Exploration 4

Exploration #4 is the second major surviving fragment associated with The Navidson Record and the first to make the house’s mystery inseparable from organized exploration, deprivation, and violence. Unlike the earlier “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway,” it is discontinuous, hurried, and visibly incomplete; yet its broken form gradually discloses a coherent catastrophe. The tape records an expedition planned by Holloway Roberts, its descent into the Spiral Staircase, the team’s dwindling resources, the house’s apparent ability to erase provisions and markers, Holloway’s fixation on the growl, and the shooting that leaves Kirby “Wax” Hook wounded while Holloway disappears into the blackness.

Emergence and Fragmentary Form

Exploration #4 surfaced less than a year after “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway.” It was sought more fervently than the earlier short and prompted unsuccessful attempts to locate both Will Navidson and the house. Because the new tape lasted eight minutes but was not presented as one continuous shot, viewers speculated that it consisted of extracts from a much larger film. Its structure is expressly discontinuous: abrupt transitions, jarring cuts, and poor edits suggest haste rather than controlled completion. The first image catches Navidson in the middle of a sentence, visibly tired, depressed, and pale; he speaks of being unable to think clearly and says he would like to burn the house down. The next shot cuts to Karen Green and Tom Navidson arguing about whether to go in after an unidentified person, withholding the immediate circumstances that would make their dispute intelligible.

The fragment then introduces Holloway Roberts through a direct declaration of survival failure. Bearded and broad-shouldered, with frantic eyes and rapid, breathless speech, Holloway identifies himself as born in Menomonie, Wisconsin, and educated at the University of Massachusetts. He reports being lost, out of food, low on water, and without a sense of direction. He says that something has followed and stalked him for days without attacking, as though it were waiting for an unknown event, and insists that he is not alone. The tape ends as an abstract and only later becomes legible as part of The Navidson Record, so its incompleteness is not merely a missing portion of plot: it is the viewer’s first experience of the expedition as broken testimony.

For two years, the fragment circulated without a stable explanatory frame. Few viewers knew who the people were, and the eventual recognition of Navidson as the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist responsible for the photograph of a dying girl in Sudan produced speculation rather than clarification. With no press confirmation, no known location for the house, and no statement from Navidson, many dismissed the material as a hoax or an aberrant UFO report. The tape’s scarcity intensified the uncertainty: deteriorating copies passed from hand to hand, while professors, students, SoHo artists, and avant-garde filmmakers discussed material many may never have seen. Exploration #4 therefore functions simultaneously as footage, rumor, and an unstable archive whose authority depends upon the very gaps that undermine it.

Preparation for the Expedition

Within the reconstructed account, Holloway prepares for what Leon Robbins calls “Operation #4,” a term that emphasizes the medical precision of his planning. On the evening before the descent, Holloway checks and rechecks the team’s equipment. Helmets receive securely mounted flashlights, and Hi 8 cameras are attached to chest harnesses. He packs tents, sleeping bags, thermal blankets, chemical heat packs, food, water, and first-aid kits, then adds neon markers, twelve-hour lightsticks, five-minute high-intensity lightsticks, long spools of four-pound-test monofilament fishing line, flares, spare flashlights, a hand-generator pumper light, batteries, radio parts, and an altimeter. The compass and altimeter will eventually fail, making his preparations a catalogue of technologies that promise orientation while remaining vulnerable to the house.

The planned duration is itself extreme. A night in an enclosed, lightless environment is unusual even in caving; visits to the Lechugilla Crystal Cavern ordinarily last twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Holloway expects the Spiral Staircase expedition to require at least four, possibly five nights. The team must therefore remain for days in freezing temperatures and complete darkness, without any reliable knowledge of what lies below. Jed Leeder voices the conceptual problem behind the practical one: direction is impossible to establish when the explorers do not know where they are in relation to the staircase, the house, or the outside world. Wax places confidence in Jed’s sense of direction, but Jed’s question exposes how completely ordinary spatial reference has been stripped away.

Holloway attempts to impose a manageable purpose on the expedition by giving the team three priorities: taking pictures, collecting samples, and reaching the bottom of the stairs. He suggests that discovery might occur before Navidson raises money and organizes larger expeditions. The language sounds procedural, but the idea of discovering “something” becomes the seed of the disaster. At first, the mission has a defined endpoint: reaching the bottom of the Spiral Staircase. Once Holloway begins treating the growl and the house’s apparent erasures as evidence of a creature, he changes the objective during the descent. The expedition ceases to be an investigation with limits and becomes a hunt.

Holloway also brings a rifle, unlike during Explorations #1 through #3. When Navidson asks what he intends to shoot, Holloway answers, “Just in case.” Navidson believes the growl is probably produced by the house changing its internal arrangement, but Holloway rejects that explanation. As team captain, he claims responsibility for everyone’s safety and dismisses Navidson’s interpretation as irrelevant to the person actually entering the darkness. Jed and Wax do not challenge the firearm; they are accustomed to Holloway carrying weapons. The Weatherby thus enters the expedition as an apparently rational precaution, only to become the instrument through which the team’s internal conflict turns lethal.

Descent, Distance, and Erasure

The journey alters the scale of the house as it proceeds. Navidson eventually stops before an entrance much larger than the others, an arch opening into blackness where his flashlight finds a floor but no walls and, for the first time, no ceiling. The image reveals how large the house truly is, while Navidson’s unusually steady camera gives the discovery a controlled visual form. His footage rarely shakes, trembles, jerks, or suffers from poor framing. By contrast, Holloway’s tape is nearly unwatchable, with tilted frames, bad focus, shaking, poor lighting, and eventual oblivion in the face of danger. The difference is crucial: Navidson can shape terror into an image, whereas Holloway’s recording registers terror as the collapse of image-making itself.

When Holloway’s team begins the long return trek, the staircase proves much farther away than expected, as if the distances have stretched in their absence. They must camp for a fourth night and ration food, water, and batteries. On the fifth day they reach the staircase and begin climbing. The staircase is now more than seven hundred and fifty feet in diameter, yet the ascent initially proceeds quickly. Holloway had left provisions along the route to reduce the team’s load and reserve supplies for the return, estimating that the first cache would be reached in no more than eight hours. The journey takes nearly twelve. Exhausted, the explorers establish camp and find that exhaustion does not make sleep easy.

On the sixth day, the return continues smoothly until Holloway discovers a foot-long neon marker barely attached to the wall. It has been mauled, with half its fabric torn away by an apparently unimaginable claw. The next cache has been gutted: only traces of a plastic water jug and scattered pieces of PowerBars remain, while the stove fuel has disappeared entirely. The intact fragments make the loss more disturbing, because the house has not simply destroyed everything indiscriminately; it has removed precisely what the explorers need to continue. The marker and supplies turn the house’s spatial impossibility into a material threat.

Wax and Jed react with alarm, but Holloway responds as a hunter. He removes his Weatherby .300 magnum, checks the bolt and scope mounts, loads five 180-grain Nosler Partition rounds, and chambers a sixth. A glimmer of pleasure appears on his face, as though the damaged marker and missing provisions have finally supplied him with an intelligible enemy. He begins exploring the corridors branching from the staircase, directing Jed’s flashlight with the rifle barrel and listening for the growl. The corridors produce only more corridors and ashen walls, while the sound approaches and recedes like a distant mass, impossible to locate by ordinary pursuit.

The growl becomes a recurring acoustic structure in the tape. Navidson later describes it as beginning far away, slowly increasing in volume until it surrounds the listener, then passing beyond reach. Holloway no longer accepts it as merely a quality of the place. The torn marker and vanished water transform the sound, in his mind, into the utterance of a definite creature. He rushes after it without laying fishing line or hanging markers and scarcely stops to rest. Jed and Wax recognize that moving farther from the staircase does not bring them closer to its source. Their resistance is therefore practical rather than cowardly: they understand that the hunt has no navigable destination.

Mutiny and Violence

Jed and Wax try to persuade Holloway to return, resupply, and obtain more guns. Holloway refuses to abort the mission. The word marks a change in the expedition’s meaning: aborting would imply failure to kill the prey or reach a final objective, although the original objective of reaching the bottom of the staircase has already been achieved. Holloway has redefined success around the pursuit of an elusive presence. Jed and Wax understand that continuing is equivalent to suicide, so they turn back without him.

Holloway initially rants and curses, then abruptly storms away alone into the blackness. His disappearance is followed by a silence that feels less like resolution than an additional threat. Back at the staircase, Jed and Wax wait for him to cool down and return. After several hours they venture out, call his name, and search for him, but find neither Holloway nor a single neon marker or shred of fishing line. He has run off blind, abandoning the navigational system he had so carefully prepared. The pair camps again, hoping that time might reunite the team, but the seventh morning brings only the continued shortage of supplies and the necessity of leaving him behind.

An hour later, Jed and Wax reach another cache near the entrance to an unexplored corridor. The food and fuel have vanished, but the water jug remains intact. As Wax bends to drink, a rifle shot drops him to the floor, blood pouring from his left armpit. Holloway emerges from the dark corridor carrying the rifle and appears shocked both by the wounded men and by the sight of the staircase. He asks how he arrived there and insists that he thought the shot was directed at the thing he had been hunting. His confusion does not erase responsibility; it shows that the pursuit has fractured his perception of both place and action.

Holloway mutters that he cannot go to prison. Jed tells him that he will not be jailed merely for the shooting, but that allowing Wax to die would make him criminally liable, and orders him to help. Holloway rises, yet instead of assisting, he walks away into the impenetrable darkness. His departure leaves Jed to carry and care for Wax alone. When two further bullets strike a nearby wall, Holloway’s helmet light reveals him standing on the opposite side of the staircase. Jed extinguishes his flashlight, carries Wax up several steps, and uses brief flashes to locate a narrow side corridor. Another shot answers the fragmentary illumination, sending the report repeatedly through the dark.

Documentary Evidence and Significance

Exploration #4 is not simply a record of an expedition; it is the point at which documentation becomes part of the danger. The broader recording apparatus surrounding The Navidson Record includes monitors, video decks, a VHS machine, computers, printers, radio transmitters, a 16mm Arriflex, a 16mm Bolex, a Minolta Super 8, electrical and video cable, flashlights, flares, rope, fishing line, batteries, tools, compasses, sample jars, graphs, books, and a microscope. This accumulation suggests an attempt to make the impossible answerable through technical capture. Yet the tape’s discontinuity, Holloway’s unusable images, failed instruments, and eventual darkness demonstrate that more recording equipment does not guarantee more knowledge.

The later climax of The Navidson Record makes Exploration #4’s darkness part of a larger documentary grammar. When Navidson falls and begins to die from exposure, nearly six minutes of screen time become black, leaving only scattered images and audio fragments. The episode provokes ridicule, outrage, and admiration, but the cleaned-up sound remains intimate even when the image disappears. Exploration #4 anticipates this reversal: its evidence is most forceful where representation falters, in breathlessness, bad framing, missing edits, failed orientation, and the growl that cannot be assigned a stable source.

The tape also places the expedition within a history of journeys where deprivation turns leadership into conflict. The account compares Holloway with Ferdinand Magellan, whose voyage began on September 20, 1519, and whose expedition faced shortages, winter hardship, mutiny, injury, and death. It then recalls Henry Hudson’s fourth attempt to find the Northwest Passage, when his crew became trapped in the ice of Hudson Bay with provisions running out and discontent no longer confined to whispers. These precedents make Holloway’s mutiny recognizable, but the comparison also exposes the difference: Magellan and Hudson confronted geographical and environmental limits, whereas Holloway converts an unknowable interior into a personal quarry.

Exploration #4 therefore records a double failure. The house defeats the expedition’s systems of mapping, marking, rationing, and evidence, while Holloway defeats the expedition’s social structure by redefining its purpose and turning the rifle against his companions. The tape begins as a sought-after fragment and ends as an encounter with the consequences of seeking completion where none is available. Its broken form preserves the central paradox of The Navidson Record: the more urgently the explorers try to make the darkness yield a thing—a creature, a bottom, a fact—the more completely the darkness absorbs the instruments, supplies, relationships, and bodies brought against it.