I moved to North Park this summer, and it didn’t take long before I realized I was living in a friendly neighborhood. Sure, it had its fair share of litter and domestic disturbances, but all-in-all it was a charmer — just urban enough, just interesting enough and a place for families.

But as is the case with any seemingly friendly neighborhood, evil tends to seep through the cracks like an unknown current of psychic tar that bubbles beneath our sidewalks day after day without end.

On one particularly humid day, my companions and I took shelter in a peculiar, air-conditioned bookstore on North Park Avenue that, for the purposes of anonymity, I will refer to hereafter as “The Library of the Damned.” The stuffy shop offered a quirky selection of “non-fiction” paperbacks with subjects ranging from dull New Age philosophy to unabashed sci-fi cult, new world order. I dusted off a trippy tome whose poorly Photoshopped jacket sleeve eagerly hyped the alleged missing link between Area 51 and the Lord Jesus Christ’s third coming. I read some from L. Ron Hubbard’s “Dianetics.” We were about to leave when something stopped me.

I’m not sure exactly what it was about the tape that caught my eye. In fact, its packaging was eerily unassuming — a tattered black box with a small, pentagram-like symbol on the sleeve and a title printed in a naked and vaguely ‘80s typeface: “Dr. Fritz.”

I’ll pause here and skip ahead to some shocking information I obtained while conducting my own late-night research, long after I experienced the mind-altering contents of the tape.

According to Wikipedia, Dr. Fritz was a “hypothetical German surgeon whose spirit has allegedly been channeled by several Brazilian psychic surgeons.” Seems simple enough. But then come the testimonials.

There was the spirit of Fritz inhabiting the body of Brazil’s Ze Arigo, prompting him to successfully remove an un-anesthetized patient’s uterine tumor with a kitchen knife, before collapsing into to tears. The patient made a full recovery and reportedly felt no pain. Then there was a second incarnation: A gynecologist from Sao Paulo named Edson Queiroz, whose bare-handed and unsanitary, supernatural outpatient procedures are so starkly documented on the tape I found.

Without getting into graphic details, let’s just say that this unholy relic of a tape contains some of the most medically inexplicable and disturbing images ever captured. What is this and why is it keeping me up at night? It can’t really be true, can it?

Outraged and frightened, I returned to the Library of the Damned, to find that they had no record of the cassette.

“It doesn’t even look familiar,” insisted the old woman at the counter. “Never seen it before in my life.”