg inducted into the Order at the Atlantic Test Site
    • July 16, 2012 – Chris tweets that nothing else of interest has come up on Greg’s tapes
  • August 20, 2012 – Noah Maxwell of Tribe Twelve obtains a 1985 East Coast Assembly Manifest implicating his wanted aunt Mary Asher as an Order member and is directed to Chris, Alex, and Daniel; Daniel, who plans to visit the Atlantic Test Site, will drive Noah back to Florida on his own way there to visit friends
    • August 24, 2012 – Daniel visits the Atlantic Test Site, finding general evidence of Order activity and proof that the Princeton Experiment happened; he eventually meets Noah there and drives him to Chris and Alex
    • Chris and Alex agree to help Noah meet with the Order only under the conditions that he not give away their involvement or get killed, and they give him Jesse’s contact information for a note to speak to the Overseer at the Atlantic Test Site
    • August 25, 2012 – Noah’s meeting with the Order ends with him getting ambushed by the cultists just before Gorr’Rylaehotep starts attacking some; it appears in front of the stalled car and warps them away
    • Over the next three days, Daniel searches for them to no avail
    • August 29, 2012 – Chris, Alex, and Noah end up on a beach in daylight, where they leave him after learning that he gave away their names under pressure; Daniel informs Noah that it has been three days and gives him a ride, and Noah apologizes to them over Twitter
    • August 31, 2012 – Daniel issues his video apology to Chris, Alex, and Noah; Chris and Alex apologize to him and Noah over Twitter
  • October 5, 2012 – Chris and Alex attempt to capture Jesse, but his insistence that they take his car ends with him leading them to the Order; they attempt to execute Chris and Alex with axes, but Jeff holds the Order at gunpoint and allows the two to escape
    • October 19, 2012 – a few days after filming it, Chris and Alex post their interrogation of Jesse in which he tells them that the Order considers them “Harbingers” and escapes; they only upload it after deciding it is leverage
    • October 21, 2012 – Chris posts his written analysis of the tape they found in Jesse’s room
    • November 11, 2012 – “Greg’s Final Log” shows that on March 15, 2011, Greg told Jesse of his intentions to leave the cult but Jesse kept insisting that he stay and locked him in the basement during Gorr’Rylaehotep’s appearance
    • November 26, 2012 – Chris and Alex agree that the closure on Greg’s death necessitates that they only update if anything happens; Alex has learned from Jesse’s parents that he is missing
  • December 21, 2012 – a woman outside of a church’s late night sermon gives Daniel an envelope containing a key
    • January 3, 2013 – Kind von der Ritter video “Memoir” relays an unusually lucid message about how Kind von der Ritter, formerly human, has seen a future he wants to change; capitalized letters spell out “DANIEL”, “NJ”, and “ROT”
    • January 4, 2013 – Daniel posts his own theory that Kind von der Ritter is Marc McComber and the Order’s Oracle, and wants him to find something in New Jersey; he will, in spite of the Order having recently sent him a cease and desist letter, because he has discovered that the Chief Overseer Jacob Rainwood lacks any public records
    • January 5, 2013 – Daniel visits Chris and Alex; Matt says that the Rainwood Elementary School closed but verifies his former boss’ existence, mentioning that one room of the Day Camp is locked
    • January 6, 2013 – Chris, Alex, and Daniel find two papers in the crate from the locked room, but they split up when Daniel lets the pursuing Order members go after him; he meets them again to say that the coded messages on one paper involve the ROT-13 cipher, while the other (“A Lord in Woe”) is an anagram for “L. E. Rainwood” (Lawrence Rainwood, previous Chief Overseer and Day Camp’s founder)
    • January 7, 2013 – Chris, Alex, and Daniel find that one coded message leads them to the New Harbor Library and others indicate which books they should find to solve the final, hardest code
    • January 8, 2013 – the final message implying a conspiracy in Lawrence Rainwood’s succession, they go to Brandt-Crater cemetery per its instruction and find a flagstone with a cemetery map at the bottom; Daniel photographs, destroys, and disposes of it, but Order members with guns force them to flee
  • February 24, 2013 – Chris updates viewers on his and Alex’s newfound paranoia, having lost a lead on potentially disassembling the Order
  • March 15, 2013 – the Order films their execution of Jesse for revealing their actions to “Harbingers” and working with the Sixth Enclave, the only members attempting to kill Chris and Alex rather than leave their fates to Gorr’Rylaehotep as prophesied by the Oracle; the Overseer issues a warning to Chris and Alex about how the Order will kill their families and ruin their lives should they interfere further
    • March 17, 2013 – Alex finds a news report on the discovery of Jesse’s body and shows it to Chris
    • May 29, 2013 – Chris receives the execution tape in an envelope at his door

Dark Harvest III

  • August 2013 – Heather meets Chris and Alex in a gazebo, admitting that she is part of the Order but not of her own volition; she asks for their help in discrediting the Order’s beliefs with their videos due to the mass murder the cult now plans to commit, and Chris sees that a hooded figure was watching the conversation
    • August 20, 2013 – the Order murders Chris and Alex’s families, so Chris gathers supplies and a gun before calling Alex to meet at Heather’s house
    • Chris confronts Heather at gunpoint, but she eventually convinces him that she had no involvement in his parents’ deaths; one of the Order members outside shoots Heather in the leg as she and Chris flee to the car, he performs first aid on the wound because hospitals would not be safe, and they and Alex agree to stay with Matt
    • August 21, 2013 – Chris and Alex take Heather to Matt’s apartment, where Matt’s med student friend treats her due to no doctors being available; they pay him their remaining $526 and he remains anonymous
    • August 24, 2013 – Matt procures fake birth certificates for Chris, Alex, and Heather from a friend
    • September 8, 2013 – Chris calls Noah Maxwell and asks for $1,000 to help Matt pay rent, having seen the video where Noah obtains nearly $100,000 from a briefcase; however, Noah is distrustful of the money’s origins and only agrees under the condition that Chris prove his story
  • September 11, 2013 – Daniel posts that he has long since abandoned the Brandt-Crater investigation and started a business of buying and selling information
    • September 14, 2013 – Chris posts the video of finding his father’s body; Daniel and his business associate Charlie McDowell spend a video drinking and discussing the deaths of Chris and Alex’s families
    • October 1, 2013 – after recording his realizations from September, Daniel lets the internet know that some clientele of his information brokering business have covertly been Order members trying to identify the Sixth Enclave members in their ranks; he is letting them, because it eliminates a threat to Chris and Alex that now cannot go after him without giving themselves away
  • October 31, 2013 – Gorr’Rylaehotep’s appearance in the apartment causes Alex to vomit blood and panic, which later causes Chris to speculate that “it’s just toying with us at this point”
    • November 3, 2013 – Noah calls Chris back, promising to send $2,000 and apologizing for his role in their parents’ deaths
    • November 26, 2013 – Alex suggests to Chris and Heather that they take action again with a plan of his that they won’t like
  • December 2013 – Chris, Alex, and Heather infiltrate an Order meeting at the Atlantic Test Site, which ends with Chris and Alex shooting at the members assembled there once identified by their voices; one of them is Matt, who claims that he wanted to escape the Order and would never betray them, but his awareness of the plan to kill their parents causes Alex to shoot and Chris to allow it
  • 2014 – after an attempt to memorialize his parents, Chris expresses guilt that he could not save them and that he killed people, asking viewers not to forget him
    • Heather tells Chris about how she fled from her abusive father at eighteen; later, Gorr’Rylaehotep appears on the side of the road and causes Alex to lash out at Chris and Heather
    • Alex goes catatonic immediately following the encounter, Heather disappears from the hospital where Chris takes her after her leg wound reopens, and Chris sells both his and Alex’s cars; the dealer lets them live in the boiler room where Chris cleans cars for money
    • Alex wakes up and insists that they leave, an anonymous note directing Chris to a park yields them $5,000 from an envelope under a bench, and their call to Charlie reveals that Daniel disappeared due to an incident with Order members but Charlie has left a cache of his research in Massachusetts
  • July 14, 2015 – Chris uploads “2014 - boiler room” despite having told Heather in May 2014 that he would no longer upload videos
    • August 20, 2015 – Chris uploads “2014 - Alex woke up”, marking it “2 of 3” without ever posting a third part
    • November 4, 2015 – Chris and Alex go to Massachusetts with bulletproof vests and find the duffel bag; Alex kills a Sixth Enclave member who shoots Chris, which places events “around the time that the 6th Enclave completed its schism” based on the cultist’s unusual black-and-white mask
  • November 20, 2016 – Heather uploads “The Massachusetts Footage (Nov. 4, 2015)” with a description mentioning that the Sixth Enclave broke from the rest of the Order and she has more footage of Chris and Alex’s to piece together –never specifying their status in the present


Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License