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Repeated Without End · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Here we go.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: All right, here we go the Sally House.
• 0:16
  Speaker 3: What's the smold smelling it is? It is super it's pungent. Yeah,
• 0:23
  I'm telling you.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: There's little like facts on the wall. Oh yeah, okay,
• 0:30
  I'm scared. Oh sometimes I don't like that. Holy all right,
• 0:35
  come in here. Look at those?
• 0:37
  Speaker 4: Is that Sally FreeCast?
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: That's the doctor's bag or she died, this would be
• 0:41
  the table Sally.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: Sally, what are you talking about? Sally began writhing with
• 0:53
  so I began writhing with pain, her fears increasing after
• 0:57
  the doctor surgical instruments as he cares really laid them
• 0:59
  out the surgery. This is a nice fucking Fridgiday.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Look at this Sally's pizza hut, classic range.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: Shit. Welcome back to creep Gast. Today we are in
• 1:22
  an actual haunted house. This is in Atchets in Kansas,
• 1:27
  the Sally House. And we decided that this time around,
• 1:30
  when Isaiah came out to do some recordings, that we're
• 1:33
  going to actually read a ghost story and a haunted
• 1:36
  house where I suppose we like a little girl.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I get to hear and Harry picks me up
• 1:40
  this time, yes, hunter, Harry picks me up from the
• 1:43
  airport and they're like, here, we're going to a hunted house.
• 1:45
  I'm like, great, which one And they're like, here's the
• 1:47
  name and I look it up and it's like, yeah,
• 1:49
  it's a place where a child was killed in a
• 1:51
  bought surgery.
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: It's a it's supposedly there's supposedly there's a demon in here.
• 1:58
  There's all kinds of stuff. And then not only that,
• 1:59
  there's a tornado warring. It's fucking thundering outside. We might
• 2:02
  get stuck here. So we're recording a couple episodes here.
• 2:06
  This is our first one that we're recording for the night,
• 2:07
  and it is a ghost story called Ad nauseum, ad mortem,
• 2:10
  ad infinitum. Bye. Who's this by?
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: This is by our good friend imperial invective. Oh okay, yeah,
• 2:18
  so we've covered their stuff a lot. I have to
• 2:21
  shout out a story that Harry told me. When Harry
• 2:23
  reached out and asked if we could cover this, he
• 2:25
  said we could, but he thinks that he's got enough
• 2:28
  attention and we should give other authors attention. So that's
• 2:30
  the kind of guy.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: This dude is.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: No, But I also don't care because this is a
• 2:34
  cool story that's come highly recommended, and most importantly, I
• 2:37
  want to read it.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that was one thing that we were
• 2:40
  talking about before we started, was you were like, this
• 2:42
  is the one that actually I have been wanting to
• 2:43
  read for a while, which seems perfect for like a
• 2:46
  actual spooky setting. And I will say I'm a little
• 2:49
  jittery the house. The lights are all off in the house.
• 2:53
  I will say, luckily there's other people here, but I'm
• 2:56
  ready to actually get actually pretty if you get see
• 2:59
  the room around us.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: So this room, according to the legend, there was a
• 3:03
  young girl named Sally that came to this house back
• 3:07
  when the family that lived here had a medical clinic
• 3:10
  in the basement because there was an hospital nearby, like
• 3:12
  late eighteen hundreds, And a little girl named Sally was
• 3:15
  brought by her mom one day and she died during
• 3:17
  an operation. So the story is that Sally's ghost continues
• 3:22
  to haunt the house. But before it became an attraction
• 3:26
  that you could come stay in, it was a house
• 3:29
  that other tenants and families lived in for a while,
• 3:32
  and there was one family who had a boy who
• 3:35
  was about eight years old I think, who was staying
• 3:37
  in this room and said that he would lay in
• 3:39
  this bed and watch his toys move in the night
• 3:42
  as if Sally's playing with them. So now people who
• 3:45
  come to the house, as you can see, will leave
• 3:47
  toys here for Sally as a sort of en We
• 3:50
  all left Margaret. He left Margaret.
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: I will say, I'll tell you the whole thing about Sally.
• 3:55
  They did that bitch. No favors with that sell torture downstairs.
• 4:00
  That looks like a forty three year old dwarf downstairs.
• 4:03
  She's gonna start complaining Peter Dinkle just stealing her work.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: I mean, to be fair, she's got to be what
• 4:10
  one hundred and forty years old.
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: Now, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So it's been a bit,
• 4:14
  it's been a bit. Yeah.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: So yeah, we're in We're in the room that Sally
• 4:17
  likes to play in with all of Sally's toys.
• 4:21
  Speaker 4: Uh.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: And there's also a few other spirits theres that live here.
• 4:23
  The same boy that lived here would wake up in
• 4:25
  the night see an older woman, an older woman strangling him.
• 4:29
  There's stories of like a man that.
• 4:32
  Speaker 3: I hate that we're getting read to read a scary
• 4:34
  ghost story with it.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: There's another one right down the hall in the master bedroom.
• 4:38
  Someone who was staying the night here, had a dream
• 4:41
  of a dead boy who was chained to a pipe,
• 4:44
  and then he go he wakes up from the dream
• 4:47
  and he goes to the room and he finds the
• 4:49
  pipe and he opens up a crevice in the wall
• 4:52
  and there's a blooded shirt that the boy was wearing
• 4:54
  in the dream. So there's there's the the young boy
• 4:57
  that was killed. There's Sally, there's the old woman. And
• 4:59
  also at some point there was a tenant who lived
• 5:03
  here who had a ritual in the basement, and.
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: That we win the basement and it's and you can
• 5:11
  see where the ritual because there's a hole into nothing
• 5:14
  that is literally fenced off.
• 5:15
  Speaker 5: Yes, it's fucking absurd. Isaiah general first thoughts. All right,
• 5:19
  so I'm gonna say this is pretty I don't like
• 5:25
  this at all. What's wrong with it? There's a giant
• 5:32
  black scorch mark in the mid there's a chair in
• 5:36
  the corner facing me, a pillow and someone's cage.
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: A hole in the wall. Ok okay, all right, hold on,
• 5:46
  so that's that's actually.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: Then we looked on the floor right here is this
• 5:56
  where the sigil was that was painted over the Beelzama thing.
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: It was on the wall.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: Did just say downstairs? And according to everything I read,
• 6:09
  he had a ritual to someone Beel's above if that
• 6:11
  means the devil to him or satanic.
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: Entity, which I have a lot of respect for. If
• 6:15
  you're gonna aim for one for the top the why
• 6:18
  why why play? Yeah, I was like, what do we me?
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: It's like, I'm here to summon Man and it's like, okay, exactly.
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: It's like meeting Hall of Notes and being like can
• 6:24
  I meet Darryl or can I meet Hall? Or can
• 6:27
  I meet Oats. You're like, no, I want to meet
• 6:28
  Darryl Hall.
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean?
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: Uh So, without further ado one. Also, I want to
• 6:33
  say we should keep an eye on the front door,
• 6:37
  make sure it's locked, because there was like people outside
• 6:39
  there walking around. She's like, I love this place. Seris
• 6:42
  he's a magic eight ball and all that kind of stuff.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: As we came in, every house nearby was like peering
• 6:46
  in watching us.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: The next door neighbor which I I'm not going to
• 6:50
  go into, but I will say the next door neighbor's
• 6:52
  house is far more haunting than when we When we
• 6:55
  rolled up, I was like, there it is. I'd like, no,
• 6:58
  it's one next door, and I'm like, oh my god.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: There was a good three minutes of Hunter being like,
• 7:02
  this is the scariest house I met.
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: I was like, oh my god, I s alsoone to
• 7:05
  look at me from the top. Yeah, and I thought
• 7:07
  it was a ghost there. It's like no, it was
• 7:08
  just the.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: It's like down. So Hunters spent like ten minutes being like,
• 7:12
  I've been this is the worst thing I've seen in
• 7:14
  my life. I am absorbable.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: I've been.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: I've been horrible. I've been I've been scaring myself. I
• 7:22
  kid you not.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: I went outside on the front porch to help Harry
• 7:24
  carry something in, and I heard a group of women singing.
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there the.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: Kind of and it wasn't like it wasn't like a
• 7:34
  hopped off the planet. Yeah.
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: If you if you were going to be a witch
• 7:43
  and you're like I want to hang out some other
• 7:44
  like fucking witches, why would you not live near a
• 7:47
  house like this? You know what I mean?
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: It was a chorus of women.
• 7:50
  Speaker 3: It's a course of saying what you mean to say,
• 7:53
  a course of witches is what you need to say.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, without further dooce, should we get in so
• 7:58
  Imperial Invective covered. A lot of his story is on
• 8:00
  the podcast before Incredible Author. We'll have all of his
• 8:02
  stuff linked in to one, uh the inced in the Earth.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: Oh sure, it bleeds, it breeds, and that's a great one. Yeah.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: And there's one more we covered by him. I can't
• 8:14
  remember right now, which one, plush Gate, that's right, that's right.
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, what are you asking me? I don't know.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: The one about this showing into the woods and there
• 8:23
  one of them was a mimic. Okay, yeah, sure, so
• 8:26
  a bunch of cool stuff. Friend of the show, we
• 8:29
  like it, and every time we read him, people recommend
• 8:33
  this story as one of his Best's asleep.
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: Okay, it's numb up. And I tell you what, every
• 8:42
  time I always sit, and I always sit on my
• 8:43
  left foot, I always say it's my diabetes. That's gonna
• 8:45
  like cut away the circuit. I don't know, I'm so anyways,
• 8:49
  add nauseum. This is a three part chapter.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: One, So it's fine if your footfalls asleep, but the
• 8:54
  moaning thing you did.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: Sally stopping, ad nauseum, add mortem, and add infinitum. So
• 9:03
  let's start it, man.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: All right, let's begin beginning with our first nection ad nauseum,
• 9:09
  which ad nauseum means the illness. Correct.
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: I think this is Latin. I thought I legitimately thought
• 9:17
  that it was just.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: In ad infinitum means yeah nausea. Yeah, so it would
• 9:27
  be to illness, to death, ad mortem and add infinitum.
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: Forever I thought was just was legitimately just a magic card.
• 9:34
  Well that's all I knew of them. God damn wait,
• 9:37
  will you.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: The shoes gonna comply?
• 9:43
  Speaker 3: It's not coming off my foots all sole ve? Beginning
• 9:49
  with our first sweating, Do you need a whistle?
• 9:55
  Speaker 6: I need a I'll tell you what swing this swee break?
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: How do you wake up a foot?
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 10:13
  Speaker 7: Stand up?
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Stand up? You act? You act like we're about to
• 10:17
  play in the super Bowl?
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: So d I feel like I've been running fucking Oklahoma
• 10:23
  drills all day? All right?
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Go ahead, ad nauseum?
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: Have you ever seen a ghost?
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: I don't usually ask the question because everyone will typically
• 10:34
  start telling a typically bullshit story about seeing an old
• 10:38
  woman in their peripheral vision one late night, hearing the
• 10:41
  voice of their deceased grandfather asking about the kids, or
• 10:44
  maybe even picking up a phantom hitchhiker on a late
• 10:47
  night after driving for too long. I asked this question
• 10:50
  because I want you to have your spiritual encounter on
• 10:53
  your mind, and I tell you my story. My encounter
• 10:57
  with the afterlife wasn't very typical. I out that after
• 11:00
  listening to my story, you'll be able to see yours
• 11:03
  as ordinary.
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: Either kind of a cliche, isn't it the whole? They're right? Oh,
• 11:08
  if I tell you my hand story, I always saw
• 11:10
  an old woman.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah what what? What? What?
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: What would be one where it's a curveball? We were like, oh, damn,
• 11:16
  you know what would you if you were getting a haunting?
• 11:18
  I'd be like if I heard like, imagine this not
• 11:23
  a good example. So I don't judge me, but like
• 11:26
  a fightus plant? What do you mean by focus plant?
• 11:31
  Say exactly? I don't know what you just said, A
• 11:36
  haunted fightus plant?
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: Okay, so you gave us you.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: Wake up and there you wake up and there's a
• 11:42
  plant in your room? Would that not be kind of creepy?
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: What is okay?
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: I see okay, I'm saying that it's always an old woman.
• 11:48
  So it took too many.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: Old It took three attempts for you to get to
• 11:52
  what the fightus plant does.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: Couldn't have been more clear on the first one. Couldn't
• 11:55
  have been more clear on the first one. Actually, mine
• 11:57
  completely completely clear, sweat burn in my eyes. And I'm
• 12:01
  telling you right now that it was You're not that.
• 12:03
  I'm looking at you right, You're not be more well.
• 12:05
  You meant like, come down and let me tell you
• 12:07
  my tale. I fought, like, what's another alternative for that?
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: No?
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: No, I'm just saying that when people tell you their
• 12:13
  haunted stories, they always say, Oh, it's a little kid,
• 12:15
  it's an old woman. I'm saying that someone's just like,
• 12:17
  there's a there's a random plant in my room every night.
• 12:21
  That'd be kind of creepy. Huh. I'm just I'm picturing
• 12:23
  another living object, right, because you were like a rock,
• 12:26
  I'd be like, he gives a ship?
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: You do that with like cats, a lot like strange cats.
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: I never really care about animals, you know what I mean?
• 12:33
  Unless I met you.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: Wake up and there's a grizzly bear in your room.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: Well, a.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: Haunted grizzly, Yeah, that's scenario. What would a haunted grizzly
• 12:46
  Would he talk if you wanted to?
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: I can now speak your language. You don't speak. Bear
• 12:54
  with me, motherfucker. That's how we're talking to each other.
• 12:57
  He's like, fine, you win, all right.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: Paragraph. It all started in early two thousand and one,
• 13:10
  when I was thirteen years old. My family had just
• 13:13
  moved to a new city after my father lost his job.
• 13:17
  He was lucky enough to find work in a small
• 13:19
  town in Michigan town Kalamazoo was a quaint and quiet
• 13:23
  Community's Kalamazoo.
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: It's like, it's fucking like Willy Wonkat Town or something.
• 13:29
  Where do you live? I live in Kalamazoo.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: It is a real town.
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: I don't care. If shame, I wouldn't move there. Can
• 13:36
  imagine going on the zillo and looking at house in Kalamazoo.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: What state's Kalamazoo?
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: And that's what I went. Michigan. Yeah, small town of Michigan.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there you go.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that explains it. Clean water in Kalamazoo.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: They say, well, yeah, it has to be going somewhere.
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: Leg fall asleep down. I was just gonna lose feeling.
• 14:02
  I might be paralyzed. By the end of his reading,
• 14:05
  I didn't realize how much my body needed a chair.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: There.
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: There's Sally's crib here, I might actually crawl in that here.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: And that we'll get us on. We moved there midway
• 14:16
  through the school years, so I found that I had
• 14:18
  about five or six months of free time before I
• 14:21
  could attend school and meet the other kids. My neighborhood
• 14:24
  was built for younger couples, so there weren't too many
• 14:26
  kids to hang out with during this time. The cold
• 14:29
  weather forced me inside most of this time. I was
• 14:32
  fine with being indoors. I'm an avid gamer and love
• 14:35
  survival horror games. Spent most of my time in my room,
• 14:39
  which was in the basement, playing games and trying to
• 14:42
  distract myself from the fact that I had left my
• 14:44
  social circle and was now in a new and unfamiliar place.
• 14:48
  I was a big fan of Resident Evil and was
• 14:51
  slowly getting into Silent Hill around that time. It's a
• 14:54
  small note about my house in Kalamazoo. I had a
• 14:57
  main floor with a kitchen, living room, in a bedroom, bathroom,
• 15:02
  basement had a wide open area. My room in a
• 15:05
  room with a water heater off to the side. See,
• 15:08
  because we're in here, I can only imagine this house's basement,
• 15:13
  so I imagine like that dungeon set up with.
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: Like a million percent. Also you describing that I'm not
• 15:18
  even joke, like my assholes tightening. And then there's even
• 15:22
  there's even there's even.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: Like cracks of thunder outside of he says, I'm reading
• 15:26
  you sitting there like the rumble people.
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: What he watches back, You're gonna see me look at
• 15:31
  my laptops. I'm reading. But I just have a thousand
• 15:33
  yards stare like this. There's like this bear does like
• 15:42
  I don't like a fucking look at any movie.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: That bear was not in that position.
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: Yes it was.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: It was because say that, because I was gonna make
• 15:48
  a joke when we sat down, because it was facing
• 15:51
  directly at me.
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: Nick's probably bumped into it.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: It's probably bumped it, But but I had on mine
• 15:55
  like I'm gonna make a joke about that bear keeps looking.
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: At me naked.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: You bump now the bear's.
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: Looking at you. Don't shake your head, No fucker.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: The bears looking directly at you and right of me.
• 16:05
  Care about me. No, I'm not touching that bear. I'm
• 16:09
  not touching that that bear. You're touching the bear.
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: I put my computer upstairs while.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: We were in the basement. I took care when I
• 16:21
  got down there where the sigil was on the ground
• 16:24
  where they said like the summoning ritual was. I saw
• 16:28
  that and I was like, oh, I'm not going to
• 16:29
  step on it. And the first thing.
• 16:31
  Speaker 4: You did was stomp all over it as soon as
• 16:35
  we got down there.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: Okay, no one told me about the sigel on the floor.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, Well when we walked down I said, hey, Hunter,
• 16:42
  that must be where he drew the sigel on the floor.
• 16:45
  I'm pretty sure, I said, And you're like, nah, it
• 16:48
  was on the wall and then you stand on it
• 16:51
  to look on the wall.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: Where is it?
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: I think the bear knows you did that. No, no,
• 17:01
  we get a bear cam going.
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: I feel like, how about maybe.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: That is a nannycam?
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: Are people fucking in Sally's room?
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: Oh?
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: That baby? They have hidden cameras in here somewhere. People
• 17:10
  always talk about airbnb stuff where they like, they'll sit
• 17:13
  there and because those old dudes, they'll sell those they'll
• 17:16
  sell those videos and people take their shit fucking or
• 17:19
  they'll just beat their cock off to it or something
• 17:20
  like that. But they sell that shit all the time.
• 17:22
  How do we know there isn't a fucking Sally cam
• 17:24
  that's going for sale? Pirates Bay, Sallycam, pirates baby feeling.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: There isn't all because like the whole thing with those
• 17:30
  like keeping Tom videos, there's a market for it because
• 17:33
  people are looking to like get their rocks off that way.
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: Mm hmmm.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: I feel like there isn't a plethora of horror haunted
• 17:41
  House enthusiasts.
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: Well, I think they get the hit and footage. There
• 17:44
  might not be a lot of people that are into
• 17:46
  it because there's already like seventy million YouTube videos of
• 17:49
  people here. But see that, what are they doing off camera?
• 17:51
  I'd see that's what the That's what that fucking teddy
• 17:53
  bear is looking at. I'm trying to say about you.
• 17:56
  Some guy has a snapchat story of him getting his
• 17:58
  dick sucked right here. Oh yeah, no, oh a million,
• 18:02
  one hundred percent him sitting there and he's like he's
• 18:03
  doing this camera for one for one. It has it
• 18:05
  has three days for dinner.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: I can explain this, alright, it's getting his okay.
• 18:17
  Speaker 4: One bold that someone who rents out the Haunted Sally House.
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: Also no, I don't.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: I don't think coming here to like the the Sally
• 18:33
  like sanctuary area where everyone leaves her toys and like
• 18:36
  letters and birthday cards and stuff, and do that you
• 18:38
  deserve whatever happened.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: I'm not saying anything away, Scott Free. I'm just saying
• 18:42
  one hundred percent happened. And then they go flyingcase. This
• 18:45
  is definitely not the original window. People have definitely shot.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: The house was old, it was built sometime in the
• 18:53
  nineteen hundreds.
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: It was I got I'm so sorry. The blood's going
• 19:00
  back on my foot in the tingles.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: Oh it's no, really good if I spect it right now? Good? No, No,
• 19:09
  it hurts so bad when your foot's waking up.
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: And something hits it. Get it. I'm not I'm.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: Not like the way you're saying that.
• 19:18
  Speaker 7: Oh yeah, fills and needles.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: Okay, alright, d.
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: Okay, alright, alright, Minnie James a train.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: This is a scary story podcast.
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: Like I can't tell him die my fucking something. Oh
• 19:51
  my god, take your shoes off. Take your shoes too,
• 19:57
  that's gonna steak well, ye, holy of it on it?
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: So can I read the story?
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry, man, I'm like winded. I'm sitting here, I'm
• 20:07
  fucking I'm gonna do a cute thing here. I'm gonna
• 20:10
  get on my belly. Here we go. I just need
• 20:21
  a little second here.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: Just keep reading.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: Let me do my thing. You just keep reading. There's
• 20:26
  no way I.
• 20:26
  Speaker 4: Can read with you doing this.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: This is it, okay.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: The house was old. It was built sometime in the
• 20:35
  nineteen hundreds and was refitted to be more modern. Asbestos
• 20:39
  was replaced by insulation, lead paint was removed, the copper
• 20:42
  tubing was put in. It reminded me of the old
• 20:46
  Ship of theseus conundrum. At what point of repairing and
• 20:49
  replacing parts does the house stop being the same house
• 20:52
  and become a completely new house? Did I live in
• 20:55
  a house that was almost a hundred or was it
• 20:57
  now a completely new building. The house had its fair
• 21:01
  share of problems. It was freezing in the winter due
• 21:04
  to pore heating, particularly in the basement. Every now and
• 21:08
  then I would wake up to find my breath fogging
• 21:10
  in the air. I slept with a heater in my
• 21:13
  room to combat this invasive cold. I accepted this drawback
• 21:17
  in exchange for the privacy that had afforded me, and
• 21:19
  as a teenager, privacy was of the utmost importance. The
• 21:23
  house also made sounds at night. My parents told me
• 21:26
  that it was just settling on its foundation. But I
• 21:29
  wasn't so sure. It started with the most innocuous of things.
• 21:34
  Whenever I was settling down for the night, the sound
• 21:37
  of a door lightly bumping into the frame could be heard.
• 21:41
  At first, I thought it was just a wind current
• 21:43
  generated by the heating system or pressure change pushing a
• 21:47
  door in the basement closed. I told myself that the
• 21:50
  next few nights it happened. I held tight to that
• 21:52
  belief when the sound persisted, even after shutting all the
• 21:55
  doors in the basement to got down on flow through.
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: Noise that was almost always.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: Happening at night was the sound of my bed creaking.
• 22:05
  At first I thought it was me turning in bed
• 22:07
  and making the sound. Then it started happening even when
• 22:11
  I wasn't moving. It's been a few nights lying completely still,
• 22:15
  waiting for the sound of my bed shifting. I would
• 22:18
  always look over at the other side of the bed,
• 22:21
  but there wasn't anything there. Eventually began to get used
• 22:25
  to the sounds and they became background noise, routine occurrence
• 22:29
  in my life.
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: A few days past, do you ever have anything that
• 22:32
  happened to you lounging you laid on their side? Has
• 22:44
  there anything happened like that to you before, like specifically
• 22:47
  the bed thing.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember after my uh, after my grandfather passed away,
• 22:54
  who I was really close with, j I had I
• 23:04
  had a dream of lying in the bed and he
• 23:10
  came in and said at the end of the bed
• 23:12
  and talked to me, and then I woke up. He
• 23:16
  became sleep. This was in a completely pleasant way. This
• 23:23
  wasn't a scary way at all.
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: What was the conversation.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: It was just it was just me saying that I'm
• 23:29
  afraid I'm gonna miss him, and he said it's not gonna.
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: Be He said, shut the fun up, loser. He said,
• 23:40
  hell gate right now.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: Damn Yeah, I missed your grandpa.
• 23:53
  Speaker 8: Yeah no, Yeah, that's that's what I was gonna say
• 23:58
  about when I go to my my buddies and his
• 24:01
  grandma would be like, there's a.
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: There's a little boy in the closet, and we kept
• 24:06
  thinking that it was one of our friends that was like, like,
• 24:08
  what going there? Nothing is there? So freaking She's like, oh,
• 24:13
  I was sitting around a long time and it just
• 24:15
  turned up. She was like a horrible call. She was
• 24:19
  super drunk.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: Night.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: When you get older, you're like trying hold on, an
• 24:30
  old woman said, there's a boy in the closet, And
• 24:32
  your first thought was must be one of my pals hiding.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: You hang around, You're goofing around.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: You're saying, there'd be a large group of guys.
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a big hangout.
• 24:42
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought you were saying. It's like, oh,
• 24:47
  he gets an old woman's closets.
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: All the times, outfits.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but she just drank herself into imagining.
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, there was one time we were sitting there,
• 24:59
  not even joking, she said, as one pizza like sure,
• 25:04
  that crazy bitch took out a cookie sheet at four
• 25:08
  hundred and fifty degrees. I had two Totinos pizzas on it,
• 25:10
  fully cook. She didn't bacon. She looked at the Toto pizzas,
• 25:20
  grabbed the cookie sheet with her bare hands. Oh, she's like,
• 25:23
  set it on the oven, didn't flinch, didn't move a
• 25:26
  goddamn muscle, and she was like, hm ba, you didn't
• 25:31
  never touched the pizzas once, only the cookie sheet. She
• 25:34
  lifted her fingers as she touched it. She was just
• 25:38
  drunk out of her out of her gourd, cause hey
• 25:43
  ripped to her too, though, dude, she's gone. She actually
• 25:47
  she visited me in my dream. She said, I got
• 25:49
  like tons of pussy and stuff. The opposite of my said, okay,
• 25:54
  you should from your friend.
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: It's funny. I've told like ten people that story, and
• 26:05
  every one of them is like, that's so sweet, And
• 26:07
  then you come along.
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: You gotta be misremembering.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a few days pasted with the persistent sounds, I
• 26:17
  would have forgotten about it had I not opened my
• 26:20
  eyes late one night, I had just heard the creaking sound,
• 26:23
  and I rolled over to look across the bed saw
• 26:26
  another person right next to me. My heart leaped into
• 26:30
  my throat and my stomach sank. She was facing away
• 26:33
  from me, and her long hair ran down her back.
• 26:37
  He was wearing a white nightgown. I laid on the bed,
• 26:40
  paralyzed and watched her, too afraid to move, too afraid
• 26:44
  to scream. She rocked back and forth for a few
• 26:47
  minutes before getting up. Slowly, the bed creaked. She moved
• 26:51
  into a sitting position. She had her hands in front
• 26:54
  of her face. She sat in that position for a
• 26:58
  few minutes before she got up and moved towards the door.
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: She moved slowly when.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: She reached the door, her hand extended towards the door knob.
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: She didn't open it.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: She just pased through the door and it moved slightly
• 27:13
  with her passing through it. I didn't sleep for the
• 27:17
  rest of the night. That's interesting. All the sounds he heard,
• 27:20
  the creaking on the bed, the door bumping, is her
• 27:22
  doing that same path every night?
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: When was the nightgown early nineteen hundreds.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's been traditionally a thing for probably several centuries,
• 27:32
  but they kind of phased out a popularity around like
• 27:36
  early nineteen hundreds.
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: I'd say, at what point do they start stop shifting
• 27:39
  from nightgowns to like, I don't know, like somebody would
• 27:44
  see it, like Walmart with like cookie Monster sweatpants with
• 27:47
  the Cookie Monster sweatpants came later, you know what I'm
• 27:50
  talking about? Those? Yeah, you think it's one hundred years
• 27:52
  from now. I was just like, yeah, I woke and
• 27:53
  there was a morbidly obese woman with cookwans a Captain
• 27:58
  America shirt. She faced the door. I'm saying, like, there's
• 28:04
  gotta be at a point, there's gonna be a shift.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: I feel like I feel like we should cut this.
• 28:07
  But I imagine there's a lot of fellows waking up
• 28:09
  to that right now as I as I roll around
• 28:19
  on the floor, like was that fucking slug.
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: Whate? Yeah? Yeah, somebody's listen with their AirPods. They just
• 28:34
  look over next to them.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: Damn, just single tear. I spent the next couple of
• 28:45
  nights sleeping upstairs in the guest room. I lied and
• 28:48
  told my parents that it was too cold downstairs. I
• 28:51
  knew I couldn't tell them what I saw. They were
• 28:53
  already worried about my adjustment to a new city. I
• 28:56
  didn't need to think that I was going crazy in
• 29:00
  the guest room for a few nights before they began
• 29:02
  to get suspicious and started asking if anything was wrong.
• 29:06
  I went to bed in my room the next night
• 29:08
  and I saw her again. I didn't just see her,
• 29:11
  I heard her as well. I tried to stay up
• 29:14
  that night, but I eventually drifted off because I was
• 29:17
  about to really go under. I became aware.
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: I was just like, he's a restaurant all time. We
• 29:30
  can hear all of it.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: I've been ignoring it, but it sounds like I can't.
• 29:45
  I've tried to sound like a rag going through a
• 29:48
  trash can just new equipment, flipping over for no reason,
• 29:57
  stuff getting scattered.
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: It's time to talk about something scary, your health. I
• 30:04
  know I don't go in the doctor as much as
• 30:06
  I should. If I'm feeling sick, I'll just lie in
• 30:09
  bed and sleep it away. But that's only because I
• 30:11
  don't want to have to deal with the appointments, insurance
• 30:14
  and blah blah blah blah blah. That's why I have ZocDoc.
• 30:19
  Zoc doc is a free app and website where you
• 30:22
  can search and compare high quality in network doctors, choose
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  book an appointment. We're talking about in network appointments with
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  more than one hundred thousand healthcare providers across every specialty
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  from mental health to dental health, ie care to skincare
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  and much more. And a nice thing about zockdoc is
• 30:43
  that you can filter for doctors that take your insurance,
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  are nearby, and are highly rated. It's super easy to use,
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  and you can find an appointment time that works for
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  dot com slash creepcast. Thank you zock doc for sponsoring
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  the episode. Back to our spooky.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: Story, I want to take a moment to think today's sponsor,
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• 31:41
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  will be in the description. And we are back to
• 32:45
  the episode. I tried to stay up that night, but
• 32:48
  I eventually drifted off. That was about to really go under.
• 32:52
  I became aware of a sound, softly repeated in my room.
• 32:56
  I opened my eyes and she was there in my bed.
• 32:59
  She was still walking slightly, and I realized what the
• 33:01
  sound I was hearing. It was crying softly. She was
• 33:06
  doing her best to stifle her sobs. But they were
• 33:09
  just barely audible. I should have been scared, but as
• 33:14
  I listened to her pitiful bawling, felt nothing but sympathy.
• 33:18
  She rose to a sitting position and wept for a
• 33:21
  few minutes before leaving my room. I managed to go
• 33:24
  to sleep a few hours later on the floor next
• 33:27
  to my bed. The idea of waking up in the
• 33:29
  middle of the night and seeing her facing me, dead
• 33:32
  eyes looking right into mine was a terrifying thought. She
• 33:36
  didn't seem to be aware that there was someone else
• 33:39
  in bed with her, and I had no intention of
• 33:41
  making her aware of my presence. I slept on the
• 33:44
  uncomfortable floor in front of the heater the rest of
• 33:47
  the night. She appeared every night in my room for
• 33:50
  the next week. She always repeated the same motions. At
• 33:54
  the end of the week, I decided to try and
• 33:56
  make contact with her. I was beginning to feel like
• 33:59
  a boy wrist of creep watching her at her most
• 34:02
  raw and unguarded moment. She appeared, let her cry for
• 34:07
  a few minutes or slowly reaching out my hand, A
• 34:11
  trembling hand slowly crept across the bed sheets. I was
• 34:15
  terrified that I might get her attention and provoke her wrath.
• 34:19
  I drew closer and closer to her shoulder, blew out
• 34:23
  a laden sigh, and reached forward, only to see my
• 34:26
  fingers slid right through her. It was the oddest sensation
• 34:30
  I ever experienced.
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: In my life.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: My mind told me that I wasn't feeling anything, but
• 34:35
  it still felt like I had touched her. Later, when
• 34:38
  I was older, I would come across an article explaining
• 34:41
  phantom limb syndrome talked about how amputees would sometimes feel
• 34:45
  sensations in their lost limb despite the fact that it
• 34:48
  was no longer there. I think that's the closest analogy
• 34:52
  I can.
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: Come up with.
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: I was feeling something that was not there, or at
• 34:56
  least no longer there.
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: It's like when you put VR games and when you
• 35:01
  get hurt, you feel it in real life. It's like
• 35:05
  phantom pain, like metal Gear Solid five. It's like what
• 35:09
  I'm in a VR chatroom money. It's like when I'm
• 35:14
  in a VR chat room and someone walks through me
• 35:16
  and it hurts extremely bad.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: My attempt at contact galvanized me. I shot out of
• 35:27
  the bed and walked around to the other side. She
• 35:30
  had just risen to a sitting position and was now
• 35:32
  facing me. She was a few years older than me.
• 35:36
  I had guess I would say she was sixteen or seventeen.
• 35:41
  She had relatively plain features, but there is an endearing
• 35:44
  quality into her simple style. I was shocked and a
• 35:47
  little embarrassed to be thinking of her like that. I
• 35:50
  was busy mentally castigating myself when she stood up and
• 35:54
  moved right through me. If trying to touch her was discomforting,
• 35:58
  yelling her pass through me was. It's the oddest sensation
• 36:01
  I ever felt. I had to sit down and catch
• 36:03
  my breath, steal my heart. The next night, I tried
• 36:06
  to make contact again, but met with the same results.
• 36:10
  Instead of watching her leave the room and make the
• 36:12
  sound of the door bumping against its frame, I decided
• 36:15
  that I had to follow her. I had to figure
• 36:18
  out what happened to her. She moved slowly through the basement,
• 36:21
  but wasn't heading in the direction of the stairs. She
• 36:24
  was instead heading towards the boiler room. I followed her
• 36:28
  to the door, but as soon as I got within
• 36:30
  reach of the handle, I felt my blood turn cold,
• 36:33
  my skin prickled. She faced through the door and I
• 36:37
  stood outside. I was afraid of what might happen to
• 36:40
  me when I entered that room. I was more worried
• 36:44
  of what I would find when there. I didn't enter
• 36:47
  the boiler room until a week before class began. I
• 36:50
  won't lie. Those first few months in Kalamazoo, Michigan were
• 36:54
  some of the loneliest of my life. My friends Beck
• 36:57
  and Simsbury, Connecticut were moving on with their lives, and
• 37:00
  I felt like I was being left behind, left alone.
• 37:04
  I didn't have any friends in Kalamazoo yet, And to
• 37:06
  tell you the truth, I was beginning to see this
• 37:08
  nightly Wraith as a companion hindred spirit.
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: She was alone and sad, just like me.
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: Every night I would wake up to the sound of
• 37:17
  her suffering, and I would follow her to the boiler room.
• 37:21
  A week before class began for me, I entered the
• 37:24
  boiler room with her. I had stood outside the door
• 37:27
  for a few minutes, trying to steal myself for what
• 37:30
  I might see. My entire body was screaming at me
• 37:33
  to run back to my room and never go near
• 37:36
  that boiler room again. But I had to know what
• 37:38
  happened next. I drew in a deep breath and blew
• 37:41
  it out. I grasped the doorknob and turned it. The
• 37:46
  door swung into the room, and I was at eye level.
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: With her feet.
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: I swayed back and forth like a pendulum, powered by
• 37:53
  her frantic kicking in an attempt to find some purchase.
• 37:58
  I stifled a scream when I realized that she wasn't
• 38:01
  levitating like a ghost. She was hanging from a beam
• 38:04
  in the ceiling.
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: So clearly she took her on life. Yes, when she
• 38:10
  was actually.
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when this house was older, she was depressed, and
• 38:14
  then one night couldn't taken any more.
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: It went to the boiler room and did that. Do
• 38:17
  you think that she's depressed and that she's just re
• 38:20
  enacting it, or do you think that she's depressed from
• 38:22
  the after math.
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: I think since this is the same effect over and over,
• 38:26
  it's like a death echo, like someone reliving the life repeat,
• 38:31
  like a cycle of sorts.
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: I left the room and went back to my bed.
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: There was nothing more I could do, and I had
• 38:38
  no intention of spending any more time than necessary.
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: In that boiler room.
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: I laid in bed and slowly curled up into a
• 38:44
  fetal position. I prided myself and not being the kind
• 38:47
  of person who cried openly, but at that moment, the
• 38:50
  flood gates broke, and I wept. My throat felt raw,
• 38:53
  and my eyes stung with tears. I saw for a
• 38:56
  few moments before I realized I was not alone. Was
• 39:00
  in bed across from me and weeping, in that same
• 39:02
  position she had always been in. I tried to find
• 39:05
  out who she was, but the realtor was tight lift
• 39:08
  about the house's previous occupants and wasn't interested in chatting.
• 39:12
  I pressed her for more information, and she finally caved
• 39:15
  and confessed to not really knowing too much about the
• 39:18
  house's history.
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: I went to the library. I felt just finny. It's
• 39:23
  like I pressed the realtory. She didn't know anything. All right, fine,
• 39:25
  I don't know nothing. It's like, why would you I
• 39:28
  just say that, I'll talk.
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure. I went to the library, but I
• 39:37
  failed to turn up any information when reading a book
• 39:40
  on the history of the area. I even tried asking
• 39:42
  the neighbors about the previous owners, but the two families
• 39:45
  that lived there before ours didn't have a daughter or
• 39:48
  only had an infant daughter when they occupied the house.
• 39:51
  I had no idea about the girl who appeared every
• 39:53
  night and hung herself in the boiler room. It was
• 39:56
  now a routine for me. I'd wake up in the
• 39:58
  middle of the night around the time would appear. I
• 40:01
  was ashamed to admit it, but sometimes I found myself
• 40:03
  waiting for her. I was hopeful that someday I would
• 40:06
  break through and tell her what I had wanted to
• 40:08
  say ever since I saw her. I would tell her
• 40:11
  that she didn't deserve the fate she was suffering. I
• 40:14
  would tell her how lonely I was, how desperate I
• 40:17
  was for someone to talk to. I would tell her
• 40:20
  I don't know. I always stayed behind when she left
• 40:22
  the room. I had walked into the boiler room during
• 40:25
  the day once and I saw her hanging there. She
• 40:28
  was gasping and clawing desperately at her neck as she
• 40:31
  slowly asphyxiated. She rocked back and forth in the room,
• 40:34
  and her feet frantically kicked around, looking for some purchase
• 40:37
  to save herself.
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: I did scream.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: Then I had to make up a story about seeing
• 40:42
  a shadow from my mom when she came up downstairs
• 40:45
  and saw me pale as a ghost and shivering. I
• 40:48
  started class and began to make some new friends. I
• 40:51
  haven't had a few classmates.
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: Over to hang out.
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: I remember one time we were playing a video game
• 40:56
  and the girl passed right through him on her way
• 40:58
  to the boiler room. My friends couldn't see her, nor
• 41:02
  my parents. Only I could. I wondered for a bit
• 41:05
  if I was going crazy and that was why only
• 41:08
  I could see her. But I'm not sure that's the case, well,
• 41:13
  at least not going crazy. Back then, she was repeating,
• 41:16
  always reliving her last moments. She would start out weeping
• 41:20
  on the bed, then she would rise to a sitting
• 41:23
  position for a bit before going to the boiler room
• 41:25
  and hanging herself. This happened almost every night, but on
• 41:29
  a few occasions I did catch her walking through the
• 41:32
  doors on the way to her demise during the day.
• 41:35
  We must have seen her hundreds, no thousands of times
• 41:38
  during my time in Kalamazoo. Sometimes I would try and
• 41:41
  talk to her. Sometimes I would cry. Sometimes I would
• 41:45
  do nothing. It took me a few years to try
• 41:48
  and figure it all out, but I finally did. I
• 41:51
  realized what she was doing. I realized what the afterlife
• 41:55
  was like. There is in a heaven or a hell,
• 41:58
  at least not in the literal sense. There are only
• 42:01
  those last few moments of your life, reiterating like a
• 42:05
  broken record. She was reliving those final moments, maybe trying
• 42:10
  to make sense of it all. Maybe she wanted to
• 42:12
  choose another path, but in the end she always came
• 42:16
  around full circle to the noose in the boiler room.
• 42:19
  This is why the concept of death scares me so much.
• 42:22
  HP Lovecraft said, the oldest emotion is fear, and the
• 42:25
  most powerful of all fears. It's our fear of the unknown.
• 42:29
  I think he's wrong about that. I know what's waiting
• 42:32
  for us all when we die, and that is the
• 42:34
  scariest thought I can think of. I'm so terrifying that
• 42:39
  when I die, I will stay behind on this earth,
• 42:42
  repeating my last moments ad nauseum, trying to make sense
• 42:48
  in my last minutes. This is what is waiting for
• 42:51
  us all after it is all said and done, and
• 42:54
  I know that the end is inevitably approaching the.
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: End of ad nauseum. Do you think that these stories
• 43:01
  are going to be connected through Yeah, I think it's
• 43:04
  gonna be the same person me, same ghost. Or is
• 43:08
  it just gonna be this is his encounter with it.
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: It's probably gonna be different encounters. If I had to guess.
• 43:13
  So the title anologym mortemad infinum is kind of the
• 43:16
  idea that, like again with what we said at being like,
• 43:20
  you know, to the point of sickness, to the point
• 43:22
  of death forever. It's like repeating your last moments on
• 43:26
  and on and on without fail. So I think we're
• 43:30
  gonna see other examples.
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: Of that, seems like. Also, this concept of like the
• 43:33
  afterlife that he's saying almost feels like a purgatory, like
• 43:36
  all like our definition of purgatory, you know, yea reliving there,
• 43:39
  kind of existing in this state of just like perpetual
• 43:44
  scared me. Knocking over that toilet really got to you.
• 43:51
  Just tiny little toilet. Ew, what the fuck? Oh my god,
• 43:55
  it's a skimmity toilet.
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: No, it's not, it is.
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: It is a scimmity toilet.
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: Get his head not pop up, and you have to
• 44:04
  hit the flusher. Well, the flusher pushes them down. What
• 44:17
  is there a button or a lever somewhere to make
• 44:19
  them go oh at the base of the toilet. That
• 44:22
  is the scariest thing that's happened since we got here.
• 44:26
  That pushed his head down. What kind of monster left
• 44:37
  little Sally a skippity toilet.
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: See this is the this is the cookie monster sweatpants
• 44:46
  or it's like sweatpants with a bunch of Buddhas on it,
• 44:49
  and it it's built like a Buddha. Or that's one
• 44:53
  of our audience members. If one of our audience members
• 44:57
  left the skimmity toilet, scroll down a little bit.
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: All right, ad Mortem, But I do agree with you
• 45:08
  about the it feels like a penance.
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I thought I was like his way of also
• 45:13
  adding in the ad nauseum, like that's my fear of
• 45:16
  doing this ad nauseum. It's kind of the fun little
• 45:18
  tie and I'm curious to see how being stuck in
• 45:19
  that forever.
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: At the last moment, ad Mortem, He's as like, what, like,
• 45:24
  is it a clairvoyant?
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: Is that somebody who can talk to the like clairvoyants
• 45:29
  have the natural ability to see the dad or the
• 45:30
  other side.
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: That's what I'm like wondering. It seems like this character
• 45:33
  is like that kind of person.
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it just has the ability to Yeah, ad Mortem.
• 45:40
  I was just starting my junior year in high school
• 45:42
  when my grandfather came to visit. He was my father's
• 45:45
  father and he had lived in California most of his life.
• 45:49
  Used to smoke like a chimney, but a few years
• 45:51
  back he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was put
• 45:54
  on oxygen and had to give up smoking, which did
• 45:57
  nothing to improve his cantank or his nature. He lived
• 46:00
  across the country, but come up to Michigan to visit
• 46:03
  with my family. My relationship with my grandpa was always strained.
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: If you wanted to be.
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: Pleasant, you would say that he was an old fashioned man.
• 46:13
  If you wanted to be honest, you would say that
• 46:16
  he was a racist and a sexist who used to
• 46:19
  beat his children when they disobeyed him. My father was
• 46:22
  always honest about how he was treated by him when
• 46:25
  he was growing up, and because I loved my father,
• 46:28
  I found my relationship with my grandfather to be adversarial.
• 46:32
  He originally had come up to visit for a week,
• 46:35
  but due to health issues, he ended up staying in
• 46:37
  Michigan for over a year to be cared for. My
• 46:41
  grandfather's extended stay only served put a strain on our relationship.
• 46:46
  We rarely talked, and when we did, I managed the
• 46:49
  conversation in the coldest fashion. Since my grandfather was suffering
• 46:54
  from lung cancer, yet to carry around an oxygen tank.
• 46:58
  Manufacturers must have had a sin it's of humor because
• 47:01
  they named the gargantuine machine the Liberator. The tank was
• 47:06
  one hundred or so pounds and set in a corner
• 47:08
  by the entrance of the house. The oxygen cord gave
• 47:12
  my grandpa five hundred feet to move around the house.
• 47:15
  Saw the Liberator as a massive ball in shame that
• 47:18
  anchored him to the guest room, kitchen, bathroom, a dining room.
• 47:22
  Grandfather was suffering from lung cancer. He had to take
• 47:25
  a regiment of pills to keep himself going day to day,
• 47:28
  blood pressure medication, broncho dilators, opioids, and about a dozen
• 47:34
  other supplements and vitamins. The cancer had rotted away his
• 47:37
  lungs to the point that the oxygen was necessary to
• 47:40
  keep him alive. He could barely move without gasping for breath,
• 47:44
  and when he talked, he came out as a rasp.
• 47:47
  The sounds of his respirator clicking on and off and
• 47:50
  his wheezing gasp came a fixture of our everyday life.
• 47:54
  We'd been living here in Kalamazoo, Michigan for about three
• 47:56
  years before my grandfather came to live with us. This time,
• 48:00
  I was accustomed to my nocturnal and sometimes diurnal visitor,
• 48:05
  who wept in my room before proceeding to the boiler
• 48:07
  room and hanging herself. My latest attempt to contact her
• 48:11
  was through a Wuiji board. Stuck one of my friends
• 48:14
  into the house through the emergency fire escape the basement had,
• 48:17
  which was just a ladder built in an alcove that
• 48:19
  let outside. She believed that there were ghosts and that
• 48:23
  only a select few were attuned enough to see them.
• 48:26
  I didn't tell her about my encounters, and only hinted
• 48:29
  that I thought there was something paranormal happening in my room.
• 48:33
  She snuck in during the night and brought her board
• 48:35
  with her. We both sat on my bed and put
• 48:38
  our hands on the Wuiji board. I lit a few
• 48:41
  candles to set the mood. She said, quietly, afraid to
• 48:44
  wake my parents.
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: Spirit of this house, you beseech thee.
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: I always wondered why people thought ghosts talk like serfs
• 48:51
  from medieval times, even if they died well after it.
• 48:55
  If you were trying to contact your loved one, would
• 48:58
  you talk to them like you were in nineteen twenty
• 49:00
  He's gangster.
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, if ay, I love you. I miss you every day, Pops.
• 49:05
  She continued, if there's anyone here besides us, move the
• 49:09
  plane jet and make us aware of your presence.
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: Set for a few moments with our fingers on the
• 49:14
  plane chet. After nothing happened, she took her hands away
• 49:18
  and said, I.
• 49:18
  Speaker 3: Guess the noises you've been hearing was just the house settling.
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: Cracked a smile because out of the corner of my
• 49:24
  eyes I could see the wraith weeping on my bed.
• 49:28
  My friend was only a few inches away from the
• 49:30
  ghostly girl who haunted the basement of my home, and
• 49:33
  couldn't even see her. Talked for a bit, and then
• 49:36
  she left. I walked her back to her house and
• 49:39
  told her good night, and I stuck back into my house.
• 49:43
  Sounded my grandfather's respirator filled my ears and covered up
• 49:46
  any noise I might have made staking into my room.
• 49:49
  A couple of weeks past and my grandfather's condition deteriorated.
• 49:53
  He was now confined to the guest room. He barely talk,
• 49:56
  and when he managed, he had to pause between sentences
• 49:59
  to catch his breast. Sometimes, when he over exerted himself,
• 50:02
  his body was wrecked with congested coughs and wheezing rafts.
• 50:06
  My mother took care of him because my father was
• 50:09
  working and I was at school, and of everyone in
• 50:11
  the house, my mother's relationship with my grandfather was probably
• 50:15
  the best. She went out and picked up his prescriptions,
• 50:18
  cooked food for him, kept company, and changed his sheets.
• 50:23
  As per his traditionalism, he treated her more like a
• 50:26
  servant than a person whost were commands and demands. Despite this,
• 50:32
  my mom treated him with kindness and compassion. Remember the
• 50:35
  last time I saw my grandfather, I was getting ready
• 50:38
  for school, and he was telling her that he was
• 50:40
  going to rest and asked if she could pick up
• 50:42
  his prescription. He now spent most of his time in
• 50:45
  bed and was developing bed sores and had to use
• 50:47
  a bedpan to relieve himself. He had a coughing fit
• 50:50
  and he covered his mouth with a handkerchief. I think
• 50:53
  that I saw something red staining that handkerchief, But I
• 50:56
  realized that that little observation that I make now is
• 51:00
  tainted by the memory what happened to him later. When
• 51:03
  I returned home that day, I knew something was wrong
• 51:05
  the moment I walked through the door. There was something
• 51:08
  off about the house. There was something missing. Took me
• 51:12
  a moment to realize what it was. The house was
• 51:15
  completely quiet. The omnipresent sound of the respirator pumping oxygen
• 51:19
  was no longer present. The liberator sat in the corner,
• 51:22
  silent like the grave. I went upstairs to find my
• 51:26
  mother in the guest room, tripping the bed sheets and pillowcases.
• 51:29
  She had been crying, but wasn't at that moment. My
• 51:33
  mom didn't have to say the words, but she did. Anyways,
• 51:37
  he died.
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: His heart just stopped. There's nothing that I could have done.
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: I pulled her into a hug and she broke into
• 51:44
  a fresh set of tears. Offered to help her wash
• 51:47
  the bed sheets, but she told me it wasn't necessary.
• 51:50
  His part may make me seem like a horrible person,
• 51:52
  but I was glad she turned down my offer. My
• 51:55
  grandfather died, It evacuated and the smell was horrible. She
• 52:00
  washed the sheets as best she could, but ended up
• 52:02
  throwing everything away. My father took the news like Guiney's
• 52:06
  son would take the news of his father's death. I
• 52:08
  don't know what I was expecting from him. For some reason,
• 52:12
  I thought he would be angry, angry at the fact
• 52:15
  that his father had never told him goodbye, never told
• 52:17
  him that he loved him, or that he was proud
• 52:20
  of him.
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: He wasn't angry, it was just quiet for a while.
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: He didn't cry at that moment, but I remember going
• 52:27
  upstairs from the basement and hearing the soft, hush sounds
• 52:31
  of him crying in the night. Tried to take my
• 52:33
  grandfather's death as stoically as possible. I didn't cry intill
• 52:36
  the funeral, and then the floodgates broke, and I wept
• 52:39
  to say lowered him on the ground. He may have
• 52:41
  been a racist, sexist, abusive old man, but he was
• 52:44
  still my grandfather. He was family, and he was gone.
• 52:48
  The worst thought I had was the realization that even
• 52:50
  though I loved my grandfather because he was family, I
• 52:53
  didn't like him. The next month was relatively quiet. My
• 52:57
  mom and Dad dealt with getting his affairs in order,
• 53:00
  intending to his will. I can't tell you exactly when
• 53:03
  they started, but I can tell you when I first
• 53:05
  became aware of the sounds. I was sneaking outside a
• 53:09
  night to have a cigarette, and I thought my mind
• 53:12
  was playing tricks on me. I'd become so accustomed to
• 53:15
  the sound that took me a few seconds to realize
• 53:17
  what was wrong. I was hearing the worrying and hissing
• 53:21
  of the Liberator. We had donated the oxygen system a
• 53:25
  week ago to the nursing home. I paused in the
• 53:28
  darkened hallway and listened. It was a slow and steady sound.
• 53:33
  Listening to that noise chilled my blood and made my
• 53:36
  stomach sink. It must have stopped still and waited for
• 53:39
  that sound to stop for a few minutes. Didn't stop.
• 53:43
  If anything, the sound grew louder. I lied to myself
• 53:48
  and said it was a trick my mind was playing
• 53:50
  on me. I went downstairs back to my bedroom, passed
• 53:53
  by the ghost grill as she proceeded to her death.
• 53:56
  I kept lying to myself for the next couple of days,
• 53:58
  as the noise of the Liberator go progressively louder and
• 54:01
  was joined by something almost undetectable. The respirator kept going
• 54:05
  throughout the day. This wasn't like the Wraith girl, who's
• 54:08
  weeping only manifested at certain times. The noise was a constant.
• 54:13
  It was growing louder. It took me a few days
• 54:16
  to really begin to hear the wheezing and gasping beneath
• 54:18
  the worrying of the liberator. I avoided the guess room
• 54:21
  at all costs. It was quite a simple thing. There
• 54:25
  was nothing in there except for the sounds of gasping
• 54:27
  and wheezing. To be completely honest, I was afraid to
• 54:31
  enter that room. I could live with seeing the image
• 54:33
  of the girl in the basement, but I wasn't so
• 54:36
  sure I could accept seeing the ghost of my grandfather
• 54:38
  reliving his last moments. I avoided it for a few
• 54:41
  months before finally succumbing to the curiosity. It was my
• 54:46
  senior year then, and I was just wrapping up with
• 54:49
  graduation parties. Okay, sorry, turned it off.
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: I pressed it. You pressed the camera to geinst your dick,
• 55:03
  and it turned it off. Holy fuck, wait to break
• 55:06
  the momentum. That was a fucking I was so locked
• 55:09
  in my dick. Turn it off. Good fucking Lord. Just
• 55:14
  just keep reading, Just keep reading. I'm only here for
• 55:19
  a couple of days. I'm only here here for a
• 55:21
  couple of days. I'm only here for a couple of days.
• 55:23
  I get to see my family, get my family again.
• 55:26
  Speaker 9: There's no place like Cambouzlu. There's a place like Gambouza.
• 55:31
  There's no place like Columbia. There's no place like Columbia.
• 55:34
  It was my senior year then, and I was just
• 55:36
  wrapping up with graduation parties. I had had quite a
• 55:39
  bit to drink that night, but was still capable of driving.
• 55:43
  Pulled into my driveway and thought struck me. The thought
• 55:46
  was that I had to see him before I left
• 55:48
  home for college in a few months. I had to
• 55:51
  face the ghost of my grandfather if I wanted to
• 55:53
  move on with my life own into the house and
• 55:56
  approach the guest room.
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: I wasn't prepared for what I would say. I don't
• 56:00
  think I ever could be. I stood outside the guest
• 56:04
  room for a few moments, trying to steel myself from
• 56:06
  what I would see next, and listened to the methodical
• 56:09
  worrying of the oxygen tank and the discordant gasps and
• 56:13
  coughs that broke through the rhythm. More I listened, the
• 56:17
  more I found my resolve weakening. Another couple of minutes
• 56:21
  and I knew that I would completely lose the will
• 56:23
  to investigate. So I swung open the door and stepped
• 56:26
  into the room. My eyes took a few seconds to
• 56:29
  adjust to the darkness curtains had been close to the moonlight.
• 56:33
  I mean the room a separkel feel to it. The
• 56:36
  room had grown musty and smelled like mothballs and stagnant air.
• 56:41
  The wheezing and gasping was louder. Now it's just in
• 56:45
  my mind now, but when I recalled this moment, I
• 56:48
  could have sworn that the rasping and haggard sounding breasths
• 56:51
  were almost deafening. My eyes adjusted enough to see the
• 56:56
  shade of something on the bed. I was adjusted to
• 56:59
  the light and I could see him clearly, the spirit
• 57:03
  or echo My grandfather was on the bed, His body
• 57:07
  writhed spasmodically on the sheets. It looked like he was
• 57:11
  having a seizure or stroke of some sort. His hands
• 57:14
  clawed at the air in front of his face. This
• 57:17
  motion looked out of place until I realized that he
• 57:20
  was probably trying to adjust the respirator on his face.
• 57:23
  He writhed in the bed for a few more minutes
• 57:26
  before he fell still. He was dead. The room was silent.
• 57:31
  Turned around and left the room, so the door closed
• 57:34
  behind me. Sound frantic gasping and wheezing started up again.
• 57:40
  Man talk about a nightmare, just slipping through choking like
• 57:43
  the respirator falling off, oh, forever and ever.
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: It's just only happening at his house. It doesn't seem
• 57:49
  like any of the cleared ones happens outside of the house.
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: Well, these are the only two places. What are the
• 57:55
  only two people that died? Because it's in the place
• 57:58
  that they died, it's repeated over it.
• 58:00
  Speaker 3: I just don't know if it's like because people have
• 58:02
  fucking died.
• 58:04
  Speaker 2: Realistically, he would be walking around and see like medieval
• 58:08
  era people like.
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: You believe that in the story so far that he
• 58:13
  is actually saying other people outside of this, but we're
• 58:16
  just hearing about the occasions in the house.
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: No, I think hmm, I think this is all you've
• 58:22
  seen so far. Okay, But realistically, yes, if you walked
• 58:26
  around anywhere, you would see the remnants of something, someone
• 58:29
  killing someone for some reason. Yeah.
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: Car wrecks everywhere, just every straight cor Oh my god.
• 58:36
  Speaker 2: The night before heading off to college, rolled over in
• 58:39
  my bed and watched the nightly visitor to my bedroom.
• 58:42
  She rocked slightly in the bed and wept quietly. It
• 58:45
  taught me to know that she was doing her best
• 58:47
  to keep quiet. Who was she hiding her depression from?
• 58:52
  Why couldn't she ask for help?
• 58:54
  Speaker 3: I didn't. I he was tragically young. I leaned over to.
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: Her and whispered her her, I'm so sorry this happened
• 59:02
  to you. Much else left to say to college the
• 59:06
  next day.
• 59:08
  Speaker 3: DeVry University, Full Sale Technology.
• 59:15
  Speaker 2: I'm going to MIT. I'm sorry, I can't take you
• 59:18
  with me.
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: I went to National American University.
• 59:21
  Speaker 2: Do you want to cry in my bed at MIT?
• 59:23
  Would you like that?
• 59:24
  Speaker 3: I went to Phoenix Online. I went to DeVry University.
• 59:31
  Speaker 2: Time drudged on, and my first semester of college was
• 59:33
  going well. Did have any ghostly encounters in the dorm,
• 59:36
  which was a plus. I don't think I would have
• 59:39
  managed to focus with the spirit of someone constantly dying
• 59:42
  from alcohol poisoning and frat initiation's gone wrong. I had friends,
• 59:46
  but in a sad way, I found myself waking up
• 59:49
  in the middle of the night wanting to see to
• 59:52
  talk to her, talk at her. At least. November rolled
• 59:56
  around and I decided to drive home be with the
• 59:59
  family for things g I wish I'd just stayed at college.
• 1:00:03
  I arrived the day before Thanksgiving and proceeded to catch
• 1:00:05
  up with my parents. My mom even rushed outside of hugging.
• 1:00:08
  As I pulled into the driveway, my old man greeted
• 1:00:11
  me with a beer and we sat on the deck
• 1:00:13
  as I filled him in on my life at college.
• 1:00:16
  My first semester wasn't over with yet, but I was
• 1:00:19
  already adjusted to life at college. It was one of
• 1:00:22
  the happier moments of my life. Reminiscing about it now
• 1:00:26
  leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. We had a
• 1:00:29
  good dinner and I settled down for bed. I was
• 1:00:32
  getting ready to drift off to sleep when I heard
• 1:00:34
  the sounds I had become so familiar with when I
• 1:00:37
  was a child. Opened my eyes and faced the crying girl.
• 1:00:42
  I thought of all the usual platitudes that I used
• 1:00:44
  to offer to her.
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: You were too young, You had so many moments ahead
• 1:00:48
  of you. You could have been happy.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: I wanted to tell her all of these things. Something
• 1:00:54
  else was on my mind. The thought was that something
• 1:00:59
  wasn't right. It felt like I was overlooking something deathly important.
• 1:01:04
  It was something that I couldn't make sense of until
• 1:01:07
  I saw him one more time. I moved upstairs and
• 1:01:10
  went to the guest room. The respirator was still clicking
• 1:01:13
  on and off. And he was still gasping out his
• 1:01:15
  last minutes in that room. Trepidation filled me. My whole
• 1:01:20
  body was screaming at me to turn around, and my
• 1:01:22
  mind was begging the same. I knew if I entered
• 1:01:26
  that room and witnessed my grandfather's death again, that I
• 1:01:29
  would never be the same. I entered the room anyways,
• 1:01:32
  and I wish to this very day that I had
• 1:01:35
  never tried to say that curiosity. He was still on
• 1:01:39
  the bed, gasping, clined, struggling in his final moments. I
• 1:01:44
  moved close to him and sat on the bed. His
• 1:01:46
  body writhed and twisted on the sheets. I knew something
• 1:01:50
  was off about all this. Something in the back of
• 1:01:53
  my mind pushed me forward and leaned in close and
• 1:01:56
  watched it all carefully, and watch as my grandfather claud
• 1:02:00
  at the empty air in front of his face. Something
• 1:02:02
  was off about all of this. It wasn't Kleine at
• 1:02:06
  the respirator. When I realized what it was, I knew
• 1:02:10
  I had no other choice. I went downstairs. I grabbed
• 1:02:14
  my suitcase, like the house, Oh, that's pretty cool, you.
• 1:02:23
  I don't know what that is happening his father, It's
• 1:02:26
  not his respirator. Fell off, someone choked him to death,
• 1:02:30
  someone strangled his dad or his mom. Yeah, well, I
• 1:02:35
  mentioned the dad loved him. But when he gets home,
• 1:02:38
  mom's already changing the sheets. Oh shit, she's emotional, and
• 1:02:41
  it talks about how the grandfather would command her all
• 1:02:44
  the time, Uh, treated her more like a maid than
• 1:02:47
  a daughter in law.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: And then he gets home and she's already cleaned up.
• 1:02:50
  So Jesus.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, so I think it's mom killed him. That's
• 1:02:54
  pretty cool that you put that together from the echo
• 1:02:56
  of the death.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 2: I debated whether or not to wake up my parents
• 1:03:00
  and let them know why I was leaving and why
• 1:03:02
  would not return. Okay, maybe he hasn't put together. I'm
• 1:03:04
  pretty sure it's his mom.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 3: I think why they wouldn't return. I think he knows that, like, hey,
• 1:03:07
  you killed this person. Maybe that's why he's not returning.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: Well, he says, I wouldn't wake them up to let
• 1:03:13
  them know.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: Well, yeah, he's not gonna wake them up and be like, hey,
• 1:03:15
  I know what you did. I think is what you're saying.
• 1:03:17
  At least that's how I'm reading it.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 2: Okay. I debated whether or not to wake up my
• 1:03:20
  parents and let them know why I was leaving and
• 1:03:22
  why I would not return and call me a coward.
• 1:03:25
  But I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't face
• 1:03:28
  them with that knowledge. But through my suitcase in the
• 1:03:31
  trunk of my car and drove to the nearest bar.
• 1:03:34
  I never needed to drink more than I did at
• 1:03:36
  that very moment. I wanted something to give me the
• 1:03:39
  liquid courage to leave Kalamazoo, to leave my family. I
• 1:03:43
  was almost in tears by the time I reached the
• 1:03:45
  dive bar. I swallowed back my emotions, entered the bar
• 1:03:49
  and set at the stool closest to the bartender. It
• 1:03:52
  was a dive, the kind of place that had sawdust
• 1:03:55
  on the floor to soak up sweat spills and skull spit.
• 1:03:59
  I wasted no time in getting the bartender's attention. Ordered
• 1:04:02
  a double shot of whiskey and down. As soon as
• 1:04:05
  the drink was poured, ordered another, another, and another. S
• 1:04:10
  Midnight rolled around and they were preparing for last call.
• 1:04:13
  They decided to perform their night before Thanksgiving tradition. The
• 1:04:17
  bartender would go around and ask what everyone was thankful
• 1:04:20
  for this season, give them a free shot at the
• 1:04:22
  cheapest liquor they had offer. For their response, an old
• 1:04:25
  man in the corner said, for who. A young patron
• 1:04:29
  who was probably too young to be drinking, shouted eyolo.
• 1:04:33
  It was promptly denied a shot along around my.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 3: Age Declaire's for life and its adventures.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 2: Down the drink. Spanish couple had a booths declared a
• 1:04:43
  familiar changed around the bar until he had last came
• 1:04:47
  to me. Bartender came around to me and he asked,
• 1:04:50
  what are you most thankful for? Pause for a moment,
• 1:04:54
  I didn't know what to say. Bartender tapped his foot,
• 1:04:57
  ready to wrap up last call and finish their night.
• 1:05:00
  I had to say something. I couldn't think of anything
• 1:05:02
  I was grateful for. It's not in the right head's
• 1:05:05
  face and only wanted to drink the memory away.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: He grunted, Come on, buddy, what are you grateful for?
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 2: He said the first thing that popped into my head,
• 1:05:14
  and mordem God fuck off.
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 3: I'd be like, and you're not getting a shot. See
• 1:05:23
  you later, heye, see you later, dead pose anxiety.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 2: It's death to death? Yeah, yeah, what are you grateful for?
• 1:05:36
  To death?
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: I watched the bartender's quizzical expression as I down the
• 1:05:41
  shot and ordered another. I'd have ordered another after that one,
• 1:05:45
  But in some part, deep down inside of me, I
• 1:05:47
  knew that I would never erase that image from my mind.
• 1:05:50
  The image of my grandfather climbed at something in front
• 1:05:52
  of his face, The thought of the pillow over him
• 1:05:55
  that my mother had been holding down smothering him in
• 1:05:58
  his sleep, The memory of her disposing of the bed
• 1:06:01
  sheets and the pillow case. Today I returned home from
• 1:06:04
  school only made me feel worse. I tossed back the
• 1:06:07
  shot and left the bar, not knowing what to do next.
• 1:06:11
  I felt sick to death.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: That's a fun time too.
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 2: I like that.
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 3: I felt sick to death because his grandpa was so
• 1:06:17
  sick too.
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 2: The and also sick to death is acknowledge and ad mortem.
• 1:06:22
  Oh is it another sickness to death?
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 3: The uh? Yeah, that is that is fun? The uh
• 1:06:28
  a fun little twist there too. Yeah, you just expected
• 1:06:31
  to be him clawing and gasping for air with his life,
• 1:06:34
  like with his ventilating machine. But it's almost a weird
• 1:06:37
  uh the.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 2: Mention earlier, like he's clywing in front of his face
• 1:06:40
  and you're like, oh, I guess that's a fosk in motion.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 2: But realizing it's a pillow. That's pretty cool.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a lot of fun, and it's also I
• 1:06:47
  wonder how cathartic it is for the It's like all
• 1:06:50
  these feelings of just being like the things you wish
• 1:06:52
  you could have said, or like all the things you
• 1:06:53
  wish you could have done. The dad's talking about how
• 1:06:55
  abusive he was and all that kind of stuff, and
• 1:06:57
  it's the mom ends up killing him. It's pretty sick them.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a pretty cool time. I like
• 1:07:02
  the idea of being able. It's very sixth sense, being
• 1:07:05
  able to piece together, you know, someone's final moments, what
• 1:07:07
  happened to them? My their ghost? Mm hmm, Well we're
• 1:07:14
  speaking of ghosts. You know little Sally down in the basement,
• 1:07:17
  she was killed.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 3: All her downstairs they have literally surgical tools being they have.
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 2: They took out her appendix and they have a table.
• 1:07:28
  They're like, this is like the table where she died on.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: What do you think of the What do you think
• 1:07:32
  it's an ethical thing to have that kind of stuff
• 1:07:35
  or does it matter? No, Well, because it's been so
• 1:07:38
  much time, if it was last year that happened, I
• 1:07:40
  think people are like, that's poor taste. But because it's
• 1:07:42
  so long ago, you're like, who gives a fuck? And
• 1:07:44
  I didn't know. That's what I'm saying, Like, is.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 2: That the thought to me, the thought process is will
• 1:07:49
  their family see it? And I'm not talking about like
• 1:07:51
  great grandkids and stuff like that. I'm talking about like, well,
• 1:07:54
  their sisters, their son, their mothers, stuff like that.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: Such a weird attachment from like a human it is,
• 1:08:00
  you know, But to me.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: That's like history. For example, right if you were to
• 1:08:04
  have Pompei is a great example where we have all
• 1:08:07
  the frozen bodies of POMPEII.
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 3: When you think about how morbid that is, oh sure.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 2: You know, like if that happened last year, imagine there's
• 1:08:16
  an earthquake this year, and then in twenty twenty seven
• 1:08:20
  there's a museum you can go to of the petrified
• 1:08:23
  bodies from the air well.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 3: That's what it feels like, fucking like. I mean, I
• 1:08:26
  don't I don't really go on Twitter, but perusing Twitter
• 1:08:28
  during like the Ukraine War, it feels all the videos
• 1:08:31
  of people nine on both sides, it feels pretty crazy,
• 1:08:33
  all the drune footage and all that kind of shit.
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 2: It's just like, here's death here's death, here's death. And
• 1:08:38
  to that one, there's even something in my head where
• 1:08:40
  it's like, well, you're at war with them, so they're
• 1:08:42
  the enemy and stuff like that. So there there is
• 1:08:45
  a layer in my brain that detaches it a little bit.
• 1:08:48
  But when it comes to like with this house a
• 1:08:53
  child right to me a time? Does heal it enough
• 1:08:56
  that you can be now? Is the way? It's in
• 1:09:00
  a respectful now?
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 3: But no, thanks pretty, I mean the whole thing too,
• 1:09:03
  like making sure that you know that she was like
• 1:09:05
  in total misery and kind of I don't know how
• 1:09:08
  respectful it is. It feels weird. Yeah, well I think
• 1:09:10
  feel respectful it does it feel like a horror gimmick
• 1:09:12
  for people? What do you guys think? Think? Yeah, people
• 1:09:16
  want something tangible to make the connections, even if they
• 1:09:19
  know it's a prop.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: So I think that's part of it too.
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a museum. It's like the Holocaust Museum. Wouldn't
• 1:09:26
  say it's anything. Really, I don't think this is all right,
• 1:09:30
  ad infin This is ad infinitum. We can keep talking,
• 1:09:36
  we can keep reading this.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: This is the Holocausts, the dolls everywhere. Anytime Nick speaks,
• 1:09:43
  it's an assault to someone.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 3: Turns off, turns off his camera with his cock. It
• 1:09:50
  has to publicly tell people to a lot of people.
• 1:09:51
  I feel like would just be like, oh oh yeah, sorry,
• 1:09:54
  turned off and she's like, yeah, my dick turned it off.
• 1:09:56
  You can't stop this guy. Also also also like, also
• 1:10:01
  you speak about your cocas if it has his own
• 1:10:03
  mind it pressed into it.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 2: I begged, I wouldn't be surprised with him.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: Oh my god. No, Well should we finish it off
• 1:10:11
  with add infinitum ad infinum the final part?
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 2: So we now reached the conclusion my third act, my
• 1:10:18
  excellent stage left.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 3: God, dude, I feel like this is He's like, you know,
• 1:10:23
  I went to I went to college. I didn't have
• 1:10:25
  a lot of friends. Well not really. It's like yeah,
• 1:10:27
  probably cause you're saying ship like this, like add moreem
• 1:10:30
  Oh hey man, hey man, there's like a kegger having
• 1:10:32
  down the road ad infinitum. And you're like, nah, actually
• 1:10:40
  know what Actually we actually just canceled it.
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 2: Hey, you want to come hang out carp DM. I lied,
• 1:10:47
  Actually I was.
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 3: I was gonna take off all my clothes and hang
• 1:10:49
  myself and my dad's study. Anything is shot himself, did he?
• 1:11:01
  I thought that. Yeah, the red foreman runs up and
• 1:11:05
  he's like.
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 2: Then, and then there's like an incredibly heartbreaking scene where
• 1:11:14
  the mom finds him and he's like, no, he's okay,
• 1:11:16
  he's okay, we'll just scrap this. So it's okay.
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 3: It's like, it's damn that Poetsie is a great movie.
• 1:11:21
  Ye oh, captain my, that's see, that's what this fucking
• 1:11:25
  guy would do. Oh captain my. He'd be like, hey, man,
• 1:11:28
  men that men. So people are gonna go grab some
• 1:11:29
  burgers and shakes. You want to come with? Oh, captain my,
• 1:11:32
  captain Actually, never mind, I'm like totally vegetarian now, so well,
• 1:11:39
  next time think about me. I love I love plants, vegetarians.
• 1:11:47
  Just connect with him. Man, I wish I could still
• 1:11:50
  talk and cry next to that crying girl in my bed.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 2: Just an insufferable guy through and through. Oh yeah, every sense.
• 1:11:57
  It's a car ran by the window really fast.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 3: Did you guys hear like I did hear that? I heard? Well,
• 1:12:05
  at first I looked at Harry because I heard. I
• 1:12:06
  could have swore I heard somebody say something. Okay, yeah,
• 1:12:15
  that's fucked up there. They would do that. That's rude.
• 1:12:17
  It's true to do that. Wait, hold up, wait, hold
• 1:12:20
  on everyone all right, ad infinum at infantum also too.
• 1:12:23
  I will say the beginning of the story, making the
• 1:12:25
  presence of the girl, you know, it has it's put
• 1:12:29
  a different vibe on the house so far from me
• 1:12:32
  because the girl was so innocent and like, you know,
• 1:12:34
  because when you go into hantes space, I feel like
• 1:12:35
  you're always like I'm on defense whatever. But now it's
• 1:12:38
  like it has a more sympathetic tone, which I should
• 1:12:41
  have had.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 2: That was someone banging on the window. There was someone
• 1:12:45
  knocking on the glass. Do you want yeah, check on it.
• 1:12:53
  That was someone like I'm down. Yeah, we would do it,
• 1:12:58
  but we're like recording and all right, so apparently we're.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 3: Trying to finish this out and apparently somebody's like knocking
• 1:13:03
  on the door something. Oh yeah, be careful on the stairs.
• 1:13:06
  I'm just waiting for.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 9: I don't.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: Have a good night.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 3: Thank you.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 8: Okay.
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 3: It was just a a order. Think that's why people
• 1:13:45
  just fucking with us.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: Probably all words just back a hundred dollars.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 3: I'm talking about.
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 2: Just you're hearing gets shopped in the chip.
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 3: That would oh my god, I don't even say that.
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: Harry.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: Where is.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: Harry?
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 3: Did you take the camera?
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah's everyone going to hell one at a time.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 3: The doors kind of sell open to Oh, he's not.
• 1:14:43
  Somebody definitely came back in and entered the house, right,
• 1:14:47
  He's gotta be screwing with us. Well, it could have
• 1:14:50
  been the door just squeaking.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: No, that first one was the first one.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 4: I don't He might have his car.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 2: It's clearly messing with us, but it's clearly messing with us.
• 1:15:25
  But that was a knock, yeah, but from not him. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:15:29
  it was on the glass downstairs. I got that win though,
• 1:15:33
  because you can see his car out there. Right. Well,
• 1:15:36
  don't you go down there?
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 3: Why the door open?
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 2: Well, I don't care to stay up here knocking?
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 3: H What do you have about the story so far?
• 1:16:04
  Have you liked it? Yeah?
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 2: I like it. I like it so far.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 3: I think it's a just waiting for the top for
• 1:16:13
  the balloon to Yeah, I like it so far.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 2: I think it's cool on the idea of this, like
• 1:16:22
  a loner the coast and stuff like that. We could
• 1:16:43
  just keep reading. I don't know, I don't know.
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 3: I might as well.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 2: Do you find everyone?
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 3: What is that?
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 2: Oh?
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 3: Taco bell, his door dashes, Oh oh, where did you
• 1:17:02
  all go?
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: Need him?
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 3: All the way down on the corner.
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 2: He would come to the house.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 3: What who the fuck knocked on the door? Though he knocked,
• 1:17:11
  and then he oh, he didn't want to be at
• 1:17:13
  the house. He didn't want to be.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 2: At the house.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 3: All right, we thought you got that's very we I
• 1:17:24
  think we both were getting a little well.
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 2: I thought that you guys were pranking us because Harry
• 1:17:29
  goes out and then he never comes back, and then
• 1:17:32
  you go look and he was like, oh, Harry left
• 1:17:34
  the door, but you don't come back, and the knicks
• 1:17:35
  luck I have to go down.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean after a while, that's what I was like.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 2: This, there's some prank.
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 3: There's gonna be some scary thing.
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 2: But then I was sitting here, like they get to
• 1:17:45
  knock on the door.
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 3: The taffic on the window actually fucked me.
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because because it's one thing if all three of
• 1:17:51
  you leave and you're pulling a prank, it's another that
• 1:17:53
  you've got to form all here. I'll just I can't
• 1:18:00
  eat while i'm reading, so I'll just give you the bag.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 3: You guys want to breda. My god, these are so many.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 2: For Sally too. Oh yeah, hey, hey, you know what,
• 1:18:13
  pouring one out for Sally right now on her carpet.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 3: All right, ad infinitum.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 2: So we now reached the conclusion my third act, my
• 1:18:27
  excellent left stage left. I feel like guys should rehash
• 1:18:31
  my predicament a little. Ever since I was a teenager,
• 1:18:34
  I've been able to see things that no one else can.
• 1:18:37
  I can see certain spirits. I don't know why I
• 1:18:43
  can see some and not others. I thank God that
• 1:18:46
  I can't see every dead spirit, Otherwise my world would
• 1:18:49
  be full of billions of people that died before my time.
• 1:18:53
  I've only seen a handful of ghosts during my life,
• 1:18:56
  one being a girl who killed herself in my house
• 1:18:59
  next to me, my graind father who was put out
• 1:19:01
  of his suffering by my mother. These ghosts always repeat
• 1:19:04
  their last moments, had nauseum, had mortem. I wish I
• 1:19:07
  could say that I managed to bear the burden of
• 1:19:09
  what I had learned about my mother. The reality was
• 1:19:12
  that I just lost control of everything. It begins, it's there. Yeah,
• 1:19:29
  I'm going to dobler.
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 3: Man is It's it's ironic, but I do get it
• 1:19:33
  a lot.
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 2: I wish I could say that I managed to bear
• 1:19:44
  This really is like a sleepover when you're eight and
• 1:19:47
  you're trying to do something in your friend just keeps
• 1:19:50
  doing some bs over in the corner.
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: Damn.
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 2: So you're trying to play Xbox if there's one for like,
• 1:19:58
  but Monopoly. I'm plain Xbox. So we play round of Monopoly.
• 1:20:02
  So my captain, that's right now. I wish I could
• 1:20:08
  say that I managed to pare the burden of what
• 1:20:09
  I learned about my mother. The reality was that I
• 1:20:12
  just lost control of everything. I began slipping in a
• 1:20:15
  downward spiral. I tried to finish up the semester strong,
• 1:20:19
  but the mental image of my mother pressing a pillow
• 1:20:21
  over my grandfather's face and smothering him to death haunted me.
• 1:20:25
  I found that drinking and old that thought some but
• 1:20:28
  did not completely obliterate it. I was self medicating some success,
• 1:20:33
  but the memory was constantly needling away at my conscious
• 1:20:36
  which I will add off. What he says put him
• 1:20:38
  out of his suffering. It's kind of implying that it
• 1:20:40
  was a mercy killing her, killing him that way.
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 3: So maybe hating him.
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for lack of a better term, I became a
• 1:20:47
  walking shit show. They love opening that front door, just
• 1:20:52
  walking in and out.
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: Did they order more?
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 3: Do or thath? There's no way.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 2: I'm what you said.
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 3: So we got pizza.
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 4: We got I like to put the burrito and the
• 1:21:06
  yellow sauce on, the pepperoni to Mexican cell zone.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: On.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 3: Then there's my computer. That's what you get.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 4: That's so what you get. He just poured water all
• 1:21:26
  over it ship the Mexican cell zone.
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 2: Oh is it not working?
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 3: I think we're okay?
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: Is it still working now?
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: Aren't?
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: Apple is pretty good with water resistance. Where my brainlet?
• 1:21:56
  Did they only get.
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 8: One bad glass to share it with five people?
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 4: Well, it's my bob last right now. But made me
• 1:22:04
  laugh as I was swallowing up my chest is like cramping.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 2: Oh. Shut We're in a haunted house right now.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 3: This is very scary.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: That bear keeps leaning towards you.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 3: It doesn't no, it doesn't, shut up. It was it's
• 1:22:24
  leaned forward from where it was earlier.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 2: He was like, yeah, he was looking more towards me.
• 1:22:29
  He's humming in on hunter.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 3: Compare Compare the position I'm telling you he's I saw
• 1:22:37
  both his eyes. I'm going to see one now, shut up.
• 1:22:42
  I can't take it with.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 2: Every time.
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 3: It's not that good.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: I've had Togo belt before and it's not that good.
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 3: I don't care. I don't care.
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 2: We're reading a scary story, are you reading them? Oh?
• 1:23:08
  I was drinking whiskey like it was the waters of
• 1:23:10
  the river lathe Eire you go, It's more stupid being
• 1:23:16
  all memory was more persistent than the ghosts themselves. That
• 1:23:21
  reality haunted me day and night. The image of his
• 1:23:24
  final moments were branded into my brain. Can you really
• 1:23:27
  blame me for getting smashed every opportunity I got? Maybe
• 1:23:31
  I'm writing all of this to find someone sympathetic will
• 1:23:34
  listen to me I don't deserve it. Or maybe I'm
• 1:23:37
  writing this to reach out to someone who could talk
• 1:23:40
  some sense into me and give me the answers I
• 1:23:42
  desperately needed. I wish I could say that I dropped
• 1:23:45
  out of college when I realized that I wasn't doing
• 1:23:48
  anything except drinking. But after another round of filling grades,
• 1:23:52
  my college politely informed me that I should not return
• 1:23:55
  next semester. I didn't bother appealing the decision. I decided
• 1:23:59
  not to return home. I crashed with a friend for
• 1:24:02
  a couple of weeks, while I tried to figure out
• 1:24:03
  what to do next, couldn't bring myself to go back,
• 1:24:07
  couldn't face my mom, slept on my friend's couch and
• 1:24:10
  drank like a fish thrown into a tank filled with whiskey.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 3: I managed to live with my.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 2: Friend for a couple of weeks before he kicked my
• 1:24:17
  drunk ass out. He had put up with me for
• 1:24:19
  too long. He spent too many nights cleaning up my
• 1:24:23
  messages and turning me on my side when I passed out.
• 1:24:26
  He was a good guy, but I think the final
• 1:24:28
  straw was my late night confession about the ghost. I
• 1:24:31
  think he could handle an alcoholic hop message as myself,
• 1:24:34
  but throw in my hallucinations and that was just too much.
• 1:24:38
  He calmly listened to my drunken ramblings and waited until
• 1:24:41
  I passed out before stealing my cellphone from me and
• 1:24:43
  calling my parents. Welcome in my bed at home for
• 1:24:47
  my blackout. My father was standing in the doorway and
• 1:24:50
  my mom was sitting on the bed next to me.
• 1:24:53
  She was stroking my hair gently like she used to.
• 1:24:57
  I'm gonna be honest, liking talk it is performative. Oh
• 1:25:03
  I disagree, Yeah, no, you can be okay with it,
• 1:25:06
  But like people who were like, oh I love talk Bell,
• 1:25:08
  give me two am taco Bell, that's performative.
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 3: I disagree with that.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 2: Oh I disagree. She whispered to me about how she
• 1:25:31
  was here for me and how she was going to
• 1:25:33
  get me through this. It is in that moment that
• 1:25:36
  I knew that I couldn't confess what I knew about
• 1:25:38
  my grandfather's death to my father.
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 3: She was my mother.
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 2: She was the one I ran to when I hurt
• 1:25:44
  myself as a kid. Maybe it was a mercy that
• 1:25:46
  she did my grandfather. I decided I would try to
• 1:25:50
  turn my life around if only it were that easy.
• 1:25:53
  I'm gonna let you in on a few fun facts
• 1:25:55
  about giving up drinking after over a year of heavy drinking.
• 1:26:00
  First fact, Bean, it's not fun. You sweat like you
• 1:26:03
  were trapped in a sauna. You have mild trimmers out
• 1:26:11
  of my peripheral. I can just see him examining the burrito,
• 1:26:17
  turning it over. You're driving me up a wall right now,
• 1:26:22
  these different positions you're getting into the burrito, you're playing
• 1:26:34
  on like a bunch of toys. We're in a ghost
• 1:26:41
  girls like sacred altar room. You don't have to be
• 1:26:45
  company you.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 4: Really it was funny. Now it's not funny. Now I'm upset.
• 1:26:58
  Stop turning it over in your hands.
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 3: You look like the uh guy in American Beauty Oh
• 1:27:05
  film in the bag does kind of look like that kid?
• 1:27:09
  Doesn't even yeah a little bit because you have no
• 1:27:13
  emotion on your face. You're fucking like scaring me. Man,
• 1:27:16
  I can't read you. Man, you have no motion on
• 1:27:28
  your face. He's like, I have to investigate.
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 2: First fact being, it's not fun You sweat like you
• 1:27:37
  were trapped in a sauna. You have mild trimmers unless
• 1:27:40
  you're a hardcore alcoholic, and then you get DT's delirium trimmings,
• 1:27:45
  which are like severe tremmors. I luckily didn't have that,
• 1:27:49
  but I did have anxiety, which was severely compounded by
• 1:27:52
  the realization that while I was there sweating, slightly shaking,
• 1:27:56
  and otherwise feeling like shit in my bed.
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 3: The ghost scroll was right next to me weeping.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 2: After a few minutes of this, she would get up
• 1:28:04
  to go hang herself in the boiler room, and I
• 1:28:06
  would make a mad dash to the bathroom to throw
• 1:28:08
  a file try to kick my alcoholism. I really did,
• 1:28:12
  I really wanted to move on with my life. I
• 1:28:14
  wanted a normal life with stupid, meaningless problems.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 3: I just couldn't.
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 2: I couldn't live at that Charnal house when the girl's
• 1:28:24
  weeping wasn't getting to me, the wheezing and groaning of
• 1:28:27
  my dying dead grandfather was assaulting my ears. I managed
• 1:28:31
  to live at home for a few months before I
• 1:28:33
  fled and went up to Grand Rapids, Michigan. It only
• 1:28:36
  took a couple of days living by myself with myself
• 1:28:39
  before I downed a bottle Johnny Walker. My parents tried
• 1:28:43
  to get me to come home, but I couldn't go
• 1:28:44
  back to that place. I managed to convince them to
• 1:28:47
  let me stay as long as I called them weekly
• 1:28:49
  to keep them in the loop. My father even managed
• 1:28:52
  to get me a job outside of town. I worked
• 1:28:54
  weekdays cleaning animal cages for a pharmaceutical company. It wasn't
• 1:28:59
  the most glamorous of just but it paid well enough
• 1:29:01
  to support my necessities and me. Fortunately, drinking heavily had
• 1:29:05
  become one of those necessities. I managed to keep my
• 1:29:08
  habits under control for a month or so. I would
• 1:29:11
  work on the weekday seven to five, and then while
• 1:29:13
  away my weekends, whiskey wash stupor. I found some friends
• 1:29:17
  along the way, some at work, and a few of
• 1:29:19
  the bars I frequented. I was just getting a sense
• 1:29:22
  of normalcy in my life when everything fell apart and
• 1:29:26
  all started with a phone call. It was the simplest
• 1:29:30
  of things, one of my routine calls to my parents.
• 1:29:33
  We chatted about the usual things. I caught them up
• 1:29:36
  in my work, friends, and life in general. I was
• 1:29:39
  talking to my mom and she mournfully said.
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 3: Your grandfather would have been I have a mouth over.
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 2: This is incredible, this is really this is an amazing
• 1:29:51
  performance on her.
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 3: Do you want the rest of the baja No, I'm okay.
• 1:29:56
  Your grandfather would have been seventy eight to day.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 2: As soon as those I love your first tip for
• 1:30:02
  grandfather would have As soon as those words were uttered,
• 1:30:06
  I heard something click and began pumping a familiar sound
• 1:30:09
  through the phone.
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 3: It was the sound of the Liberator giant hawks. Oh god, dude,
• 1:30:19
  sure you have got to make this watchable.
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 2: I do not. It was the sound of the Liberator,
• 1:30:30
  the giant oxygen tank that my grandfather. Okay, that's.
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 3: It, die, Can I get another camera? Whatever?
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 7: Just just it's been a whole is truly testing us.
• 1:31:02
  Oh God, people going the story.
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 3: Is good good, that's.
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 2: It's a bunch of di.
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 3: How did you get sauce? We just went there. The
• 1:31:16
  Chaco bell is that close.
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 2: Surprisingly close.
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 3: That's very kind of you. It's very kind of you.
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 2: Her.
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 3: I found a lot of very creepy the buildings out
• 1:31:30
  around here. We're going to get some. I would I
• 1:31:33
  would do anything in my life to finish this story.
• 1:31:37
  You do not enjoy it. I think it's pretty good. No,
• 1:31:38
  it's good. I'm just saying like I just want to
• 1:31:42
  just I'm so runny.
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 10: But I do feel like I'm in an echo right now,
• 1:31:49
  Like lovingly, I think I said, all right, now, add
• 1:31:54
  infinum six times, six times.
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 2: I tried to start. I heard something clear and began
• 1:32:00
  pumping a familiar sound through the phone. It was the
• 1:32:03
  sound of the Liberator giant oxygen take that my grandfather owned,
• 1:32:07
  which my parents had donated to a nursing home long ago.
• 1:32:10
  Sunday became a terrible thing for me. It was the
• 1:32:13
  day my parents would call. I'd spend the week dreading
• 1:32:16
  the time they would call. I knew it was them
• 1:32:19
  before they even spoke. Sound of the respirator droning became
• 1:32:22
  almost deafening to me. I had asked my mom and
• 1:32:25
  dad to speak up when talking to me so I
• 1:32:27
  could hear them over the sound of the liberator. They
• 1:32:30
  became increasingly concerned over my erratic behavior and eventually biting
• 1:32:34
  me home for dinner. I turned them down, lying and
• 1:32:37
  saying that I already had plans. I knew that if
• 1:32:40
  I stepped foot in that house with that spirit of
• 1:32:43
  lose it. My mom was silent for a few minutes
• 1:32:46
  before telling me she loved me. It was getting ready
• 1:32:48
  to respond when it began. It was a low, barely
• 1:32:52
  audible sound, but I heard it. When I heard that sound,
• 1:32:56
  my weekend resolve shattered apart. I heard the low, pain
• 1:33:00
  sound of my grandfather's strain wheezing that was quickly muffled
• 1:33:03
  by a pillow pressed over his face. I managed to
• 1:33:06
  keep myself in check for a few weeks by relegating
• 1:33:08
  my heavy drinking to the weekend. That way, man should
• 1:33:12
  be productive enough to keep myself grounded. Hearing my grandfather's
• 1:33:15
  death gasp rattling through my mom's phone was too much
• 1:33:18
  for me. I fled to my old vice and let
• 1:33:21
  it take over my life, went out to the nearest
• 1:33:23
  bar and drank myself into a stupor. I'm pretty sure
• 1:33:27
  I was still drunk when I went into work the
• 1:33:29
  next day. My coworkers knew something was going on when
• 1:33:32
  I showed up the next day drunk. I even stuck
• 1:33:35
  out at lunch to have a couple of pulls from
• 1:33:36
  the flask in my car to get through the day.
• 1:33:39
  Try to keep myself in a constant state of inebriation
• 1:33:41
  because I knew that Sunday was fast approaching, and being
• 1:33:44
  intoxicated dulled the grim realization. My co workers were tight
• 1:33:48
  lipped about it, but I could tell from their disapproving
• 1:33:50
  glares that I was wearing thin on their patients. Next
• 1:33:54
  Sunday night, the wheezing was so loud that I could
• 1:33:56
  barely hear my parents' voices. I made up an excuse,
• 1:33:59
  telling them I didn't feel well, and hung up Shortly
• 1:34:01
  after that, I spent the rest of that weekend getting wasted,
• 1:34:04
  as if my drinking could ward off their upcoming call
• 1:34:07
  and their concern. Situation at worked graded, and my friends
• 1:34:10
  and co workers began to distance themselves from me, sensing
• 1:34:13
  that I was about to self destruct.
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 3: I developed my own routine for getting through the week.
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 2: I'd wake up in the morning and wash my mouth
• 1:34:19
  out with a bottle of Jack Daniels before going to work. Luckily,
• 1:34:23
  I worked in a pretty rural area where my sloppy
• 1:34:25
  driving did and attract a lot of attention, and the
• 1:34:28
  sky was still dark at six in the morning. Out
• 1:34:31
  of lunch by myself take pulls from a flask to
• 1:34:33
  steal myself for the rest of the day. I'd become
• 1:34:36
  a social pariah at work. After work, I'd visit a
• 1:34:39
  bar and have bar food for dinner and a couple
• 1:34:42
  of drinks to keep me going through the night. I
• 1:34:44
  knew that I was burning through my money I had
• 1:34:46
  accumulated while working, but it was a necessity. When I
• 1:34:50
  was sober, I questioned what I heard. Was I really
• 1:34:53
  hearing my grandfather wheezing and gasping through the phone, or
• 1:34:56
  was it my guilt at knowing that my mom had
• 1:34:58
  done my decision to confront or tormenting me. Was it
• 1:35:02
  a mercy killing or was it desperation.
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 3: I'll never know.
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 2: I managed to make it through another Sunday night call,
• 1:35:09
  but I'm almost certain that they knew something was happening.
• 1:35:13
  Maybe I slurred my words, or maybe it was how
• 1:35:15
  I spoke, but they knew that I'd fallen off the wagon.
• 1:35:18
  It was at this point that I can't really relate
• 1:35:20
  what happens next to you all with reliable accuracy. Forgot
• 1:35:24
  a large portion of this time due to my alcohol
• 1:35:26
  induced days. I spent days in such a stupor. I'm
• 1:35:29
  still amazed that I wasn't fired. I have little to
• 1:35:32
  no recollection of those days that I was constantly chasing
• 1:35:36
  that blacked out state. I guess I was still doing
• 1:35:38
  a good enough job to warrant paining me, but I'm
• 1:35:41
  not sure how. There's only one memory of this binge
• 1:35:44
  that I can remember with clarity. I remember turning over
• 1:35:48
  my phone and seeing that it was my parents calling
• 1:35:51
  me after weeks of radio silence from them. I hung
• 1:35:54
  up the phone and continued poisoning my body. The next
• 1:35:58
  moment that I can faithfully recall, it's a sound. A
• 1:36:01
  jarring thud snapped me out of my drunken autopilot and
• 1:36:05
  sobered me up like a cold shower. My head snapped
• 1:36:08
  up and my glazed eyes glanced around. I realized I
• 1:36:11
  was driving and had just zoned out. I regained control
• 1:36:15
  of the wheel and slowed down the car. I pulled
• 1:36:17
  over to call my pounding heart. Having achieved that, I
• 1:36:20
  got out to inspect the damage. There was a hillacious
• 1:36:23
  dent in the bumper. I examined the area as my
• 1:36:26
  stomach began to sink, and I hit something that thought
• 1:36:30
  sobered me up. There was no blood on the car,
• 1:36:32
  so I reasoned that I hadn't hit anything living. The
• 1:36:36
  dent was substantial, so it had to be something large.
• 1:36:39
  By the hazard guests, I would estimate that it was
• 1:36:41
  the size of a basketball or larger. I breathed out
• 1:36:44
  a sigh of relief before another thought insinuated itself. What
• 1:36:48
  had I hit with my car? I walked a couple
• 1:36:51
  hundred yards back, but I didn't see anything. Looked for logs, branches,
• 1:36:55
  or any time of debris in the road. My search
• 1:36:58
  didn't turn anything up. I reasoned it was nothing, and
• 1:37:01
  after confirming that it was around six in the morning
• 1:37:03
  and a weekday, I went to work. I didn't have
• 1:37:06
  a liquid lunch that day. I didn't have any lunch
• 1:37:09
  at all. Really, my stomach in mind was so upset
• 1:37:12
  that I doubted I could hold anything down even if
• 1:37:14
  I wanted to. Finished up washing the animal cages and
• 1:37:17
  went home for the day. Along the way home, I
• 1:37:21
  stopped by the side of the desolate rural road. Searched
• 1:37:24
  the area again turned up nothing to my investigation. I
• 1:37:28
  went home instead of my bed. I didn't have anything
• 1:37:32
  to drink. I didn't eat either. I also didn't sleep.
• 1:37:36
  What had happened on that road? When did I hit
• 1:37:40
  I recall it was a Saturday. I remember this because
• 1:37:43
  I had to check my phone's calendar to find the
• 1:37:44
  correct date. Much to my chagrin, I realized that checking
• 1:37:48
  my phone to find out what day it was had
• 1:37:50
  become a common occurrence for me. I moved to the
• 1:37:53
  fridge in a mechanical repetition of my typical morning ritual.
• 1:37:57
  I opened the door, expecting it to be barren. I
• 1:38:00
  saw carton of eggs and enough food to make breakfast
• 1:38:02
  for myself. It was a shame that I still wasn't hungry.
• 1:38:06
  It was around this time that I started to get
• 1:38:08
  worried about my health. I hadn't eat anything since yesterday morning.
• 1:38:12
  I sat down on my couch where I typically had breakfast,
• 1:38:15
  and turned on the television. Dark thoughts began to surface
• 1:38:19
  in my brain. My mind flashed back to when I
• 1:38:21
  was younger. I was watching the Ghostly Girl. She would
• 1:38:25
  appear almost every night, and she was always repeating. She
• 1:38:29
  wept for a few minutes before sitting up and going
• 1:38:32
  to the boiler room to hang herself. My grandfather spent
• 1:38:36
  his afterlifeline in his bed, coughing and wheezing, before my
• 1:38:39
  mother went to his room and smothered him. What I
• 1:38:41
  can only hope was an act of mercy. What was
• 1:38:45
  I doing if not repeating myself like them? I like
• 1:38:49
  that connection a lot that he's so terrified of, living
• 1:38:53
  in a loop he can't come out of. But he's
• 1:38:55
  doing the exact same thing to himself with the drinking,
• 1:38:58
  like pushing himself there. He's created his own hell that
• 1:39:00
  he's so scared of. I was filled with existential tear.
• 1:39:04
  Horrible thoughts began to fester in my brain. What if
• 1:39:07
  I had hit something bigger than a log. Maybe I'd
• 1:39:09
  struck a tree and gone through my car's windshield. Maybe
• 1:39:12
  I was lying on that quiet rural street dying or
• 1:39:17
  already dead? Was I doomed to repeat a drunken haze
• 1:39:19
  before coming around full circle?
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 3: To the moment of my death.
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 2: I continued with that terrifying mindset before there was some
• 1:39:25
  breaking news, and I was saved from that horrible thought
• 1:39:28
  and thrown to a much more painful one. The breaking
• 1:39:32
  news was an amber alert. Oh no, I, oh, gosh, dude.
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 4: Oh.
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 2: A local nine year old boy had gone missing. His
• 1:39:48
  parents woke up a day ago to find that he
• 1:39:50
  was not in his bed. Police didn't have any leads,
• 1:39:53
  but they were confident they would turn something up in
• 1:39:56
  their search. I watched his tearful mom pleading with everyone
• 1:39:59
  through the TV to please return her boy to her.
• 1:40:03
  He was only nine years old. He liked reading video
• 1:40:06
  games and exploring the woods near their house. Her eyes
• 1:40:09
  welled up with tears and she repeated.
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 3: He's my futtle explorer, Please come home to me.
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 2: For some reason, my stomach coiled up tighter than it
• 1:40:17
  had before, and I felt sick. It seemed like every
• 1:40:22
  channel I flipped to I was looking at that boy's
• 1:40:25
  cherubic face. When it wasn't his picture. It was his
• 1:40:29
  mother's weeping and his father's paint expression. I turned off
• 1:40:33
  the TV. Couldn't watch anymore. I went to the fridge
• 1:40:37
  and got a beer cracked it open, and I had
• 1:40:39
  just held it to my mouth. When I got sick,
• 1:40:42
  I emptied my stomach into the sink. Typically I felt
• 1:40:46
  better after getting sick, but this time only felt worse.
• 1:40:50
  I went out onto my balcony to get some fresh air.
• 1:40:53
  I live in an apartment on the third floor. Every
• 1:40:56
  now and then I would go out onto my balcony
• 1:40:58
  to have a cigarette. Police and people swarmed the streets
• 1:41:03
  like ants in a colony. Were they all looking for
• 1:41:05
  the boy? My stomach coiled up even more to the
• 1:41:08
  point than it hurt. Even though it was early in
• 1:41:11
  the afternoon, I went to bed. I was so exhausted,
• 1:41:15
  but I still couldn't get to sleep. Spent hours in
• 1:41:18
  my bed, turning, writhing, and being unable to make sense
• 1:41:22
  of it all what had happened on that road. It
• 1:41:26
  was around four in the morning when I decided that
• 1:41:28
  I wasn't going to get any sleep until I knew
• 1:41:30
  what had happened out there. I needed the cold, hard truth, reassurance.
• 1:41:36
  I had to have the certainty. I got in my
• 1:41:38
  car and started heading to where I had had my accident.
• 1:41:41
  I wanted to know the truth, even if it was
• 1:41:44
  as horrible as I thought it would be. I parked
• 1:41:47
  my car on the side of the road. As I
• 1:41:49
  walked up and down the road, my memory slowly started
• 1:41:52
  to recall bits and pieces I was driving to work.
• 1:41:56
  When I was waiting at stop lights, I would take
• 1:41:58
  a sip from my flask. It was almost like muscle memory,
• 1:42:01
  and sometimes I would catch myself trying to drink from
• 1:42:04
  an empty flask, even though I knew that i'd finish
• 1:42:06
  it off moments earlier. I turned off the city road
• 1:42:10
  was heading towards my work via an old country road
• 1:42:13
  through the woods. I remember my head drooping down. I
• 1:42:17
  wasn't tired. I just wanted something to get me through
• 1:42:19
  the day, to get me through the Sunday night call.
• 1:42:23
  My head had just nodded down again, and then thud.
• 1:42:27
  I must have walked up and down those dismal roads
• 1:42:30
  for about two hours. The sun was just beginning to
• 1:42:33
  peek through the night sky, and I didn't have to
• 1:42:35
  have to try and explain to any passing cars. While
• 1:42:37
  I was walking up and down a mile stretch of
• 1:42:39
  road looking for god knows what, I decided that my
• 1:42:43
  mind was playing tricks on me, and it was just
• 1:42:45
  a fiendish coincidence. I pulled around and headed home. As
• 1:42:50
  I was leaving, I thought that I had seen something
• 1:42:53
  in my rear view mirror on the road.
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 3: I ignored it.
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 2: I got home and reflexively grabbed the remote and aimed
• 1:42:59
  it at the tailion. I didn't depress the button because
• 1:43:02
  I knew what was waiting for me on the TV.
• 1:43:05
  Managed to make myself a sandwich to eat. Still wasn't
• 1:43:08
  feeling hungry, but I forced myself to eat it. As
• 1:43:12
  I swallowed down the last bite, I regretted my decision
• 1:43:15
  to sandwich, said of my stomach like lead. I spent
• 1:43:19
  the rest of the day wandering aimlessly around my apartment,
• 1:43:22
  too anxious to settle down with a book and too
• 1:43:23
  nervous to watch television. Talked to my parents that night,
• 1:43:28
  but I was too shell shocked to recall anything from
• 1:43:30
  that conversation. I can't even remember if I heard the
• 1:43:33
  spirit of my grandfather wheezing and gasping into the phone like.
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 3: A perverted caller.
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 2: If you had a gun in my head and told
• 1:43:39
  me to remember that conversation with my family, I would
• 1:43:42
  say that I remember talking about work. I would then
• 1:43:45
  question why you would hold a gun to my head
• 1:43:47
  for such trivial information. Safe to assume that I didn't
• 1:43:50
  sleep at all that night. I rolled out of bed
• 1:43:52
  and went about my morning ritual, forced myself to eat
• 1:43:56
  a plate of eggs and a slice of toast. I
• 1:43:58
  worked late that night. Most of my time was spent
• 1:44:00
  trying to correct the multitude of mistakes I made. You
• 1:44:03
  to being distracted. It was dark when I drove home.
• 1:44:06
  I was just grounding the corner when I saw him
• 1:44:09
  emerge from the woods on the other side of the road.
• 1:44:12
  I slammed the brakes, but it was too late, and
• 1:44:14
  he lifted his tiny hands to his face. Blinded by
• 1:44:17
  my headlights. He gave a slight cry before being knocked
• 1:44:20
  off the road that he had been backhanded by some
• 1:44:23
  invisible and vengeful god.
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 3: A terrible reveal, but at the same time, that would
• 1:44:28
  be pretty funny to see just the kid get in.
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 2: I mean, he's like, he just says, because there's no
• 1:44:36
  car there, but it's the action thrown that far, so
• 1:44:39
  it's just him invisibly like, yeah, yeah, hunter. Funny that
• 1:44:47
  nine year olds getting hit by drunk drivers. It's really
• 1:44:50
  I would say, the visual I understand. I pulled off
• 1:44:53
  the road and looked up and down the streets. There
• 1:44:55
  was no one on the road. I was alone in
• 1:44:58
  a sense. It walked the side of the road and
• 1:45:00
  proceeded to climb down the slope. Scanned the darkness for
• 1:45:03
  a few minutes before I found him. He was curled
• 1:45:07
  up in the alcove of a tree. He was in
• 1:45:09
  a fetal position, cradling his fragile, broken body. Stared at
• 1:45:14
  his corpse for a few minutes before going home, pouring
• 1:45:17
  every single liquor bottle down the drain. I thought he
• 1:45:23
  was gonna like call the police, turn himself in. So
• 1:45:25
  I feel like he's building up to it, probably, but
• 1:45:28
  it is a little funny to be like, you know what,
• 1:45:30
  I'm getting no more exactly this wups the wake up God.
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 3: Received. There's this.
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 2: So I played Resident Evial nine, right, and uh. The
• 1:45:42
  guy through all the Resident Evil games who like started Umbrella,
• 1:45:45
  who made the virus is this guy named Spencer. He's
• 1:45:48
  like the super post of the games. He's like an
• 1:45:50
  old dude in a wheelchair who's on life support, who's
• 1:45:53
  trying to create these viruses so he can find a
• 1:45:55
  way to live forever in like a perfect body. And
• 1:45:59
  in the series he is directly responsible for the deaths
• 1:46:02
  like a billion people. Right, Well, nine comes out and
• 1:46:05
  you find the secret video of him. It's like an interview.
• 1:46:10
  And he adopted like a little girl, like a baby
• 1:46:14
  girl he found, and he's like, in some small way,
• 1:46:16
  I hope to make up for the deaths I've caused.
• 1:46:19
  It's like, yeah, it's like, no, it doesn't it don't
• 1:46:26
  You adopted one living child.
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 3: Ye, to the difference, it'd be pretty cool.
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 2: I think that doesn't count. But here it's like, you
• 1:46:37
  know what, I may have hit, I may have killed
• 1:46:39
  a child with my vehicle, but no more. I'm done
• 1:46:42
  hitting the bottle. Yeah for sure.
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 2: After I emptied out every drink I had in my fridge,
• 1:46:46
  which took a while. I stood at the sink for
• 1:46:49
  a few minutes before breaking down. I thought throwing it
• 1:46:51
  all away would make me feel better, but I only
• 1:46:53
  felt worse. I can only describe it like this. Imagine
• 1:46:57
  that at some point in your life, some somehow gets
• 1:47:01
  knocked loose from you and you realize it's missing.
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 3: But don't know how to fix it.
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 2: You live with that emptiness for years before realizing that
• 1:47:08
  there's a way to numb it. You can pour alcohol
• 1:47:11
  into the exposed wound, and for a moment, it doesn't
• 1:47:14
  feel so bad. The world seems monochrome, it dull, You
• 1:47:18
  don't have to care so much. All that pain, all
• 1:47:21
  that ache is gone, and you can function, if only.
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 3: For a little bit.
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 2: Pretty soon you realize that this is the only way
• 1:47:28
  you can reach the state of disassociation. You keep returning
• 1:47:31
  to that found and self medicaiding as best you can
• 1:47:34
  with what you can, until you realize that something's wrong.
• 1:47:38
  Just doesn't work like it used to. It doesn't dull
• 1:47:40
  those thoughts, it doesn't blunt those memories. At first it
• 1:47:44
  numbed everything, But now now there's a dull throbbing in
• 1:47:48
  your head of what you've done and what you've failed
• 1:47:50
  to do, and it festers, It eats away at you,
• 1:47:53
  regardless of how much liquor you pour into it, until
• 1:47:55
  you realize that it's not the liquor that's the problem.
• 1:47:58
  Chu You pour everything out, thinking that it'd be some revelation,
• 1:48:03
  some great boon, but it's not. It only feels like
• 1:48:06
  that emptiness inside you has grown. Now there's nothing to anthetize.
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 3: And antes and enphasize it whatever. There's nothing to fucking.
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 2: Uh numb it, and now there's nothing to numb it.
• 1:48:22
  There's nothing to solve these issues. You can't piece yourself
• 1:48:26
  back together. Something inside you is broken, and you don't
• 1:48:29
  know if you'll ever fix it. Without alcohol, I couldn't
• 1:48:32
  find anything to that feeling. I considered placing an anonymous
• 1:48:37
  call in in the amber alert brings some form of
• 1:48:40
  closure to his parents, but I couldn't do it. Why
• 1:48:44
  not yet?
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 3: Not yet?
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 2: Couldn't do it?
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 3: I could have been on I have faith in them.
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 2: I'm a coward. And worse than that, I kept asking myself,
• 1:48:53
  why me? All right?
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 3: I'm yeah, I'm hoping.
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 2: That I'm the victim here. I made this terrible moment
• 1:49:04
  about me. I pretended like I was the victim here,
• 1:49:08
  but I wasn't word pard from bar. I asked myself
• 1:49:12
  what I'd done wrong to deserve all of this, as
• 1:49:15
  if I didn't already know the.
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 3: Answer to that.
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 2: I'm a selfish coward, and no amount of drinking will
• 1:49:19
  distract me from that. I managed to drift off to
• 1:49:22
  sleep that night, but I kept waking up with a
• 1:49:25
  scream in my throat and sweat staining the sheets. Five
• 1:49:28
  in the morning, I decided to go into work early.
• 1:49:31
  I passed the boy on the way into work and
• 1:49:33
  on the way home. Each time it was a little
• 1:49:35
  more graphic, a little more gut wrenching. He stepped out
• 1:49:39
  into the road. What was he doing out then?
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 3: Early?
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 2: He raised his hands in front of his face, shield
• 1:49:45
  his eyes from my headlights. My car struck him and
• 1:49:47
  sent him skipping along the asphalt, whirling dervish, broken bones,
• 1:49:52
  off the road. I wish I could tell you that
• 1:49:54
  I did the right thing. Then I called the police
• 1:49:58
  or his parents. I let them know where the body
• 1:50:01
  of their son was nestled in between the roots of
• 1:50:04
  a tree. I couldn't bring myself to do it. I'm
• 1:50:08
  a horrible person. I am the lowest of the low.
• 1:50:11
  I tried to go about with my life. After a week,
• 1:50:14
  the Amber alert ended and the world moved on. I didn't,
• 1:50:18
  the parents didn't. He's on that road. Every time I
• 1:50:22
  drive to work, I see him stepping out onto the road.
• 1:50:25
  He's there with me when I close my eyes. I
• 1:50:28
  had foolish thoughts of moving away, but his death is
• 1:50:31
  going to follow me. It no, he is going to
• 1:50:35
  haunt me. It's a dead albatross tied around my neck.
• 1:50:39
  I'll never forget the sound of his startled gas. He
• 1:50:41
  impacted my bumper on his tiny body. A few days
• 1:50:45
  after the Amber alert was canceled, I returned to that
• 1:50:48
  dead road in the middle of the night, parked my
• 1:50:50
  car and washed his spirit, living out its last moments
• 1:50:54
  his short life. I hit him with my car, and
• 1:50:57
  he skipped along the road and off the side. I
• 1:51:00
  walked solemnly behind him. I trailed him as he dragged
• 1:51:03
  his broken and bleeding body along the dirt. He reached
• 1:51:07
  the tree and curled up in its roots. His body
• 1:51:10
  was still there when I returned. Diamond left him withered
• 1:51:13
  and putrefied. I can't say how long I stood by
• 1:51:16
  his corpse doesn't really matter in the long run. As
• 1:51:21
  I stood there in vigil, I knew that this guilt
• 1:51:24
  was going to consume me, eat me away inside like
• 1:51:27
  a cancer. It was in this moment that I knew
• 1:51:30
  that I'd be haunted by this and the others for
• 1:51:32
  the rest of my life. I'd be dogged by the
• 1:51:35
  overwhelming loneliness that the ghostly girl who claimed my bedroom
• 1:51:39
  as her haunt. I would be stalked by the feeling
• 1:51:42
  of hopelessness that consumed my grandfather as he lay in
• 1:51:46
  what would be his deathbed and excruciatingly slid towards his demise.
• 1:51:50
  Most of all, I'd be haunted by my murder of
• 1:51:53
  that young boy. Fatal mistake was now like a tattoo
• 1:51:57
  on my soul. So he reached the conclusion. My conclusion.
• 1:52:02
  The irony is almost palpable. I want nothing more than
• 1:52:05
  to die at this very moment, and I am consumed
• 1:52:07
  by an overwhelming desire to live. I know what happens
• 1:52:11
  to us when we die. I't want to live those
• 1:52:14
  final moments of my life, my suicide and nauseum, see
• 1:52:19
  myself slicing open my wrist, hanging myself for the rest
• 1:52:22
  of eternity. I also don't want to experience this skilt
• 1:52:25
  and shame for the rest of my miserable life. I
• 1:52:28
  want to embrace the reaper, and I want to run
• 1:52:30
  screaming from his bony grasp. These sentiments will follow me
• 1:52:34
  ad mortem. My mind is constantly waging a war within
• 1:52:37
  itself to unload this burden and escape into death, and
• 1:52:40
  to hold it within me like a dark treasure. Maybe
• 1:52:44
  writing this all out will help me achieve some sort
• 1:52:46
  of clarity about what I should do next. I doubt it,
• 1:52:50
  although I have to confess in some form or other.
• 1:52:54
  Don't know which choice is right or wrong. All I
• 1:52:57
  know is that this is hell had infinitum.
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 3: It was a fun ending. Yeah. I kind of like that,
• 1:53:04
  actually didn't not that I like that he didn't confess,
• 1:53:07
  but I think it makes his character a little more complex. Yeah.
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 2: Well, it's like he's obviously tormented his whole life by
• 1:53:15
  seeing these death echoes, and that pushes him to drinking,
• 1:53:20
  which leads to another death. So the thing I mentioned,
• 1:53:23
  I like the theme and where he becomes so terrified
• 1:53:26
  of death, knowing that it's just reliving your final moments
• 1:53:28
  over and over that he pushes his life to.
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 3: A point where it's kind of like that death just
• 1:53:33
  a misery over and over. It seems like all the
• 1:53:36
  echoes ring true with himself too, the little girl getting
• 1:53:39
  killed and dying echoes, the kid that he the child
• 1:53:43
  that he killed, his mother, killing the grandfather is going
• 1:53:46
  to echo how he kills himself, and even the grandfather
• 1:53:49
  grasping and being sick is like his alcoholism. Yeah, it's
• 1:53:51
  kind of interesting how it all just like comes full
• 1:53:53
  circle and It's like he could have learned from all
• 1:53:56
  these things, but yet he just decided to like numb himself,
• 1:53:58
  which you know, it'd be difficult here all those things
• 1:54:00
  and having to deal with that, but very very interesting.
• 1:54:03
  Needless to say.
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 2: I feel like there's another story about a medium or
• 1:54:07
  a psychic or whatever that begins to lose their mind
• 1:54:09
  because they see dead people.
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 3: So that sound familiar to you at all, No, just
• 1:54:16
  six sens like you were saying, I.
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 2: Mean sixth sense, of course. But the sixth sense was
• 1:54:19
  interesting because it's from a child's perspective and they don't
• 1:54:22
  really understand or grasp, but that one kind of has
• 1:54:25
  I mean obviously not with Bruce Willis, but with the
• 1:54:28
  child that kind of has a hopeful note at the
• 1:54:30
  end of like maybe they can use this for good,
• 1:54:32
  to help people and you know, do things like that,
• 1:54:35
  and it's like, yeah, Bruce Willis is dad, which is
• 1:54:37
  the part everyone remembers from the ending. I swear there
• 1:54:39
  was a movie I watched whereas about a guy who
• 1:54:42
  was like he could see the dead, but he was
• 1:54:44
  like terrified by them, and he pushed him to drinking
• 1:54:47
  and stuff like that, but I can't remember what it was.
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 3: I don't know, all I knows. This story was great.
• 1:54:50
  I thought it was a lot of fun. I really
• 1:54:52
  liked this interesting to see how all of them kind
• 1:54:53
  of tied up. And I like that he kind of
• 1:54:55
  like inner he inner wove the at likeasically all of
• 1:55:00
  the titles together in a very fun way where it
• 1:55:03
  all felt really cohesive and in a way, like I said,
• 1:55:06
  it just felt full circle and that moment.
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 2: So yeah, I think Imperial Invective always has these really
• 1:55:12
  cool themes baked into his stories, like It's Sourceld in
• 1:55:15
  the Earth, where it was about like someone decaying and
• 1:55:17
  you know, falling apart as they crawled deeper into this cave.
• 1:55:20
  And here it kind of feels like pushing your being
• 1:55:26
  so afraid of the inevitable that you cause it, right,
• 1:55:30
  I think he's afraid of the ocean that you swim
• 1:55:32
  out into it.
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 3: I think, uh, I feel like with a lot of
• 1:55:35
  his work, which I might be, I don't know, but
• 1:55:38
  I feel like maybe he has not that maybe he
• 1:55:41
  has a drinking problem. No, but I think that really,
• 1:55:43
  but I do think that I wonder if, like any
• 1:55:45
  of his substance abuser of any of that stuff, because
• 1:55:47
  so much of his work is about decaying, numbing, It's
• 1:55:50
  about like, I mean, this, this whole story is just
• 1:55:52
  literally the ghosts that haunted your past, that drove him
• 1:55:55
  to drink, and how that made him the ghost, to
• 1:55:58
  create a ghost, create his own ghost with his actions
• 1:56:01
  so pretty interesting.
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 2: I think the addiction point, like the addiction that he
• 1:56:05
  gets from like dwelling on this so much, pushes him
• 1:56:09
  to create more of it, both in his own life
• 1:56:11
  and the child, create another instance of you know, death
• 1:56:14
  that has to be repeated over and over. So it's
• 1:56:17
  like he was so paranoid of this eventuality that he
• 1:56:21
  creates it. Yeah, it's a very.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 3: It is a very.
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 2: And this isn't a negative of the story, but it
• 1:56:29
  is an incredibly uh bad. It's the word I'm looking for,
• 1:56:36
  the opposite of like a hopeful, like triumph the opposite
• 1:56:38
  of triumphant. It's a very defeated ending where it's like, yeah,
• 1:56:42
  this horrible thing happened to him. Uh so he made
• 1:56:45
  that thing happen and everything got worse. You know, it's
• 1:56:47
  a very. It's like the narrative continues to.
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 3: Well over and over. No one learned, I mean, it's
• 1:56:52
  just no one learns it's a byproduct of his actions
• 1:56:54
  for sure. I think I think for a story too.
• 1:56:58
  In the Scary uh House, it felt fun, like I
• 1:57:03
  like that it also tied in, like just with the
• 1:57:05
  setting that we're sitting in, go scirl on the bed
• 1:57:07
  or squirrel and all that kind of stuff. I think
• 1:57:09
  that it's just it was a fun read for this
• 1:57:11
  and I think that too. It put a very sympathetic
• 1:57:14
  uh it. It puts a very sympathetic twist on the dead,
• 1:57:18
  which is interesting where I think a lot of people
• 1:57:20
  use it as a catalyst for you know, fear and
• 1:57:23
  uh things that are trying to go to.
• 1:57:24
  Speaker 2: And also like the thing I mentioned at the end
• 1:57:25
  of the second part where he figures out that his
• 1:57:27
  grandfather was killed by his mom. Because the way it's grabbing,
• 1:57:29
  it's almost like the story there is giving him an option,
• 1:57:32
  like the universe is being like, look, you could use
• 1:57:34
  this for good, right, Like I mean, imagine how that
• 1:57:38
  can help with investigations or like trying to answer questions
• 1:57:42
  about lost loved ones and stuff like that. There's so
• 1:57:44
  much he could do with this palpability. I don't know
• 1:57:46
  if I read it that way either.
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 3: I think that he has such an unusual and almost
• 1:57:52
  unhealthy view of what death is to.
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 2: Where I guess it is true that he only sees
• 1:57:57
  people related to him, because he mentioned that thing about Yeah, god,
• 1:58:00
  I don't see it.
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 3: You can't see everybody, and I think that, like also,
• 1:58:03
  I just I don't think that there's ever It's kind
• 1:58:06
  of seems interesting of like I don't know if his
• 1:58:08
  dad has a similar thing or if it's like the
• 1:58:10
  things that are passed down to you, but it seems
• 1:58:12
  like his relationship with death and how it embeds like
• 1:58:16
  it instills sphere. I think the biggest problem is that
• 1:58:18
  he actually never talked to anybody, and he like never,
• 1:58:21
  he never approached it from the angle. He was like
• 1:58:23
  very reserved, and the thing that he turned to is
• 1:58:25
  numbing his problems. I think that's like, ultimately, that's that's
• 1:58:28
  the that's the lesson learned, is that I think he
• 1:58:30
  should have been more open than I think that he
• 1:58:32
  should have tried to understand it versus spheirit.
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 2: I think too. There's also like, if you pull out
• 1:58:37
  the supernatural elements, there's still an existing narrative of someone
• 1:58:41
  going through addiction mental turmoil and not making it better.
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, this is a very I would say this
• 1:58:47
  is a very realistic understanding of addiction. Of the catalyst
• 1:58:51
  is just super It's easy to also lie to yourself
• 1:58:54
  to light others and all that. I mean, like it's
• 1:58:56
  but I think the catalyst that makes it a like
• 1:58:58
  a fun Sunday with a cherry on top is that
• 1:59:00
  there's ghosts and that kind of stuff.
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 2: A lot of the description of like his drinking and like,
• 1:59:04
  oh those couple of paragraphs about like for a little
• 1:59:07
  bit you can operate, you don't think about the reality
• 1:59:10
  that was giving me wraps of mother horse eyes with
• 1:59:14
  all this stuff, with the author there talking about alcoholism
• 1:59:16
  and stuff like that.
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 3: The scariest part of all this, though, is door dashing
• 1:59:20
  taco bell to a haunted house and eating the driver
• 1:59:24
  won't come to the door, and the driver tapping on
• 1:59:26
  the door and being like can you maybe down the
• 1:59:28
  road to drop off the food? That actually happened. So
• 1:59:30
  I'm writing Knox and just walks away. Yeah, I am
• 1:59:33
  ready to get out of this position. So until next time, guys,
• 1:59:35
  we will see you in the next one. Please watch
• 1:59:37
  the next one. We'll be going to recording next in
• 1:59:39
  the basement.
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 2: Be recording in the basement. There's a lot of really
• 1:59:42
  big bugs down there and I can't wait for them
• 1:59:44
  get all in Hunter's hair.
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 3: So thank you so much. Also to our audio listeners
• 1:59:48
  who didn't get to see this, please check out the
• 1:59:49
  visuals this time. But if you are listening on audio,
• 1:59:52
  thank you for listening on Spotify, Apple podcast anyway we
• 1:59:54
  can go and giving us nice rating. And also thank
• 1:59:56
  you patrons for supporting the show and getting a nextra
• 1:59:59
  episode which we're gonna upload like a vlog.
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 2: We're gonna have vlog and stuff like that for the
• 2:00:02
  patroons of us, like going around kind of everything.
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's been a lot of fun.
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 3: And also.
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 2: The way you said, like, please watch of the visuals
• 2:00:13
  this almost it's if you just watch audios. Please just
• 2:00:17
  look at me please, it's too good.
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 3: All right, that's it, Bye bye bye bye way. I
• 2:00:20
  have to say my back. I'm gonna put crickets in
• 2:00:24
  his taco bellers. I don't know, h