Alright, it's 10, 20 am, June 8th. I'm standing just outside this, I don't know what you call it, this huge container thing.

And I just heard a sort of Christ, it was a violin being played somewhere far away. I couldn't get the recorder on in time.

So I'm just gonna wait here for a while and see if that happens again.

My name is Bruce Cosh, I'm a freelance writer and reporter.

Before it was unofficially and cynically renamed ECHOTOWN.

The place I want to tell you about was called Rarity Computing West, one of the most expansive tech campuses in North America.

Conceived and paid for by the Thorn Brothers, Nung and Pio, the Vietnamese Dynamos who had been bringing the world's fastest laptop processors and a cloud storage machinery to global business year after year.

They bought 12,000 empty acres on the east side of Charleston, South Carolina and went about constructing a multi-use complex to rival the ones they'd already built in Germany and South Korea.

Thousands of employees were going to work and even live there in the most modern office buildings and boutique apartments.

There would be a self-contained shopping district, a street car system, even a full recreational park, all for the benefit of Rarity's highly trained white collar tribe.

It was going to dramatically alter the face for the area's economy, but the financial crisis of 2026, combined with a couple of very bad gambles on unproven tech, brought everything to an ugly, skinning halt.

The Thorn Brothers frantically halted construction on the campus four days before Christmas, and I still remember how the stock market freaked out.

About 70% of the brothers' wealth disappeared in six months. Rarity computing west was abandoned.

It was such a massive property with so much of it already half developed that finding some other wealthy concern to step in to repurpose the land was going to take years if the thorns didn't sell.

And ever optimistic, they refused to entertain offers. And so block upon block upon block of gaunt skeletal structures remained in the banks of the Cooper River north of the Septima Clark Parkway.

Seven temporary operations centers were emptied out and stripped.

Even a couple of payloaders were just left to rot amongst all that concrete, steel, dirt, iron, and a rubble.

The three crumbling parking lots beside an old minor league baseball stadium that had been demolished to build with the new Rarity US corporate offices were left with long ragged tears in them, creating gullies to feet deep.

As if the claws of some massive angry animal had come down from the sky.

It was spooky from day one, people said. And from having seen videos and photos of the place long before I ever went there to write an article about it, I can attest.

Building after building, their growth thwarted in mid bloom. No windows yet installed in most of them. No sides are most of them.

Insolation and loose boards knocked around in the wind, mounds of debris 20 feet high blocking entire blocks. And all of it completely silent.

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