What is The Origin?

Back in 2020, I got a few call-and-hang-ups from a place called the Garret Van Horn motel, in upstate New York. At the time, I did a cursory search on the place and discovered that the owner was a guy called Vartan Boghossian. The motel closed, apparently, in 2019, but Mister Boghossian still lives on site. When I spoke to him in 2020, he denied having called me.

At the time, I put the name of the motel through a few search engines and ended up in a chatroom where people were talking about something called The Origin. I skimmed through this and it looked like the usual conspiracy stuff. I didn’t have the bandwidth for a new secret society back then, so I put the whole thing on the back-burner.

But some of the stuff Matt and I have been working on recently put me back on the trail, so I dug out the notes I made at the time and decided to do a little more digging.

The chatroom I had found before seems now to have closed, but there were a few breadcrumbs to be followed on the Dark Web (I never know if that should be capitalized), not least a story about a woman named Carol Matlock.

Carol Matlock was a realtor living in a town called Tunguska, Florida (I think she was originally from Nebraska). Carol sold retirement properties, which is big business in that part of the world. To all outward appearances, she was successful and happy. Tom Matlock, Carol’s husband, worked in financial services and was a popular character in the local community.

I’d love to be able to provide you with more details about Carol, even a photograph. But none exist. They certainly used to; Carol had LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, she was an Instagram user, there were pictures and information about her on the realty company’s website. But one day a few years ago, all of that vanished. And when I say “one day”, that is not simply colloquial; literally every single piece of information or image of Carol Matlock disappeared from the internet in one single day. That was the same day on which more than $20,000 went missing from the safe in Carol’s boss’s office, the same day on which Carol and Tom’s joint account was cleared out, the same day on which Tom was beaten to death in the family home, the same day Carol Matlock disappeared off the face of the Earth.

Did Carol murder Tom? It's not easy to get any inside information on their marriage. Perhaps Carol acted in self-defense. Perhaps she stole the money as an escape fund, perhaps she erased all online traces of herself to make it harder for law enforcement to find her. It’s certainly possible to join those dots. It's equally possible that Carol was not responsible for Tom's murder. In which case, what happened to her?

Where it gets even weirder is in the account of Betty Furst. Betty was a waitress who worked in the diner a block over from Carol's office. Carol would come in there every morning for a cup of coffee before heading on to work. Betty knew Carol as a regular, but they weren’t friends. Betty recalls that Carol would always have a paperback on the go (apparently she favored old Sidney Sheldon novels). She would sit in the same booth every morning, drink a cup of black coffee and read. Twenty or thirty minutes of time to herself before the day got busy.

But on the morning before all of these events happened, there was a break in the pattern. Carol arrived at the diner, as usual, but there was a woman sitting in her regular booth. A homeless woman, Betty believes. She had tried to move the woman on a few minutes earlier, but the woman had become abusive and Betty had decided to leave her to it. When Carol arrived, Betty expected her to give the homeless woman a wide berth, but they actually exchanged some pleasantries, which Betty couldn’t hear, and then Carol sat down with the woman and they talked for a few minutes.

The one detail Betty remembers, the detail that has the Dark Web chatrooms so excited, is that the stranger apparently passed Carol a small hardback book with a bright red cover.

The “red book” is an intriguing piece of lore for the kinds of people who hang out in the shadows of the internet, muttering about The Origin. Most often it is described as a plain hardback book, I think kind of A5 size, with a bright red dust jacket. But sometimes it is claimed that the book does have a title, emblazoned in gold lettering on the red: “How To Disappear In America”. The “red book” is supposedly some kind of handbook for members of The Origin.

The idea that Carol Matlock met with a homeless woman who gave her the “red book”, and that the book gave her instructions on how to erase herself from the internet, murder her husband, and then vanish into thin air is what makes this case particularly intriguing.

So if the “red book” is the instruction manual, then just what is The Origin? Again, facts are thin on the ground, if not non-existent, and even the rumors seem a little flimsy. But I have seen it described as “the shadow government of the United States of America”.

I asked Eleanor Peck about it and, while it’s outside of her field of expertise, she did put forward a theory that she once heard that The Origin was a secret society that actually took seed within the Puritan faith in Europe during the Early Modern period, but was transferred to America, where it took root, when the Mayflower sailed. The diaries of several people aboard the Mayflower refer to a Mister Ely, who was apparently a passenger, but who does not appear on any of the manifests. He vanished almost as soon as the boat docked at Plymouth Rock, and there is an idea that he was the first leader of The Origin.

Nowadays, again according to the Dark Web, The Origin is a kind of underground railroad for outlaws and misfits. It is apparently very well funded and is interlaced throughout American society. It’s certainly easy to see the appeal, in a society that seems increasingly polarized and fractured, of an organization that takes care of its own, that provides a safety net for society’s outcasts, and that wields the kind of financial and political power to operate with impunity across the whole United States. But is it just a comforting myth, or is there something there?

In the same month that Carol Matlock vanished from Tunguska, Florida, a woman called Isobel Sklansky also went missing from the small town of Rockwell, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest. Isobel had not killed anyone. Indeed, it was thought for a while after her disappearance that she herself had been the victim of a violent crime.

Isobel was the daughter of the family that started the town of Rockwell, after the American Civil War. The Miller family are wealthy and influential within their community. I've seen a few unsavory rumors floating around about various members of the family, but nothing that I can substantiate. Isobel married a man named Raymond Sklansky, who was some kind of crypto-bro. He had been the subject of a couple of earlier civil suits about workplace behavior, and that might be why the cops and the local media looked pretty hard at him when Isobel disappeared. They didn't find anything though, and it was determined that, whatever had happened to Isobel, Raymond didn't play any part in it.

Isobel vanished into thin air. The family offered a reward for information but none was forthcoming, except... The day before she was reported missing, Isobel was seen in the town bookstore, by the owner of the establishment, a man called Harold Winter. Winter knew Isobel as a regular customer, so there's no chance that he was mistaking someone else for her. He claims he saw Isobel in the shop, speaking in hushed tones to a woman he had never seen before. Winter said that he had initially taken the woman to be homeless, because of her appearance. But in observing her, he said he felt more like she was dressed up, or disguised - something about her appearance didn't add up, something was off. Winter says he couldn't hear what the women were talking about, but that he saw the stranger pass Isobel a SMALL RED BOOK at the end of their conversation. Winter then had to serve a customer and, when he looked up again, Isobel and the woman were gone. According to the police, Harold Winter appears to have been the last person to see Isobel Sklansky before she vanished.

Was this strange woman in Rockwell the same woman who gave Carol Matlock the "red book" in Tunguska? Is she really homeless, or does her appearance constitute some kind of disguise?

In the maelstrom of rumor and innuendo surrounding The Origin online, mention is made of a character known as "Raggedy Ann", who is supposedly some kind of recruitment agent for the group. Was this woman in Rockwell and Tunguska "Raggedy Ann"?

I'm still digging into all of this. There are various hazy photos online, taken from all different corners of the United States, that claim to show Carol Matlock and Isobel Sklansky post-disappearance. Some of them even claim to show the two of them together. I can't vouch for any of these images.

I also can't vouch for this, which is allegedly a page from the Los Angeles section of the "red book". I have no idea if it's real or not, but it gives a useful flavor of what The Origin, if it even exists, might be: