In 2004, a friend forwarded me a spam email with nothing but a URL and the words "this is normal."
The URL was normalpornnormpeople.com. I visited it expecting exactly what the name suggested. What I found was a list of video files with descriptive filenames: umipoumon.avi, peanut.avi, jessica.avi, and others. There was no other text on the page. No navigation. No advertising.
I downloaded and watched the first few out of curiosity.
The videos were baffling but not immediately disturbing. Umioumon.avi showed a woman in a kitchen cooking a meal, dressed normally, doing nothing out of the ordinary, but filmed in a way that felt wrong — the camera too close, too still, held for too long on ordinary details. She never looked at the camera. The video was sixteen minutes long and she just cooked.
Peanut.avi showed a man in a backyard playing with a dog. Normal. Boring, even. Twelve minutes.
I showed them to friends. We agreed: weird but harmless.
Then I downloaded jessica.avi.
I'm not going to describe jessica.avi. I'll say that it began normally — a woman, a kitchen, the same held-camera quality as the others. I'll say that by the twelve-minute mark it was not normal at all. I'll say I closed it before it ended and I could not sleep that night, and I have never downloaded anything from that website again.
Other people who found the site over the years have posted descriptions online. The later videos — the ones with animal names as filenames — are apparently progressively worse than jessica.avi. People who watched them reported nightmares. A few reported going to the police. No one knows who made them or where they were filmed.
The domain has changed hands several times. As of the last confirmed report, the URL is dead. But the files circulate.
The detail that has stayed with me, that I think about more than the content of jessica.avi, is the name of the site. Normal porn for normal people. It's the most perfectly calibrated piece of psychological horror I've ever encountered, because it tells you exactly what you're going to find, and you find it anyway, and the thing you find is the least normal thing you could imagine.
Someone made that promise knowing it would make it worse. That requires a very specific kind of mind.
I've never found out who registered the domain. The registration records were private.