_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9: the mysterious tale terrifying Reddit

An intimidating story emerging on Reddit plays on the horror of the unknown lurking in plain sight among the tools we use for everyday dialogue

If you take enough LSD, can you build a portal to the divine? It sounds like a typical internet conspiracy theory, the kind of thing weirdos post in online communities isolated from the rest of the world. But it's also a conceptual prompt for a new work of digital fiction - a cool, and deeply creepy story that is gaining a cult fanbase.

Two weeks ago, a user who came to be known as "_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9" posted a disjointed snippet of text in a comment on Reddit, a site where communities post articles, images, personal stories and more for threaded group discussions. The post, added almost as if by accident to a thread about the cover of George Orwell's 1984, made claims about the CIA's acid-fuelled "mind control experiment" programme, Project MKUltra, a common staple of paranoid theory. MKUltra was indeed a real programme, but other items the user mentioned - "restraint bed portals" and "flesh interfaces" - are not.