As a collector of vintage and lost newspaper media, it is rare that my hobby takes me ‘into the field.’ Much of my time is spent in small-town museums, estate sales, or antique stores. In pursuit of the truth, finding out if Grouse Springs existed, if Douglas Ray Cleavon was just the construct of a creative project. I found myself in the Appalachian backwood, shovel in hand. Although there was no church, and no town, I still somehow managed to find three perfect headstones, and along with them, three bodies. Even to an untrained eye, through the state of decay, I could tell that something had gone deeply, terribly wrong. Horrified, I returned them to their rest and went back to my home. That night, I purchased a firearm for the first time in my entire life. You would be wise to do the same.

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Blast Radius: An investigation into the tragedy and coverup of Grouse Springs

By Douglas Ray Cleavon

Published August 2021

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Part One: the Interview

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Part Two: the Autopsy

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Part Three: a Letter

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The story of the woman at the bar left me floored. Nobody could have predicted such a gruesome turn of events, and I left the interview quickly. I’d given Kitts the money I had promised, but internally, I brushed him off as a grifter. However, this led me down a rabbit hole. How would I verify what happened that day, outside of eyewitness accounts?

This line of thought led me on a short road trip to Manassas, Virginia. Due to the number of casualties resulting from the incident at Grouse Springs, many coroner’s offices from across Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. were required to step in and assist in the examination and identification of bodies. Grouse Springs was considered the primary jurisdiction of the Northern Virginia office, so I figured that would be my best starting point. Luckily, it also was my last.

The medical examiner herself refused to speak with me, but a young medicolegal death investigator who received my email decided to contact me instead. He asked to only be identified as “Cole,” as he felt that coming forward may potentially jeopardize his career- and his safety.

On his lunch break, he slipped into my vehicle, where we began our interview. He brought a manila folder with a few papers inside, and told me they were for later.

“How long have you worked for the medical examiner’s office?”

He kept his gaze forward as he answered the question, but smiled slightly, “I’ve been here for five years. Most people leave after one or two, so I guess you could call me a veteran.”

“And what were your experiences in the days following June 23rd, 2016?”

“I was only an autopsy technician at the time,” he said. “It was my first year. Talk about an introduction! We were all working fifteen, sixteen hour days, going nuts so we could process the amount of decedents we were receiving. Everyone had to wear one of those big, white hazmat suits, which made the actual examination and sampling a huge pain in the ass. It was exhausting.

I was terrified of radiation poisoning, too. I mean… some of these bodies, man. All burned up, black down to the bone, in some places. Their faces were twisted, too. Like whatever happened to them hurt so bad they carried it right to the second they died. We all had these little devices clipped to our suits called a personal dosimeter. I thought I was lucky when mine didn’t indicate any significant exposure to radiation.

Towards the end of the fourth day, almost everyone was stressed to the point of breaking. I guess I was still so green that it was all still exciting, almost. Like I hadn’t been in the business long enough for it to really get under my skin, yet. So that’s how I ended up pulled into an exam room with the coroner himself, by these two guys in suits that I'm sure were some from three-letter agency. To this day I'm still not really sure who they were.

Now, when I say that these next bodies bothered me, that they were strange, I want you to understand that I don’t say that lightly. I worked a case one time where the guy just seemed to drop dead in a locked hotel room. Nobody could figure it out until pathologist noticed a laceration on his taint. Turned out some moron was messing around with a gun in the room underneath his and shot him in the balls.

One night, I had to drive out to the middle of a parking garage to help some guys from the funeral home pick up a body. When I got there, there was a suitcase. Just sitting there, all stained and dingy. But it stunk, that sickly-sweet, meaty decay smell, and the guys told me the decedent was inside.

So all three of us lifted this thing up, and I guess the body had been in there for a while, and the shitty polyester just, gave out along the bottom. The body sloshed out all over us, this nasty, greasy black sludge that had been stewing for who knows how long. I smelled like that suitcase for days.

Anyways, my point is, none of that was worse than the three bodies that I had to look at with the coroner that day.

I thought it was a joke, at first. I mean, two guys in suits come in, tell me to take my hazmat suit off, that I’m needed urgently? It sounds like a prank. But the coroner, God bless his soul, was a serious, old-school type doctor, and it just wasn’t his style. He looked positively grave when we stepped into the exam room. No pun intended.

The first decedent was a woman, early twenties, older than I was at the time. Here,” he handed me the folder. “This is a copy of the autopsy report. I technically shouldn’t have this, so be careful with it.

She had similar injuries to the other bodies. Burns, suspected shrapnel injuries, that sort of thing. But there were other things. The fingers on her left hand were missing at the second joint, with marks consistent with those of human teeth. On that arm, there were wounds consistent with those of what I thought was a knife. I pointed this out to the coroner, who immediately corrected me.

‘Not a knife,’ he said. ‘Not a knife. These are claw marks.’

Now, there are a lot of hiking trails out here. Every once in a while, someone will die out in the woods, and of course, animals will be attracted to the corpse. So it’s not uncommon to see a body that had been mauled by something like a black bear, for example. But what bear would be mauling people in the middle of a nuclear meltdown?

Another thing. When a decedent has been sitting for a while, the body undergoes something called livor mortis. Once the heart stops pumping blood around, it all just kind of settles at the bottom, from gravity. This usually takes a couple of hours. But this body had none of that. It was just all, pale. Even the deep, fatty slash marks on the arm were just sitting open.

After we finished the examination, we opened her up. And there wasn't any blood. Nothing. Not like an injury, where someone bleeds out. It was like she never had any in the first place!” Cole was wide-eyed as he recounted this, as if he could hardly believe it himself. I had no doubt he was telling the truth.

“What was the body like, internally?”

“It was-… she was all solid inside. Like her fat and muscle had all turned to soap. We didn’t even have time to think about it, though, because as soon as we were done with her, we had to move on to the next one.

This next decedent was an older guy, who looked mostly untouched by whatever was happening at Grouse Springs. The only weird thing was how light he was, when we moved him onto the table. He wasn’t exactly a slender dude or anything, so I almost dropped him on the floor, just because I lifted him with way more heft than I really needed.

Visual examination didn’t reveal much, no visible injuries, so we were thinking maybe he died of smoke inhalation or something. Palpation- when you feel to see if there are broken bones or anything- didn’t reveal much either. He just felt kind of spongy. So we start on the internal examination. Some parts were there. He had blood, and fat, and muscle, and bones. But we go to check the lungs and they aren’t there. No heart, no intestines. I’d say about ninety percent of his organs weren’t there. It was upsetting, for some reason, like the girl had been. It just wasn’t right. But the worst part didn’t happen until we went to put him back.

We pulled out the icebox and sitting in the tray where the body just was - were all of his missing body parts. Perfectly arranged, just like how’d they sit if they were inside him. And they weren’t there before. I don’t- I can’t-… There isn’t any logical way that can happen. There just isn’t. So I look towards the guys in the suits, and they just, order us to open the guy up and put everything back in. So that’s what we did.

The last guy. Everything started off normal. Or as normal as any autopsy in the wake of a nuclear accident can be, I guess. I was almost relieved, but part of me knew, if these guys wanted us to examine him here and now, something was going to be wrong. And there was.

The cause of death seemed pretty obvious, due to the extent of injury, but we were told we needed to remove the brain for sampling. The brain itself seemed normal, but the inside of the skull was hollow. Dark. There isn’t really a lot of space in there, in a regular body, but this guy’s skull was shadowed inside, like a tunnel. One of the guys in suits handed the coroner a flashlight.

The coroner was old guard. The kind of guy who didn’t make jokes on the job. The kind of guy who carried a flask filled with scotch around, that he’d sip regardless of who he thought would see. But when he took that flashlight and looked in that guy’s head, he smiled.

‘Look!’ He told me. I didn’t really see anything. Just shadow, and a mess of membranes and veins that stretched impossibly on past the beam of light.

‘Don’t you see it?’

I didn’t see anything.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he told me.

‘Here, hold this,’ he said.

He handed me the flashlight, and before I could say anything, he put one arm inside of the guy’s head, up to the elbow. Just looking at it made me feel sick. One time I broke my finger, and it ended up at a ninety-degree angle, in a way that a limb shouldn't bend. I had to close my eyes. Not because it hurt too bad or anything, but because I hated looking at it. It shouldn’t have been possible. Watching that man stick his arm in that guy's skull gave me the same pit in my stomach.

The coroner wasn’t smiling anymore, but his eyes were still all happy and open. He slid in up to the shoulder and it make a nasty sucking sound, but it was like he didn't have a care in the world. Honestly it was the most relaxed I think he'd been in years.

I was backing away at this point, but he was waving me over, like we were at a damn pool party and he wanted me to get in. Fight or flight response isn't really adequate, in a situation where you're panicking. There's another one that people add sometimes. Freeze. And that's exactly what I did, as soon as I was out of his reach.

Soon his other arm went in, and his head, and the rest of his body. Just, into this guy’s head. The hole didn't stretch, or anything, to accommodate him. And he didn't get crushed or anything, either. He just went right in. I watched the coroner's feet go into this impossible tunnel like he was a goddamn spelunker

And then he was gone. I never saw him again.

The men in suits ushered me out quickly after that. Ushered is the nice way to put it, actually. They basically had to throw me out by the seat of my pants because whatever they were saying to me, I just couldn't process it. I didn’t even do any kind of cleanup, just a push out the door and that was that. They told everyone the coroner committed suicide; blew his brains out in his office from stress, or alcoholism, or whatever. But I know what happened.

I was expecting a knock on the door for weeks, thinking that some guys would take me away and I’d ‘commit suicide’ too. It never happened though. Obviously. I guess they just figured I wouldn’t talk about it. Or if I did, nobody would believe me. But I found these records,” he thumped the folder with the back of a finger, “and I’m talking to you right now. You can keep these if you want. Do whatever with them. I spent a lot of time being afraid. And I still am. But I guess now I’m more afraid of whatever happened to those people than being disappeared by some agency.

I found out, recently, that some people from this office were told to exhume the bodies, for some fucking reason. But when they opened the coffins, the bodies weren’t there.”

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The Autopsy Reports

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I thanked Cole for his time, and he returned to work. I didn’t open the folder until I returned to my office, and when I did, it appeared to verify everything he said.

I was closer to finding out the truth, about what happened at Grouse Springs, but I felt no closer to finding out what that truth might mean. What had caused such bizarre phenomena? Was there really a nuclear meltdown at all? What had killed so many people, and continued to kill people after the event had ended?

It was only through a final coincidence, one last stroke of luck, that I was even able to begin to put the pieces together.