The lowly worm crawls up the winding stair

I have a few more videos to post, but of course my internet has to be clogged up. 'Tis the season.

But I've found some more details about Prof. Braunmuller. I didn't have a chance to get onto campus over the weekend-- not that anyone would have been there anyway, and at this point it's kind of imperative to engage in the human element to prise information out about this.

I managed to actually get some details out of one of the grad students who happens to be a teaching assistant for one of the more senior professors here. I ran into her in the library on campus, and I think I have to thank the hideousness of finals week for her lack of discretion. She has mounds of final exams to correct from the freshman classes, poor girl.

Anyway, it turns out that her supervising professor knew Braunmuller. And knew about Braunmuller's work. And it sounds like whatever happened was simply not pleasant.

Prof Braunmuller was a visiting professor at the university I'm in. He was apparently attached for a few years to teach a few specialized, graduate level anthropology courses, and was helping bulk up the publications of the anthro dept in this subfield, focused around folklore and linguistics.

Apparently he was a good professor, and a good guy to work for. But something went wrong on his last field excursion-- what I'm guessing was Smith's Mills-- and he resigned from his position, and dropped completely out of contact with the university. (Maybe I'll just casually name check Smith's Mills sometime at one of the senior profs, see their reaction.)

The TA I spoke to didn't have much more detail than that. Most of what she was telling me was stuff she overheard her professor talking about with another senior professor. But there was some kind of hushed implication dropped that it didn't end well for the graduate researcher attached to Prof. Braunmuller's project, either. I'm not sure how bad it was, but from what the TA said, it sounded like he left his studies as well.

She didn't say if there was anything criminal involved, but if there were I anticipate I should have found something a lot more official on it. From what I remember of the documents in the archive, what they were dealing with was children kidnapping, and it's entirely possible there was a real element to that. Who knows.

Of course, one last thing. Apparently Braunmuller had a pretty extensive academic collection, and kept a lot of it in archive. When he left the university, he left in a hurry, as in most of his stuff was gone literally overnight. But some of it had been left behind, and the university held onto it probably for legal reasons.

But hearing that made a bell go off in my head. Is that where I found the special archive collection box from? Was this part of Prof/ Braunmuller's private collection?

And most importantly. what the fuck did I do with it?

I'll try to get the other videos out today. I'm frustrated, and tired, but I need to keep going.