The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is not a real place, it's a fictional horror universe created by illustrator Trevor Roberts.
The project's official X account continues to post in-universe updates keeping the fictional world alive, including a recent post reading: “The Texas Department of Public Safety has issued a geobiological activity warning for the following counties: Gumption County, Irion County, Sterling County, Coke County, Tom Green County, Taylor County, until 2:00 a.m. CST.”
So what exactly is the Mystery flesh pit?
As per the project's official website, the Mystery Flesh Pit is described as a fictional, bizarre natural feature "discovered" in the Permian Basin region of West Texas in the early 1970s. It is described as a giant underground organism of unknown size and origin, with strange and disturbing features inside it.
The fictional story says the site was developed by the fictional Anodyne corporation, which opened it as a tourist attraction in 1976. It was later added to the National Park System before suddenly closing in 2007.
The official website says the project is a multimedia collection of illustrations and writings by Trevor Roberts, inspired by his experiences living near the oil fields and wide open landscapes of West Texas. According to Forbes, Trevor said he also took inspiration from real-life closed attractions, including Orlando's Mystery Fun House, and the Defunctland YouTube channel.
How it all started
{{/usCountry}}How it all started
{{/usCountry}}It all started with half a rotting cantaloupe. In the summer of 2019, illustrator Trevor Roberts was working at a small architectural firm when he noticed a co-worker's leftover melon in the office break room.
“I'm waiting for my lunch to microwave and I'm looking at this cantaloupe half, all nasty, and I'm like, ‘Oh, man, that would look really weird if you were small and standing right on the edge of this,’” Trevor told Forbes in June 2023.
He photographed the melon and edited it into a stock photo of an open pit mine in South Africa, then changed its colour to red “so it looks really meaty.” He shared the image on Reddit's r/WorldBuilding community for fun, and it was well received. “People really liked it. And so, I thought, 'Well, okay, this is fun. Let's take this a little bit more seriously [and] try to think about why would they be going down in this thing? What reasons would there be? What would there be to do? What is this?'” he said.
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What's next for the project
According to Forbes, the Mystery Flesh Pit is now the focus of a Kickstarter campaign for a tabletop role-playing game (RPG) created with Ganza Gaming. The campaign originally had a goal of $15,000 and has since raised $69,000.
“We're doing a big, 250-page game book that outlines how to play and the character classes and the monsters and all that kind of stuff,” Trevor said.
According to the project's official website, an official coffee-table style art and documentary book is also being written, and the team is “looking for a publisher”.