December

A month into the phenomenon new reports continued to radiate outwards like the spokes of a bone candelabra in a medieval ossuary. Though this was not to say that returners stopped appearing at ground zero either. While the first to rise were the newly buried dead, with the fewest signs of decomposition and the newest soil over their graves, older bodies were still continuing to claw their way upwards at a slower pace. Much of the infrastructure in the tristate area had crumbled following the panicked, mass exodus, which made large scale analysis of the phenomenon difficult, but as time went on, more and more researchers headed toward ground zero, like salmon fighting against the current of New Jersey’s fleeing residents.

The researchers drawn to the phenomenon were a diverse, motley bunch, coming from the humanities as much as from the hard sciences. Initially, the government sent the mandatory biologists, virologists, and an assortment of medical professionals to investigate, but as they failed to reach a consensus on the cause, and as the political situation worsened and became unsafe, many fled out of the steadily increasing radius. The ones now drawn to the hypocenter were mainly independent researchers, unaffiliated with any university, company, or branch of government.

Some, naturally, were medical doctors, though many were unlicensed, either hoping to redeem themselves from past malpractice by solving the biggest mystery confronting modern science, or just wanting to use the knowledge they spent so long accumulating, which they could no longer utilize professionally, to make a difference. They also brought a greater diversity of perspectives to the phenomenon, since quite a few of them lost their licenses for practicing “unscientific” alternative medicine, just as by this point it was becoming clear that mainstream Western medicine wasn’t going to cut it.

There were also many psychologists and parapsychologists. When the returners first started appearing, many tried to dismiss the sightings as mass hallucinations tied up with grief, trauma, and denial. Once the reality of the physical resurrection sunk in, the psychological explanation lost much of its popularity, yet there remained many unanswered questions. For one, it was unclear as to why some returners were resurrected, while others, with similar causes and times of death, sometimes even in the same cemetery, did not. At first it was conjectured that the chances of returning were probabilistic, yet the initial large-scale statistical studies conducted in November did not yield a clear result. Sometimes it was one out of ten that returned, other times nine out of ten, and nothing about the location, soil composition, or other major environmental factors could account for why.

This led to resurgence in psychological interest in the phenomenon. What did the returners want? Was individual desire a key factor in becoming a returner? Or was it also linked to some external cause? The psychologists that were drawn to ground zero banked on the chance that this was a case of mind over matter, and that without their expertise, the mystery would never be solved.

The parapsychologists were a different story. Most of the scientific establishment looks down on parapsychology as a pseudo-discipline. But, needless to say, in the current state of things, interest in it spiked dramatically. Before November, parapsychologists mostly dealt with ghosts, as until then there had been no verified cases of undead in physical form. As such, parapsychology largely relied on various forms of photo- and videography to analyze magnetic fields, ultraviolet light, and other phenomena normally invisible to the naked eye, for signs of unusual activity, as well as the examination of sub- and supersonic audio frequencies.

Historically, such “evidence” collected by parapsychologists has been highly suspect, despite going back over a century to early spirit photography. There were just too many ways results could be forged, with the most basic example being a double exposure photo, where one image is superimposed onto another in the same frame, creating a transparent ghost form in the case of a photo of a person, which could happen with older film cameras when one rewinds the film, forgets to take it out, and then proceeds to take a whole other set of photos with it. While, perhaps, the earliest cases of false spirit photographs were accidental artifacts, once the mechanism through which they were created became understood, it could be deliberately used to mislead the gullible.

THough even with that aside, the main issue with such evidence, even when collected in good faith, was the selection bias. Given enough footage or photographs, some small percentage will inevitably have strange blurs, glares, shadows, etc. which may at times resemble faces or bodies, some more convincing then others. With the rapid rise in digital storage, the amount of footage that could be collected had been increasing exponentially, and so was the number of those one in a thousand shots bearing the marks of the eerie and bizarre. Still, these were selected intentionally from a pool of overwhelmingly mundane footage of nothing special. Nonetheless, the important thing was that the parapsychologists brought a unique set of equipment to the analysis, which most of the “real” scientists did not rely on in the same way.

More surprising were the many humanities researchers that flocked towards ground zero, most of them sharing a certain fascination with death. There were the poets, who were difficult for many of the others to communicate with, since they spoke in riddles. There were the classicists, bringing perhaps the most historical expertise to the issue, as it seemed that most cultures throughout history had something to say about the resurrection of the dead, which made the modern age that had been so quick to “disprove” the undead an outlier, if anything. And then there were the musicians, whose abundant number was somewhat surprising, especially given the wide variety of genres they represented. Yet, any one, be they blues, folk, metal, or classical, argued passionately that music is deeply tied up with death and rebirth.

Meanwhile, the radius of the phenomenon continued to grow. Reports of violent conflicts began to pour in as the masses of people moving away from ground zero started to encounter resistance and closed state lines. While the physical danger to the returners posed to the living was largely imaginary, the danger from other humans turned out to be very real. Panic breeds more panic. So, each instance of mass violence that made it into the public eye only served to amplify the next one, unintentionally but steadily reinforcing the perceived seriousness of the situation.

As Christmas approached, more and more apocalyptic Millenarian cults started to appear throughout the US, many of which were founded around the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, specifically the section called the Acts of Pilate, which features the episode known as the Harrowing of Hell, Christ’s descent into the underworld, or more accurately translated from Ancient Greek, Hades.