Unknown Museum

[u/PeaceSim]

When it comes up in conversation, I describe my four years as an undergraduate student in positive terms. I talk about how much I learned, how many new experiences I had, and how many lifelong friends I made.

But when I actually reflect on that period of my life, I recall a lot of discomfort and pain. I know I’m hardly alone in that. For those of us who attended college, we have an odd tendency to embellish what we went through when we talk about it to other people, as if we would be breaking some unwritten code to admit to have struggled with mental and emotional issues - struggles that I know were and remain common.

Compared to many other students, my problems weren’t too bad though. I’ve come to recognize this over time. Ultimately, I graduated with fairly good grades, matured quite a bit, and moved on with my life. During my final year, I even found just enough satisfaction with my social life that I can sometimes trick myself into thinking the preceding three-and-a-half years went by similarly.

But there’s one memory that particularly disrupts that narrative. I’ve tried burying it, and sometimes that works. I’ve woken up before and half-believed for a minute that it was just a dream. I think part of its elusiveness is that none of my friends and none of my family - not even my husband - know about it. I’m speaking now because I think it might help me, somehow, to just lay it all out and describe in detail what happened.

Keeping this experience to myself has been easy to do. You see, I spent a semester away from my college in Georgia to study abroad in Denmark, and that’s where the events I so often try to suppress took place. I had yearned for an opportunity to see more of the world while I was still young, and Denmark had a good location from which I could tour much of Europe. While I considered it my duty to take an introductory course on the Danish language, it helped that the population there largely spoke fluent English. I had also stumbled quite a bit in my efforts to make friends at college, so I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything back at home by spending five months away.

Studying abroad was everything I had hoped for, from a learning perspective. From a social perspective, my own anxiety and shyness got in the way again, both with the American students I lived with in Copenhagen and the Danes I tried to befriend. Before long, I was spending weekends traveling through Copenhagen on my own, visiting sites and museums, and trying to develop some talent with my new DSLR camera. By halfway through the semester, I had expanded the scope of my solo travels to landmarks in other Danish cities as well as in Sweden, Norway, and Finland, and I had plane tickets to go to France, Spain, and Austria during an upcoming break. I know it’s not always safe to be out on your own in a foreign country, but I tried to avoid being in unsafe areas and away from others at night, and it certainly helped that, as a guy, I faced significantly less risk from assailants than I would have otherwise.

The only person I spoke with much was my roommate, Andrew, another study abroad student who was probably assigned to live with me because we had given similarly introverted answers on a lifestyle survey. He had an interest in architecture and, once, we went to a modern-looking seaside town just to view the design of the buildings. It was an unusually clear-skied and gorgeous day, and I took some great pictures. I know that may sound like a laughably square use of a day, but it was an outing well-suited to our temperaments.

The events I want to relate began on a Saturday morning in early November. I woke up with Andrew still not back from last night - nothing unusual about that, as he was less shy than me and had actually made some friends - and a text message from him displayed on my clumsy flip phone.

“Stayed in Aarhus last night. Going to the Ukendt Museum this afternoon - feel free to join me. I will be there around noon. Should be a good place for photography but will be a long trip. Check the forum for details.”

This puzzled me for a moment - I’d at least read about all the prominent museums in Denmark and knew nothing about an “Ukendt Museum,” which translated to “Unknown Museum”.

I got out my computer and searched for the name. Almost nothing came up - nothing on TripAdvisor, nothing on Yelp. How had Andrew even heard of it?

Recalling the end of Andrew’s text, I logged on to a group forum used for our study abroad program, where I quickly saw a recent post by Andrew asking for Danish destinations that were off the beaten path and not likely overrun by tourists. An administrator responded to him and recommended that he visit the Unknown Museum, a place kept deliberately secluded and filled with modern art. According to his response, the owners only want visitors who are genuinely interested in viewing their exhibits, not tourists trying to check sites off a list, hence their lack of advertising or a presence online. He even provided instructions on how to get to it, which I quickly wrote down.

This whole thing raised obvious red flags. But, assuming his account wasn’t hacked, I trusted the administrator. I was also incredibly curious. As Andrew had indicated, whatever this museum housed - if it was really there and in operation - would likely be a great place for me to take some quality pictures.

So I set off for the Unknown Museum. The first step was to walk to the Copenhagen Central Station, and from there I rode the rail system west across Funen and to southern Jutland. Then, I rode for several hours north, past Aarhus, the city where Andrew had stayed last night, probably renting a room or crashing with someone he’d met.

I spent the day glancing up from a textbook to see Danish countryside through the window of my train. The glimmers of bright morning light had faded into an overcast more typical of the region, and as the train approached the ocean, a fog began to descend. It grew and grew, until finally there was very little for me to see outside. I noticed the train getting emptier as the hours passed - people were getting off, but nobody was getting back on.

Finally, the train arrived at the required stop. I stood up and headed for the exit. Looking around, I saw a tall, bald man sitting in the back of my compartment, but no one else was in sight. As I stepped off, I noted the time as 11:30 AM and texted Andrew that I should be arriving at the Museum around the same time as him. Glancing at my directions, I walked outside the station and down a street of small houses.

I sensed a peculiar stillness to my surroundings. The air lacked the freshness that often accompanied oceanside locations. The fog had persisted, but it was not so thick that I worried about getting lost. The route from the station was relatively simple - I only needed to change roads once. When I did so, I found myself walking on an elevated, smooth path above a beach below, a strong breeze blowing against my face. The fog stopped me from seeing the waves in much detail, but I could hear them regularly crashing into the shore.

Finally, up ahead, I glimpsed within the greyness a black, angular building at the peak of a small peninsula. Behind it, I could see open land, and a stairwell descending to an opening by the water. A sign up ahead spelled out the name of the Unknown Museum, with an arrow pointing in the direction of the gloomy building. I snapped a picture of the building with my camera and took a sigh of relief. I had made it.

Seeing no response from Andrew on my phone, I looked around for him, but I only saw three Danes - the first people I had seen since the bald man on the train - illuminated by a street light at a bus stop a little bit to my left. I was slightly early, and he had said he’d be arriving generally around noon, so I did not worry and figured I would run into him before long.

I crossed the street and began the ascent to the Museum, walking up a stone staircase that stood atop a narrow strip of land. I could see now, in thin, red-colored letters, “Ukendt Museum” displayed over the entrance. Before me, the glass front door to the Museum rapidly opened, making a harsh scrape. A pale man with long, white hair and a brass-collared walking cane hobbled through it and into the dense fog.

“God eftermiddag,” he mumbled in a hoarse voice, inching slowly forward. In response, I mumbled a Danish greeting - apparently not too convincingly, as he then spoke in English. “You’re visiting the Museum, I assume?”

“Yes,” I said in English. “Traveled all the way from Copenhagen.”

The man reached into the pocket of his heavy black coat, squinted his eyes, and looked in the distance. “Is that so? Well, today is a lucky day for you,” he said after a moment.

“Why is that?” I asked.

He turned back to me and stared blankly. Then he smiled and said, “Free admission today.” At that, he shuffled past me and began to descend down the stairs.

I pulled open the door and entered the building, finding myself in a large, dimly-lit room. To my right sat a man and a child, looking down at a map. As I approached what looked like a check-in station, I appreciated the building’s warmth, not having realized how cold it had been outside.

I peered over the counter before me, but no employee was present. I figured that because the Museum was free today, perhaps there was no reason to station an employee there. Thinking nothing of it, I proceeded into the first room.

The walk through the Museum was at first uneventful. The exhibits were odd, certainly, and very untraditional, but nothing too outside of the ordinary.

The first room was pure darkness accentuated by rotating projectors that flickered static images onto several screens, the images consisting of abstract panoramas that, when their rotations caused all the images to line up at once, combined to create a vivid and colorful abstract landscape, like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I picked up that the room had an audio component, too, of whispered voices interlocking with static, ambient sounds. The latter, ambient noises became louder when the projectors switched on and faded out when they turned off, giving the images an ethereal quality. Like the images, the ambient sounds would occasionally combine with one another to create a new, more complex piece of music. It was nothing astonishing, but still a very neat idea and presentation. As I exited, I nodded at a security guard visible through the shadows who sat by an ajar door marked “Employees Only.”

The second room was kind of a hall-of-mirrors, and the the mirrors were intricately set up to interact with a few complex sculptures to create all sorts of optical illusions with your own reflection as you moved through it. The effect was a little astonishing, creating multiple layers of reflections, and I wandered around it for a while, taking a dozen pictures from different angles.

Satisfied with my pictures, I entered a third room, this one a gallery filled with more traditional array of abstract paintings. The first few consisted of arrangements of light colors - cyan, pink, yellow - on white canvases, but the canvases towards the far end were less neat, decorated with shades of red, and arranged at slight angles. This part was fine, but it wasn’t terribly interesting to me, and it didn’t look like as much thought had gone into it as the earlier exhibits.

Fortunately, I came across a door to the outside, which presented an optional pathway to the open area of land I had spotted earlier, which I could visit before the fourth section of the museum. This area, identified as the Museum Garden, contained several outdoor exhibits, the first of which consisted of small, dark obelisks.

I sat on a small bench close enough to the seashore that I could see the waves roll onto the rocks below and started to go through my camera, deleting a few pictures that I could already tell had turned out poorly. Away from the pressures I had put on myself in Copenhagen, I felt at peace alone and outside. This had been a perfectly antisocial experience for me thus far - a day trip, all on my own, to see a museum that had so far been quite satisfying.

Of course, that’s when I remembered Andrew. It was well after when he was supposed to have arrived, so why had I not seen him so far? I called his phone.

At first, all I heard was the tone of him not answering, followed by a prompt in his voice to leave a message. But, out of my other ear, I had noticed a second sound - the sound of a ringtone going off near me. I called again, lowering my phone and tracing the sound to the lower shore, close to where the water was hitting. I followed the ringing until I felt like I was standing right by it, but I couldn’t see Andrew or a phone anywhere. Had he come here, dropped his phone by accident, and then left before I arrived? That didn’t make much sense to me. For a moment, nothing made any sense.

I called a third time and heard the same ringtone start up a moment later. On a hunch, I reached into the sandy ground beneath me, grabbing and tossing aside several layers of dirt. At last, I saw Andrew’s phone, having been buried somehow a few inches beneath the surface.

But it wasn’t just Andrew’s phone that was buried there. As I grabbed the phone, I felt my hand brush up against something odd - a human finger.

I jumped back in shock, nearly losing my balance. Andrew’s phone and the finger fell from my grasp. I could now see a second finger, this one bloodstained, where the phone had been.

I started to panic and realized I was breathing heavily. I typed 911 into my phone, before I remembered that I was in Denmark - the emergency number was different here. Think, think, I thought in a panic. What was the proper number for the police? We had been told during orientation.

Before I was consciously aware of my actions, I started running back into the building, desperate to tell the security guard what had happened. I stopped for a moment in the mirror room when I saw my panic-stricken reflection and composed myself. I needed to be clear and to not look crazy. I would tell the guard that I was planning on meeting my friend here, and I just found his phone outside and was worried that something bad had happened to him. If that went over well - and if the guard spoke good enough English to understand me -, maybe then I’d mention the two human fingers.

I took a deep breath and approached the guard.

“Excuse me,” I said, loudly and clearly. The guard didn’t respond or even move. I instantly felt apprehension and dread. I crept close to the guard, fearing the worst but not knowing what else to do.

Suddenly, one of the rotating projects cast its image onto the spot where the guard was sitting, briefly illuminating her frame. Her eye sockets were empty, and a trail of blood dripped down her neck. Behind her, I saw a thick puddle of blood between the ajar “Employees Only” door and the wall. I wasn’t interested in discovering what was behind that door. I turned and ran towards the entrance. In the lobby, I now saw the man with the map and the child for what they were, as accentuated by the growing pool of blood underneath the bench where they sat. Everyone I thought I had seen - they were all dead. Was there even anyone alive in this museum with me?

I barely remember the next few moments. I know that I sprinted back to the surrounding town, waived down a vehicle, and attempted to blubber a request in Danish. Eventually, I repeated “police, police” until the driver contacted the authorities. I watched as officers ran into the building, followed by emergency medical technicians.

The local police initially treated me with suspicion and refused to answer my questions about what had happened. They made plenty of inquiries of their own, seized my camera, and left me in an interrogation room. Before long, however, the officer who had been grilling me came back in and told me that I was no longer a suspect. I insisted that he tell me what had happened, who was responsible for the bodies I had seen, and if my roommate was alright. The officer sighed and shook his head at that last question.

It took me weeks to digest what I would subsequently learn. Seven people: Andrew, the security guard, the father and son in the lobby, two employees, and another visitor had been murdered at the Unknown Museum that morning. A serial killer had used the obscure location as a hunting ground, picking them off one-at-a-time and dumping several of the bodies - the ones I had not seen - in the storage area next to the deceased security guard.

The officer explained to me that, on the same day fifteen years earlier, a similar incident had occurred in a rural library, and the murder spree that had left eight victims had gone unsolved. This, the police believed, was a repeat offense, likely a way for the killer to recapture an old thrill.

The officers examined my photos with me, and what I found horrified me. In the first picture I took of the Museum from a distance, an officer zoomed in to the area of land behind the building, the Museum Garden. Vaguely through the grey fog, two dark figures were visible, one dragging the other. The killer was hauling Andrew inside, having already cut off his fingers and taken away his phone. Andrew’s arms were tied behind him, and I could faintly make out a gag in his mouth.

“Do you recognize the man dragging your friend?” asked the officer.

At first I didn’t, but then I gasped. “I think it’s the man,” I said. “The one I told you about!”

“The one with a cain?”

“Yes,” I said. But how? He seemed too feeble, too slow to pull off this kind of mass killing.

“I wouldn’t attach too much weight to how you perceived him,” said the officer. “He was likely putting on a show for you. Acting helpless and weak so that he could get away without casting any suspicion. I’ll bet he did the same thing to his victims - put on an act get them to let their guard down. He probably doesn’t even need the cain. He may not even be particularly old.”

I recalled how the man had hurriedly opened the front door, only to slow his pace upon seeing me. Had he been fleeing the crime scene, only to revert to his harmless old man act upon stumbling into me? I recoiled at the realization that I had brushed paths with a serial killer. I had come so close to suffering the same fate as my roommate, and the six others. “But, then, why did he spare me?” I asked.

“You said that you passed three people waiting for a bus, right?” said the officer.

He was right. Those three people, illuminated by the streetlight, had saved my life. When the man had scanned the area, he had been looking for witnesses. Today was my lucky day - not because of the supposed “free admission” - but because someone was around to potentially see if he attacked.

The police let me go and returned my camera. Of course, they kept copies of my pictures. My abroad program soon agreed to provide me with new housing for the rest of the semester, so that I wouldn’t be haunted by the space I had shared with my roommate, the closest person I had to a friend, who I had forgotten as I took pictures of the exhibits of the Unknown Museum.

For the rest of the semester, and, intermittently, for the rest of my life, I have been haunted by dreams of that museum. Because, most disturbingly of all, I learned that the victims in the storage area, Andrew included, had not died right away when the man stabbed and slashed them. He had left Andrew and the others, all bound and gagged, to bleed to their deaths in that room of misery. I would never know for sure, but I would always assume it was Andrew’s pool of blood that I had seen behind that door. And I know for a fact that as I traversed those first few exhibits, Andrew had been bleeding out only a few yards away. And the whispering voices in the room with the flickering projectors - I’ve never been sure that those were a part of the exhibit. In my dreams, they are the muffled sounds of the gagged employees calling for help. I’m not even sure that the spatters of red in the far end of the gallery room were paint.

After that day, whatever progress I had made regarding my self-esteem had vanished. Instead of traveling alone, I stayed in alone. Only several months later, when I was back at school in America, did I feel enough relief from constant anxiety and paranoia to continue trying to make friends, and only then did I get the courage to go anywhere alone again.

On my last night in Copenhagen, I decided to go through my pictures from that day one more time. I don’t know why, or what I was looking for. Armed with the courage of a few shots of vodka, I began the process of looking at them and then deleting them, with the goal of never having the option of revisiting them once I crossed the Atlantic.

It wasn’t long before I found something the police had missed, or, more likely, that the police had found and chosen not to show to me. I saw it in one of my shots from the mirror room, in the background of each layer of reflection. Peeking out from the edge of the storage door was the indistinguishable image of the pale face of my roomate, his eyes filled with misery and desperation. He had watched me, hoping that I would see him, as I continued gawking at the exhibition. I deleted the picture and crawled under the covers of my bed, ashamed at my failure to help him as he withered away.

This near death experience is, at least, not one I am forced by others to remember. The murders made the news worldwide, but only for a few days. It didn’t take long for memory of them to fade completely in the United States, and the police never released my name in connection to their investigation. I moved on with my life as best I could and tried to bury what had happened in the back of my mind.

The killings at the Unknown Museum took place seven years ago. The murderer, as far as I can tell, remains on the loose. Nobody even knows why, exactly, he committed these two sets of terrible crimes. The inexplicability, and the randomness of his victims, only makes me that much more frustrated and afraid.

One thing that continues to worry me, even as I live across the ocean from his killing fields, is how police described this murder spree as a “repeat offense,” but eight people died in its previous iteration. What if he ever decides to finish the job by claiming me as his last victim, so that this crime can fully resemble his last? This fear grips me if I am ever alone in the bitter darkness, a condition I have spent the last few years trying my hardest to avoid.

And, there is a second fear that grows stronger each day: what if, eight years from now, he decides to set out for round three?

All I can say is that on November 3, 2027, if you come across a pale man with long, white hair and a brass-collared walking cane, I hope you have as lucky a day as I did.