E-mails

Ok, this is harder than I thought it would be.

A decent sum of people have e-mailed me claiming that they too are familiar with the author and his work. Even if you have no evidence, this is encouraging and I appreciate it. It's good to know that I'm not crazy and just completely making this up. Again I encourage people to try and find actual evidence and send it in.

Still, something has me worried: a couple of people, two so far to be precise, have told me that not only were they familiar with the author but that they could actually get a copy of his book. I was ecstatic. One actually included the story in the body of his e-mail. The other produced it upon request a few days later.

I found it slightly odd that both stories were completely transcribed with no photos. I found it slightly odder that the two stories were completely different. In fact, one was a full three pages longer than the other. Both were poor, amateur excuses for short horror fiction. One actually ended with the writer descending into simply mashing gibberish onto the page.

Ed Kann is not a figment of my imagination, and is certainly not an excuse to write bad horror. It is nice that people are fascinated by the story, but that is not a good reason to bury it in even more misinformation and crap writing. Even though some may believe Ed Kann is a hoax I certainly do not, and I would appreciate people not making my case even harder by taking part in hoaxes based on this page. This is an actual, if grass roots, investigation.

Obviously I enjoy a good story as much as anyone, evidenced by the fact that I am currently hunting one down. Still, the entire reason I am having difficulty finding it, and the reason that it may in fact be lost forever, is because so many people insist on diluting the truth with their own rumors.

Anyway, now that that's out of the way I have some good news. A woman e-mailed me a couple of days ago saying that she might have tracked down a copy of the book. Her brother runs a used book store in Colorado, and after reading my posts she contacted him to ask if he had heard of it or could get a hold of it. He hadn't, but he offered to call around to other store owners he knew to see if he could track it down.

It took weeks, but apparently he found a copy owned by a store in Washington. The woman, Jenn, said the book is on its way to her house at this very moment! It should arrive within a few days. She's already offered to do a full scan of the work, and even offered to sell it to me for a very reasonable price.

So we may be reaching the end of this search. I figured if I could get enough people looking then I would get results, but even this was faster than I expected. Never doubt the power of the internet, or of people. Obviously I'll post scans or any other information as soon as I get them. Stay tuned!

First piece of evidence: A review of The Noise Coming from Inside Children

Here we go, straight from a shitty newspaper/magazine in my garage. I searched for this thing for weeks because I knew I had it, gave up, but just tried again and found it after only about half an hour. If this doesn't get you interested, nothing will.

Review of The Noises Coming from Inside Children

After much hesitation, consideration and outright deliberation I am going to give this work a negative review, and in doing so I will make hypocrites of all of us. I will only be the most recent of many people who have done the same. Like most people, I heard about this story through someone else's complaining of it. First one person, then several. Well, one can only hear a particular thing cursed and denounced so many times before they get curious, and I recently gave in to my curiosity.

I'll be honest and admit that I did something no critic should ever do; I started the story with the intention of giving it a positive review. I desperately wanted to be the one voice of dissent, and also wanted to show people that there is value in that which so effectively disturbs and disgruntles us. I thought fans of horror should recognize that more than anyone else.

But I cannot give The Noises Coming from Inside Children a good review, because I hated it. I hated the entire experience of reading it, and only through some strange combination of obsession and masochism did I finish it. Because of this fact, I realize that I am a hypocrite, as is anyone who declares themselves to be a fan of 'horror stories'.

It is a shame so few people will actually finish this story. I suspect I am one of only a very few who actually did, although few people will want to admit this because of their desire to bash it in its entirety. This is because it was so desperately difficult to finish. It is a shame more people don't read this story because it would surely lead to us carefully changing the name of the genre we all love. I know now that 'Horror' certainly isn't the name for it. 'Creepy Fiction' might be a better choice. If more people read The Noises Coming from Inside Children then the genre of 'Horror' would be reserved solely for it alone. And no one would ever claim to be a fan of it.

Some truth, due to popular demand

I have received an alarming number of e-mails claiming that Ed Kann is not a real person. Not that 'Ed Kann' is a pseudonym, mind you, or that I simply got his name wrong, but that the entire concept of the author Ed Kann and his story The Noise Coming from Inside Children was a blatant, intentional fabrication. On my part.

Let me just say that we have not yet reached the age where a simple Google search can prove (or disprove) the existence of a person. I will admit that, after some prompting, it has become clear that there is no mention of the author Ed Kann anywhere on the internet, at least the parts that are publicly accessible. A search now turns up other Ed Kanns', or discussions pertaining to my initial mention of the Ed Kann in question, but no prior mentions of an Ed Kann who wrote short horror stories exists.

This does not prove that he never existed. A lot of people have used the internet their entire lives, myself included, and it may come as a surprise to these people that any person, especially someone who attained 'temporary cult status', could entirely avoid an online mention.

I first saw the name Ed Kann around age eight to ten. The small library near my house would often have local authors come in and read their material. I never went, of course; the only reason I knew about it was because someone decided to hang fliers for these events all over our neighborhood. This was strange, because no one ever hung up fliers for anything else around our neighborhood, but I hadn't really figured any of that out at the time.

All I knew, and all I remember, is always seeing these fliers for the 'One Stop Shop'. That was the name of the event, I guess. It must have at least been a monthly event because new fliers were always showing up without the old ones ever getting taken down. I don't think I ever really read one, and if I did I failed to comprehend or remember whatever it said. They were just something I got used to seeing, but they always seemed to be around.

I only ever noticed one. It was a flier hung for the month of October, and it had a Halloween theme. In previous years I remembered seeing Jack-O-Lanterns an all the fliers so it must have been some sort of annual event. This flier didn't have pumpkins or any kind of cheesey pictures, though. What it did have was a picture of a basement window, covered by rusty bars. The shot was taken at a strong tilt, and I remember it being a very creepy picture, even from far away. It caught my eye every time I saw it and before long it grew quite frightening to me, and so it wasn't long before I read one.

It wasn't much, just a list of authors and story names. The names, to me, were scary enough, and I read the list many times, almost every time I saw that same flier. One story name in particular sat with me: it was called In Concrete Basements. It stuck with me. Months and even years later I would think of it sometimes, and let myself imagine what it was about. What exactly did happen in concrete basements?

For a few years the only bit of information I retained was this story's name alone. This certainly didn't bother me. In Concrete Basements was just a name, a shred of a memory, not a tangible thing I ever desired to find or understand.

Still, the shred wanted otherwise. One day in 7th grade a disgruntled me grabbed a random magazine off of a rack so I could pretend to read during our 'read anything' period. I stared at an article on teen fashion for 30 minutes before deciding to swap it out for something else in order to look busy. As I put it back, I noticed the particularly crappy looking magazine behind it. It was made from the cheap paper used in newspapers, was entirely black and white, and even to my middle school eyes it looked like an amateurish publication. I cannot remember the title exactly, but it was something like 'Seattle Regional Horror Quarterly'. My eyes grazed it, and I gave it a longer than usual stare until my eyes glided over the words In Concrete Basements. I physically flinched.

The fragments of childhood memories are strange. They are essentially memories of what it felt like to be highly ignorant. It's so easy as a child to find things familiar and to feel like you know about them, when in fact you know nothing about them at all. Names of politicians or celebrities or events get drilled into us from an early age, well before we have the desire or capacity to understand them, so we pretend to understand them instead. These fragments of knowledge stay with us into adulthood, but I believe the most important part of maturing is when you stand back and actually wonder what these things are.

"Why exactly is the sky blue?" I might have finally asked around age 15.

"What was the deal with that whole Bill Clinton thing?" I finally solved by looking on Wikipedia at age 21.

"Is that actor the same guy as that rapper from the 90s?" Yes, usually.

So I stood looking at the large title on the front of this cheap magazine. In Concrete Basements. I knew what that was! What a coincidence! But did I really know what it was? I had only heard the name somewhere else at an earlier time. That wasn't the same as knowledge. As my young brain was just beginning to understand this, the bell rang and class ended.

I asked the librarian if I could check it out, but they don't check out magazines, so I simply stuffed it into my backpack when the person I asked wasn't looking and nobody else cared.

Like most things I intended to read at that age or any age it ended up forgotten, mashed up and slightly torn at the bottom of my backpack, a loose bunch of papers unable to fend for themselves against the larger contents of my bag. Eventually I cleaned out my backpack, took note of it again and tossed it in a drawer, again intending to read it.

Many years later, having recently graduated college, I finally cleaned out that cabinet. I was out of school, unemployed and had more free time than I'd ever had before in my life. This is probably why I was cleaning out cabinets in the first place. It's also why I finally ended up reading that magazine.

Instead of a story I found an article written on the up and coming author Ed Kann, who had 'exploded on to the horror scene' with his 'smash hit' In Concrete Basements which 'is not reprinted in full here because of its numerous apperances in other publications'. All I got were a few small excerpts.

The second half of the article is dedicated almost entirely to discussing Kann's recently released work, The Noises Coming from Inside Children. This section seemed to be written with extra caution to avoid spoiling any parts of the book, and if the reviewer read it he failed spectacularly to articulate both what it was about and his response to it.

And now a confession: this is the entirety of my exposure to Ed Kann, or his stories. When his name came up again I deemed it evidence enough to declare he had 'temporary cult status'. I suppose I was secretly hoping someone out there would know more about him or have at least heard the name. I suppose I still need to learn the difference between familiarity and knowledge.

I will finish with a plea. If anyone knows anything about the author Ed Kann, please forward that information to me, no matter how small. If you don't, don't bother trying to research him online. Dozens, possibly hundreds of people have already tried, and have proved well beyond my satisfaction that literally no evidence of him exists on the internet. Anyone's best bet will be going to the Seattle area themselves and searching through old piles of local publications. I may do just that.

What this is all about

A while ago I made a post where I briefly mentioned Ed Kann and his cult hit The Noise Coming from Inside Children. The story is legendary for its extreme creepiness and I just assumed that others out there would have heard of it too. I admit that somewhere in the back of my mind I was probably hoping that others would be more familiar with him and his work. I guess I assumed that since I had heard of this artist and I didn't know him personally that he must have at least some amount of fame.

This turned out to be untrue. At first people seemed to ignore my anomalous mention of this strange author entirely. A few people began to ask who he was, and others responded with Google searches trying to identify exactly who I was talking about. A few different Ed Kann's were found online, but no mention was found of the disturbing story. No trace at all was found of any authors going by the name Ed Kann.

People eventually assumed I had made him up. They believed that, for some reason, I had nonchalantly invented an entire person and book as some kind of strange lie. I was accused of attempting to perpetrate a hoax. I wanted to produce evidence to the contrary, but I had never before had any interest in this person and was no better at internet detective work than the next person, and certainly no better than masses of determined internet users. I had nothing to show them, at the time.

Some time passed and I didn't give it much thought. I felt embarrassed for somehow having no way to back up such a simple claim. Still, I knew that Ed Kann was a real person; I had distinct memories of seeing both his name and the title of his work. To my knowledge I am not an insane person, so I must assume these memories are reliable.

What interested me most, though, was not evidence for Ed Kann's existence, but rather the lack of evidence. How can an entire person and their work fade so quickly? In this age can dozens of people searching the entire internet really fail to find a single mention of a living, breathing person (assuming he is still living)?

I suppose this must be true for some people. Good luck finding an Amish person using a Google search. Certainly there must be other recluses out in the world who have never used a computer. But Ed Kann was an artist with a published work. Which brings me to my most important point.

Even more intriguing than the disappearance of a person is the disappearance of a major work of art. I know many great films were lost in the last century due to negligence and apathy. Who knows how many orated stories were lost to time, or even how many manuscripts were lost forever in acts of senseless destruction, such as the burning of the Great Library. Regardless, I believed such a concept - the complete annihilation of a piece of information - to be a thing of the past.

I know that there exists a book titled The Noise Coming from Inside Children. My goal is simple: track down a copy of the text. Every thing I know about it indicates that it was a horror story, and a particularly disturbing one at that. I believe if enough people look, information will be recovered. It may be in the back room of a used book store, it may be on some old disused laptop. But it must be somewhere.

Send any info to whoiseddkann@gmail.com. If you send me something that has to do with Ed Kann or his stories I will post it here. I will also post any personal findings as well.

Thanks everyone. I believe when this is done we will have one very creepy story to enjoy.