Item#: 7115

Containment Class: neutralized

Secondary Class: none

Disruption Class: dark

Risk Class: notice

Employees of the Molson & Company meat packing plant, photographed circa 1908.

Assigned Site
Site Director
Research Head
Assigned Task Force

Site-187
Dir. Martin Anbinder
Marcia Ferretti
N/A

Special Containment Procedures: Paper records relating to SCP-7115 are currently stored in the Federal Bureau of Investigations Unusual Incidents Unit Secure Archive. Physical remains relating to SCP-7115 are to be stored in a standard biological containment lockers per the recommendation of the current HMCL supervisor of Site-187.

SCP-7115 is presumed to have been neutralized. Despite this, sightings of SCP-7115-A or SCP-7115-1 entities are to be treated as a high-priority threat.

Description: SCP-7115 designates a series of anomalous phenomena which occurred in 1908 at the Molson & Company meatpacking plant, a sub-section of the meat packing district of Chicago. The source of said phenomena is believed to have been an entity designated SCP-7115-A, which at the time operated under the identity of Antanas Rimas, a Lithuanian immigrant and employee of the Molson & Company plant.

Addendum 7115.1: Background

H.H. Molson, photographed circa 1908.

Molson & Company, founded in 1863 and dissolved in 1909, was a pork farming and packing firm, with its largest meatpacking plant located in Chicago's Union Stock Yards. The company primarily farmed and slaughtered hogs, but also manufactured products such as soap from slaughterhouse byproducts, doing so in factories adjacent to its main plant.

Prior to the occurrence of SCP-7115, the president of the company was Henry Hughes “H.H.” Molson. Following the publication of Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, which sought to advocate for socialism by portraying the exploitation of immigrants by the Chicago meatpacking industry, and legislative action against the unsanitary nature of contemporary meatpacking1, Molson grew concerned that negative publicity, legislative action, and unionization would affect his profits.

To this end, Molson influenced Harold Leslie, the editor of the Chicago Daily Courier newspaper, to publish articles opposing reform in the meatpacking industry. This culminated in a letter from Molson to Leslie (undated, but likely sent in August of 1908) suggesting that Leslie send a reporter to the Molson plant, disguised as an employee (much like Sinclair himself did in order to research The Jungle), with the aim of producing a firsthand account of the meatpacking industry which would present the Molson corporation positively and contradict Sinclair’s book.

Leslie recommended Sherman Hayes, a young reporter fluent in a number of the languages spoken by the immigrant workers, for the task. He was to lodge with Jelena and Tomas Petrulis, employees of Molson & Company2 who had previously spied on trade unionists on behalf of the corporation.

Addendum 7115.2: Sherman Hayes' Journal

Hayes' stay at the plant, from September to December of 1908, provides the clearest first-hand account of SCP-7115. Relevant excerpts from Hayes' notebooks and journals are provided below.

The P.3 house, or rather shack, is shared between them & 3 ragged chickens which they feed on kitchen scraps. I bunk in the main room by the stove under the story that I am a distant cousin come here to work. They have given me their warmest blanket - I would more happily take it if they did not go on about how it was the best they had, how they were at the service of the Molson corporation and I, bowing & scraping like coolies.

to do - notes re: work tomorrow, "street sketches" of workers + area ("though less than luxurious, the inhabitants have constructed a neighbourhood brimming with rusticpeasant conviviality"?)

Praying I will hear some news of Kozoski4 here! A story like that would make my fame, though God only knows if I will gain anything here except some exotic skin disease.

Much to praise re: plant design efficiency (consult plans for clearer description when returning to office) & administration. Am glad to hold a pen after hacking at pig carcasses for a day. Foreman was informed re: my presence, did not hound me too hard as he did other workers - even so am exhausted working at half their pace.

Even with a lighter workload I am exhausted. A thing I cannot find a kind description of is the smell - sweat & flesh piled on flesh & pigshit & steam from boiling lard still clinging to my face. Hungry too: so close to pound after pound of meat with nothing but thin soup for meals, not that I would want pork knowing how the meat practically steams in its own sweat and slime for hours

"the socialistic voices of the press may argue for unionization and indolence, but the plant workers' actions demonstrate otherwise. Their industriousness is commendable - twice in one day I saw workers cut themselves butchering the slaughtered pigs, yet grit their teeth manfully and go on working. Would that more in this country had their grit and sufferance!"

strange thing seen: one man (Nicolai?) lost a finger to an errant cut, but a wizened worker (long prophet's beard, vaguely like Whitman) grasped the finger and rejoined it to the stump, leaving not even a scar. Some parlor trick, that.

two workers boys were crushed under a section of the factory's roof which caved in this morning. From gossip seems to be an event which has occurred before, pillars and supports widely known to be damaged - previous deaths not reported in the Courier as far as I know.

Regrettably, not even factories as modern and well-regulated as the Molson plant are immune to accidents,

"even in grief the workers have a rustic dignity

working here I witnessed

Jelena says their names were Tavas and Rytas. Brothers.

The old man is called Antanas, some sort of shaman or unofficial leader - better English than all other workers, voice like a preacher. He was consoling Tavas and Rytas' mother when Tomas & I arrived to work. Word amongst workers as relayed by Tomas (the others do not speak in my presence) that we are to go to a meeting spot outside workers' shantytown tonight. Union meeting perhaps?

must write down as proof it was all real

we met in the old mans house, bigger than the rest with a spread of their countrys food laid out. Tomas and I arrived late (his wife tired) he was already speaking to the crowd. telling them not to grieve these deaths nor the other injuries their work had caused. A massed outcry in the congregation, which showed their injuries furiously - stumps of hands, skin peeling from disease, children who were half bone. God, the stench as they shouted & raved!

the old man quieted them. "grief is no use, my friends. tears will not feed or clothe us. does your pain make you want death? I will show you how pain will save you."

I thought he was a socialist & was busy thinking of the words which would best ridicule his claims when he drew the boys' mother from the crowd. she was sobbing, her dress filthy from working in the fertilizer plant. he produced a knife the long lightly curved sort used to cut swine open.

"you were willing to bleed for Molson once. now you will bleed for all of us."

& with a slash he cut her belly open top to bottom through the skirt and as the crowd surged forward and also back in horror he reached in & parted the flesh

and out of the bleeding guts pulled forth a writhing piglet.

the crowd quieted as the woman sobbed quietly still & he reached in and this time a fat sow, squealing and thrashing, trotters tangled in & kicking her intestines, was dragged out on the ground

"Elzbieta, don't cry. You bled once for a rich man. Now bleed for us all, painlessly, and let your blood bring life."

&with those words we all fell to and slaughtered the pigs as we had learned to do.

the workmen are friendlier now having seen me at that meeting. I was invited to sit with them even tried their lunch of black bread and cheese and compared war-stories of the abuse the foreman had made us suffer. they used to look at me with suspicion and for a moment I rejoiced I was getting closer to these people. One even told me about how Kozoski and his anarchists were stockpiling dynamite in this shanty to play at being Czolgos5, clouting me round the head and laughing as if we had worked and shared jokes for decades

but I know the blood&guts business which earned me this acceptance and the taste of raw pork is still slick on my tongue

the old man must know I do not belong. My face too clean-cut and demeanour too inquisitive

What will I taste like?

two men who were friends of Tomas volunteered to be cut open this time saying it was better to die to feed their families than waste away (those workers being rheumatic from working in the chilling-rooms, shivering even when they stood by the old man's stove and declared their willingness). He charged them to bring a third victim, and this night we gathered to see them kneel besides two others - one the loathed foreman, the other (from what the gossip in the room was saying) his son both tied hand & foot

they jeered

I jeered with them and cursed the man and his son too and spat on the boy's face as we paraded him through the meeting room and they were all cut open & black-bristled hogs rose up out of their gashed open guts. We feasted on meat, and the four of them - still living, crying and praying as their guts dangled down to their knees - were dragged away by some of the man's acolytes.

plans to do more. others offered themselves as sacrifices making plans to hunt down others - strangers & beggars not even the staff at the plant to be brought as part of the feast. the scream of the boy as a hog twice his size reared its head from his stomach and ripped the boy's flank apart with its tusks

Something had gnawed up the P.'s chickens. screaming pigs & roaring machines by day, screaming men and women and children by night.

the old man must know I am a spy

We are all just meat

These notes were deposited in a PO box used by Hayes, discovered following the investigation of the events surrounding the Molson factory.

Addendum 7115.3: SCP-7115-1

Jawbone of an SCP-7115-1 instance.

SCP-7115-1 designates a population of organisms observed in the meatpacking district in autumn and winter of 1908. Contemporary autopsies indicate that recovered corpses were humanoid, but exhibited haphazard and asymmetrical mutations rendering them superficially porcine in appearance. While SCP-7115-1 varied visually, all specimens possessed thickened epidermises covered in bristles, elongated faces terminating in boar-like snouts, and teeth elongated into multiple sets of tusks. Genetic testing of recovered skeletal material indicate that SCP-7115-1 share genetic material with baseline Homo sapiens, hybridized with traces of Sus domesticus6, Sus scrofa7, and Metridiochoerus8.

SCP-7115-1 were reported roaming the meatpacking district (though sightings in other areas of Chicago were also recorded), usually operating nocturnally, in order to abduct civilians. While records from this period are fragmentary due to a distrust of law enforcement amongst the immigrant population and the dismissal of sightings as the result of superstition, it is believed that as many as 50 individuals may have been abducted in this phase of activity.

Addendum 7115.4: Interview (28/07/1909)

The Molson & Company factory following the roof collapse.

On 15/12/1908, the Irregular Threats Unit of the Bureau of Investigation9 was notified of "a horde of pigs and pig-men" rampaging in Chicago's meatpacking district. Reports described hundreds of SCP-7115-1 instances assaulting civilians indiscriminately and bisecting their stomachs with knives or their hands. A combination of non-anomalous swine and SCP-7115-1 instances would then proceed to emerge from the stomachs of the victims. It is estimated that more than 200 individuals died in this phase of activity.

Due to the lack of manpower and organization of the then-fledgling Bureau, attempts to liaise with the Chicago police force were haphazard. Ultimately, the impact of the Bureau and law enforcement on containing the anomaly was minimal, as all SCP-7115-1 entities and anomalously produced swine ceased life function in the morning of 17/12/1908, following the collapse of a section of the roof of the Molson & Company meatpacking plant.

The clearest first-hand report of why this anomalous phenomenon ceased was provided by Jelena Petrulis, who was found unconscious and severely injured in the ruined Molson factory and taken into the Bureau's custody. Following a lengthy recovery, she was permitted to give her testimony in Lithuanian, which was recorded and translated. Her testimony is excerpted below.

The company told us to give the boy, the journalist, a place in our house or they would make public the fact that we had informed on Jaczemir and Gintautas10. With that hanging over our heads we were hardly concerned with what Antanas was doing.

The old man did odd jobs around the factory. He was not related to any of us, but we all called him Grandfather because he was gentle and knew remedies for all our ills - how to stretch our wages, or heal a sick child, or mourn the ones we lost.

I didn't go to that first meeting - I had intended to mourn with them, Elzbieta being a good friend of mine, but that night I was sick with a fever. When Tomas and the boy came back with haunches of raw pork in a basket I thought I was dreaming. I tasted it, and it was the finest, fattiest meat I had eaten, certainly not the worm-ridden stuff Molson sold. My fever passed in days.

We didn't have the luxury of asking too many questions: food was always short, and the ones who died died willingly. The men went to work with a new shine of health in their faces and the children did not go to bed hungry for the first time in years.

Then we began hearing that the men were killing workers who had not chosen to go to their deaths, or strangers, or company staff. There was more meat than ever for all of us. And then the boy came to me, after the chickens had been mauled to death one night. He told me that he had hidden his notes away, in case something happened to him that night. "I will confront him," he said, in his stilted schoolbook Lithuanian. "I need to understand. Or to stop it, if that is possible." Then he apologized if he had caused us any harm or offence and said that he had only ever wanted to help the workers at the plant, so sincerely that I had no choice but to smile and thank him.

There was a gauntness in his face even though he, like us, had grown fat on meat. He vanished that night.

Tomas warned me, told me that what had happened to the boy would happen to me, but I did it. I hid my carving knife in my shawl and went to the old man's house. He was alone, wrapped in an old fur, cutting slices from a piece of cured pork-fat - my favourite treat when I was young, eaten on bread drizzled with a few drops of molasses. But when he offered me it my stomach turned and I sat down without speaking.

"You are afraid, aren't you? Of my children, who have learned to walk on their hind legs and forage for their own meals now?" He ate, and went on talking. His accent had always been strange, sounding like it was from no place and every place. "I am sorry about your chickens. You must have been fond of them."

"When the world was young, I preached to people of better lives. But the world disabused me of that notion. Do you know what this country has taught me? It is that all of you can be made to willingly line up to be chopped up into meat. Every belief is just a machine. People go in one end, and bodies comes out the other. Do you really think that the unions and the socialists and Koszewski's anarchist bombers will save you from being slaughtered for some cause or another? No - it is the highest and noblest lesson of this great nation that all of you will choose to die and suffer, to become nothing but cuts of American meat. And there is only one escape from this system."

"And this is?" I asked him. I remember that the knife slipped from my shawl and clattered to the ground but I did not pick it up.

"To be the one eating the meat."

He motioned to his plate of cured pork-fat. "This pig - well, this was a well-bred one, from a good family. A little piglet who knew his letters. You knew him well. Won't you have a bite? I have some molasses to sweeten the taste."

And - I cannot describe how it happened, as if a light suddenly shone against his face - I saw what he was. Something monstrously old. A weeping red symbol was carved on his forehead, and when he stretched his hands out, white staring eyes were set in his palms. I shrieked and ran. All he did was laugh, and snort and snuffle like a pig.

May I please finish this interview later? I don't feel well.

No, I can continue speaking. Just some water, please.

You know about the pig-men, how they burst out of our shanty slaughtering every man and woman and child. I saw more die from the stampede and the crush than at the creatures' hands - though the ones who did die, cut open to birth more of those hideous things, I will pray for from now until the hour of my death. Tomas and I hid until the stampede of men and swine passed, and joined a handful of others, Francowicz and his friends, who claimed to know where Koszewski's stockpile of dynamite was. The old man was holed up in the factory, they said. We would go in, and…what the plan was, I cannot guess.

Two of them, they…they were taken by those things before we got there. Women I had shared meals with, torn open with meat-hooks. All to get our hands on a pistol and three sticks of dynamite. But we took them and headed back towards the factory. This place was still where we had made our home, after all. And we had no intention of seeing those things slaughter us to a man.

Those pig-creatures were ferocious, but slow-witted. Now that the crowd had escaped or been slaughtered, navigating around them was easier than it seemed - though we were almost given away when the sight of, of hanging bodies or trampled children or worse made us sick.

[In English] No, I can go on. Just some more water and a cigarette. Thank you.

Yes. You must have seen how the old man, or those creatures, had hung the factory walls with bodies. Each one cut open, birthing screaming pigs onto the ground, the building itself straining and shaking and panels from the roof clattering to the ground. The noise gave us cover until the handful of us found our way towards its center, where the old man had cleared a circle in the blood and filth. Before one of the pillars, where he had hung some idol, he was bowing and chanting. It was a word I do not know; I will try to say it.

"Aeon! Aeon! Aeon!"

The old man spotted my husband first. His expression was one of bafflement - I truly do not think he could understand why anyone would stand against him. But with a flick of his hand, faster than Tomas could pull a trigger - I looked away just in time, but in the corner of my eye I saw him tearing apart like old cloth. We scattered, and I grabbed the dynamite and matches. Francowicz drew the pistol, but a pig-creature took all six shots with its body and closed the distance with him and plunged a meat-hook -

Where I found the strength, I do not know. But I lit a match and touched it to the dynamite and tossed it.

It landed by the pillar, some distance from him, and he only laughed. "Nothing but meat," I remember him saying as he pointed his hand towards me.

And then the dynamite exploded, and the pillar twisted at its base, and the roof tore and buckled, and I brought the entire fucking ceiling of the factory down on that creature's head.

The Bureau of Investigation publicized a cover story that the SCP-7115 event was caused by mass hysteria amongst workers. Molson & Company was dissolved in 1909 following the SCP-7115 event; H.H. Molson died in a car accident the same year, an event heavily rumoured to have been a suicide. The Chicago Daily Courier, having lost its most prominent corporate backer as a result, likewise ceased operations in 1913. To obscure her involvement in the event, Jelena Petrulis was indicted for criminal damage of property, dying due to complications of pneumonia in prison in 1914.

Due to the cessation of life functions in all SCP-7115-1 instances, SCP-7115-A is presumed neutralized. However, the fact that a non-anomalous human was able to survive the factory building's collapse suggests the possibility of the entity's continued survival.

Footnotes

1. Most significantly the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

2. Respectively employed at the Molson soap-making factory and in the meatpacking plant.

3. Referring to the Petrulis couple.

4. Presumably a misspelt reference to Josef Koszewski, an anarchist operating in the Chicago area wanted for his involvement in two attempted bombings of politicians.

5. A misspelled reference to Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901.

6. The domestic pig.

7. The wild boar

8. The giant warthog.

9. A unit of what would later be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation dedicated to monitoring anomalous threats, which was folded into the Unusual Incidents Unit following the formation of the latter.

10. Referring to Jaczemir Dzikowski and Gintautaus Petravičius, two labor union organizers who were arrested in 1904 for allegedly planning to sabotage factory facilities.