People who knew Matt Korven don’t believe he’s the type to orchestrate elaborate stunts. But after all, it’s hard to think badly of those you’re close to. Perhaps that’s why when #WinslowHoax started trending, I was convinced it was a performance. Even Matt’s disappearance seemed a ploy for attention—a ploy that worked since it’s what got me curious about my brother.
After his videos went viral, I became an online stalker. I read every post he’d written, watched all the climbs he’d recorded, and harassed his friends for more. This was how I got in touch with Beth Winslow. Ironically, she agreed to break her silence only because I was his sister, and she thought I needed closure. When really, I was after an opening—a way to uncover who Matt had been.
She met me on video-chat several times to fill in the details the films missed. Between the footage and Beth’s information, I gained, perhaps, the most comprehensive picture of that day of anyone who wasn’t there.
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Matt switching on the camera the moment he arrives at the farm has caused many sceptics to say it’s a sign the whole thing was scripted. Although this ignores all his other mini-documentaries with their quiet-before-the-storm introductory scenes. Ever the showman, he enjoyed setting the stage for his viewers.
The video starts with his dash-mounted GoPro tracking a narrow driveway that snakes through a sea of wild grass turned beige by the onset of fall. Rising from the overgrowth, three stout buildings form a small compound. Their red bricks darken to a coppery brown under the slate sky. Beth and her husband, Darren, have only lived here for two months. They moved from the city after they started working from home. The extra space was perfect for their pets. Not to mention for Darren, who always had too many projects on the go. Like the half dozen old junkers parked out front, he planned to fix up.
Pulling in behind a ’50s pickup, Matt says, “So, this is where the old dog hangs his hat.” He swivels the camera across the house and outbuildings to the fields where there isn’t a hill in sight. “Why did he ask me to bring the gear? What could he possibly need a rope and harness for?”
His grizzled face comes into frame. It’s hard to believe he’s only fifteen years older than me. Leading tours up Blackcomb, Robson, and the Bugaboo Mountains has robbed him of any semblance of youth. The sun and high-altitude cold has cut fissures into his face and has frosted his beard with snow.
Giving a crooked smile, he says, “I swear, he better not be expecting me to go down some old well.”
Matt and Darren had gone out west together to climb mountains after high school. Darren eventually moved back, but Matt never did. He didn’t even come back to visit except for this one occasion, as far as I know.
Beth remembers him knocking on the door around seven-thirty. They had coffee together, but he was too eager to get started to wait for breakfast.
When I asked about her impression of him, she told me, “He was a charming rogue. That type of guy who never leaves the bar alone and never sticks around until morning.”
She quickly apologised, but I hadn’t been offended by her honesty. By all accounts, he wasn’t one to settle down. He was always searching for the next thrill.
When the camera comes back on, it’s clipped to Matt’s shirt and follows Darren into a sparsely furnished living room.
“Man, thanks for coming,” he says, biting into an apple. “I wanted to check it out with someone I trust before...well, before deciding what to do next. Just don’t freak out.”
Matt turns, and the lens captures Darren’s snaggletooth grin and blond beard.
“When have you ever known me to rattle?” The bravado in his voice is thick, almost comical, but he often talks this way on camera.
Darren waggles his eyebrows as if saying, “Wait until you see.”
With the apple clasped in his teeth, he kneels and sweeps back a rug. Underneath, a bright square of plywood is wedged into the age-stained floorboards. He prises it up, revealing a black and featureless hole—the camera jitters and retreats.
Beth had this to say: “There was something off about it. The dogs wouldn’t go in there, and I didn’t blame them. Even covered up, a feeling of emptiness rose from it as if all that space caused gravity to accumulate. I always felt I might get sucked in.”
Matt leans over for a look and lets out a low whistle. “How deep?” He aims a spotlight down. The darkness doesn’t lessen.
“I thought we could find out.” Still working on the apple, Darren says, “I lowered a work lamp with extension cords. ‘Bout thirty metres. Saw something that looked like a head?”
“Human?”
“Nuh-uh. Stone. Big.” Darren flings the spent core into the void. The mic doesn’t register any sound of it hitting bottom.
Apparently, Darren had taken to throwing all their garbage into the hole instead of making trips to the dump. At first, Beth was concerned it would start to smell, but she grew more worried when the trash just vanished.
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The next clip has Matt giving Darren a safety 101 spiel. But since he’s an experienced climber and no stranger to long vertical descents, it’s really for the viewers’ benefit. It’s effective. Even I was able to understand how their equipment would get them down the length of two sixty-metre ropes and then back up.
Some have questioned the sanity of jumping into an unknown pit after only a couple of minutes, but off-camera, they spent nearly eight hours plumbing the depth and working out a plan for their descent. According to Beth, they were both confident the rope would get them safely to the bottom.
Although considering how disastrous things turned out, they must have made some error with their measurements.
The sequence ends with Darren planting his feet on the edge of the cut floorboards and swinging himself over the empty blackness. Matt reaches out to switch on his helmet’s light right before he repels down and is lost from sight.
When I asked what they were hoping to find, Beth said, “Rationally, an underground cavern or something. But I admit, I never had a lot of rational thoughts about that space beneath us.” After a moment, she added, “What did I want? Peace of mind. I wanted to know that it was all normal and safe. But of course, it was anything but.”
The Winslow Hoax is famous for the stills and memes harvested from the last video, but it’s a miracle anyone watched it long enough to see that footage. The first twelve minutes is nothing but a blank screen with the two men shouting to coordinate their movements. It doesn’t get interesting until Darren says, “Tell me you see it too?”
The camera pivots, and two white dots from their headlamps land on an object, then float across its inky surface.
“Is that a fff…?”
Matt doesn’t finish, but most people suspect he’s asking if it’s a face. Over on UnsolvableMysteries.com, they’ve pieced together the skittering footage into a mosaic showing two monstrous eyes and a leering mouth. It’s compelling but likely the equivalent of seeing Elvis on a slice of toast.
The video only shows areas of convex and concave stone. Even after Matt draws his handheld spotlight, no more than a portion of the rock column is seen at once.
Based on the range of the light he uses, they must be half a kilometre from the pillar. The next one they find is twice as far away. The third is little more than a glint in the distance. And yes, there is something human about them, with their rounded “heads” and broader “bodies.”
I can confidently say there’s no evidence any of the Indigenous peoples in Ontario ever built large-scale monuments other than some effigy mounds. Certainly, not towering underground statues. Yet, it’s hard to believe these are natural formations.
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Darren’s now-famous scream always sounds louder on playback than it should. There’s a reason the soundbite has been sampled so often, used from ringtones and rap songs. There’s power in the distilled terror it expresses.
And who can blame him? Picture yourself twisting freely in utter darkness, dropping into the unknown, and suddenly you find yourself at the literal end of your rope with no bottom in sight.
Through a torrent of curses, Darren explains how he almost fed the last of the rope through his rappel device and went into freefall. Here, Matt’s experience guiding novices through difficult situations comes into play as he walks Darren through switching over to the ascenders in a gentle, soothing tone.
I don’t know how he can be so calm while the light shines past Darren to a layer of mist far, far below. If not for the sweaty, wild-eyed man in frame, it could be a picture of clouds taken from a jet.
They’re still struggling with the gear when the fog breaks and a formless shape begins to emerge below their feet. Because the autofocus is locked onto Darren, we never see more than a vague interpretation of dark geometry.
MadDelver.com claims to have enhanced this footage, but the image he produced is highly fanciful, showing a vast pyramid structure filling the frame. The building is a city unto itself, with spires rising from its tiered levels and a pantheon of unearthly statues.
Whatever it is, they both stop everything for a full minute-and-twenty-three seconds to watch it expand beneath them. Then, in a shaky voice, Matt barks out directions to get them “the hell out of there.”
The ascenders aren’t designed for speed, and they inch their way up at an agonising pace. The camera stares out at the abyss or up at the small square of light. The only audio is the groan of metal on rope and quick heavy breaths. At some point, a soft but persistent beating is introduced. Depending on who you believe, it’s either Matt’s heart or distant drums. Either way, a new element of distress comes into his movements, swinging his body drastically left and right with each upward thrust.
Just before the video ends, his headlamp catches the first stone column again.
No matter how many times I’ve rewatched it, it always looks as though it’s moving—walking away. But it must be Matt’s motion and my imagination.
At least, I try and convince myself that’s all it is.
The last thing my brother says is: “Hurry.”
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Despite her fear of the hole, Beth stayed by it the entire time. She couldn’t imagine being any more nervous but knew not watching would be worse. The tightness in her chest only eased once the small cluster of lights, hovering an impossible distance below her living room, began to rise. But before she could make out the men themselves, the shaking started.
Beth said, “A houseplant crashed to the floor, and it woke me up to what was happening. I had been so focused on them I hadn’t noticed the plaster cracking on the walls and the couch jittering across the floor. I started screaming, trying to warn them, but I’m not sure I made much sense.”
She was eventually forced to flee as the old farmhouse collapsed around her. When the authorities arrived, they took her to the hospital to get a gash on her forehead stitched and her broken arm set. They dutifully searched the rubble and the surrounding farm for Matt and Darren, but it’s not clear they ever took Beth seriously. It didn’t help that seismic reading showed no indication of an earthquake, and a core drill produced no evidence of a void beneath the house.
When the videos went public a month later, everyone assumed Matt was behind them, and the legend of the hoax was born.
Beth won’t set foot on the farm anymore, and it took some convincing to get permission to look around the place.
Driving up, it was almost like the first video, except the grass was green, the cars were gone, and only two buildings still stood. The house was levelled and lost beneath the wild lawn.
In the wreckage, I came across a rough-hewn square hole in the wooden floor. It opened onto a brick-strewn crawlspace, not even waist-deep. The base was a solid sheet of stone that had been there since the glaciers retreated. There was not so much as an old well for Darren to have thrown his garbage into.
Is my brother out there laughing at all us fools searching for clues? Or are the conspiracy mongers right, and an ancient city roams beneath our feet, hiding its secrets from prying eyes?
All I know is that on sleepless nights, I go down to my basement and press my ear to the cold concrete and try to convince myself I can’t hear the scratching and the muffled cries for help.