Speaker 1: Calarugu Shark Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the October Records, a
month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode five, The Visitor.
Speaker 3: October fifth, nineteen seventy four, Silas Crane. The Hendrix family,
God help them. Last night. They locked everything doors, windows,
even the cabinet doors, the closet doors, the bedroom doors.
Robert Hendrix is a security expert, installs alarm systems for
half the businesses in town. He knew something was coming.
He'd heard about the Davidsons, about the hospital, about the
Brennan boy. So he turned his house into a fortress.
Motion sensors, camera systems, steel bars on the windows, three
dead bolts on every exterior door. It didn't matter. It
came through anyway, not breaking in, just through, like the
children of the library, like it existed in a different
relationship with solid matter. The family woke at three a m.
To find their house rearranged. Every piece of furniture moved
to form a path from the front door to the
basement door. Every family photo turned to face the walls,
every mirror reflecting rooms that weren't theirs, rooms with water
stained walls and drowned furniture, but that's not the worst part.
Their daughter, Anna, seventeen years old, were standing in the
living room when they came downstairs, standing perfectly still in
her nightgown, eyes clouded white. She wouldn't respond to their calls,
wouldn't move when they touched her, just stood there, staring
at something they couldn't see. At six am, she walked
to the basement door, opened it, walked down. They tried
to follow, but the stairs, the stairs went down too
far deeper than their basement, deeper than should be possible.
They called up from the landing, but the darkness just
swallowed their voices. Anna hasn't come back up. The basement
door won't open now, but they can hear her down there,
humming the same tune Patricia Brennan used to hum. Timothy's
mother says the same tune. All the taken hum.
Speaker 1: The fifth recording played differently. The sound was clearer, as
if Silas was standing right beside me speaking directly into
my ear. Was palpable, infectious. I found myself checking my
office door, making sure it was locked, even though I
knew locks meant nothing to what we were dealing with.
The Hendrix family still lives on Pine Street, different house.
They moved after nineteen seventy four, but stayed in Millbrook.
That detail struck me as significant. Every family touched by
the patterns stayed in town. Even those who tried to
leave came back, as if the town itself wouldn't let
them go. I arrived at the current Hendrick's house at noon, safe,
bright daylight, children playing in nearby yards, normal suburban life
continuing despite the darkness gathering at its edges. Emma Hendrix
answered the door, years old, same as Anna in nineteen
seventy four. The resemblance to the old photographs was uncanny.
Same dark hair, same questioning eyes, same way of tilting
her head when confused, Miss Blackwood from the library, is
your father home, Robert Hendrix. Dad's installing a security system.
That's what he does. He's been really busy lately. Everyone
wants new systems. All of sudden started about a week ago.
A week ago, when October began, Robert Hendrix met me
in his home office, surrounded by monitors showing feeds from
dozens of security cameras across Millbrook. His own home had
even more cameras than his customers. Every angle covered, no
blind spots. You hear about nineteen seventy four, He said,
without preamble, about my aunt Anna. You know what happened.
He gestured to a wall of filing cabinets. My father
documented everything. He was fifteen when Anna was taken, spent
the rest of his life trying to understand what happened,
trying to prevent it from happening again. He pulled out
a thick folder. Inside were photographs, police reports, and pages
of handwritten notes. The photographs showed the Hendricks house from
nineteen seventy four, furniture arranged in that pathway silas described,
but from above, from the aerial shots, the furniture arrangement
formed a symbol, the same symbol I'd been seeing everywhere.
The visitor, Robert said, that's what Dad called it. Not
a person, not a ghost, something that exists partially in
our reality and partially somewhere else. It comes through solid matter,
because it's not entirely solid itself. It's like imagine something
swimming through dimensions, the way a fish swims through water.
He showed me security footage from three days ago, October
twond his own home at three am. The cameras showed
nothing at first, then Gradually, furniture began moving by itself,
sliding across floors, rotating, repositioning, forming that same pathway, that
same symbol. No intruder, Robert said, no visible force, just movement,
and then he switched to another camera, Emma's room. She
was standing beside her bed, eyes open but unconscious, sleepwalking
but different, too, still too purposeful. As I watched, she
walked through her bedroom door, not opened it, through it.
The solid wood rippled like water as she passed. I
found her in the basement an hour later, Robert said,
just standing there. When she woke up, she didn't remember anything,
but she was wet, soaking, wet, and she was humming.
What song? He pulled out his phone played a recording,
a simple melody, haunting and old, the same tune I'd
heard the Brennan boy humming at story Hour, the same
tune the dead nurses hummed in the morgue. Every taken
person hums this, Robert said, Dad figured that out. It's
not a song, it's a frequency, a vibrational key that
lets them move between states, solid and liquid, here and there,
living and dead. Emma appeared in the doorway, Dad, I'm
going to Sarah's house. No, Robert said quickly, not today,
not until November. Dad, You can't keep me locked up
all month. Emma, his voice was sharp with fear. Please
just stay inside, stay where the cameras can see you.
She rolled her eyes, but acquiesced, heading back upstairs. It's
happening again, Robert said to me. The visitor has been
in our house three times this week, each time getting
closer to Emma each time. The furniture path leads deeper
into the basement. Last night I welded the basement door shut.
This morning it was open. The weld was intact, but
the door was open, as if it had opened into
a different space where my welding didn't exist. Robert stood
walked to a map of Millbrook on his wall. Five
red pins marked locations the pattern, He said, Dad figured
out some of it. The Davidson House, the library, the hospital,
the Brennan House, and here five points so far. But
there need to be thirty, one for each founding family.
The Hendrixer point five. We've always been point five. Why thirty,
because that's the bargain, thirty souls every fifty years, one
from each family that made the original deal. But Dad
believed it was more than that. He thought the thirty points,
when connected, creates something a doorway, a summoning circle, a
containment field. He never figured out which. A crash came
from upstairs. We ran to Emma's room. She was standing
in the center, surrounded by furniture that had arranged itself
into a perfect circle. Her eyes were clouded white. It's here,
she said, in a voice that wasn't quite hers. The
visitor is here. It wants to show you something. The
mirrors in her room, the vanity mirror, the full length mirror,
even the black screen of her laptop all showed the
same image. Not Emma's room, but another room, flooded, furniture floating,
and in the center. Anna Hendrix, seventeen years old, unchanged
from nineteen seventy four, standing in water up to her waist.
She's waiting, Emma said, They're all waiting in the spaces between,
in the rooms below, in the dark water that remembers
twenty five more to collect, twenty five more points to mark,
then the circuit will be complete. The mirrors cracked simultaneously.
Emma collapsed. When Robert caught her, his hands came away wet.
The hendricks House is the fifth point, and Emma, like
Anna before her, has been marked. When I returned to
the library, I found something impossible. The furniture in my
office had been rearranged, the same pathway, the same symbol
leading from my door to a wall, a solid wall
with no door, but on that wall written in water
that was already evaporating. Visitor comes for witnesses too. The
Blackwood point approaches. Tomorrow. I'll play October sixth. Tomorrow. I'll
learn about dead Air at WMIL Radio. Tonight. I'm sleeping
in the library again, but I've realized something. It doesn't
matter where I sleep. The visitor can come through anything.
Speaker 2: Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Caloroga Shark Media.
Some elements of AI may have been used in this production,
but it was written, edited, mixed, and produced by Real
Live People. Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott