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| - A claim that a doctor named Robert Miller created "quantum-phase corrective lenses" to help his daughter, Emily, alleviate her visual impairments, circulated online (archived) in November 2024.
The claim alleged that these special glasses resulted in Emily being able to see otherworldly things — specifically, that Earth and everyone on it were part of a cosmic digestive system for some unseen entity. Emily allegedly told nurses, "The thing, it keeps us dreaming so we don't feel ourselves being consumed, being digested."
Driven mad by the imagery, Emily allegedly removed her own eyeballs and has remained institutionalized ever since, while her father disappeared soon after.
@emptyvesselstt In 1985, Dr. Robert Miller developed what he called "quantum-phase corrective lenses" to help his 12-year-old daughter Emily, who suffered from severe visual impairment. The breakthrough should have revolutionized optical science. Instead, it led to one of physics' most disturbing unsolved cases. Initial tests were promising. Emily reported perfect vision for the first time in her life. Then, after three days of use, she began describing "wrongness" in what she saw. "The air is breathing," she wrote in her diary. "Everything is inside something's stomach. We're floating in digestive fluid. It's so big I could barely see it. It's laughing at us, all of us!" Her final coherent statement to hospital staff: "The thing, it keeps us dreaming so we don't feel ourselves being consumed, being digested." Dr. Miller found Emily in their bathroom on March 14, 1985. She had removed her own eyes with her hands. Before sedation, she repeatedly thanked him for "making me blind again." The prototype glasses were never recovered. Miller's research notes, found partially burned, contained equations that leading physicists called "impossible" and "architecturally incompatible with our universe." Miller vanished two weeks later. His final recorded phone call to colleague Dr. James Chen contained one cryptic statement: "The human eye evolved to see what we need to survive. Not what's actually there." A 1986 investigation found Emily's diary contained recurring sketches of what appeared to be vast, cellular structures surrounding everyday objects. The final page showed a crude drawing of Earth, labeled: "nutrient sac #4.2e9." Emily remains institutionalized. During rare lucid moments, she asks nurses to check if the sky is still "digesting." #creepy #creepytok #creepypasta #scarystories #horrortok #cursedimages #analoghorror #mystery #thematrix #mandelaeffect #smile2 #conspiracy #reality ♬ Black Star - Lustmord
One TikTok video featuring the claim received 1.2 million views as of this writing. The same video also was shared on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
One user on TikTok said, "True or not this is one of the trippyest [sic] stories I've heard in a while." A different person on YouTube wrote, "This is total b.s. I mean, why didn't she just take off the glasses. No need to rip your eyes out."
Another YouTube viewer commented, "This story originated from this channel's website that publishes creepy pasta material. There are absolutely zero cross references out there."
Indeed, the claim originated with an account named Empty Vessels, whose bio page on the blogging website Medium read "SCP / CREEPYPASTA," indicating that was part of an internet group that writes and shares scary urban legends. The organization describes itself as "a creative writing website. The Foundation, its anomalies, and everything else that's been written about is fictional."
Snopes found no record of Dr. Robert Miller or Emily Miller before Empty Vessels posted the story on Nov. 15, 2024, and a reverse Google Image search generated only results that lead back to the claim on TikTok.
Further, the original video was labeled on TikTok as "AI-generated." The AI detection platform Hive Moderation returned a 99.9% likelihood that the image of father and daughter was generated by AI.
(Hive Moderation)
In fact, Empty Vessels includes many similar made-up urban legends, including "The Folding Man," about a man who can purportedly contort his body in nonhuman ways and used the ability to kill and consume human livers for more than a century, which bears a striking resemblance to a popular episode of the television series "The X-Files" called "Squeeze."
Similarly, "The Palmer Incident," in which a child's doll terrorizes her family, is lifted from a famous episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "Living Doll."
The Robert and Emily Miller story deals with cosmicism, a primary theme found in the works of horror and science-fiction author H.P. Lovecraft, which a profile in The Morning News explains as:
The defining feature of Cosmicism is not evil, as is the case with Gothic horror, but the utter insignificance of man… [Lovecraft's] existential universe is one in which no one and nothing cares about us one way or the other, where the only "gods" are beings of a scale we mortals cannot readily process.
The imagery of a giant entity feeding on humanity in the claim about the Millers is also present in a separate Empty Vessels video presenting another take on similar lore, about a man waking from a coma and reporting seeing "the true reality."
Like the tale of the Millers, "The Folding Man" and "The Palmer Incident," this too is a tall tale created to seem authentic through the use of artificial intelligence and existing pop culture to fabricate a false but entertaining equivalent of a spooky campfire story intended to go viral on the internet, often referred to as creepypasta.
Snopes has fact-checked creepypasta stories before, including the claim that viewers heard the devil's voice on TV, the history of" Sprinkles the Killer Clown" and the disappearance of a man following a call to 911.
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