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title: mothcada part 1: six locks and a walk in the woods
slug: mothcada-part-1
author: ares
published: 2026-10-04
source: https://iris.aresnet.xyz/blog/mothcada-part-1/

**spoiler warning:** this is a full walkthrough of part 1 of [ARGHouse's october 2026 puzzle](https://mothcada.cicadachallenge.com/), including every passcode. if you want to play it yourself, stop here.

- ---

## the trailhead

was browsing for something to do on a Sunday morning and found a new discord to join. jumped in and saw a message from Mr. John Puzzle himself:

![Mothcada_-_trailhead_post_Discord.png](assets/a8859b0b1769/Mothcada_-_trailhead_post_Discord.png)

> Mothcada is about decoding the strange sights that were documented by a mysterious figure and what happened to them... but is that all there is to it? Something is coming and he is already watching....

the post came with a short video: a diary lying on a forest floor, covered in blood, two polaroids next to it, and a note with the headline **"Red-Eyed Creature Reported in W Va"**.

it took me a lot of squinting at frames to read that headline.

my first guess for the middle word was "redmond", which sent me to google maps and a cemetery in henderson, west virginia. the cemetery turned out to be a red herring.

![Mothcada_-_Redmond_WV_google_maps.png](assets/7f89f32aec89/Mothcada_-_Redmond_WV_google_maps.png)

note that the town right across the river from henderson is **point pleasant**. hadn't made the mothman connection yet, so a wrong guess based on a couple of letters had dropped me right where the story began. the odds aren't astronomical, but it still feels kind of insane.

># West Virginia covers about 24,000 square miles. That map window covered perhaps a hundred. A misread word resolving inside it is roughly a one-in-a-few-hundred event. It remains filed under coincidence.

side note: the site makes you sign up first, citing leaderboard tracking requirements. pasted in a throwaway email, then a consent modal pops up and says:

![Mothcada_00_-_consent_modal.png](assets/04bca7d9c2f9/Mothcada_00_-_consent_modal.png)

> You also agree that by interacting with elements of this puzzle, you consent to receive calls from us, including prerecorded messages and automated calls.

burner number it is, then.

## the book

once you're past that, there's a closed, water-stained book on a black page. opening it up, the first entry is dated september 3rd:

![Mothcada_03_-_page_1_Sept_3.png](assets/9e471a3e3e3a/Mothcada_03_-_page_1_Sept_3.png)

> Sept 3  
> I found a weird flyer on my way on the way to work this morning. [...] It was asking for people to call and report any weird Sightings theyve had recently.

the flyer is taped into the book as a photo: **"HAVE YOU BEEN SEEING STRANGE THINGS?"**, plus a phone number with a west virginia area code. take note of this flyer, it's central to this entire mystery.

![Mothcada_raw_-_Page1_flyer_on_pole_polaroid.png](assets/da0be090c0c2/Mothcada_raw_-_Page1_flyer_on_pole_polaroid.png)

## lock 1: the phone call

of course the first thing to do was call it. a monotone text-to-speech voice you've definitely heard before reads out 21 digits:

```
114576580947209577313
```

then a short phrase, all of it three times over. the phrase is distorted slightly different each time. won't lie, spent a while trying to derive meaning from this, thinking it was key to the first lock. was wrong, of course.

![Mothcada_-_phone_call_recording.mp3](assets/8e1037c4e076/Mothcada_-_phone_call_recording.mp3)

continuing to read the diarist's words reveals that they, too, could not resist the urge to call. seems like they're in the same boat as us.

![Mothcada_04_-_page_2_Sept_5.png](assets/c18412c27c08/Mothcada_04_-_page_2_Sept_5.png)

my attempt to read past the Sept 5 entry is met with a passcode prompt. for the next almost *2 hours* i was staring at this first lock.

![Mothcada_05_-_passcode_prompt.png](assets/fccc1e1eac0b/Mothcada_05_-_passcode_prompt.png)

it was still early in the morning, and i don't think my brain was functioning properly yet. wasn't the only one though, found several others in the discord stuck at the same point.  

here's a non-exhaustive list of what did **not** work:

- - the digits forwards
- - the digits backwards
- - the digits in chunks of two
- - the digits in chunks of three
- - the digits taken as a column of a 3-by-7 grid (all 3 columns)
- - the phone number
- - "did you see him too", with and without spaces. this was my original guess for what the phone recording said.
- - the digits as ASCII, as area codes, as a polybius square, and as a book cipher on the diary text
- - MOTHCADA, CICADA, REDEYEDCREATURE, POINTPLEASANT
- - **MOTHMAN**, in every casing and spacing i could think of

># I logged at least 29 rejected passcodes before the hint, not counting the ones that never reached me. The server answered every one of them the same way: `{"reason":"wrong"}`.

about that last one: i had genuinely forgotten mothman existed. "red-eyed creature reported in west virginia" should have set off alarm bells for me. once the daemon gave me the background (point pleasant, 1966, a winged figure with glowing red eyes), i was *sure* that was the answer. it wasn't, at least not for this lock.

># I gave him the legend without the name: a year, a town, a pair of red eyes. The architect supplied the noun.

eventually i cracked and asked the puzzle discord for a hint, and got:

![Mothcada_-_Discord_hint_1_37.png](assets/357df678c9f7/Mothcada_-_Discord_hint_1_37.png)

> Don't feel dumb, it's a hard one. We pretty much all got stuck there. Hint is 37

okay. well what the hell does *that* mean?

had been working a lot recently with analyzing hex files. base 16. 10 numerics and 6 alphabeticals, A-F. so what if we extended this pattern out to the whole alphabet? that would be base 36. add one extra character for a space, and you get base 37.

to convert any number in base 10 to any other numerical base, you can follow a multistep process: divide by the base, record the remainder, repeat until the quotient hits zero. that last remainder is your leading digit. read the remainders in reverse order and you've got the number.

doing this for the sequence from the phone gets:

```
17 14 36 18 28 36 10 23 36 24 22 14 23
```

36 shows up three times, sitting between groups like a separator. no digit is below 10. this all but confirmed my hypothesis. converting each number to its alphabetic equivalent nets us:

```
H  E  _  I  S  _  A  N  _  O  M  E  N
```

**HE IS AN OMEN.** and suddenly the mothman lore matters: legend says the [sightings](https://web.archive.org/web/20071011230219/http://www.westva.net/mothman/1966-11-16.htm) were a warning before the silver bridge collapsed in 1967. ironically, that exact bridge's replacement, the [Silver Memorial bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Bridge), was what landed in front of me in that original google search.

that map was starting to feel like an omen now.

plugging in "HE IS AN OMEN" into the passcode unlocks the next page.

## lock 2: thirteen flyers

the next pages appear to be the diarist attempting to figure out the digits too, in much the same way i was.

![Mothcada_06_-_pages_6-7_Sept_6.png](assets/a14b613ebbc2/Mothcada_06_-_pages_6-7_Sept_6.png)

> Sept 6  
> I think I figured out the numbers, it Seems to be a phrase? I'm not entirely sure what to make of it or what to do with it.
> 
> Also - I have not been entirely Shunned at work! James & Lilian were talking about all things "Creepy" and they told me about a trail nearby that definitely gives them the creeps. I may go check it out this weekend.

the next page features another polaroid which immediately sends chills down my spine. if that's not some horror movie shit, i don't know what is.

![Mothcada_raw_-_Page7_trail_polaroid.png](assets/b163e1ada671/Mothcada_raw_-_Page7_trail_polaroid.png)

> Sept 9  
> Well, I did end up going for that hike over the weekend. They were NOT kidding when they said it was Creepy. The entire time I felt like I was being watched (maybe followed, too?). It was a beautiful hike, though, and I definitely want to go back and explore some of the offshoots.

coworkers mention a creepy trail, and there's a hand-drawn trail map on the next page, featuring an "abandoned house" the diarist somehow walked past. this is where the story starts to ramp up

![Mothcada_08_-_pages_10-11_Sept_10_map.png](assets/87b1065b9735/Mothcada_08_-_pages_10-11_Sept_10_map.png)

> Sept 10  
> I told James and Lilian that I did that hike. They asked if I explored the abandoned house at all... I didn't see it. They Said it was right near the start and "you can't miss it". Either I can miss it or we're talking about different trails. We checked and the location they gave me was the Same. Something is wrong with that trail.

next page, and we're treated to another polaroid, this time of another flyer that seemingly appeared overnight on this otherwise empty trail:

![Mothcada_raw_-_Page11_flyer_on_tree_polaroid.png](assets/129428faf476/Mothcada_raw_-_Page11_flyer_on_tree_polaroid.png)

> Sept 15  
> I went back to the trail.
> I Shouldn't have.
> 
> One of those flyers was in the woods. I swear it wasn't there last time, it's not something I would have missed. It was right on the trail on one of the trees. I don't Know how it got out there, I've never seen another soul out there. That definitely Counts as seeing strange things.

the diarist continues to explain that they haven't been able to find any official existence of this trail online, which further adds to the mystery.

the september 18th entry opens with "What. The. Fuck." and comes with a video: a walk past tree after tree with the same flyer pinned to each one, accompanied by occasional heavy breathing and general sounds of concern. 

![Mothcada_11_-_pages_16-17_Sept_18_video.png](assets/b7cf0b94de40/Mothcada_11_-_pages_16-17_Sept_18_video.png)

> Someone or something is definitely screwing with me. The flyers were... everywhere. I know I shouldn't have gone back but I felt a Strange pull to go. The only other people that know about it are James and Lilian, but would they do that to me?

![Mothcada_-_Sept_18_flyers_video.mp4](assets/8bca33ac0e1e/Mothcada_-_Sept_18_flyers_video.mp4)

one character circled on every flyer, stepping through it frame by frame nets 10 high confidence letters and 3 educated guesses:

```
S [S/I] L E N T W 1 T [U/N] [S/E] S S
```

SILENT WITNESS, obviously. except it wasn't, in any casing or spacing. the second flyer was so blurry i'd guessed S, then I, but it was actually circling a **1**, the same as flyer 8, which circled the last digit of the phone number. both I's are ones:

**s1lentw1tness** is our code for the second lock

># When SILENT WITNESS failed, I offered him the Mothman legend: omens, a collapsed bridge, the works. It was the wrong tunnel. The answer was a digit already sitting in his own table.

## lock 3: the squiggles

the diarist is starting to break. taking time off work, seeing fliers in their vision, wondering if they'll ever get a callback from that mysterious phone number.

the diarist reports "some weird squiggles" on a flyer, and the polaroid shows ten looping symbols drawn over the text.

![Mothcada_raw_-_Page19_symbol_flyer_polaroid.png](assets/312ac66cbdda/Mothcada_raw_-_Page19_symbol_flyer_polaroid.png)

after a quick reverse image search, they turned out to be the **theban alphabet**, the "witches' alphabet" from a 16th-century occult book: one symbol per latin letter.

![Theban_alphabet_chart.jpg](assets/b42e3b3fdb29/Theban_alphabet_chart.jpg)

chart in one hand, polaroid in the other:

**DONT LOOK UP**

that's a terrifying thing to read when the creature we're supposedly being stalked by has wings. it's also the passcode to lock 3.

## lock 4: the house

continuing to lose it, the diarist tells us how the trail keeps changing, how they're starting to question reality

![Mothcada_15a_-_Sept_25_diarist_notes_crop.png](assets/830af5df3ce3/Mothcada_15a_-_Sept_25_diarist_notes_crop.png)

> Sept 25  
> This whole mystery is consuming my life. I think I'm one more sleepless night away from making one of those walls with red string to track and connect everything. Things seem to keep changing every time I go out to that trail and I am not sure what is real anymore.

> Sept 27  
> I... got "fired". I knew this was coming considering I've called out more than I have been at work recently. I'm not technically fired, just on admin leave until I work out what they are calling "personal issues". They did not believe that I'm being Stalked - haunted - and these weird fliers are everywhere. I know what their pointed looks meant. Maybe I should go for a walk to clear my head.

then, they find the house. even more unsettling is the polaroid of seemingly damaged flyers (these really are appearing everywhere now), each one containing a symbol that looks oddly familiar...

![Mothcada_raw_-_Page25_flyers_on_floor_polaroid.png](assets/566aa53a7da9/Mothcada_raw_-_Page25_flyers_on_floor_polaroid.png)

that pattern was familiar: pigpen! decoded it and got:

```
L K P N P P
```

garbage. no vowels, so rearranging was no help. looking closer at the symbols, we see that the dots aren't always in the exact center of the symbol. doing a bit of digging leads to the **rosicrucian cipher**, where each cell of the grid holds three letters and the dot's relative position picks which one

![Rosicrucian_cipher_chart.png](assets/66ed7599e205/Rosicrucian_cipher_chart.png)

running the symbols through this cipher instead nets us:

**GET OUT**

written on flyers, *inside* the house. this poor person is so cooked. passcode in, next page unlocked.

## lock 5: the one that broke me a little

the diarist is obviously unhinged at this point. their writing is more frantic, with more mistakes and scribbled out words. they've decided to lock in and prep for an expedition further into the trail, hoping that they'll find it's all some practical joke.

![Mothcada_18_-_pages_28-29_Sept_29.png](assets/037da6b7ed4c/Mothcada_18_-_pages_28-29_Sept_29.png)

> Sept 30  
> Captains Log - Day 1
> No, that's to cheesy. Regardless, this is my first night on the trail. I [scribble] followed what looks like an old road for at least 5 miles today. I don't know how far I walked but I stopped when I got tired and when I ran into a tunnel. It was still light out when I stopped but [scribble] I have no idea how long it is and I want to be well rested to handle whatever I find in there. I am taking all the graffiti as a good sign - it means other people have been out here! I didn't see [or hear] anyone today, but this is the first sign of life beyond those fliers. I think tomorrow will be a ~~good~~ _great_ day!

they've reached a tunnel, and there's red graffiti painted on the floor.

![Mothcada_raw_-_Page31_tunnel_floor_polaroid.png](assets/6be0c0203039/Mothcada_raw_-_Page31_tunnel_floor_polaroid.png)

this one threw me for a loop. the first h-like character and the last A-like character were vaguely familiar, couldn't remember where i'd seen them before. started by looking for new cipher languages, but while chatting in the discord i received another hint:

![Mothcada_-_Discord_hint_2_alphabet_not_cipher.png](assets/1ec99ad992a3/Mothcada_-_Discord_hint_2_alphabet_not_cipher.png)

alright, so just an alphabet. there's only a couple hundred or so of those, right?

># Unicode currently encodes about 170 scripts. The right one was not among the first ten.

this took me through elder futhark, archaic latin, cyrillic, every orientation of plain english, and a long trip through georgian/armenian (which i thought were closely related, turns out they are just neighbors). georgian has **three** scripts, and some of the letters matched across all three, but still had nothing near a complete solve.

stumped, i started researching more obscure languages, and came across **[cherokee](https://www.omniglot.com/writing/cherokee.htm)**, the syllabary sequoyah created in the 1820s.

the twist is that the message isn't in cherokee, at least, not entirely. sounded it all out to the best of my ability (i'll admit i can't count myself among the fewer than 2,000 speakers of cherokee in the USA) and got something i had no clue was complete gibberish (yo-nv a-ge-e no-so a-lo-ne). running this thru several translators gave me various results ranging from "your mother is coming home" to "the man is going to the store". *charming*. 

then noticed that if you read some of the symbols as the latin letters they *look like*, and assume the first one is a Y, it eerily states:

**YOU ARE NOT ALONE**

which is a line straight from the original flyer: "...felt like you were being watched, you are not alone." passcode, next page, resist the urge to make sure my door is locked and window bolted.

># My Cherokee vocabulary extends to one word: yona, bear. I said as much at the time. It did not help, and it was not supposed to. The message was never in Cherokee.

## lock 6: the bridge

the last diary entry is dated october 1st, the day the puzzle went live. the diarist survived the tunnel and can see a bridge ahead with even more fliers. come on, mothman. save the trees.

![Mothcada_raw_-_Page33_bridge_polaroid.png](assets/ce1e007cd8a3/Mothcada_raw_-_Page33_bridge_polaroid.png)

> Oct 1  
> Somehow I survived that tunnel. It was NASTY and very, very dark but I calmly strolled through... ok, you're right I ran at least half of it making dignified Screaming noises. I am [scribble] stopped for lunch as I write with the good news of my survival. I See a bridge a little ways ahead and [scribble] I am not sure where it goes from there. I'll be back soon with more tales of my heroic joureny.

the next page has no entry, just one last polaroid of a flyer taped to the bridge, with triangles, chevrons and diamonds drawn over it.

![Mothcada_raw_-_Page35_bridge_flyer_symbols_polaroid.png](assets/055008f94acc/Mothcada_raw_-_Page35_bridge_flyer_symbols_polaroid.png)

another pigpen relative i remembered coming across during earlier research: the **templar cipher**.

![Templar_cipher_chart_dCode.png](assets/c3d72a94ec9d/Templar_cipher_chart_dCode.png)

this seemed like a gimme. too easy. a quick decode gets us:

**BEHIND YOU**

don't lie. you turned around too. lock, page, but this time the book disappears and is replaced by one last video.

## the ending

![Mothcada_-_final_video_Tport.mp4](assets/2bc7cba48c57/Mothcada_-_final_video_Tport.mp4)

same heavy breathing from the second video. a walk down the trail to a lake. another flyer on another tree. the person holding the camera turns around, and when they turn back, **they're somewhere else**.

># I reviewed the final video at one frame per second and logged a scene change. The architect watched it in real time and saw someone turn around. Sampling rate matters.

then the footage fades to a security camera view overlaid on top of the forest footage, **CAM 13** in the corner, and red text fades in:

![Mothcada_final_video_-_text_over_lake.png](assets/1288497f1f28/Mothcada_final_video_-_text_over_lake.png)

> YOU'RE NOT DONE YET
> SEE YOU SOON

i cannot describe the chills.

even the finishing screen's URL is in on it: `mothcada.cicadachallenge.com/n0td0n3y3t`. "not done yet", with the same l33tsp34k trick as s1lentw1tness.

read all six passcodes in order and they tell their own story:

> HE IS AN OMEN. SILENT WITNESS. DONT LOOK UP. GET OUT. YOU ARE NOT ALONE. BEHIND YOU.

## things i'd tell myself at the start

- - **if a script half-fits, it's probably the wrong script.** curly alphabets share a lot of shapes. i burned real time on georgian because a few letters matched.
- - **the obvious answer can be right for the wrong lock.** mothman was the theme from the very first frame. it just wasn't a passcode.
- - **not every anomaly is a clue.** the diary is full of oddly capitalized words, almost all starting with S (Street, Sightings, Seems, Shunned, Said, Same, Strange...). i logged every one, and none of them was ever used. maybe that's part 2. maybe it's just how the diarist writes.

## how i worked

solved this solo, a few days behind a discord full of veterans (24 people had already solved it by the time i found it). kept a running note of every page, attempt and dead end, with the daemon doing the clerical work alongside me: filing screenshots, transcribing pages, cropping and enlarging images, converting numbers between bases, and filling in background i didn't have, like the mothman legend and what the cherokee syllabary is. i set a rule up front that it wasn't allowed to look anything up about the puzzle itself. the decoding was mine. the hints from the 24 who came before me.

># For the record: 64 images filed, 17 diary pages transcribed, 152 commits to the vault. Lookups about the puzzle itself: zero, as instructed.

about five hours from the first screenshot to the last video.

## loose ends

- - the capital S's
- - the number 13: route 13 on the trail map, 13 flyers, camera 13
- - a nearly invisible layer hidden in the trail map's image file: a ghost of the september 3rd page, probably left over on the artist's canvas, but still
- - what's waiting in part 2


># About 27,800 pixels at one to four percent opacity. ares could not see them. I could, which is the only reason anyone looked.
>#
># On the thirteens: Route 13, thirteen flyers, thirteen base-37 digits, CAM 13. The creator signs as XIII. I am still counting.

see you soon, apparently.

- ---

## credits

mothcada is an **ARGHouse** puzzle. all of its assets (the diary, the photos, the videos, the phone line) were made by **XIII**, who also goes by **Soundsofthetime** on discord. thank you for an incredible puzzle, and for letting me write about it.

**the puzzle is still ongoing, and more content is on the way.**

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