(Dating back to at least August 9, 2009, Barbie.avi is the story of a young man who goes to a party in a largely abandoned industrial neighborhood. After being awoken early in the morning by something being thrown into a dumpster, he finds a discarded computer tower that he hopes to restore. Looking through the hard drive, he finds a video file labeled "Barbie.avi." It's a video of a woman apparently being interviewed, but it's impossible to hear what she's saying over the static.
It seems the woman is being verbally abused, with "skin" being the only word the protagonist thinks he can read on her lips. After 40 minutes of watching, he's convinced something horrible happened to her. In a shot lasting a few seconds at the end of the video, there's an abandoned home near some railroad tracks a few miles away. He and a friend go to investigate.
They don't find any trace of the woman in the building. However, more significantly, they do realize that there is running water at this decrepit house out in the middle of nowhere. What could have been covered up?
As hard as it is to believe that people might leave evidence of a murder on their computers before carelessly throwing them out, there are cases of people apparently being even more actively self-destructive with their murder evidence. For example, on Thanksgiving in 2012, a man in Little Falls, Minnesota outfitted his house with a large array of cameras and microphones to capture him tormenting and then murdering two young people that broke into his house.
Barbie.avi with its ambiguity and subtlety is actually much more believable than real incidents like that.
Here is the story. Read at your own risk.)
Hello. This thing happened to me a few months ago; I just need to share it with somebody.
It all started at my friend's party. He's an artist who rented out a loft in the industrial part of town. If you can picture what a place like Detroit looked like in the 1920s - that's what this area looks like. A bunch of old turn-of-the-century factories crammed into ten blocks.
Most of them are abandoned.
So I partied a little too hard that night and decided to crash on a couch at the loft. I woke up at around 4 am, the sun wasn't out yet but you could still make things out in the dim blue light. I went to the bathroom, carefully tiptoeing around the people that were passed out on the floor. As I was doing my thing, I tiptoed to look out the bathroom window and I saw the panorama of deserted urban decay.
I remembered how much I liked places like this. It was so dark and devoid of life, and strangely serene.
So I went back to the couch and tried to fall asleep. After 45 minutes of staring at the ceiling I decided I didn't want to be there any longer, so I swallowed my pride and decided to wake my girlfriend up to beg her for a ride, since walking around the vacant streets at this time was not an option. Being an awesome girlfriend, she was totally cool with it, and told me she would be there in about a half-hour and that she would give me a call when she was outside. My phone died ten minutes later so I decide I would sit by the window and watch for her car. I sat there for a while and my eyes started getting heavy and I began to doze off.
A crashing noise outside woke me up. It wasn't loud, but just enough to snap me into reality. I looked out the window and scanned the area, but didn't see anything. Across the street from the loft near a mountain of garbage bags and one of those enormous dumpsters I see a computer and a monitor smashed against the floor that hadn't been there before.
When my girlfriend arrived I went downstairs and greeted her. Just as I was about to get in the car, I remembered a friend of mine who had blown out his power supply. So I decided to walk over to the dumpster and see what I could salvage. The monitor was worthless, but the tower seemed to have suffered almost no damage, so I put it in the trunk and we drove off.
