⚠️ This investigation contains spoilers for all of Marble Hornets, including Rosswood and the Marble Hornets comics. Reader discretion advised.
Part 1: Glowing Eyes from Beyond
In Rosswood Part 5, Jay, after being trapped in the ark for an undefined amount of time, has a close encounter with the Operator (7:08) that sends him running for his life. For some reason, he is able to reach the Rosswood tunnel (8: 52) instead of looping back to the hospital. After entering it, two lights appear at the end of the tunnel, resembling a pair of glowing eyes (9:18-9:27).
Sometimes, a single spot of light can appear as two when blurred, but there are clearly two sources of light here.
Notice the reflection on top. It’s slightly curved, following the shape of the tunnel in a rim-light effect. This means the source of the light comes from the other side of the tunnel, not from inside. When Jay, believing it’s Alex, runs towards it, he’s met by this figure obscured by heavy distortion:
Jay lifts his arm as if shielding his eyes from intense light. The strange figure disappears, but Jay turns to see something strange. Himself (9:38). He is attacked, and drops the camera. He wakes up at the hospital.
Does this sound familiar? Homie (the interview guy from Rosswood: Part 1) tells Alex a story during his interview. His brother got taken into Rosswood tunnel by the Operator. Homie reached the tunnel and called for him. A voice behind him answers: "Here I am." and when Homie looks, he sees himself.
The eyes of Jay’s “double” appear distorted on camera, marking it as something from the ark. Maybe the choice of having its eyes glitch means they were the source of the glowing eyes. And we’ve seen something similar to this before. In Marble Hornets Entry #83, Tim is teleported around by the Operator while wearing the GoPro camera attached. In one of the frames, Tim seems to be in the tunnel and Masky comes towards him menacingly.
This parallel with Marble Hornets made us think that this was not supposed to be a one-time scary trick, but that there might be something else interesting going on. But that was not the only reason.
Right after the attack, we se something that had only appeared before as a drawing or manually inserted image of some sorts: the Operator symbol.
This anomaly only peaked our interest further, so we decided to scour Rosswood for any that could resemble the glowing eyes in the tunnel. We knew TTA made use of the glowing eyes imagery too, so we decided to comb through all their videos (in both the totheark channel and the main MH account) to see if they were separate uses of a similar stylistic device or if we could establish some sort of link.
We are leaving examples of glowing eyes in Eckva and Clear Lakes 44 out because we believe they are beyond the scope of the current investigation.
Another connection we found was in Issue #1 of the Marble Hornet comics. Jessica sees a duplicate version of herself, but the nature of the comics makes it harder to know if she’s experiencing a hallucination, and that’s why we didn’t include it initially. In any case, here it is: after an encounter with the operator in Rosswood Park, Jessica finds herself in a dark forest with unnaturally tall trees.
She runs, but the trees close in on her, trapping her A light suddenly appears behind her. There’s only one way out.
And there she is. Another version of herself in the middle of the path, with light waiting on the other side.
But it is not her. It's wearing her face as a mask.
