Claverhouse Emails

The **Claverhouse Emails series** was a series of fifteen stories posted to r/nosleep from 2012-2015 by an anonymous user of the same name. (A sixteenth story, Hands, was also published by the author, but appears to be their original work, being left off the site's listing) The user stated that these stories were emailed to them by a friend from a psychology forum, though they couldn't verify whether they were true accounts or works of fiction. The stories can be read in any order and do not have any direct connections to each other; the only link between them is the context of their writing.

Of the fifteen stories, ten were adapted to audio form on The NoSleep Podcast. The majority of them were read by James Cleveland and Kyle Akers.

## Background Information

*Taken from the author's comment on The White Room, and from the About section on the official site*

A few years back, while I was still a student, I used to go on various forums a lot, mostly to do with the two subjects I was most interested in: psychology and philosophy.

On the forums, there was one name that kept cropping up – some guy (I presume it was a guy) who called himself Claverhouse. He wasn’t a prolific poster, but what he had to say was always interesting (at least to me). He seemed to come at things from a different point of view from most of the people on the forums, who were probably just young students like me who’d read a few books and thought they knew it all.

He had a pretty bad reputation on the forums. A lot of the other posters thought he was just a crank who had no idea what he was talking about, because he’d go against a lot of the theories that we’d read about and dismiss the latest fashionable hypotheses out of hand, but I liked the guy. He was hard to understand and could be very abrasive (and sometimes a little shocking) at times, but once you got used to the way he put things, he made a lot of sense. It was refreshing to hear from someone who had such a different outlook on things and wasn’t just parroting the same stuff we’d all picked up from textbooks.

It got to the stage where no-one was really taking him seriously anymore, and he was getting a lot of abuse from other posters (mostly just stupid name-calling: they never actually addressed what he was saying. You know what the internet can be like). I felt sorry for him, and ended up sort of befriending the guy, although he didn’t really seem to care what other people thought about him at all.

We ended up sending each other emails quite a lot. I gathered that he must have worked in a psychiatric institution of some sort, maybe as a nurse or a care worker or something, probably not as a psychiatrist or psychologist. He was always very sketchy about the details, saying that he wanted to stay as anonymous as possible, and that the details didn’t really matter anyway as it was the general principles of the things he had learned that were important.

Anyway, he ended up sending me quite a few accounts like the one above. He called them his “case studies”. They were always written in the first person like that, as if someone had told him their story face-to-face. I don’t know if he interviewed the people as part of his job, or if he pieced together their stories just through talking to them informally: hell, for all I know he might have been just a janitor or a porter or something. He’d just say that this was the best way to present what he’d found, and that it helped you to put yourself in the person’s shoes and really understand what had happened to them and what it might mean.

Whenever I pressed for more details, like who the person was or what happened to them afterwards, he’d clam up and just say, “everything you need to know is there in the case study”, or “that’s not the important thing”. After a while I stopped asking, and just took the emails for what they were.

Eventually I left college, got a proper job and real life sort of took over. I stopped going to the forums, the emails slowly tapered off, and now we haven’t been in contact for years. Claverhouse always said that I shouldn’t talk about the emails he sent me with anyone else, but it’s been so long since I last heard from him that I think it’s okay to show them to other people now, and this seems to be the ideal place for them.

I’m not sure I still have all of them, and the ones I do have will take some digging to find (he used a bunch of different email accounts, and I don’t have the same email I used to use back then, but I think I’ve got most of them stored away either on disc or online somewhere), but if there’s any interest I can post a few more on here if people want to read them.

## Stories

* The White Room
* Hives
* A Face in the Crowd
* Footprints
* Snow
* Echoes
* In the Family Way (posted under "Expecting" on the site)
* Touched (posted under "A Caress" on the site)
* The Accident
* The Sleep Clinic
* The Tree House
* Still Waters
* Monsters
* The Summer House
* Last Words

## On The NoSleep Podcast

* *Echoes* was featured in S2E13
* *Snow* was featured in S2E18
* *The Accident* was featured in S3E05
* *The White Room* was featured in S3E05
* *The Sleep Clinic* was featured in S3E10
* *A Face in the Crowd* was featured in S3E13
* *Footsteps* was featured in S3E19
* *Hives* was featured in S4E04
* *Still Waters* was featured in S4E08

## Trivia

* Despite being the first story in the series, *The White Room* would not be featured on The NoSleep Podcast until episode S3E05, after three other stories in the series.