About

Umbra Society is an independent, volunteer-run research collective founded in 2016 to document unexplained phenomena and folklore reports with the same procedural discipline as any other field science — chain of custody, cross-referenced instrumentation, and a willingness to close a case when the evidence points to a mundane explanation.

How we started

Umbra began with a single filing cabinet and four people meeting in a rented storage unit, cataloguing secondhand reports that had been circulating locally for years without anyone writing them down properly. Case 006 — logged two months after founding — is still in our archive, both for its historical significance and because missing-time reports, however unverifiable, deserve a permanent record.

Our approach

We treat every report the same way regardless of how strange it sounds on first read: we ask for specifics, we check what can be checked, and we log what can’t be resolved as honestly unresolved rather than forcing a conclusion either way. A case being “Unresolved” isn’t a failure state for us — it’s the accurate one, and roughly 15% of our archive sits there at any given time.

What we won’t do

We don’t charge witnesses. We don’t sell footage or “exclusive access.” We don’t stage anything for cameras, and we don’t publish identifying details about witnesses or private property without explicit permission. If a case can’t be investigated without crossing one of those lines, we don’t investigate it.