The Lot Six experiment was a 1969 trial at Harrison State College whose disastrous results turned a classified research project into the buried origin of the Shop’s pursuit of Charlie McGee. Twelve student volunteers were divided between injections of water and water containing Lot Six, a compound described as a hypnotic and mild hallucinogenic. The participants’ experiences included possible psychic phenomena, but also profound confusion, lasting harm, and death. The project was halted, its consequences concealed, and its surviving subjects left with effects that continued to shape the story years later.

Design and Rationale

The experiment was led by Dr. Joseph Wanless. At an earlier briefing, he explained that six volunteers would receive water and six would receive water mixed with Lot Six. The trial would use a double-blind method: neither the volunteers nor the researchers would know who had received the compound until later. All twelve were to remain under close observation for forty-eight hours after injection. Wanless described the compound’s exact composition as classified, offering the participants only a broad account of its effects.

Questions from the audience focused chiefly on what Lot Six contained. Andy McGee, then twenty-two, wondered instead about Wanless’s habit of shredding cigarettes, but did not ask. The episode gives the briefing a mundane surface even as its unanswered questions point toward the secrecy surrounding the experiment. The volunteers were being asked to enter a carefully managed scientific procedure without being told the substance’s true nature.

The trial took place in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall. A dozen cots had been brought in from the college infirmary, and graduate assistants administered the injections while Wanless moved among the volunteers. Andy and Vicky Tomlinson were among those lying on the cots. Andy disliked the injection and looked away as it was given; the planned supervision and orderly room did not prepare the participants for what followed.

The project’s rationale was later recorded in a 1968 memorandum from Wanless. He warned that animal testing would not advance the inquiry and argued against using convicts or people he described as having deviant personalities, because Lot Six might be powerful. He nevertheless recommended testing it on selected college students, with contingency plans for failure. The choice of volunteers thus reflected an attempt to manage the risk through selection and supervision, not evidence that the researchers understood or could control the compound’s effects.

The Trial and Its Uncertain Experience

Andy’s recollection of Room 70 is not a stable account of a sequence of events. He later remained unsure how much he had actually witnessed and how much belonged to hallucination. Time seemed to slow; ordinary objects appeared to move through the room as if blown by an invisible force. In his memory, the experience shifts between episodes without a dependable order, making the trial feel less like a continuous observation than a series of impressions whose reality cannot be securely sorted.

One volunteer experienced a crisis severe enough to bring graduate assistants running to his cot. Andy remembered the staff gathering around him and the urgent attempt to revive another participant after a cardiac arrest. A staff member, John Mayo, later recalled being the person who used a defibrillator. The remembered emergency and the later account establish that the danger was not merely a product of Andy’s altered perception, even though other aspects of the session remained uncertain.

The participants’ altered state also shaped Andy and Vicky’s encounter. During periods of drifting in and out of consciousness, they talked about their lives and confided experiences they might not ordinarily have shared so early in an acquaintance. Andy spoke about his mother’s death in a car accident and the grief that followed; Vicky described a painful experience from childhood and the fear it had left her with. Their conversation became part of the relationship that later led to their marriage.

Music from the ceiling speakers offered a different anchor within Andy’s disordered memory. He and Vicky later concluded that it had been Rachmaninoff. For Andy, hearing that composer afterward brought back the suspended, dreamlike time in Room 70. The music’s recurrence links an ordinary detail of the setting to an experience that he could neither fully reconstruct nor leave behind.

Casualties and Long-Term Consequences

The immediate and subsequent toll on the twelve volunteers was devastating. According to John Mayo’s recollection, one participant died after going into cardiac arrest during the trial, and a female participant died six days later, apparently from a brain embolism. Two others suffered severe and lasting consequences: one became blind, and another developed paralysis from the neck down. Wanless characterized the paralysis as psychological, but the cause remained uncertain. These outcomes made the supervised trial’s failures impossible to separate from its human costs.

The Shop’s later account of the cohort tracks further deaths. One former participant died in a 1972 car accident that the Shop believed was probably suicide. Another died by suicide in 1973 after leaving a note describing an inability to endure what was in his mind. Three more participants died by suicide between 1974 and 1977. The files distinguished four definite suicides from a fifth that was considered probable. The Shop’s records attributed this pattern to a lasting effect of Lot Six, while acknowledging uncertainty about what the individuals themselves had experienced.

By 1977, three participants remained central to the Shop’s attention: James Richardson, who was under covert surveillance, and Andy and his wife, Vicky. Richardson had demonstrated telekinesis, thought transference, and mental domination while under the drug’s influence. The Shop considered him a likely failure, leaving its attention fixed on the couple. The eventual marriage of two Lot Six subjects mattered to the organization because Wanless had repeatedly warned that their children might require close observation.

The experiment’s psychic effects were powerful but uncontrolled. A retrospective account describes the volunteers as experiencing drug-induced abilities while also being profoundly disoriented. The Shop’s leaders saw that combination as a central obstacle: even where the trial produced results, researchers could not reliably direct or contain them. One scientist compared the intervention to placing a jet engine in an old car: forceful, but liable to fail at the first obstacle. That judgment captures the gap between eliciting an ability and making it useful or safe.

Cover-Up and Legacy

After the trial, the Shop concealed what had happened and imposed an indefinite moratorium on further testing. The senior leadership had found no sign that foreign powers were pursuing drug-induced psychic abilities and judged Lot Six a dead end despite its apparent positive results. The decision reflected not only scientific doubts but the difficulty of concealing student deaths, missing people, and continuing distress among former participants. The people involved had friends and acquaintances, even though the volunteers had been selected partly because they had few close relatives.

The cover-up was extensive and expensive. The Shop’s retrospective account puts hush money at nearly seven hundred thousand dollars and describes efforts to silence a persistent investigator connected to the participant who had become blind. Secrecy did not erase the consequences; it made concealment another part of the experiment’s history. The moratorium ended neither the survivors’ suffering nor the institution’s interest in the abilities Lot Six had exposed.

Years later, Andy explained to Irv Manders that he and Vicky had both received Lot Six and that he believed the drug had altered their chromosomes. In his account, the changes passed to Charlie and combined in a new way, giving her extraordinary abilities. He also believed the Shop wanted to study her and use her as a means of reactivating the program. His explanation presents Charlie’s powers as connected to the experiment’s legacy, while preserving the distinction between what he knew about the injections and what he could only infer about their biological effects.

Rainbird later forced Dr. Wanless to recount the complete history of the Lot Six tests and their climactic experiment. Wanless supplied details that filled gaps in Rainbird’s knowledge, and the account renewed the connection between the original trial and the Shop’s interest in Charlie. In this way, the experiment returns not as a closed episode but as the source of later pursuit: the institution’s attempt to produce psychic power had left behind casualties, concealed records, and a child whose abilities revived the project’s ambitions.