01Open story ↗Florida · Skunk Ape folklore
A Sound No One Made
Two recordings. The same impossible sound. An audio engineer follows a pattern into the dark.
A Threshold Obscura story · Start here
The recorder had
no batteries.
It recorded anyway.
Deep in the Florida swamp, an audio engineer finds something he cannot explain—and cannot stop listening to.
A SOUND NO ONE MADEFLORIDA FOLKLORE · PSYCHOLOGICAL FICTION
History leaves a record. Mystery leaves a door.
Real events. Unanswered questions.
Told like you were there.
Enter a world of historical mysteries, unsettling folklore, and cinematic psychological stories. Follow the evidence to its edge. Then step into the imagined experience.
The story archive
Choose your threshold.
Six stories. Six places where
certainty begins to slip.
01Open story ↗
02Open story ↗Maine, 1799–1800 · Nelly Butler haunting
The Voice That Needed Witnesses
A schoolmaster sets out to discover what is true. Then a voice speaks words he wrote in secret.
03Open story ↗Washington · Black Diamond Cemetery
The Lantern at 6:40
A surveyor follows a lantern through an empty cemetery. The distance suggests an answer. The map makes it worse.
04Open story ↗Alaska · Lake Iliamna
The Water Lies About Size
Three instruments agree. A scientist sets out to prove them wrong. The lake offers no easy answer.
05Open story ↗Hawaiʻi · Kaimukī folklore
The House They Named
Claire Mori traces a haunting to an unsupported address. But correcting the story cannot explain what happens at her sister’s empty doorway.
06Open story ↗California · Dark Watchers
The Ridge Ahead
A surveyor notices figures near the stations she plans to visit next. Every bearing sharpens the question. None establishes what is watching.
Story artwork is illustrative. Characters and dramatized events belong to the fiction.
Behind the story
The case files.
What survives in the record.
What the story imagines.
01 / FloridaA legend enters
the public record.
A 1978 legislative file gives Florida’s Skunk Ape folklore a traceable archival reference.
Read the source notes ↗
02 / MaineA haunting.
A body of testimony.
The Nelly Butler tradition survives in collected accounts and local historical research.
Read the source notes ↗
03 / Washington · Black Diamond CemeteryThe people behind
the lantern stories.
Sixteen lives lost in the Lawson Mine disaster. Later reports of lanterns and whistles. Explore the historical record, the folklore, and the boundary between them.
Read the source notes ↗
04 / Alaska · Lake IliamnaWhat have people
been seeing?
A vast freshwater lake, resident harbor seals, and decades of reported sightings. Follow the evidence from documented ecology to unresolved testimony.
Read the source notes ↗
05 / Hawaiʻi · Kaimukī, OʻahuA house remembered.
A legend retold.
Newspaper accounts from 1942 and 1972 anchor a story that later acquired conflicting addresses and a new name. Read what the sources actually say.
Read the source notes ↗06 / California · Santa Lucia MountainsThe figures on
the far ridges.
Literary references, later folklore, and a real optical phenomenon. Separate the Dark Watchers tradition from Leah’s fictional survey.
Read the source notes ↗Location photographs: Big Cypress, 2012 · NPS/USGS, public domain. Sullivan, 2026 · Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0; resized and displayed cropped. Florida source · Maine source. Black Diamond Cemetery, May 21, 2009 · Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0; resized, converted to WebP, displayed cropped; adapted image under the same license. Washington source. Iliamna Lake, May 9, 2018 · Dev Dharm Khalsa / NPS, public domain in the United States; resized, converted to WebP, displayed cropped. Alaska source. Kaimukī viewed from Diamond Head, October 1996. Neighborhood context; the reported house’s location remains unverified. Photo: Holly Cheng / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Original image unchanged; card display cropped.
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How a Threshold Obscura story is made
The Record. The Threshold.
The Obscura.
Begin with what exists.
Documents, geography, testimony. Identify the source and distinguish a reported claim from an established fact.
Stand where questions begin.
A real landscape gives the story its grounding. The unanswered questions create room to imagine.
Enter the human experience.
Fiction gives the uncertainty a voice, a character, and a consequence. The boundary stays visible.
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The person behind the stories
Scott Robertson.
A fascination with what happened.
A curiosity about what it felt like.
Scott Robertson is the creator of Threshold Obscura, a growing world of psychological fiction inspired by history, folklore, and unresolved mysteries.
These stories invite you to listen closely, question carefully, and spend a little time with what remains unknown.
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