- A woman pressed play on her new Taylor Swift vinyl and was greeted by “creepy” electronic music.
- Her TikTok unboxing went viral, as commenters and collectors said it could be really valuable one day.
- Some said the record was cursed, but Rachel told Insider she’s not parting with the rare collectible.
A UK woman who ordered a $39 special edition of Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” on vinyl from Swift’s official website was initially terrified — and then ultimately delighted — that her copy turned out to be incorrectly pressed.
In her viral TikTok video, Rachel, 30, who declined to disclose her last name, pressed play on the record, as an ominous voice can be heard saying, “I quit seeing people, I quit looking at the flakes of flesh and dancing organisms.”
Since sharing it on Monday, it’s already received 3.8 million views.
Rachel then flips the record over to its B-side, where a man’s deadpan voice can be heard repeatedly saying, “There are 70 billion people of earth. Where are they hiding?” The creepy query eventually devolves into an electronic song. (Only one LP within the three-record set featured an error, Rachel told Insider. The other two play as intended.)
“At first I thought that maybe she’d put a secret message in the vinyl because it started talking and I was like, ‘OK, this is weird, but it’s not unlike Taylor,'” said the self-proclaimed Swiftie, nodding to the singer’s proclivity for easter eggs.
But as she listened further, she became a little frightened. “Oh my god, this is demonic,” she remembers thinking to herself. “What is happening?”
By googling the lyrics and with some help from the app Shazam, Rachel learned that the three tracks on her record were from an album called “Happy Land,” a compilation of electronic music from the British Isles dated between 1992 and 1996.
Rachel said she learned from comments that misprints can happen because record companies rent out their printing presses to run albums. But the fact that her discs are a purple — or an “orchid marbled color,” according to Swift’s website — and not the typical black coloring makes the mix-up all the more bizarre, she said.
“I haven’t seen a single other person who this has happened to,” she told Insider, “which is really strange.”
The responses on social media have been all over the map. Swifties are spooked — but some are urging her to keep the rare collectible as it may prove to have a high resale value in the future.
“This would creep me out,” wrote a top comment with 28,000 likes.
“Babe, that’s about to be a MEGA-RARE album,” another top comment, with 56,000 likes, said. “Don’t get rid of it!!!!!!!!”
One user identified themselves as a collector of faulty vinyls, adding, “Whatever you do, buy what you didn’t get and keep this. Value will only increase.”
Rachel said the record label behind “Happy Land,” called Above Board, messaged her privately, offering to send her the full album.
Some viewers even joked that the “70 billion people” track was a “bop,” Rachel said, while others were reminded of “The Evil Dead,” a 1980s horror movie about an old book that reawakens the dead when anyone reads it.
“People were saying it’s haunted,” she said, adding that people asked her to stop playing it or it would “curse” her.
Rachel told Insider she initially contacted customer service on Taylor Swift’s website for an exchange, whereupon a representative for Universal Music told her that they would need the record back in order to investigate. But she has opted against sending it away, given the rarity of the strange collectible.
“Apparently it’s like a big, a big thing,” Rachel said about mistakenly printed records. “They’ll pay a lot for it because it’s rare.”
“I can’t part with my creepy vinyl,” she added.
