Calarogu Shark Media, Hello and Welcome to Ghost. This episode is titled The
Boy Who Cried Ghost. From the moment the rickety moving truck pulled up to
the secluded farmhouse on Old Hollow Road, young Tobias merrit knew there was something
off about the place. An unsettling miasma seemed to cling to the dilapidated edifice,
a silken malaise that set his nerves at edge and caused the tiny hairs
on his forearms to prickle with primordial trepidation. His parents, of course,
chalked up the boy's mercurial unease to the usual streaks of youthful melodrama. After
all, relocating to the rural recesses of Gephart County was merely the latest in
a long street of cost cutting measures, each one more inconvenient than the last.
First, the fancy high rise condo in the city had to go,
then mums clutch up town salon, and finally even Dad's prestigious corporate gig swept
aside in the endless downsizings of the unfeeling modern economy. So when Tobias pulled
at their sleeves that first night in the drafty, mildew scented farmhouse, his
eyes ping ponging fretfully between the creaking oak doors and the soot stained brickwork of
the twin fireplace chimneys. All he was met with was a resigned sigh and
a tousling of his sandy blonde locks. New houses always take some getting used
to, kiddo, his father said, forcing joviality through a stream of poorly
concealed exhaustion. Just you wait. In a few days, you'll have made
the old place your own personal digs, loud nights and all. Unfortunately,
those nights proved to be even louder and more fitful than the young Tobias could
ever have imagined. It began innocuously enough, the occasional bump, thump and
groan of an aging timber frame dwelling, succumbing to the iniquities of wind and
seasonal erosion. Before long, though, a series of strange, inexplicable occurrences
manifested to plague the merit household, objects began migrating of their own volition,
materializing in rooms where they had no earthly business being. One morning, Tobias
awoke to his mum's hair dryer and toiletry case arrayed before his bedchamber mirror like
some sort of cosmetic armory. Later that week, his dad's prized baseball mit
and cracked Little League trophy somehow ended up soaking in the upstairs toilet. Strange
presences seemed to lurk in the shadows of every drafty, low ceilinged room.
An unseen observer whose tendrils of malign regard danced at the corner of the boy's
vision whenever he dared confront them head on, Half glimpsed flickering phantasms that dissipated
into languid curls of miasma if cast into the direct light of scrutiny. Whenever
Tobias alerted his beleagued parents to the latest in the household's crescendoing catalog of paranormal
violations, he was met first with gentle dismissals, and then, as the
strange phenomena escalated in intensity and audacity, outright exasperation and disbelief. You need
to give it a rest, with all this ghost story hogwash, His father
raged one blustery evening as their television set suddenly switched inputs to blast a grainy
loop of static and indecipherable demonic whisperings. We've all got enough stress to deal
with without you adding to it. The final straw came a week later,
when Tobias witnessed the merits decrepit pickup inexplicably start on its own and proceed to
slowly peel out of the barn with no one behind the wheel. He watched
in horror through the kitchen window as the driverless vehicle made possessed parah mbulations across
the muddy cow pasture that chilly April morning. Panicked, he rushed to his
parents dark room, where his father had taken up amateur photography as a coping
salve. The words came hurtling from his runaway mouth in a sputtering torrent.
The truck it's driving itself around and around the field like some big rusty top.
You've got to come see. It's one of those ghost doppelganger engine revenance
from Uncle Clive's crazy blog. His horrified recitations were cut short, however,
by the resounding crack of his father's spindly fingers impacting his upturned cheek. That
is enough, young man. Despite the decrepitude and destitution, gnawing at his
once robust constitution. Robert Merrit still cut an imposing figure when sufficiently roused to
temper. Once was in security, twice a fit of restlessness. But this
relentless boy who cried wolf routine stops here and now. As his mother wept
softly in the shadowed corner of the dankly lit room, Tobias could only hang
his head in abject shame remorse. Without another word, he was sent to
his room, his parents never bothering to check on his wild claim. Unknown
to them all, the phantom pickup truck sloughed to a shuddering halt in the
middle of the bog soaked field, as if awakening from a trance, leaving
no evidence of its supernatural journey. It was only later that evening, as
Tobias was slumped in his darkened bedroom, attempting to drown his humiliation and anguish,
that he heard the first of the anguished howls ringing out from the farmhouse's
dank, subterranean root cellar. At first, the shriek pierced the late evening
stillness, like the protracted death whistles of a rabbit. Snatched by an eagle's
talons. Then another bone chilling cry mounted atop that, and another and another,
until the agonized whales coalesced into an unholy keening cacophony. Tobias froze the
plastic game cartridge clattering from his suddenly leaden grasp. His shafts of delirium inspired
panic reverberated up through the tendons of his ankles and knees. This couldn't be
happening, his rattled, disbelieving mind rebelled. It simply was not possible for
that type of unhinjury to be occurring on this mortal dredge of a realm.
When his mother's staccato glottal shrieks of torment reached their crescendo, Tobias at last
summoned the nerve to bound down the creaking, groaning steps to the farmhouse's damp
lower levels. He only made it halfway down the musty wooden stairwell when the
sight at the landing below stole what little breath remained from his lungs. Hovering
about a foot from the dirt encrusted cellar floor, his father's shriveled spectral form
whirled and contorted in a nightmarishly choreographed cyclone of unspeakable distress. Robert Merrit's decaying
astral projection thrashed in a miasmic paroxysm ectoplasmic fluids, shuddering forth in sickly ropes
from his ruined spirit. More with every silent, gaping scream that rocked his
insubstantial frame. His mother's limp lifeless body twitched grotesquely at the whirlwind's epicenter,
jerked in profane cadence with the ebb and flow of her husband's disquieting plight.
By the time Tobias fumbled for the basement's harsh overhead fluorescence, the grisly phantasmogorical
scene was already dissolving back into the reeking epiphenomenal ether from whence it sprang.
He could only stare in silent, existential ruin at the crumpled, broken doll
slumped in the shadows that had once been his mother's smiling affectionate form, her
eyes twin holes of infinite desolation. When the police finally arrived some indeterminable hours
or eons later, they assumed young Tobias's catatonic posture among the tritus was the
mere shell shocked remnants of another senseless psychotic break. While the forensic evidence certainly
backed up the callous presumption of a grisly domestic murder suicide, the deeper metaphysical
substrates lying in half formed runs and blasphemous theorems across the boy's subconscious would never
be deciphered. For every time Tobias showed signs of stirring from his trance like
stupor, his half opened lips already beginning to keen and gibber unnameable isoicons of
preternatural torment, the officer's mind simply refused to process them realities, fracturing truths
bending in upon themselves like waves of cosmic antierdition, buffetting their core identities.
Soon the endless feedback loops and contradictions became too much, forcing their synapses to
simply erase those half glimpsed revelations for the sake of preserving what little sanity remained.
So in the end, Tobias Merit's innocuous cries ultimately went unanswered, like
so many other solemn warnings dismissed and discarded across the ages for who in their
right mind could conceive of a world where the harmless boyhood tales of things that
go bump in the night could metastasize into reality's most profane, inexorable demiurge.
The crumbling vestiges of the old Merit Place still remain nestled in the shadow of
Geppart County's twisted pines, looming in rotted silence, like some great primordial more
awaiting its next sacrificial ingestion. Local folk have long since steered clear of those
blackened, clabbered environs, avoiding the profane geometry of its druidic windows and listing
corrugated tin rooftop like a spiritual blight upon the very air itself. On the
darkest, most saturnine nights of the rural Gapartian year, some of the older
township denizens still claim to hear the waking echoes of the fallen Merit families,
anguished beyond eldritch screen. Memes riding the icy tendrils of winter wind through the
hollow stark remind us that some horrors lurk just beyond the veil, patient as
a drowned leviathan awaiting Mankind's final fateful remembrance before surfacing to drag Us. All
Beneath Ghost is a Caloroga Shark Media production, written and hosted by Alexander Ian
McIntyre, produced by Mark Francis. Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott.
Portions of this podcast may have been created with the assistance of AI. This
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