By Dr. Anomaly (original post; more comments here and here)

One of the residents of the hotel, the “Tract Lady” is a woman in her early sixties with iron grey hair, a slighty hunched posture, and a sunny disposition. She always has with her a supply of religious tracts – a single sheet of paper, printed on both sides, called The Sentinel. She has a different issue of the tract each day, and presses one on everyone she sees, though in a friendly, cheerful, interested fashion and not an overbearing or intrusive fashion.

Like most such items, each printing of The Sentinel talks about the problems in today's world and how to overcome them or cope with them through faith and the power of the Scriptures. If anyone takes the time to read the tract carefully, however, they will find a few odd…typos. For example, instead of saying “The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost” it might say “The Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghast.” Now while that could be a simple typo, others may seem a bit more sinister…words left out, added, or substituted that can completely alter the meaning of the verse being quoted. A quoted section of the Ten Commandments could read “Do not commit murder. Do not not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do testify as a false witness against your neighbor.” Again, this could be a typo, but it's more disturbing.

If anyone points them out to the Tract Lady, she'll act embarassed and say “Oh, I thought I'd gotten rid of all those misprinted ones! Here, dear, let me give you the corrected copy!” She then digs through her bundle of tracts and pulls out another copy of the tract in question, and it does in fact have the “typo” corrected to read as it should. There will, however, be another different typo of the same sort elsewhere in the document…

If anyone tries to call the phone number of the publisher (listed in the fine print on the bottom of the back side of the tract) they'll get a “number not in service” message. If they ask the Tract Lady about that, she'll explain that the publisher recently moved offices, and the number hasn't been corrected on the publications yet. She'll write the new number down on a piece of paper and give it to the person who asked. Later, when they go to pull out the piece of paper and call the number, they won't be able to find the paper. If they attempt to call the number right away (on a cell phone, for instance) they'll get a busy signal. If they call Information and ask about the number, they'll be told that number is not a listed number.

There could be a pattern to the typos if a person were to collect several weeks/months of these tracks and compiled all typos/dropped words. Or the sinisterness of the typos in the way they misrepresent the doctrine, twisting the meaning into subtly wrong and incompatible ways could be important, leading people who trully follow these tracts to base their morality on corruption.

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