Speaker 1: Calaruga Shark Media. Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the
October Records, a month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode
twenty two the.
Speaker 2: Seance m October twenty second, nineteen seventy four. Silas Crane
I found the transcripts hidden in the university basement. The
seance from nineteen twenty four. Eight students trying to contact
the dead, but the dead were already in the room.
One of them, Margaret, I'm sorry, this is going to hurt.
One of them was Sarah Blackwood, your grandmother, Elizabeth's older sister.
She was supposed to be the witness for nineteen twenty four,
but she was already dead, had been for three days
in her bath tub. But she attended the seance anyway,
sat in the circle, held hands, spoke. The other students
didn't notice. How could they not notice? Her skin was blue,
Water dripped from her constantly when she spoke, minnows fell
from her mouth, But in the transcript they describe her
as radiant and ethereal. The seance wasn't to contact the dead.
It was the dead contacting the living, teaching them to
not see death, to ignore drowning, to accept breathing, water
as normal. Sarah, the dead Sarah, she led the seance.
She's the one who made contact with it. No, No,
that's wrong. She was the contact. It was wearing her
had been for three days. Every word in the transcript,
every instruction, every promise, it all came from it speaking
through a corpse. The founding families didn't make a deal.
They were hypnotized by a dead woman into beloe. They
were alive when they were already drowning.
Speaker 3: Something's wrong with my vision after yesterday's convergence, I see double,
not side by side, overlapped. I see the library as
it is and as it was nineteen seventy four and
twenty twenty five, occupying the same space, Silas's blood still
fresh on the floor, while my feet leave wet prints
through it. After playing the recording, I went to the
university the basement Silas mentioned. The door was where he said,
but it was also not there. Present in nineteen seventy four,
absent in twenty twenty five. I had to walk through
both states to enter inside eight chairs arranged in a circle,
seven empty, one occupied Elizabeth Blackwood, my grandmother, young twenty three,
soaking wet, but also Sarah Blackwood, her sister, also twenty three,
also soaking wet. The same person had always been the
same person. Hello, granddaughter, she said with both mouths, niece self.
I stepped back, but hit something solid, turned another chair,
another woman, also Sarah, also Elizabeth, also me. The seance
never ended, they said in unison, It's still happening, has
been for one hundred and one years. We're all still
sitting in this circle, still contacting, still being contacted. The
empty chairs began filling the eight students from nineteen twenty four,
but the faces all variations of the same face, all Sarah's,
all Blackwoods. We were never eight different people, they explained.
We were one person, split across eight bodies. The seance
was Sarah trying to pull herself together, trying to remember
she was singular. One of them stood, walked toward me.
Her face was mine, but wrong, the features slightly shifted,
like looking in a warped mirror. Want to see what
really happened. She grabbed my head. Her hands were cold, wet, soft,
like something drowned, And I saw the real seance. Eight
corpses arranged in a circle, all dead for days, all
drowned in different ways, but moving, speaking, performing a ritual.
They didn't understand. Sarah, the first dead Sarah, was drawing
something on the floor in water, the pattern, but smaller personal,
a pattern of veins and arteries, the circulatory system of
something vast. We thought we were contacting spirits, one corpse said,
But we were the spirits, trying to contact the living,
trying to remember what breathing air felt like. The vision shifted.
The eight corpses were pregnant, all of them, their bellies
swollen with water that moved, that had shapes inside. We
gave birth that night, the Sarah's explained to ourselves. Eight
bodies berthing, twenty two others, the thirty families, all from
one dead woman who forgot she was dead. The vision
shattered when something grabbed me from behind. I spun, expecting
another Sarah. It was Davidson, but young, college aged, wearing
a nineteen twenty four university uniform. You weren't supposed to
find this room, he said. His hand tightened on my arm,
and where he touched my skin began to rot fast,
flesh turning black, falling off in chunks. I was there,
he continued. The ninth chair, the living witness to eight
corpses playing with forces they didn't understand. I could have
stopped them, should have, but I wanted to see what
would happen. Wanted to see it wearing human faces. My
arm was mostly bone now. I pulled away, but the
rock was spreading up toward my shoulder, down into my fingers.
You're going to lose that arm, Davidson said, matter of factly,
unless he pulled out a bottle old The label read
nineteen twenty four Preservation Solution, the same thing I've been
drinking for one hundred and one year. Keeps the rot
at bay, keeps the drowning at bay, keeps it at bay.
I reached for it with my good hand, but he
pulled it back price He said, stop playing the recordings,
Let the pattern complete naturally, Let the thirty sacrifice themselves
as planned. The rot reached my shoulder. I could feel
it entering my chest, my lung, my heart starting to stutter.
Choose quickly, Davidson smiled, die now as Margaret, or live
forever as my witness. I was dying, actually dying, not
the slow drowning of the pattern, but real immediate death.
The rot was in my throat. Now, I couldn't speak,
could barely think. But then I remembered something, the twenty
wrong Margaret. They were still at the library, still watching,
still waiting, and they were hungry. I bit my own
tongue hard, blood filled my mouth, but I spit it
at Davidson. The blood hid his face, and instantly the
Wrong Margarets knew smelled it. Since their original was in danger.
They came through the walls, twenty versions of me, all wrong,
all furious. They fell on Davidson like wolves, tearing, biting, consuming.
He screamed, dropped the bottle. I grabbed it, drank, The
rot stopped, reversed, My arm reformed, but wrong. The skin
came back, scaled, the fingers webbed. Not my arm anymore,
something else's. Davidson fought off the wrong Margarets, but they'd
taken pieces. His face was missing chunks. His uniform was shredded,
showing skin underneath. That wasn't skin. It was newspaper, old
newspaper from nineteen twenty four, with headlines about a seance
gone wrong. You don't understand, he gasped through a mouth
that was partially paper. I'm not keeping you from the truth.
I'm keeping the truth from you. If you know what
really happened, what you really are, you'll one of the wrong.
Margaret's bit through his throat. He collapsed, but as he
fell he laughed. Check the other chairs, he gurgled through
blood and ink. See who else was at the seance?
See who the eight corpses really were? I looked. The
seven other Sarahs were changing their faces, shifting, becoming clearer.
One was missus Davidson from the Walls, One was Nurse
Holloway from the Morgue. One was Timothy Brennan's grandmother, one
was the bus driver, one was the radio DJ, one
was miss Williams, one was Father Morrison. All the patterns, victims,
all at the seance in nineteen twenty four, all dead
before it began. We didn't make a deal with it,
they said in unison. We are it, pieces of it,
wearing human faces, playing human roles, forgetting we're not human.
The room began to flood, water rising from nowhere, the
eight chairs floating, the Sarahs, all of them dissolving back
into water. The seance contacts itself, They gurgled as they liquefied.
The dead, contact the dead, the drowned, contact the drowned,
and remember they're all the same water. I fled up
the stairs, out of the basement that exists and doesn't exist,
into the night where the wrong Margaret's were waiting. Nine
more days, they said, nine more recordings, nine more rememberings,
then we all remember what we really are. Tomorrow I'll
play October twenty third. Tomorrow I learn about the first death. Tonight,
I'm looking at my new arm, the scaled one, the
wrong one. It's writing on its own writing words. I'm
not thinking the seance never ended. You're still there, still
in the circle, still dead, still trying to remember you're alive.
I'm running out of time, and possibly I've been out
of time since before I was born.
Speaker 1: Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Calaoga 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.