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for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. Content warning. The following
story contains descriptions of violence, blood, and disturbing horror elements. Please use
listener discretion. Caalarogashock Media, Hi, and welcome to Ghost. This episode
is titled Brewed nineteen to the residents of the sleepy rural town of Chitterly Hollow.
The arrival of the brood nineteen cicadas in the sweltering summer of twenty twenty
four was far more than just a noisy inconvenience. It was an omen of
unspeakable dread, a harbinger of malignant forces stirring from their subterranean lairs to sow
fresh seeds of terror in the earthly realms. For as the first nymphal casings
split apart and their ruby eyed, winged horrors took to the skies in deafening
innumerable droves, So too did darker presences begin bleeding forth from the loamy rifts
and fishes beneath the township's sun cured fields and groves, portentous ectoplasmic miasmas that
flickered in and out of peripheral sight, leaving after images of desiccated mandibles and
flitting gossamer wings etched across waking human vision. It started slowly, at first,
just a handful of the town's most sensitive children and eldly residents claiming to
have felt the icy breath of unseeable specters trailing across their skin during the eerie
trance like lulls that sometimes fell between the cicada's deafening, round the clock humming.
But soon even the most stoically level headed townsfolk found themselves flinching at subtle
movements in their peripheral glare, unsure if the writhing shapes slithering past were simply
dust motes or something far more disturbing given animate impulse. Strangest of all were
the whisperings that seemed to ride in on the Cicada's ceaseless, oscillating vibrations,
maddening supplications, and unutterable urgencies distilled into throbbing, subordible frequencies just beyond the
range of wakeful mortal perception. Yet to the most psychically attuned Chitterly Hollow residents,
these sibilant, buzzing tones conveyed cryptic imperative snippets hinting at blasphemous primordial rites,
long predating them the agricultural pioneers who first carved out their collective homestead from
the virgin forest scapes. It was old mRNA Westbrook, the eccentric widow and
reputed hedge mystic, who first provided the awful context behind the encroaching Cicada haunting.
One mid June afternoon, as the shrill, in sectile humming reverberated through
every rafter and cranny of Chitterly hollows, clabbered farmhouses, and steepled community church,
mRNA strode from her decrepit weed choked hovel in a trance of malign inspiration.
Her white kaftan robes billowed around her like soul stained wings as she stalked
across the baking asphalt and her wild bluegrass Maine writhed, as if exposed to
high voltage alternating currents of unholy sentience. They want seventeen years of reverence returned
to them, anced in a dead monotone, her lidless eyes boring into the
heart of each passer by she confronted along the byeway. The Golden Rod Kingdom
seeks recompense for our sins against their sovereignty. Our shrinings gutted, our rituals,
defiled, our rights, sundered and ground beneath shovel and plow. Absolom
Garber, the town's Lutheran minister, happened to be outperforming visitations on main Street
that afternoon. Despite his typical affable nature, the sight of mRNA's slitted eyes
and droning tones of preternatural conviction triggered a reflexive recoil, as if her very
proximity were somehow spiritually corrosive and soiled. Peace be with you, Murna,
he soothed, instinctively, clasping his rosary beads in a protective clutch. The
plump, bespectacled matron only shuddered at his platitudes, seeming to retreat further inward
in the grip of her ineffable possession trance. No tidings can mollify what comes
next. Shepherd of Hollo hymns and wrote benedictions, her rasping vox intoned as
she glided away down the street, seemingly weightless. A hundred septennial turnings.
Your flocks have scuffed and ground the scions of the brood into their fallow loams.
Now their husks arise to recapture what oversights of husbandry so arrogantly stole,
feeding upon the seeds of avarice, You thoughtless late born scattered upon the sanctified
groves in hopes of denying their rightful heritage. As mRNA apparated around a corner,
leaving a trail of disturbed gravel and pollen in her phantasmal wake, Absalom
was left clutching his starched collar in a cold, incredulous sweat. Surely,
the aduled crone was merely spouting one of her typical cryptic doom sayings. Fueled
by the tinctures and folk nostrums she was rumoured to imbibe in her eccentric,
squalid solitude. But over the next few nights, Absalom's repose was haunted by
sinister half dreams of maddening subterranean pulsations and fluttering winged shapes bleeding forth from cyst
fissures in the town's fertile ochre soils. Images of Chitterly Hollow's steepled skyline being
overrun by formations of some unguessable alien purpose, a thousand billion gleaming wings drifting
on etheric zephyrs, raining down like sparkling rasped scythes of purifying retribution, and
beneath it all the incessant percussive thrumbing of the cicadas, a hypnotic metronomic pulse
that bored through his very marrow like an infinite swarm drill, delving ever deeper
towards the unspeakable Stygian seed at the world's vasculitic route. Over the subsequent weeks,
Absalom's unsettling visions soon proved to be something far more grounded and visceral than
mere tormented reverie. Around town, the first whispers began circulating of townspeople awakening
in their beds to find a more off as heaps of desiccated kitanous shells scattered
across their downy comforters, shimmering with trace membranes of some unknown secreted resin tufts
of cottony spore trailed up the bedposts and window frames, as if the brooding
manifestations required to seed these blasphemous growths could not be fully contained within any one
air tight sanctity. Yet the situation grew exponentially more horrific when the first victims
began emerging from their haunted homes in ritualized trance like fugues, with empty shells
trailing from where their orifices now blossomed in grotesque, calcifying blastuli. No matter
how loved ones tried to intervene, the glazed eyes and stilled expressions of the
possessed seemed to broadcast a simple primordial message, we have already been reclaimed by
the brood, and our transgressions upon this land are being rendered unto due recompense.
It was a week after the initial possessions first reared their arboreal sicada birth
terrors when Absalom was awakened in the parsonage's humid master bedroom by a sudden,
rambunctious stirring from his wife Elizabeth's side of the canopied bed. At first,
convinced she was merely suffering a troubled sleep seizure, he rolled over in mild
annoyance, intending to gently jostle the woman back into repose. What he saw
instead nearly caused his heart to seize with shock and revulsion. There stirring amidst
the tangled lawn of her flaxen hair, was a veritable thatch of desiccated insect
carapaces, thousands upon thousands of distended hollow shells, and fibrous rotten wings,
all seeming to cyclically sow and recoil in her sun drenched tresses like the ocean's
tides, driven by the pull of some arcane lunar appetite. As Absalom watched
in abject slack, jawed owe, further waves and pulses of the effluvia began
emerging directly from Elizabeth's slack slightly parted lips every few moments, like a dense
musky fog bank, blown forth by the exhalations of some titanic subterranean bellows.
For several minutes more, the preacher's wife continued venting the roiling gelatinous cicada spore
with every outrushing breath, the ever accumulating drift of charnel residue cascading over her
chin and breasts in a fetid, gently frothing tide. But just when it
seemed her entire upper body was in danger of being consumed and assimilated by the
noisome exuvie, she abruptly ceased her rhythmic spawning and convulsed upright on the sheets.
There was a horrific muffled crunching that sent Absalom bolting from the bed to
switch on the bedroom's sconces, only to be greeted with the sight of Elizabeth's
face, now partially obscured by a hardening amber colored veneer, through which thousand
of translucent pupie squirmed and gestated. Where her eyes, mouth, and nostrils
had been, Only vaguely discernible worlds and sutures remained in the gnarled, calcified
mask, rapidly encasing her head in its suffocating balm growth. Absalom screamed in
sheer world sundering horror as the aberrant crustacean completed its rapid, merciless mineralization,
leaving only a mute, flailing torso thrashing beneath a head now entirely reborn as
a kitanous silkworm opalescent cyst. Already its ridged fissures were pulsing with the first
few legionary precursor waves of erupting nymphs, each one slashing free of its pupil
shroud in a miniature spasm of hemorrhage, tissues and fluids. Then, as
if responding to some silent, overmined synaptic command, the newly hatched broodlings swiveled
in eerie coordinated unison to confront the cowering minister beside the bed, slashed towards
absalom in a wickedly synchronized volley, their opalescent wings loud and hungry, no
ravenous, as they descended upon the mortal's exposed flesh, like the countless wings
of some great pestilential seraph finally rousing from its tomb slumber. Today, all
that remains to greet passers by through chitterly hollow stands as mute testaments to the
township's hushed, darkly spoken trauma. The occasional pile of ossified insectile castings found
gathering dust in a shadowed corner, or leaking from the seams of an abandoned
domicile, and in the evenings, a still pregnant quiet has replaced that once
familiar, sonorous hum that rippled through the verdant grasses and sundown orchards. For
whether the brood fulfilled their vengeful zeal for unconditional reverence before retreating back beyond tangible
human perception remains a question none dare explore too deeply. Some obscure primeval dread
runs too profoundly for such prying interrogation, instinctually warning that to seek certain unvarnished
truths is to surrender one's last semblances of hearth, solace, and identity to
a preternatural desolation waiting just beneath the world's mossy, rain soaked loam. 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 show, along
with hundreds of others from Caloroga Shark Media is available commercial free on any player
hassle free. Just look for the link in the episode or show notes.
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