Every year millions of people head into the wilderness searching for peace, beauty, and adventure. But hidden in those same scenic landscapes are stories of violence, survival, and lives cut short. I'm Dilya DeAmbra and on my podcast, Park Predators, I uncover the true crimes that happened in the most amazing places on Earth. Listen to Park Predators wherever you get your podcasts. I'm sorry I didn't listen to you. Hi, listeners. I have a story I want to tell you. There was this doctor over at St. Agri's who would kill his patients. Oh, yes. It was, Mattness. Aren't you afraid the light take away that you? I'm sorry I didn't listen to you. That adrenaline, I'm a moron. I said that totally lost it. He had no idea what was on those tapes. It was like a song. All he had the outcast. So gather around, gather around, and around. And listen to this. Close. It's a terrible habit. Doom scrolling. Not something I'd gleefully admit. But in light of all that's happened, I think it's important that I share this. Because that's how I found Fairyman Zero. I was a late adopter of TikTok, loyal to an old phone that could barely receive text. Once it died, and I was forced to upgrade, the world changed for me. I became instantly hooked. The snappy train of videos began to occupy my pockets of boredom. Those pockets stretching as I dove headfirst into the never-ending rabbit holes that existed online. Your experience could be anything you wanted it to be. A comedy reprieve, a learning pow-wow, a place to vent. And best of all, everything was tailored to you. Force fed by this magical algorithm no one understood. It knew you better than you knew yourself. It knew what you liked, what you hated, and it gave you what you wanted. And apparently, I wanted tragedy. It didn't start out that way. First, I tried to leverage the app. With a tight-and-job market and my general lack of employable skills, my parents suggested that I start my own podcast to help fill the void. They even spotted me the equipment. Pops sold his construction company in the early 90s as his mobility began to deteriorate. They had me later in life and both seemed generally happy. Two prime examples of having your shit together. I took them up on the idea with very little passion or direction of my own. I decided to just start doing it. Fake it till you make it, as they say. My content was mainly at home interviews with local artists and entrepreneurs, pop-up shops and other small businesses. The goal was to put their brand on notice and mine into the community. It's all about connections, my father used to say. You need to open doors before you can close them. As a prospective business major, it made sense. I clipped the full-length videos and uploaded them with carefully curated hashtags. I stitched, duetted, and reacted to as many trending startup clips that I could find. Think Gary Vee to Grant Cardone to every viral TikTok sensation peddling their online business course. Marley Watch History would have consisted solely of business advice, entrepreneurship, sale strategies, and the glamorous side of hustle culture. Dry, a little cringed, but somewhat constructive. And then somewhere along the way, it changed. Tanya and I had called it quits after living on the same blocks since we were six, dating all the way through junior high up until most of senior year. We were due for college on separate coastlines, and as Tanya helped me to recognize, not everything was meant to work out. Sometimes practicality and longing for what's out there just bore more weight. Match that with the dwindling success of the podcast and my father getting sick, and everything I held close began to crumble right before my eyes. I was lonely, to say the least. Late at night, with nothing to do, I spent hours and hours combing through a flurry of videos. New stories, political debates, and conspiracy theories began to take over my feet, all with the general consensus that we were all screwed. Then, slowly, I began to gravitate towards stories of people who had suffered great loss. The grieving parents of passengers trapped on a commercial airliner found in pieces, personal testimony from survivors from a school shooting, drone footage from a distant war. It's shameful to admit that such misery could provide me comfort, a shared suffering that I could relate to on some tiny minuscule scale, or maybe a distraction. Some sad attempt at feeling something. Real tragedy was happening to real people every day, and my life was bad, but it wasn't that bad. And based on the sheer number of comments and likes these videos were generating, I wasn't alone. These sort of disasters, they resonated. And eventually, the algorithm led him to me. The unassuming wooden skiff floated through a calm body of water. The first emergence of light bled through the wall of clouds above. A figure. Nothing more than a shadow clasped the aura amongst the fog. The only audio was the calm splash of waves created by the rowing. The caption read, we all traveled the river alone. Creepy and seemingly random. The dreary setting and rocky motion had a dreamlike quality. I couldn't tell if it was real or some sort of cryptic AI rendering. The splashing was calm, almost hypnotic. After a couple loops, I swept away. Another half an hour of scrolling went by before. A second one hit my feet. This one was less detailed, but just as strange. The low-res camera was zoomed in on a shot of a spinning coin. There was a rhythmic sound of metal as it scratched against the concrete. It circled past a web of cracked pavement, past an outcrop of weeds that crept through the rubble. As the blur of movement faded, you could tell the coin was old. The metal was oxidized along the edges, chipped and brittle around the ornate vines that bordered the stern face of a monarch. It looked like it belonged to another country, another era. The caption was, the toll to pay. I was astonished by the video's simplicity and the number of comments. And of my videos had even a fraction of that attention. Though they certainly required a lot more effort than spinning a damn coin. Most of the comments seemed lost. Like, what the hell are we watching? It sparked my interest. And so I did some digging into Fairyman Zero's profile. It was the weirdest account I'd ever seen. The videos weren't tragic in any sense. Just utterly strange. Eerie. Like some bored emo kids art project eagerly released into the wild. None of the videos resembled the one with the small boat. But each had its own underlying mystery that drew you in. A blurred flurry of branches and dirt as the camera bobbed up and down. All that could be heard were the labored breaths of someone running. I swiped. A panoshot of what looked like a construction site after dark. Swipe. The grainy video of a modest bedroom. The sound of snoring. Swipe. The sounds of the city. Streaks of light from the nearby high rises. Pattering rain. Hundreds of people were leaving comments. It all felt like a puzzle waiting to be solved. Viewers speculated about the whereabouts of each scene. Where was he going to pop up next? And of course, the ever-illusive why. Others claimed they started to see him floating in the river of their dreams. Some alleged that it was their grandmother, their aunt, their best friend, lying in that boat. Claims were being made from all across the world. It drew me to revisit the first video. It was a brief pause where towards the bow, you could make out a vague black shadow. Like something was laid along the floor. A few broken pixels along its edge were being interpreted as toes. I soon became immersed in the lore myself. But I couldn't deny that I was a little jealous. With every one of my theory comments, I left two or three more trashing the video. Potato quality. Low effort. Lame. Fake. I even sprinkled in some playful lies to feed the enigma. Fake names. Fake locations. Fake links to unsolved cold cases. It had become a little game. And all of my friends were sent links. Weeks passed when out of the blue, fairy man zero and AWOL. I caught myself stalking his profile, rewatching his old videos. Then months went by and I finally accepted that the account had gone dead. Maybe the creator had grown bored. Eventually I found work at a local sandwich shop. Then somewhere within the whirlwind of summer and a part-time job. I stumbled across a girl I really liked. Things had been going good and I found myself being more present. I hadn't opened the app in weeks until... Hey. Birdie? Uh-huh. Finally, with a steady paycheck. Yeah. I could justify going on the weekends with friends. One night, on my Uber ride home. Too hot, too cold. No, no, no, it's good. A video that could only be fairy man zeroes popped up on my feet. It was dark, but I could vaguely make out the decals on the wall. Glow in the dark stars, a red sailboat, and smiling sea creatures beneath the glow of a dim nightlight. There was a crib, and it was empty. But shrill crying filled the room. Part of me was thrilled at the fact that he was back. But another part of me had to bury my phone. The missing baby, the crying, it all felt a little too...real. Drunken out of sorts, I pushed the thoughts away and focused on getting home. But once I was home, I came across a video I couldn't ignore. The screams held through my phone, deafening and desperate. The darkness swayed in tiny ripples like you expected at any moment for hands to claw out, flailing and kicking and scratching for dear life. But nothing ever broke through. The cries continued to loop and loop. I had to put my phone down. After taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I returned to the screen and did what any rational person would do. I reported it. This one had gone too far. The pitch of the voice, the agony in it, it was all too real, intense, and something had urged me to make it stop. Maybe I had finally outgrown it all. I clicked on follow and then went into the bathroom to wash my face before returning to bed. A couple of hours passed, and lying awake at 3am, I decided again to revisit Fairyman Zero. The video was still up, generating thousands and thousands of views. Surely it had violated the app's community guidelines. No one ever reads those terms and conditions, but there was no denying that those screams crossed a line. They were coded into stress, maybe torture. And I don't know. Maybe I wasn't as evolved as I thought. I just couldn't walk away. The overlay was of me, lying in bed, ranting for 10 minutes about how disgusting the video was behind me. Floating head with a cowlick, the epitome of low effort. I removed the jarring audio from the original video and just spoke with raw honesty. I was sick of people giving jump scare sea level horror the time of day. And when did it all go too far? That one post garnered more views than any of my past videos combined. I went to bed, feeling satisfied for once, thinking maybe I had done a little good. There was pushback, sure, but there were also others who shared the same sentiment. I awoke to a series of pains. The notifications flooded my phone. Fairyman 1, Fairyman 2, from Fairyman 3 to 300. Suddenly I had an army of new followers, all with the same profile picture as Fairyman 0. But Fairyman 0 was gone. I jolted upright, wide awake. I waited for something, a flood of messages from the endless wave of body counts that kept popping up. But nothing came. I removed as many followers as I could before giving up and hopping into the shower. My late night escapades had left me groggy and I was dangerously late for work. But even at work, my phone kept going off. More accounts and more followers. I was getting so many notifications that I decided to delete the app. I was freaked out and decided I was done with social media for good. Of course, the cravings still arose from time to time, but I tried my best to keep myself preoccupied with real life. But then it reached my friends. The text from my buddy Paul came in around 11pm. Jaden, have you seen this? Another from Alicia. Is this real? I clicked the link. The panic shook me like a rag doll. The video was shot at night. A flashlight trained on blank and blurry vinyl sighting. A pan over dusty pixels over a basement window. Then a deserted cul-de-sac. The video bobbed up and down with every step. The wind howled. The cameraman roamed the sleepy street, has parked cars and scattered recycling bins, has the flickering lightposts that had never been fixed. And before he got there, I knew I saw the cherry red roof and the warm glow of my porch light. My froze, scrolling through the messages I had received, each one echoing the same concern. Are you okay? I tried to work up the nerve to go check the locks. I peered out my bedroom window, but saw nothing near or beyond the flickering lightpost. Still, I needed to be sure. The squad car arrived in no hurry and scanned the property. My parents, days and confused, stood by my side with freshly brewed coffee. I showed them the video posted by one of the fellow fairy-man accounts. The officers noted the strange nature of the footage, but weren't entirely convinced that this was anything other than a prank. They weren't even sure if the house in the video matched my own. When I exhausted all of my pleas for help, they suggested taking up my concerns directly with the app, and having the accounts closed. I sighed as I watched them leave. The neighborhood's still silent and listless. It wasn't until morning that I discovered it, twinkling in the sun, a faded, shilling, rested upright against one of the spindles of the porch. My heart battered my chest, my eyes searching the neighborhood. The words I couldn't keep out of my head, pay the toll. I kept finding the coins everywhere. First at the house, then the gym, then on the counters at the sandwich shop. I'd never seen so much loose change in my life. And I know it sounds silly, but I've just found one in my dorm room, halfway across the country. It's not funny anymore. I'm serious. Has anyone seen fairy-man zero? Does anyone know if it's real? Full Body Chills is an audio chuck production. This episode was written by AP Royal and read by Nathan Noakes. This story was modified slightly for audio retelling, but you can find the original and full on our website. I think Chuck would approve. Everyone's told a lie, but what happens when one lie becomes a life, a movement, a conspiracy. I'm Josh Dean, host of Camillean, and I uncover true stories of deception scams so intimate and convincing they fooled the people closest to them. These are strangers, they're lovers, friends, and trusted allies. Because the most dangerous cons don't feel like crimes, they feel personal. Listen to Camillean wherever you get your podcasts.
