Creep Week 20: CompuServe is Down in the Devil's Turnaround
0It’s 1995. The internet is a primitive jungle of dial-up tones, weird forums, and chatroom whispers. In a sleepy Southern town still running on rotary phones and VHS tapes, a forgotten access point lies hidden deep in the woods — beyond the old water tower, through a break in the chain-link fence, past the abandoned softball field where the lights flicker even though no one’s flipped the switch since 1987. They call it The Devil’s Turnaround.
Legend has it, The Devil’s Turnaround used to be a train loop before it mysteriously collapsed in 1931. The land was sold, fenced, and forgotten. But some say that the railroad never stopped running — it just went digital.
Now, it’s Creep Week — the one week a year when the veil thins, weird things surface, and everything breaks down. Uncle Goona and Cooper, self-appointed paranormal tech investigators and VHS hoarders, are trying to dial into an archived bulletin board system (BBS) using their vintage CompuServe modem. Their goal? To retrieve a legendary file called GAT3WY.EXE — rumored to be the digital key to opening the *Eighth Portal*, a mythological data gate that connects the internet to the “other side.”
But the connection won’t hold. Every attempt crashes. Their modem screams. Static bleeds through the walls. And every time they try to log in, something reaches back.
Cooper traces the connection spikes to an abandoned phone junction buried under The Devil’s Turnaround. Against better judgment (and a very cursed barometer), they pack up their portable CRT, a solar-charged laptop, and a Ouija board mousepad, and hike into the woods. There, they find a rusted server rack half-buried in red clay, its green lights still blinking after thirty years offline. It's not plugged in. It shouldn't be working.
As the duo boot up a forgotten operating system — DOS/Screamer v6.66 — the boundaries between analog and demonic begin to blur. Pop-ups speak in tongues. Files scream when opened. The deeper they dig into the ghostly BBS, the more they realize they’re not alone in the system. A user named “ROOTGHOST99” has been waiting... typing... watching them since they first tried to connect.
Meanwhile, the local town starts glitching. Payphones ring with no one on the line. Streetlights blink in Morse code. Static seeps from television sets playing long-dead sitcoms. People are disappearing — vanishing into loops of time, trapped inside digital echoes of their last known login. Marla Vintz, a disgraced cyber-psychic and former AOL moderator, joins the investigation when her old modem spontaneously reactivates and prints out a message:
Soon, Goona and Cooper realize they’ve accidentally uploaded themselves into a haunted BBS — an eternal forum haunted by lost users, flame wars that ended in real death, and one relentless daemon trying to claw its way into the real world through a legacy port nobody remembered to close.
Now they must navigate a labyrinth of corrupted folders, glitching avatars, and haunted chat logs while dodging pop-up ads that bite and a firewall that literally burns. Their only hope is to upload the Gateway Patch before midnight on the final day of Creep Week, or they’ll be logged off for good.
But time is looping. Memory is failing. And every time they reboot, things change. Cooper doesn’t remember certain hours. Uncle Goona swears the woods are rearranging themselves. The Devil’s Turnaround isn’t just a place — it’s a circuit. A ritual. A trap.
With only 28.8 kbps of bandwidth and a haunted Zip disk, the team races against packet loss and pixelated doom.
*Creep Week 20: *CompuServe is Down in the Devil’s Turnaround** is a glitchcore descent into digital madness, blending ‘90s tech nostalgia with analog occultism. Packed with haunted modems, cursed BIOS menus, and a soundtrack of dial-up tones remixed with screaming, this film will make you question every Ethernet port in your house.
So dust off your floppy disks, strap on your headlamp, and don’t forget your backup battery — because this time, the internet bites back.
The Devil's Turnaround, officially known as Noonday Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, is a secluded and allegedly haunted burial ground near Marietta, Georgia. Dating back to the 1860s, the cemetery features a semicircular arrangement of graves, contributing to its eerie nickname. Over the years, reports of paranormal activity—such as unexplained scratches, thrown objects, and unsettling apparitions—have been linked to the site. Speculations about cult rituals and desecration have further fueled its ominous reputation. Located on private property, the cemetery is not open to the public, and trespassing is strictly prohibited.
The Devil's Turnaround, also known as Noonday Cemetery, is a secluded burial ground nestled in the woods near Kennesaw, Georgia, just outside Marietta. Dating back to the 1860s, this historic cemetery is shrouded in local legend and paranormal lore.