Kości

On the night of 30 January 1986, months after the infamous Telewizja Solidarnosc incident in September, TVP’s Program Pierwszy (Program One) experienced a TV hijacking in which mysterious text, together with disturbing music and imagery, was broadcasted during closedown. This hijack was allegedly related to a mass suicide in a small Polish town that left many of its inhabitants dead. It is unknown where this town is located, but it is speculated to be located near Krakow according to local reports. As it was shown at midnight, few people managed to view this unsettling broadcast, with many experiencing nightmares as a result of seeing this. Below is an account from one of the viewers, who wishes to go under the name of G.L. to protect his identity.
== The account ==
This incident goes all the way back to my college years when I was studying architecture in one of Warsaw’s top universities in the 1980s. Back then, I used to spend time watching shows on Program Pierwszy on a small Sony TV that I bought myself for my dorm when I wasn’t studying or doing homework. The TV also came with a free Betamax as well, something that wasn’t easily available in Poland at the time. Using the Betamax, I was able to get good clips of my favorite programs using fresh tapes that were used for VHS/Betamax, such as this particular broadcast that I will be talking about now.
One January night, I was watching a show from Czechoslovakia (I forgot the show's name) while lying in bed, slowly dozing off and trying not to completely fall asleep. It was 11:30 pm when the show began, but I wanted to press on anyway, because apart from this show, there was nothing on the TV that could help me stay awake until midnight. The Betamax was left on for about an hour so I can rewatch the episode on my VHS tape. Overall, there was nothing out of the ordinary, but what happened next is where it gets dark.
So once the show ended, it cut to the announcer wishing a goodnight before cutting to tomorrow’s TV schedule for Program Pierwszy and Drugi and finally, the sign-off anthem. As the channel sign-off always does every day, the Polish national anthem plays in the background as the screen features a white polygon (which was supposed to represent the borders of Poland) and the coat of arms inside the polygon in a blue background. When the screen zoomed into the Polish coat of arms, however, the screen abruptly cut to black, and a low, droning noise can be heard after three seconds. I was about to grab the remote control on my table to turn off the TV until I heard a loud, distorted beep.
The beep was accompanied with a red screen that flashed in three-second intervals. For every red screen that flashed each time, the beeps grew increasingly louder until it cut to the same screen, only this time saying “Twoja wina” (Your fault). A voice was heard, but it was so muffled and distorted that it was more or less impossible to make out what he was saying. Then, it cut to a distant view of what appears to be a town, judging by the fact that there was a church tower in the distance. The camera zoomed towards the church tower before cutting to inside the town, where some bodies can be seen lying on the road. During this time, the sound of blowing wind and eerie synth music can be heard. I considered turning off the TV quick before I saw the worst of it, but in the end I had no choice but to watch the rest of the broadcast, expecting something in store for myself.
The most disturbing part of the broadcast wasn’t just the hijacking itself. It then showed a group of bodies scattered around at a churchyard. They were all lying flat in the ground, some of them crumpled, and some were lying face-first. I don’t know about you, but this unsettling clip in this broadcast kind of reminded me of Jonestown, which occurred six years prior. The corpses in the churchyard lay in a similar fashion to that of the Jonestown victims. It also didn’t help that there were some children lying with the others too. The video cuts to a child, presumably a little boy,  nestled in the lap of a dead woman sitting by a wall, seemingly fallen asleep. I spotted some cyanide pills next to the woman, and I started to wonder if this was some kind of mass hysteria going on in that town.
For a split-second the screen began twitching violently. It then showed a close-up of a white tablet laying on some concrete pavement. By this time, the synth music had stopped, and was replaced with the sound of muffled crying and singing, which I assume it was a dirge of some sort. The camera focused on the tablet for six seconds before zooming out, revealing a dead boy lying on the pavement. He was crumpled on the ground, with his clothes and hair messed up and flies swarming his body, and he seemed to be quite malnourished. As if the dead kid with his mom couldn’t get anymore worse, there were maggots wriggling around his body, implying that he had died a few days before. I had to cover myself with my blanket while peering at the TV through the folds. 
Text below his body appeared, saying, “Szczęśliwy?” (it literally means “happy” in Polish) Then, a stack of O’s and /’s, divided in three columns, were shown. Honestly, I have no idea what this means, but I assume it was some kind of subliminal messaging. After this horrific clip, it cut back to the same distant view of the town before, only this time, it was focusing on a row of houses. The same garbled letter stack is shown once more as Morse code can be heard in the background (after running through a decoder, the code spelled out “Skóra i kości”, which means “skin and bones” in Polish). Eventually, the screen twitched again before cutting to a blue screen and later a test card, thus concluding the broadcast.
After watching this I could not take it anymore and turned off the TV. For most of the night I mostly slept with myself covered in my blanket, still thinking about the dead boy in the broadcast. The next day, questions about this disturbing broadcast went around my head, still begging me to figure out what kind of sick nightmare I had just watched. I told my friends about the broadcast yesterday, all of which were shrugged off as lies. Only the Betamax recording that I managed to save did manage to convince them that it really happened, no questions asked. 
For my friends also, they had no word to say about this broadcast, but one of my friends speculated that this broadcast could be the work of Solidarity itself, not to mention that they hijacked TVP four months before. If it was Solidarity, they may be trying to get their message across the mass suicide in the town seen in the broadcast. Presumably, the hijackers were trying to pin the blame on Prime Minister Jaruzelski for the incident that happened there. Dziennik Telewizyjny, as well as Trybuna Ludu, Poland’s state-run news program and newspaper at the time, never reported on the broadcast that happened yesterday, although there were local newspapers around the vicinity of the town in the broadcast that managed to give out uncensored and detailed information of the incident.
Either way, it has been years since the disturbing Kości incident that happened back in 1985. So far, the hijackers have never been captured and apart from this account that I wrote, no other information about this broadcast has ever been found. I have since moved on from that incident onwards, but for the others who saw it on that fateful day, it no doubt stayed with them forever.
G.L.
13/10/2002
Category:Television