The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is an online world building project created by an artist named Trevor Roberts. The project revolves around the fictional “Mystery Flesh Pit”, a national park located near the town of Gumption, Texas. The park itself is a massive subterranean organism of unfathomable size discovered during the mid 1970s, and was made a national park later on in the 1980s before its sudden closure to the public in 2007.
Creation
The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park was first posted to Reddit in 2019 by artist Trevor Roberts. The Flesh Pit is modeled after a decaying cantaloupe Roberts found in his workplace in 2019, which was Photoshopped onto a stock photo of an open pit mine in South Africa. The resulting image was then stylized by Roberts to have the appearance of a WPA National Parks poster. Roberts has since posted fictional letters, diagrams, posters, advertisements, and other materials that emulate the style of National Park Service publications that expand the lore of the Mystery Flesh Pit. The documents and posts made by Roberts surrounding the Mystery Flesh Pit combine satire and horror.
Roberts presents the history of the fictional location as follows:
In the 1970s, oil drillers in Western Texas stumbled on a crater. The crater was soon commercialized, and the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park was created. The park is near the town of Odessa, Texas, and is home to an enormous subterranean animal, named the Permian Basin Superorganism. The park operated for many years, before closing over the weekend of the Fourth of July in 2007 after a vague incident took the lives of over 750 people.
The flesh pit is home to a wide variety of “Geo-biological” structures that were popular hiking destinations during the parks tenure. Examples included the lungs, digestive areas, and throat of the organism. Living inside the pit was a bizarre troglobitic ecosystem that was completely cut off from the rest of the world. Examples of some of the inter-pit fauna include the “Abyssal Copepod”, a large arachnid-like arthropod that could grow to over 6 meters (20 feet) and possessed human-like hands and arms, The “Amorphous Shame”, a highly evolved relative of weasels that lost most of its skin, eyes, and other organs, and the “Venous Shamble”, a unique species of cephalopod that has dozens of long tendril-like arms.
In other media
A tabletop RPG is currently being developed in a partnership with Ganza Gaming. A book is also currently being created by Roberts. Once the book is published, which is set to contain expanded lore and art, Roberts says he will be done with the project. A video game based on Mystery Flesh Pit was in the process of creation, however the project was scrapped for numerous reasons, including fan feedback and internal disputes.