B (2:27)

This is for most of us quite an unusual profession. But if you knew Celeste as a kid growing up in the south of England, you might have believed this was what she was destined to do.

A (2:37)

Time for a spell. I was super obsessed with Megan Mog as a really little kid.

B (2:43)

The beloved picture books about the adventures of a muddle headed witch, her wry, slightly more competent cat and their friend

A (2:50)

owl with this British book series called the worst witch. Ms. Cackles Academy for Witches stood at the top of a high mountain surrounded by a pine forest. It looked more like a.

B (3:03)

You can think of the always getting into trouble. Mildred Hubble as a spiritual precursor to Harry Potter.

A (3:08)

So witches were the big fascination when I was very little. And then I started branching out into other stuff. Ghosts, vampires. I loved Count Duckula.

B (3:16)

This one I remember. A spin off of the hit cartoon Danger Mouse. Featuring a duck vampire who was actually a vegetarian. Sure, you get to live in Transylvania with your own butler and a maid. But so what when you've got a vampire hunter on your tail. A magic castle that takes you to all the wrong places. And an uncontrollable thirst for broccoli.

A (3:36)

Some kids like superheroes and fairies. And I liked vampires and witches and ghosts. Some of us are just born a little bit weird. I've always had this fascination with the paranormal and the occult and folklore and darker things.

B (3:53)

This early interest took on a whole new meaning for Celeste in 1999 when her dad passed away. She was 12.

A (4:02)

That really took me into a darker place. And I don't say that even as a bad thing necessarily. But I was just very interested in the concept of mortality. And also the concept of immortality and the endurance of the human soul. And I got really into, like, existential philosophy at 12 years old. And so it was all of that, plus my aunt, who I was very close to, introducing me to the work of Anne Rice. That took me down this more serious path with vampires and vampirism. The vampire as a sort of archetype was very fascinating to me Back in

B (4:41)

the day, by which I mean before the late 19th century. Vampires were thought to be basically walking corpses. A folkloric figure who rose from the grave, fed on the living, spread disease, and generally brought darkness to a village. And then in 1897, a book came out that changed the way we think of vampires forever. A Gothic horror story featuring a Transylvanian aristocrat named Count Dracula.

A (5:08)

Bram Stoker comes on the scene and writes this novel, which is still definitely pretty horrific and scary. But also, the vampire is suddenly a count. And he has this magnificent castle, and he has money, and he's cultured.

B (5:24)

Dracula captivated readers and later, moviegoers. From Twilight to True Blood to Sinners, the vampire idea has just kept evolving. It's an archetype that we seem to find irresistible.

A (5:37)

The concept of this refined monster, right? You can get in touch with the parts of you that maybe feel darker or more primal or more monstrous. But you can still have this veneer of civility and culture and class

B (5:57)

beyond contemporary culture. This attraction manifests in other ways, too. Vampire is a whole umbrella of identities, fantasies, and Beliefs, you've got people who

A (6:09)

are hard just into vampirism for the

B (6:12)

kink, which might show up as playing with, cutting or even drinking blood. For some people it's more of a lifestyle choice.

A (6:20)

They sleep in coffins, they dress in Victorian garb, they embody that outwardly.

B (6:26)

Then there are the part time role players.

A (6:29)

Maybe in their day to day life they're just Jack from accounting, but they go out on the weekends and they larp and they dress up and they take on the role of the vampire.

B (6:38)

But for some people it's way more literal.

A (6:42)

And then you definitely do have people, especially in spiritual and paranormal communities, who say, no, the actual folkloric real vampires exist somewhere and maybe the CIA is hiding them in a government facility. But like they're out there and they exist. And oftentimes people will refer back to folklore, especially the folklore of Eastern Europe and say, oh, there's documented evidence that these creatures exist. They are out there somewhere.

B (7:11)

Belief is flexible and malleable. It's emotional. What it means can change depending on who you're with, what you need and what you want to be true. And Celeste's story at its core is about belief. Believing in vampires doesn't necessarily mean you think you're in danger of meeting a man in a cape who will drink your blood. But also maybe there are stranger things

A (7:35)

in heaven and earth. Essentially there's some weird stuff out there.

B (7:43)

Celeste's family moved to Melbourne, Australia, and her interest in spooky things continued. She increasingly had questions.

A (7:51)

A lot of things happened between the ages of like 12 and 14 to teenagers. But for me, I suddenly, overnight became extremely anemic. My entire skin tone changed. I had been super tan. I lived in Australia and suddenly I was like pale as a ghost, almost on the verge of passing out a whole bunch. Massive insomnia issues, lucid dreams, lots of weird stuff happening.

B (8:14)

This was around the turn of the century. The Internet was just starting to be commonplace in people's homes. It was a good time for questions.

A (8:23)

And I was searching all this stuff up concurrent with are vampires real? Question mark. And what basically I found was this community of people who really believed that vampires were real and that it was possible to be a vampire, that you yourself, despite being a human being, could have sort of a vampire spirit or a vampire soul. Could I have a soul that's not a human soul?

B (8:54)

Celeste wanted to believe. She wanted an explanation for everything. She was dealing with something more interesting than anemia. Her grief at the loss of her dad had left a gaping hole in her life and her identity and everything she thought about herself and the world was up for grabs. She was searching.

A (9:13)

I was looking for real vampires. That is 100% what I wanted to find because I felt very viscerally that there was more to life. And I guess in a way that's where I've landed in my life now as a witch and someone who does believe in the paranormal. So that was what I went in looking for. And what I found was quite different.

B (9:49)

I'm Josh Dean and this is Chameleon, where we explore the worlds of people who put on masks. This week, a young woman goes looking for vampires and uncovers a whole web of dangerous pretenders. This is Chameleon Weekly. Regular listeners will know that this isn't the first time we've delved into the mysterious world of vampires on the Y2K Internet. Back in February, we told the story of Michael, a confused young man from the American south and the message board vampire he fell in love with. If you haven't heard that episode, it's worth going back. It's almost like a companion piece to this one. It's also kind of a sequel because Celeste's entry point to vampire culture was the same as Michael's. A message board called Le Jardin Sauvage, or ljs, which claimed to be run by the vampires from the wildly popular Anne Rice Chronicles. It was a place where the line between character and reality could get blurry. And for Celeste, it opened the door for something far darker.

A (11:14)

The person who played Marius on LJS pulled me to one side and said, you need to know that this is not real. He said, my real name is Frank and I live in Pittsburgh and I'm like 40 years old and I'm concerned about you because you're really young and you're very much going down the rabbit hole with this.

B (11:34)

It sounds like Frank was trying to do the responsible thing, breaking character to protect a teenager and tell her the obvious truth. But he didn't stop there. He had this to say too.

A (11:46)

I do think real vampires exist. So it was a weird kind of thing where I was spared the LJS clown show, but the door remained open. And from there was when a couple of different people told me, hey, there's this other message board and we're pretty sure this one's the real one.

B (12:09)

That board was called the Looking Glass, or tlg.

A (12:13)

If you went to the website, there was a blank page that said you will never defeat us, or something weird like that. And one day I went and I looked at the website and they were open again and I was able to make an account. And that was the beginning of the end. Basically,

B (12:32)

you already know from the title the story is about a cult. And from the beginning, the Looking Glass bore the hallmarks. TLG was an open door to something hidden, secretive, exclusive.

A (12:44)

The Looking Glass was very, very dark and very serious right from the jump. It had a maturity to it that I had not seen in any of the other boards. But the topics also skewed much darker. The moderators, the vampire characters, they would make posts about how they had gone out and killed somebody. It was very visceral and they were very invested in the other people on

B (13:12)

the board, specifically in other people on the board believing in them.

A (13:18)

The motto of the forum on all the graphics when you signed in was belief is the key.

B (13:25)

This wasn't roleplay. Earlier versions of the website even had text stating this explicitly.

A (13:31)

Yes, there was a suspension of disbelief, but this was like very high stakes. If you were not drinking the Kool Aid, essentially, then you were going to be belittled, harassed, banned, asked to leave. There was no breaking the fourth wall. There was no unmasking.

B (13:51)

And in this exclusive private world, the vampires had all the power.

A (13:56)

It did have these little pockets and this secret knowledge. It had this sort of gatekeeping scaffolding in place to make sure that only a select few of people were even gonna get their foot in the door.

B (14:11)

This is a key ingredient of cults gatekeeping. On tlg, status was defined by access. What you knew, who spoke to you and how close you were to the vampires, especially the cult's charismatic leader, Lestat, named for the star of the Anne Rice Chronicles. And Lestat on TLG held the key to a bigger, greater truth.

A (14:34)

Lestat called the whole forum his experiment. It was Lestat's experiment. Can vampires talk to humans? And can this be a way for vampires to reach the human world through the glory of the Y2K Internet?

B (14:46)

Lestat and the other vampires who ran the board had favorites, an inner circle of members with special status.

A (14:52)

Everybody wanted to be in the inner circle. You wanted to be the person who was being pulled in to this created reality that these people were constructing.

B (15:07)

The currency on the board was attention. And Celeste remembers her first interaction with the vampire.

A (15:13)

Suddenly I had this laser focus of attention on me, and we were having this conversation and I remember just feeling nauseous, honestly, like very anxious. And it really felt like I was connecting with this big, powerful entity.

B (15:29)

This vampire, who was called Armand, had

A (15:32)

a Question, he said, you've encountered a vampire before, haven't you?

B (15:38)

This question sowed a seed. Celeste now felt there was a reason she had found this message board. She was on the right path. Because when you want to believe something more than anything else in the world everything can start to sound like evidence. Celeste had a lot of free time on her hands. She was creative, she was sensitive. And she was also very vulnerable. She was, in other words, the perfect victim. She had been chosen.

A (16:05)

They started to tell me that I was being visited by them and having my memory wiped. And I was going through a lot of stuff in my real life. A lot of difficult trauma, processing. I was very sick. And they were telling me, part of the reason that you're having all these symptoms and you're experiencing this illness is that you have vampire blood. And Armand has been visiting you, physically sharing blood with you and then wiping your memory, and that's why you don't remember. And it was crazy because I had been having for a couple of years these experiences where I would wake up in the morning really feeling like something had been removed from my brain. So much so that I had gone to see a neurologist about it and said, I think, am I having a sleep disorder? Do I have a neurological problem? Something's happening to me. And all of these things coalesced into me really struggling to understand reality objectively and correctly because part of me was like, there's no medical explanation for why I'm going through all these things. So maybe it is happening. I'm having this whole love affair with a vampire that I just can't remember consciously. It was really crazy.

B (17:32)

Now, at 39, Celeste knows that none of this is true. But she was young, unwell and desperate to make sense of what was going on in her life. She was handed a story that wrapped up every loose end. And there was something else that happened just before she joined that people were still talking about, something the vampires called the Game. A way to prove to doubting board members once and for all that they were real. Lestat made an announcement.

A (17:58)

Hey, you guys don't believe in me, that's fine. I'm gonna pick three of you and I'm gonna come visit you. And when I show up in your backyard or your living room or whatever I need you guys to come back on the Forum and tell everybody what you've seen. And if that's not good enough for the rest of you, then, you know, fuck you.

B (18:17)

It's a classic high control, culty move. A very public test of belief. It also has another function. It keeps everyone focused. There's a mystery to solve, and people aren't going to be asking too many questions or comparing notes while they wait for the whole thing to play out. The first person chosen was an older woman, a grandmother who everyone trusted, and then a man with the username Flyboy, supposedly in the Air Force. Both came back to the message board with detailed descriptions of how they encountered Lestat. But the third person, Bastian, didn't write up a report. He disappeared.

A (18:52)

The lore was that Lustad had turned up to meet Bastian, and Bastian had not been able to handle it.

B (18:59)

He had apparently gone mad, wound up in an institution, and attempted suicide.

A (19:05)

Like, they would make artwork about this. I have an artwork somewhere that's like a terrible photoshopped graphic from 2004, but it says, Bastian went mad. And you couldn't even mention the name Bastian to Lestat because Lisette would, like, either chew you out or just disappear.

B (19:24)

Bastion was a warning, a cautionary tale. Whether or not you believed had consequences,

A (19:30)

it very much was a constant reminder that the person that you were talking to behind the screen was not a human. They were a monster. We will destroy you. Absolutely. Keep coming. Keep giving us the attention and all of your time, but we're gonna fuck you up. And it did for sure create a really messed up dynamic, because we've all wanted that in our own way. It was like there was a constant joke about mind fucking mind fuck me. We want it. We want to be brainwashed. We want to have our reality distorted. And I think that's hard for me, surviving this experience because I have to be honest and real with myself that I did sign up for it. I absolutely ripped my chest open and said, yeah, please, like, peck at my heart with your, like, evil little cyberbeak. I'm into it. Let's do it. And it did create a weird, nasty, toxic dynamic between all of the other members of that forum, because we all knew that most of us would sell out our friends if there was a opportunity to be closer to the vampires.

B (20:46)

Maybe the most persuasive character in all of this. For Celeste wasn't a vampire at all. It was a human friend from the site, a woman who she had grown to trust named Julianne. Julianne had decided to share her story with Celeste and a few others.

A (21:00)

Her story was that when she was 17, she lived in Canada, but she had come to New Orleans on a trip. And she had this amazing experience where she had met a man with, like, Long blonde hair and this beautiful puffy white pirate shirt. He had kissed her in Jackson Square under the shadow of the fucking cathedral. He walked her back to her hotel room. He disappeared before the sun rose. And then when she went back to her home in Canada, she became very sick. She started to develop anemia. She couldn't hold down food properly. She could only eat red meat. She was weak. She was having these fever dreams and these, like, lucid dream experiences, all of which had happened to me. So of course I was like, whoa, this is crazy.

B (21:49)

Julianne then described doing exactly what Celeste had done. She went online looking for answers and found the Looking Glass. There she met another woman called Kathleen, who had met the vampires in real life. And Kathleen introduced Julianne in person to a man with long blond hair who she instantly recognized as Lestat.

A (22:09)

It was the same man that she had met in New Orleans at 17. And then suddenly she discovered that all of this was real. And then she developed this lifelong relationship with Lestat, and she met the other vampires. She literally told this small group of us that she was telling us because we were all blood sisters and we all had the same vampire blood. And that's why we got the story, the real story.

B (22:32)

At this point, Celeste was in deep. She felt like she was living between two realities.

A (22:38)

You're not the vampire, but you're not a person anymore either. And you're going to be lonely your whole life. And this is why none of your relationships work out. It put me in this place where, truly I felt like I was not in the world.

B (22:53)

People close to her noticed. Her mom was worried, as was her boyfriend.

A (22:59)

It was very upsetting for him because he was like, you are spending all your time talking to these people on the Internet who aren't who they say they are. You know that, right? You know that there's no way that. That this is real. I remember him sending me articles about, like, catfish games and being like, this is you. This is what's happening to you. And I'd be like, oh, yeah, that's really interesting. Men, probably. Never mind. I'm going to go talk to my vampire some more.

B (23:26)

But over time, Celeste began to have some doubts. She started to ask questions. And in a cult that's asking for trouble. What happens next is after the break. Welcome back to Chameleon. The Looking Glass forum had been a constant in Celeste's life since she was a teenager. And she didn't see this changing. She had fully bought in.

A (23:56)

Part of me really did think that eventually I would be made into an immortal vampire. And I would get to move to New Orleans and live with my vampire lover in some kind of amazing Greek revival mansion.

B (24:05)

But another part of her wasn't wholly convinced.

A (24:09)

Agent Scully, in my head being like, hang on, wait a second.

B (24:14)

Celeste began to gently probe. But she had to do it carefully. The vampire's whole existence and status relied on her belief. She couldn't expect straight answers from them.

A (24:26)

You'd get a riddle or you'd be given a scrap of something that you were supposed to go off and investigate. In a way, they were laying a kind of breadcrumb trail for a sort of massive arg. The whole thing was like an alternate reality game. I was really trying to follow their breadcrumb trails but go deeper than they wanted us to go.

B (24:48)

Celeste operated in the back channels, tentatively approaching others on the board as well as former members who'd been ejected.

A (24:55)

I talked to people who said that they had met the vampires. I talked to people who were telling me, no, absolutely, it's all fucking fake. And here's why.

B (25:07)

This latter group had organized. An anonymous live journal appeared with one very clear aim. To expose and bring down the looking glass.

A (25:15)

They were posting sassy takedowns of the whole situation. Half gossip blog and half like investigative journalism on their part. And they were oftentimes saying a lot of very not nice things about us that were still involved. They said some really horrible things about me because they saw me as someone who was supporting and perpetuating this terrible scam.

B (25:39)

To this day, Celeste says it's still unclear who was running the LiveJournal.

A (25:44)

The fact of the matter is there are so many people who were so badly hurt by what happened that it could be any number of people. I was accused of being the anonymous account, which I never was, but still to this day, people like it was you. I wish I had that much time on my hands.

B (26:01)

There was strong pushback from the vampires. Later, Celeste found out that they had managed to install spyware on some users computers.

A (26:10)

They were able to literally read any single message that we had typed. If we had sent an email, if we had AOL instant messaged somebody else, they were able to see what we had typed. So a lot of the mind reading that went on was actually just spyware.

B (26:29)

Everyone was being watched. Suspicions and accusations were rife. The cult was rallying to protect itself.

A (26:35)

When that's been your pretty much primary social group for almost a decade, it's like being excommunicated from your family. But I had to know, even if these people are not really vampires. Are they just fucking with me because they think it's funny? Or do they care about me and they have a fucking mental health condition? So I was talking to these people. I started to listen rather than to dismiss them and be a good little cult member and ignore them. And the more that I looked at the evidence, the more I was like, huh, okay, it does seem like there's something here.

B (27:16)

Amidst the swirling stories, gossip and accusations, Celeste eventually gravitated to things she could trust more than stories.

A (27:23)

I was scraping around in metadata for, like, graphics they had uploaded. I was trying to find, like, old photo bucket accounts. I was trying to find and unearth literally anything I could.

B (27:38)

And there, in a tangle of metadata and code, Celeste zeroed in on something very interesting. The Looking Glass domain was registered to a username she recognized. Psyche's wings. And Psyche was Julianne, her friend. More than that, her half vampire blood sister. When this piece of information hit the board, everything exploded.

A (28:08)

Julianne took the fall. And she told everyone, nope, I'm behind all of it. It was just me. But then, behind the scenes, to the rest of us, the inner circle, she was like, I had to take the fall because we have to protect the vampires. Like, we need to make sure that people don't go crazy and start exposing them or trying to hurt them. I've been friends with these vampires for years. I'm just trying to help them.

B (28:31)

At this point, Celeste began to be swayed.

A (28:34)

I just confronted her directly and I said, said, either you have vampires living in your basement or you are them. As my friend, as my blood sister, do you want to just talk to me about that? Can we have a fucking honest conversation? And I remember saying to her, like, I'm not going to be mad at you. I won't even tell anyone if you don't want me to, but I've known you for a decade. Can you just be real with me, please? And she basically just said, if you want to believe all of this trash on the Internet, that's your business, but I consider our friendship to be over and I never want to speak to you again. And then she blocked me and I got banned. And that was the end of that.

B (29:18)

Celeste's blindfold had been removed. The vampires were not real. They were, at least in part, a creation of Julianne's. Her friend. This person who'd claimed to share something so special, had been part of the ruse all along. And she was now refusing to take any accountability to explain or confirm what seemed to Celeste to be unequivocal. This was shattering. A door had been slammed in her face.

A (29:43)

All of this magic and all of this mystique and this sort of strange, but kind of darkly beautiful reality that had cocooned my real life had just been totally stripped away. And I remember waking up the next day and being like, I guess this is fucking it. I guess it's just office, job and taxes and that'll be me for the rest of my life.

B (30:14)

Celeste was still in Australia at this point, but she'd been planning to move to New Orleans for some time. It's the center of the Anne Rice universe, where the author lived, worked, and where many of the original books are set. Celeste knew others from the Boar who lived there, and it even visited.

A (30:30)

It felt viscerally. This was vampire hq. All of the times I had visited, I had had some strange things happen and I had had some quirky experiences, but I had always felt like I hadn't had a long enough period of time. I was like, I can't expect a crazy paranormal thing to happen if I'm only there for a week.

B (30:53)

Even after the cult had been exposed, even after she had escaped or been ejected, the city still had a pull. So she did it. In 2012, she moved, still holding on to a sliver of possibility that maybe it was real all along.

A (31:08)

I wanted to come here and have a chance to live here because I really thought that if I did, I would finally get my, like, vampire moment where they would turn up and they would let me remember. I'm going to get emotional, but that's all I wanted, was just to be able to remember these things that were supposedly happening to me. And for some reason in my head I was like, if I'm in America, if I'm in New Orleans, it's more likely to become a reality. It did not. Spoilers. Even now, having deconstructed from all of this and deprogrammed all of it, there will be times where I'm driving home through the Garden District at one in the morning and I'm looking at the Spanish moss hanging from the live oak trees and these beautiful illuminated Greek Revival mansions, and there's jasmine in the air and it's humid and dense, and I have this strange, like, recursive reality shift where I'm like, whoa. Like, I'm here and this is a real place. But it is deeply magical. The magic is not gone. It just isn't the way I thought it was going to be. And that was tricky when I first moved here because it was supposed to be this beautiful culmination of a decade of my life. And instead it felt, honestly, in retrospect, very painful. I had all this shame and this sadness of having been cast out and rejected from this family that I was supposed to be part of.

B (32:43)

Celeste found some community. She was able to connect with a few people who had also been expelled from the site. This brought a level of healing. But the pain didn't just go away.

A (32:53)

You never got to leave that place. And just that's fine. You left. Like if you were banned, you were going to get raked across the coals, have your name smeared. I was public enemy number one because I had been one of the linchpins in destroying the facade and I had caused trouble and I had stirred up drama and they all thought I was running this anonymous account. So for those people, some of those people still will not speak to me.

B (33:25)

The retaliation got worse for Celeste last year when she decided to start talking about it. She went semi viral for a series of tiktoks she made talking about her time in the vampire culture.

A (33:36)

It's not that deep, you guys. It's an Anne Rice based role play message board. You don't have to be out here trying to character assassinate me almost 20 years later. But they are.

B (33:46)

She got a lot of positive reinforcement too.

A (33:49)

I was not really anticipating how many people were going to resonate and say, wow. I had a similar experience online and it made me realize that millennials and Gen X, a lot of us had these stories about being preyed on online catfish to one degree or another. And a lot of it does take place in these fan communities and these worlds where fiction is intersecting with reality because of the way the Internet has changed and the rise of AI. I think it's a really important story to tell because we are much more susceptible to these like, cult like control groups than we perhaps realize we are. And that goes doubly so if you have teenagers or children on the Internet.

B (34:37)

After the fallout, the forum limped along for a while before it eventually disappeared. The light was shining just a little too brightly on the whole setup. Now here's a fun sidebar. Around 2013, Celeste and a friend noticed that the domain was up for sale. They bought it.

A (34:54)

I think we put up a picture on the main website. Shia LaBeouf had just done his wearing a paper bag to the Oscars thing. And so it was just a picture of the two of us with a bunch of Mardi Gras beads on paper bags on our heads. And it just said, I'm not a vampire anymore. We Were just trolling really. But part of it felt like a reclamation. He really fucked with us for a decade. We're going to take your domain name, homie.

B (35:16)

The pushback was so strong that they eventually returned the domain and shockingly, the Looking Glass started right back up to this day. You can find the site on the Internet. It's not open to new members, but it's there.

A (35:29)

But yeah, they're still doing it. They're still at it. And from what I understand, based on people I've spoken to, the ruse is also still alive.

B (35:38)

A lot of information about what went on came out last year. In the wake of Celeste going public, she was able to fill in a lot of gaps about who was involved. There was Kathleen, who passed away last year, and three or four others. And of course, Julianne seems to have been the worst of all of them. The master manipulator. Aside from not being a vampire, Julianne wasn't even slightly who she claimed to be.

A (36:03)

She lives in Canada, which that part was true. The whole time that she was running the Looking Glass, she was serving in the Canadian military. She's around about, I want to say 68. She has been, I think, a lifelong just fan, like a big fan of all sorts of different media properties.

B (36:25)

Anne Rice obviously, but also True Blood, Smallville and Charmed. She ran maybe four or five different forums as well as tlg. Celeste was tipped off to all this in the end by a woman who DMed her.

A (36:39)

She was like, yeah, the charm forum was weird because she just taking it really seriously. And I didn't really understand why it was this high stakes when it was just like a little forum to talk about Charmed.

B (36:50)

It seems like Julianne has a compulsion, an addiction even, to set up environments where she has all the power and can control how people behave and even what they believe.

A (37:01)

I think people are lonely and I think people are looking for something in the way that I was looking for, something that made life more magical, more interesting. And I think for these people, that just intersected with some sort of desire to control. You can't armchair speculate on people's mental health, but I can't imagine that Julianne is like a super mentally healthy person. I don't think that you hold on to this kind of ruse for as long as you do without there being something not quite connecting in the mental health sphere.

B (37:46)

And this, when you know who Julianne really is, makes the whole thing horribly sinister.

A (37:53)

The fact that she was my mom's age is pretty unnerving in retrospect there was a lot of very inappropriate conversations that went on the forum. There was sexual stuff that went on, sexual role plays that happened where the vampires involved were women in their 50s and 60s, and the rest of us were, some of us were as young as 14.

B (38:22)

When you're that age, you feel like an adult, but of course you're not.

A (38:28)

I didn't see that as grooming. I thought I was talking to people my same age or 500 year old vampires. I didn't think I was talking to women my mom's age. And if I had known that the people I was talking to were women my mom's age, I would have made a lot of very different decisions. If it had have been men in their 40s, 50s and 60s, people would have been really skeeved up. But because it turns out that it was women, I think there's a tendency to be like, whatever, but it's not, it's fucked up. And pretty much right down to the last one of them, they're all older women.

B (39:04)

One of these women actually came forward and had a conversation with Celeste last year. We are calling her Lila. And she confessed.

A (39:11)

She said, yep, it was me. I was this other vampire character and I did these things. What's interesting is that Lila and Julianne are still in touch in the world of the Forum. Their characters were in love. They were both having underage cyber sex with those of us who were not yet 18. But anyway, Lila did not know who Julianne really was. Even though she was also doing this catfishing. She had no clue that Julianne wasn't like a early 40s, hot, cute Goth alternative girl. And literally only last year did she discover that this person she had known on the Internet for what, 20 plus years was none of the things that she said that she was, which is crazy.

B (40:01)

Somehow Celeste had managed to find some empathy for Lila.

A (40:05)

I wish her no ill. She was really did a lot of messed up stuff to me. But she was also manipulated. Part of the reason that she became a moderator and became a vampire is that she had been a regular member like the rest of us. She had joined the Forum under her real name, essentially, and developed a relationship with Lestat. Lestat had told her that he was going to meet her at the opera. She dressed up in this beautiful dress, went to the opera, waited, and he didn't show up. And she was devastated, obviously, but also humiliated and angry. And so she staged her own suicide, went away, and then came back to the forum under a fake identity and pretended to be like this 19 year old goth boy. And so she catfished Julianne, but also didn't know that Julianne was not really a vamp. It was like it was double catfish. And so I have, in a way, empathy for Lila because I think Julianne was playing her the whole time.

B (41:08)

Julianne now works as a web designer and it seems like even here in her professional life, she can't stop inventing Personas.

A (41:16)

Like she was coming up with fake names and like AI generated. It was so weird. AI generated avatars or like pictures that was supposed to be really her at all of these AI generated selves, identities that she was using looked like the pictures of this woman that she was posting on the forum 20 years ago. But no time, no age had passed. And I was talking to some people recently and saying, who was that? Who was that person in the pictures? Because they were really in New Orleans and they were really in the Olivier Hotel and it clearly isn't her. So where did these pictures come from? And turns out it seems to have been someone she knew in real life. It was just somebody that she knew who had been sharing pictures to Facebook. And they were all just scraped from this girl's Facebook and reposted. And now she's using those to AI generate other photos of this, like, ideal, I guess this ideal self. I feel like she must just not like herself very much. And there's a desire to escape from who she really is.

B (42:30)

Whatever empathy Celeste can muster for Julianne, she's bothered by the idea that she's still out there, still playing people. This next example is especially unpleasant.

A (42:42)

I have a friend who I had lost touch with actually in the fallout, but now we are talking again and she told me that she only left for good maybe about five years ago. And she said that at the time that she left, she was still being told by Julianne that Lestat was real, that my friend had vampire blood. My friend had just had a baby and she decided to leave because she had almost died during delivery. She had a very complicated birthday. Both she and her daughter almost didn't make it. She told me she was like, I just knew that if I stayed, this horrifying, traumatic near death experience I had would be spinned as proof and it would be, oh, you survived because you have Lestat's blood and your child is part vampire. And she was like, I couldn't do it to my fucking kid.

B (43:43)

Celeste is convinced that Julianne wouldn't want to speak to her now, and yet she thinks she may actually have reached out. After Celeste came out on TikTok, she was contacted by someone she remembered from the forum. A young English guy named James, an inner circle person who was also half vampire. He'd had a relationship and had been turned by a vampire named Daniel.

A (44:06)

We had maybe two months of almost daily conversations where James was telling me, like, I found out for sure what was going on. And I know the truth, and you will eventually know the truth, and I'm just so proud of you and stuff like that. Really emotionally manipulative. And I remember at one point I said to him, I said, when you say that you met Daniel, or like when you say you were in a relationship with Daniel, I said, do you mean that you met that person? Whoever was playing that character, did you meet in real life? And all he would say is, I can't answer that question. Like, why? It's a very straightforward question. You met someone or you didn't. I was like, okay, bro, like, why are you being so weird? And his answer was, you know how people on the Internet are, and people are already, like, looking at your stuff and we just have to. I just want to protect Daniel. And we have to be very careful because people on the Internet are crazy.

B (45:02)

There's no way to be completely sure, but it certainly sounds like this was Julianne sock puppeting as yet another identity.

A (45:10)

It started to enter this very, like, riddly doublespeak territory where he was like, I had a dream last night where an angry digital eye was bearing down on a castle besieged by sharks. Like, crazy shit. And I was like, all right, Armand. Okay, Julianne.

B (45:30)

You almost feel sorry for Julianne at this point. This is all pretty desperate, sort of pathetic. The power she craved that she once had, it's gone.

A (45:40)

I'm not 17, I'm 39 years old, and I'm very happy with my life. And I'm very lucky to be in the life that I love with a wonderful boyfriend and a career that I enjoy in a beautiful house in the city that I love. You don't have any power over me. And I think it must be driving them crazy that they can't control the narrative anymore. It's bananas.

B (46:08)

Celeste is a survivor. She understands the power of story and belief, but she's now in control. This understanding informs her work as a witch and as a writer.

A (46:20)

Fiction writing has always been an escape hatch, and it's a way for me to process truth, but in a space that gives me almost like more breathing room. Right above my desk, actually, I have a little block mounted Stephen King quote, and it says fiction is the truth inside the lie. It feels like excavating something from some sort of deeper place, but there is an escapism element to it. I wrote stories voraciously, and I read stories voraciously from a very young age. And a big part of it was either being bored with reality or finding it upsetting and traumatizing and wanting somewhere that I could go, somewhere I could be that was not that. So I think even as an adult writing that's a part of it. But it's also an opportunity to explore real things that have happened to me, or real things that I see in the world through a lens that allows for more play, perhaps more deeper excavation, because I don't have to stick to just the facts, man. So exploring the sort of archetypal resonance of stories and narratives, getting to reveal truth, but getting to do it in the words of Tennessee Williams, in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

B (47:58)

Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean, and was written by me and Joe Barrett. It was produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminhoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack. Theme by Ewin lytramuin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Sher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help, and if you have any feedback, tips or story ideas, you can email us@chameleonpodampsidemedia.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

A (49:05)

I think Chuck would approve.