Hi,

Hope the weekend went well. I had a blast reading your stories under my secret societies newsletter. Especially loved this from Steff:

“In university I won a ‘Freemason’s Scholarship’, which is hilarious because I had to go to an interview with 10 masons — and I’d just seen the movie From Hell, and all I wanted to talk about was conspiracy theories.

I won, and I got invited to attend a dinner at their Auckland lodge with my mum and my best friend. So we go off to find the bathroom, and she goes “look at this” and pulls me behind a curtain and through a door and into their secret meeting chamber.

And it looks like a movie set! I just couldn’t get over how simultaneously cool and silly it was. Like, all those lovely old men I met at dinner really hang out in here? Why don't they just go bowling?”

I loved chatting to you in the comments over the weekend, and after that I chatted to New Zealand journalist Kim Hill about what the hell is going on with New Zealand’s conspiracy scene — you can listen to our conversation here.

As for today — it’s time for a Webworm podcast. I wanted to try something every now and then where I share a piece of my writing from earlier in my career. I have stuff scattered in a variety of places — old laptops and computers, USB sticks (remember them?) and of course Google Docs.

Today’s piece was originally published on the 3News website, back when I was a journalist in New Zealand.

The website no longer exists, so neither does this piece — except, I found it in my Google Docs folder. I enjoyed revisiting it, so — like when Stephen King releases a new edition of The Stand — I decided to clean it up a little, add a few paragraphs, and re-release it into the world.

I just compared myself to one of America’s greatest writers. Not arrogant at all.

This one is a medical mystery; a rabbit hole I never expected to go down.

Trigger warning: if you’re squeamish, this might make you a bit squeamish. Nonetheless — I hope you enjoy it. Let’s travel back to 2015.

David.

Pulling on a Mysterious Thread

UFOs, chemtrails, shadowy government agents. The phone-calls usually start around 9pm. People call the newsroom with information they desperately want to tell you; information they can’t give to anyone else.

Their stories are similar and familiar — and always filled with paranoia and conspiracy. One man insists the government has put an implant in his brain, using it to track his every move. A woman calls up insisting she’s been systematically abducted by aliens for the last 15 years. 

People call the newsroom — often me specifically — because they see it as their last opportunity to be understood. Or at least be heard. The police are no help. Doctors and medical professionals have turned them away. Most of them don’t even want to consider writing to the government, because the government’s in on it. They want to talk to the open-minded reporter.

None of these callers are looking for answers, because they already have the answers. Their problem is that no one will listen to them.

These far-flung stories don’t always come over the phone. Increasingly, people direct their story to my Facebook inbox or my Twitter DMs. People like Andy:

And Andy started telling his story. It was involved and complex, full of names, dates and allegations.

The messages arrived in my inbox in a steady stream. 10… 20… 86 messages by the end of the day.  It was unrelenting and I didn’t know where to start. He claimed many troubling things, but there was no way to verify any of his claims.

And then he started talking about the threads. 

I paused when reading this, and then I re-read it, just to clarify. I didn’t quite get it. Threads? I don’t know what he is talking about. I can’t picture it. Andy is very candid about it: “It’s not normal to be able to pull threads out of your chest. I’ve got wounds everywhere”. 

Andy tells me he didn’t used to have wounds everywhere. He sent me a “before” photo, from January 2014: A topless, pasty white guy. Now the paste has turned to a blotchy mess. He sends me a more recent photo.

These splotches cover his arms, his chest, his back. He blames the splotches on the threads. It always comes back to the threads. Then he sent me a photo of what he was talking about:

There are more photos, and they all show the same thing: Andy appears to be pulling threads out of himself, just like he said he was. It’s a strange thing to look at — as I’m still not quite sure what I am seeing.

He says he’s approached various hospitals, and seen various doctors. But no answers. He sends me a report from a Diagnostic Medlab:

It report ends with “The origin of the foreign material is not apparent”.

Andy’s narrative veers back into things I can’t confirm —allegations, conspiracy and paranoia. I don’t know how founded or unfounded any of it is. “I been on the run since January 2014. I try and keep myself a moving target” he types. 

He’s sleeping rough somewhere in the North Island of New Zealand. He needs to keep off the grid. He’s been contacting me when he gets Wi-Fi on his phone. “I been trying hard at great risk to my own life. I expect to die from my injuries” he sends.

It’s easy to write him off as another conspiracy theorist. But I keep on thinking about the threads. I’ve been staring at this confronting photo for a few days now, trying to figure out what exactly I’m looking at:

I feel a bit ill. I am not good with body stuff, and I am definitely not good with “bits-of-bloody-matter-pulled-out-of-the-skin” body stuff.

In saying that, I’m part of a Facebook chat group with five friends that I like to surprise, so I send the photo to them. Rachel, a speech therapist, sends an immediate reply: “Oh my gosh, he’s got Morgellons Disease”. 

Devil’s Bait

Rachel had just picked up a book called The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller written by Leslie Jamison. The book is about being empathetic toward people you didn’t fully understand. One of the chapter’s was called “Devil’s Bait”: 

“For me, Morgellons disease started as a novelty: people said they had a strange disease, and no one — or hardly anyone — believed them.

There there were a lot of them, almost 12 thousand of them — and their numbers were growing.

Their illness manifested in lots of ways: Sores, itching, fatigue, pain, and something called formication, the sensation of crawling insects.

But its defining symptom was always the same: Strange fibres emerging from underneath the skin”.

This sounded exactly like Andy.

I immediately went on a Googling rampage, finding examples of Morgellons all over the world, from the United States to Japan.

The diagnosis started with Mary Leitao, who in 2001 took her two-year-old to the doctor to examine a crusty sore on his lip. The kid was complaining about some bugs crawling around under his skin. Doctors found nothing wrong, prescribing some vaseline.

But the sore didn’t go away, the fibres arrived, and Leitao came up with the term “Morgellons” — referencing something written by a 17th Century doctor about some “harsh hair” he’d found emerging on a patient’s back.

Ms. Leitao collects a sample of the strands from Drew’s skin. They glide right off, like filaments from a dandelion.

She places them onto slides, examining them under an $8 RadioShack microscope. She’s looked thousands of times into microscopes, fancier ones, first as a biology student at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and later for five years as a medical researcher at two Boston hospitals.

She’s seen nothing like this before. She shakes her head and thinks, “These things cannot be coming out of my son’s body.”

Once the condition had a name, people started coming out of the woodwork. Patients would collect the threads they’d pulled out of themselves and bring it to their GP in little containers or matchboxes.

Dermatologists even coined a term for it: “The matchbox sign”. The consensus was that the fibres or “alien bodies” weren’t from within the body, but were just bits of cotton and wool people found on their skin.

I thought of my guy, Andy, and his collection of bloody, fleshy fibres laid out on a paper towel. Then I thought of that photo of him pulling them out of his body. They weren’t bits of wool from his fucking sweater. What was going on?

A Disease You Catch Online

The Centre for Disease Control launched a full scale investigation in 2006 to get to the bottom of Morgellons. They didn’t get to the bottom of it.

The report was called Clinical, Epidemiologic, Histopathologic and Molecular Features of an Unexplained Illness and concluded:

“We were not able to conclude based on this study whether this unexplained dermopathy represents a new condition, or a wider recognition of an existing condition such as delusional infestation”.

That delusional infestation thing is important.

Body horror — think David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Eraserhead</e