The Yellow Echo story goes like this:
He Had No Mouth. Just Eyes and the Smell of Static.
In spring 1962, teachers at a small Wyoming school uncovered a chilling
mystery. Some 37 children from different grades, who barely spoke to each
other, had all drawn the same eerie figure during art class—a tall man. No
mouth, only hollow eyes and something in his hand: A cord made of hair.
They called him “Yellow Echo.” The children whispered that he only appeared
when it rained, that he whispered through TVs and revealed secrets they
shouldn’t know—like where a teacher kept his gun.
Two weeks later, that teacher disappeared, along with every single drawing. The
only thing left behind was a tape recorder, still running, capturing a child's
whisper:
“We didn’t draw him. We remembered him.”
Ever since Season 5’s Volume 1 of Stranger Things,
there’s been a lot of speculation about Vecna’s latest incarnation, Mr. Whatsit,
and how did Matt and Ross Duffer come up with idea. Now, Madeleine L’Engle’s A
Wrinkle in Time features a character named Mrs. Whatsit and Holly Wheeler
is seen reading the classic novel. It’s easy to see that Vecna tapped into
Holly’s mind and became Mr. Whatsit.
However, as we all know, social media abhors factual explanations.
And, ever so easily, the legend of Yellow Echo was
born.
Yellow Echo is now haunting social media’s digital
backwaters and thousands have been sharing or reposting the story all over the
Interwebs—and like that classic Telephone Game—there’ve been the inevitable embellishments.
At its core, it’s a damn fine chilling tale of thirty-seven children, all of whom
attending school in a nameless Wyoming mining town, and it’s noted that none of
the kids allegedly know one another.
Which could happen in a small town circa 1962 . . .
but I had red flags.
So, as the story goes, the Duffer Brothers found this
intriguing story about thirty-seven students drawing the same image:
The charcoal sketches, executed with unnerving
precision even by the youngest students, depicted a gaunt, elongated figure
with skin like yellowed parchment. Where a mouth should have been, only smooth,
taut skin stretched between hollow cheekbones. Its eyes—or rather the absence
of them—were perfect obsidian voids that seemed to drink in light. A braided
cord of human hair dangled from a skeletal thin hand. The children, when
questioned separately by the school’s increasingly disturbed principal,
insisted with eerie unanimity that the being they called “Yellow Echo”
manifested only during rainstorms, pressing its lipless face against bedroom
windows or hanging in the shadows, while whispering secrets and other things
through television static.
The Yellow Echo entity allegedly revealed the
location of a teacher’s revolver, hidden beneath the floorboards of his
classroom closet or elsewhere in the classroom. Two weeks later, this teacher vanished
without trace, as did every single drawing. At some point, authorities found
nothing except a single reel-to-reel recording that has a child’s voice, barely
audible above the tape hiss:
“We didn't draw him. We remembered him from before we
were born.”
You must admit it’s a very creepy, unsettling story.
However, that’s what it is: A story, one worthy of
Creepypasta; like Slender Man or Black-Eyed Kids, it’s just a creation of
someone’s imagination and it never happened. Even researching known urban
legends, Yellow Echo doesn’t exist—but I’m still looking. There are no news
articles of something like this ever happening and the Wyoming mining town is never
mentioned.
Plus, the Duffer Brothers never said Mr. Whatsit was
based on some urban legend or Creepypasta.
So, if you come across the Yellow Echo story on
Facebook or another social media platform . . . now you know the rest of the
story.
That said, I’m looking forward to Volume 2’s debut on
Xmas Day.
It’s going to be epic.