The original story

Sometime around 2013, a post appeared on Reddit's /r/nosleep by a user called /u/capnjammer80 called 'My Hometown Doesn't Exist." He described finding out one day that the town he had grown up in,  Ransom, Virginia, didn't exist, and leaving his normal life and job as though compelled to go investigate.

The story stayed on the front page of NoSleep for a while, and eventually became a series known as "The Ransom Saga."

OP describes the terrifying supernatural experiences and visions he has on the road while driving there, and commenters begin offering advice and researching the story so far...

...oddly enough, most of the information they come up with corroborates OP's story, and they find the likely site of Ransom.

Once OP arrives at the town, at different points he finds it abandoned and ruined, run down, and relatively new-looking and populated,  but by people acting very odd.

OP draws a map overlaying a Google Map of where the town should be.  Several redditors look back through time and find proof that something used to be on the spot that closely matches this map,  which oddly appear and disappear alternately throughout time.

He also mentions a haunted mansion on the hill, which he refers to as Montega Manor, and gives some backstory about his adventures there as a child.

The story itself does have some holes and some very unbelievable elements, but it is not the actual story itself that is the important here,  but these backstories.

In addition to the story of Montega Manor,  OP tells several "backstories" about some time he spent in seminary with a group called "The Funk Club." This group,  which would later be known as ESPER, or Extraordinary Supernatural Phenomenon Explored and Revealed, consists of a majority of the male dormitory students investigating claims of the paranormal throughout the East Coast.

In these backstories, OP describes a real seminary, Atlantic Baptist Bible College,  which I used to attend during this time. ESPER is a completely factual entity which I not only knew of but to which I belonged. I can't verify 100% that everything mentioned in the stories is true,  but I can, however, verify that most of what happened in the backstories is true and I experienced most of it,  each time with a number of other people.

After a while of success on NoSleep, some redditors began making the trip out to Ransom, and some dangerous non-supernatural events (such as confrontations with law enforcement from a neighboring town) led OP to come out and tell everyone that it was all just a game. Disappointed redditors stopped paying attention to the Ransom Saga, and it disappeared into obscurity.

Several years passed. During this time, OP began posting as a "regular" person, claiming to be a militant atheist, an artist and animator, desperately in need of a job at one point,  and married to a woman with a severe case of Fibromyalgia.

His tone becomes more argumentative and intolerant, and suddenly he goes silent for a while.

After a prolonged silence, OP comes back for one more post on Reddit. This one seems written by someone driven completely mad by the things he's seen. He says he feels like he could jump out of this dimension and never return at any moment. He makes a chilling apocalyptic prediction that if anyone stares into the coming solar eclipse when the sun is in the height of the sky that they will destroy the world (interestingly enough, well-known photographs show president Donald Trump staring directly into the eclipse).

Finally,  he gives a short 4-line poem.

In this poem, he claims that there are two Wizards coming... One who walks in light,  and one who will bring darkness.

Now,  if it had just been for the backstories, I would probably have just been interested in this story and researched it on my own like I do with most stories I find interesting or that have some kind of personal connection. However, this poem is what really has got me obsessed over the story.

You see, I left the church a while ago myself,  and while most of my old friends don't want to talk to me anymore,  there are a few I can keep up with.  One of them told me that a while ago he and his wife, who had also been at seminary with us, heard from one of the old members of the Funk Club.

This person, who we all consider very trustworthy, told us that he had heard one of the four main "leaders" of the Funk Club is reported to have gone either to the Pacific Coast and/or the American Southwest and has spent years there referring to himself as a Wizard and has been reported both to perform miracles and to teach others how to perform miracles.

While he has been building a following, it appears that ESPER is also trying to reorganize itself. For years, obviously fictional stories bearing the ESPER name and the names of some characters associated with ESPER have appeared and disappeared on the internet. This technique was one being used back when I was still part of the Funk Club to recruit by collecting interested parties with fiction bearing some semblance of truth and then weeding out those who were only passively interested in the horror genre.

I feel very strongly that the Ransom Saga is a completely fictional story,  but one which may be based on actual ESPER case files for the intention of finding those interested in helping to rebuild ESPER.

I also very strongly believe that these two Wizards are real, that both of them were once leaders in ESPER, and that they are about to start working powerfully in this world.

The whole point of this blog is to post as much information as I can gather about the case here, and possibly try to find ESPER and these two Wizards.

I beg you to believe me...  This is all absolutely real. They may be difficult to find but literally anyone who went to Atlantic Baptist Bible College between 1999 and 2004 should be able to verify these events, especially people who lived in the men's dorms during the Night of a Thousand Hells.

Please help me find the Truth.