Speaker 1: Calaruga, Shark Media, Hi, and Welcome to Ghost. This episode
is titled The Ghost of the Lake.
Speaker 2: When Caleb and Miranda Foster first laid eyes on the
sprawling Victorian manor nestled along the willow fringed banks of
Lake karashev it seemed almost too good to be true.
The asking price was well below what the square footage
and prime waterfront location should have demanded, and their real
estate agent was quick to assure them it was an
absolute steal they'd be foolish not to leap on. Despite
his typically jovial demeanor, Jacob Emory did seem oddly eager
to unload the turn of the century estate, almost vibrating
with nervous tension as he led them on the grand tour.
More than once I taught the stocky little man averting
his gaze from certain dimly lip corners and recesses, as
if unwilling to allow his focus to linger in those
shadowed spaces for too long. But by the time they
reached the master bedroom's wide veranda that extended out over
the glassy, willow shrouded lake waters, all such real to
quirks were forgotten. Caleb already found himself mesmerized by visions
of crisp autumn evenings, enjoying a smoke and a neat
bourbon while watching the seasonal bird migrations render the Manner's
inky reflections. As for Miranda, she practically swooned at the
prospect of filling the stately Manner's emerald trimmed solarium with
flowering planters and airy wicker lounges where she could host
her literary society gatherings. In the weeks following their hasty
clothes on the beautiful, if slightly idiosyncratic property, the foster
newlywed spent their every free moment blissfully preparing their new
dream home for its long awaited occupancy. Caleb invested in
all new tools and hardware to restore every inch of
the Manner's chipped and weathered Victorian exterior to its original
pine green and cream splendor. Miranda scoured antique markets and
salvage shops across three counties for the perfect period authentic
decor accents to complement the homes carved oak banisters and
soaring vaulted ceilings, and both shared an almost childlike delight
in scouring through the mansion's vast, cluttered walk up attics,
stumbling upon long forgotten caches of ancient treasures and dusty
curios from bygone decades. Caleb, in particular, took immense pride
in carefully cleaning and cataloging each of the relics, from
burnished cavalry sabers and flintlock pistols to chipped Dresden porcelain
and World's Fair ephemera. It'll be like curating our own
personal museum to the lost spirits of the Manor, the
former history teacher would exclaim, carefully swaddling each of the
precious artifacts in protective cloth bundles. Just imagine how much
life this old place has witnessed over the centuries. But
as the renovations finally neared their completion in early June,
with the last of the polished furnishings and baubles arrayed
just so, an eerie and unsettling aura began to pervade
the manners, corridors, and chambers alike. Somewhere in the tedious
routines of plastering, corking and baseboard lacquering, the Fosters had
apparently awoken a terrible, anguished force that had lain dormant
for untold generations. It began with an almost innocuous incident
in the upstairs western bedroom, where Caleb had been meticulously
scraping old wallpaper samples to clear the way for his
wife's custom botanical mural design. After accidentally gouging out an
errant drywall gouge with his utility blade, he bent down
to wipe the debris away. What he saw congealing amid
the dusty plaster shards brought his blood to an arctic standstill.
A thick, viscous pool of freshly oxygenated blood smeared across
the floorboards. But even more horrifying than the alarming stains
vivid crimson hue, was its unmistakably deliberate patterning, cruel curved
markings arranged with an almost calligraphic precision into what looked
like an insanely intricate series of esoteric symbols or hieroglyphs.
As Caleb stood there, frozen in speechless shock, he realized,
in mounting horror that the markings were still spreading out
across the floor, each crimson tendril elongating with excruciating slowness
and leaving sinuous glistening trails in their wake. With a
hoarse shout, he staggered backward toward the open doorway, slamming
it behind him and barricading himself against the hallway wall.
After what seemed like like a small eternity, Miranda's worried
voice echoed up the stairwell behind him, and he at
last found the courage to turn around, shaken but unwilling
to disclose the full terrors he had just witnessed. Instead,
he mumbled something about avoiding the spare bedroom until he
could properly fumigate a sudden mold issue. Over the next
few days, however, the unsettling phenomena manifested with ever increasing intensity.
Strange apparitions began flickering in Miranda's periphery. As she went
about maintaining the manner's meticulous gardens and shrubbery borders. Out
of the corner of her eye, she would glimpse pale,
shambling figures in tattered periwig style caps and dusty frock coats,
only to turn and face nothing except that she could swear.
Their ghostly echoes seemed to linger in her ears, whispering urgent,
unplaceable endearments and somber lamentations. After dismissing the sightings as
miss figments of her overactive imagination won too many times,
Miranda found herself jolted into sheer bonafide panic when trailing
after one of the flitting spectral figures and discovering it
had no feet. The vaguely humanoid shape simply rippled and
skated across their terraced backyard, as if borne along by
some non Euclidean distortion of the ground itself. The final
straw occurred one starless cloud blanketed evening as Caleb was
locking up downstairs for the night. As the bolt tumbled
home on the last of the heavy oak doors, an
almighty crash reverberated from somewhere deep within the Manner's vast
underutilized west wing heart. Seizing in his chest, he strained
to place the abominable metallic shriek, like a deafening trumpet blast,
shorn of any tonality. Just as his adrenaline began spiking
in earnest, a monumental jarring thud shook the entire foundation,
this time unmistakably emanating from the attic directly overhead, with
Miranda frozen in paralytic terror behind him, Caleb cautiously made
his way up the main landing stairs, each tread seeming
to rotten into fetid mulch beneath his weight. A foul,
sulfurous odour intensified as they neared the last few steps
up to the attic entrance, like a malignant miasma squeezing
through cracks in reality itself to lay siege to their sanctuary.
Despite Caleb's thundering heart and the winded screams from his
wife imploring him to reconsider, he stolidly gripped the ancient
brass ring pull and wrenched the attic's creaking timber door upwards.
What greeted the young couple's senses in those first few
damning seconds would forever cauterize itself into their raptured psychees.
It was a scene of unholy, prodigious horror, one that
summoned forth the esthetic sweepings of every broken spirit that
had ever stained those manner grounds over the eons. The attics,
cobwebbed rafters, ancient oak braces, and lustrous pine floors virtually
dripped with the fetid, crackling residue of peeled meat and
scorched viscera. Long runnels of caked Icarus detritus spiderwebbed from
the shadowed recesses all along the low hung crossbeams, leaving
clots of sluggish decay to splatter across the attic's mounded peaks,
like infected coagulants. In the chamber's dank epicentre, a towering,
feverish construction of tangled, frankenflesh and lacerated writhing musculature erected
its jellied cyclopaean crown. Amid all the puckering, riven horrorscape convulsions,
A single Leviathan eye seemed to lance the darkness narrowing
upon them in a roving raptorlike regard sillier choked vents
no why than Caleb's forefinger rippled with each spasmodic twitch
of its fetid strata, spewing rancid, carbonized vapors across the
night crawler lattice work of ruined nerves and tendons comprising
its base spines of carbonized bone and partially desiccated bees
stung erupted horrifically in all directions protruding from suckling abscesses
that popped and vented with each gut churning exhalation. Caleb
instantly recoiled, throwing his forearm over his nose and mouth
in a reflexive attempt to filter out the noxious, burnt
sugar reek. But Miranda reacted with even more primal terror,
unleashing a soul wilting screech that echoed across the vast
glacial expanses, like the final doomed exhalation of the last
living thing in the cosmos. She then pivoted and flew
back down the stairwell, her aimless flight fueled by nothing
more than pure animal panic. By the time Caleb regained
his nerve enough to stagger backward to the entrance and
seal off the stygion portal, his wife was already a whimpering,
glaze eyed statue, hunched against the four lounges mullioned windows.
Her teeth chattered in a rictus of shock, and her
thousand yard stare suggested some sort of psychic scarring that
cut far deeper than mere nightmare impressions upon the conscious veil.
As for Caleb himself, the sciet he had just been
forced to countenance, had left him feeling utterly gutted. Spiritually,
it was as if the foundations of all existential certainty
had been ripped away, leaving him plummeting through a vertiginous
existential void. Making his way to her trembling side, he
tentatively reached out to draw his wife close, sharing what
little respite of safety and solidarity his hollow husk could
still project. In the ensuing days and weeks, they retreated
together into a waxen catatonic state, their inner selves busy
replaying that infinite black abyssal revelation over and over life,
the final echoed bleedings of a damned metaverse. Not even
the curt authoritative knocks of concerned friends and neighbours daring
to visit could stir their wasting husks from that riven,
endless trance. In a horrific inversion of the role they
had anticipated for this place, Caleb and Miranda had effectively
become the new true curators of the nightmare sprawl unfurling
behind those attic doors, flesh scribes transcribing the unseen desolation
woven into every hand planed stair tread, hext dowl and
architrave molding across the entire accursed estate. The recent sensory
perception of what slumbered betimes in their fusty, bat winged
dormitories had awakened an instinctual part of their brained stems,
one that now recognized this stately mans for what it
truly was, an eternal, timeless monument to cosmic bondage, a sprawling,
inescapable honeycomb tomb where humanities, frail, self deifying ambitions conguc
yield and broke against implacable outer tides of unplumbable apathy
and spiritual desiccation, A literal living cyst of the dark
Void's most viscous, curdled purgations, and in the deedful silence
that now reigned over its once manicured rose gardens, gas
lit parlors and shaded verandahs, the earth shaking pneumatic hiccups
of that lightless Leviathan could sporadically be sensed, dislodging the
very memories of Enlightenment, philosophy and Victorian propriety itself, revealing
the belefic belched template encoded at the root of all existence.
Speaker 1: Ghost is a Calorogus 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 they
have been created with the assistance of AI.
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