Speaker 1: Calarugus Shark Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the October Records, a
month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode fifteen The Detective.
Speaker 3: MM October fifteenth, nineteen seventy four, Silas Crane. Detective James
Morrison hasn't slept for forty eight hours. Can't sleep, he says,
won't sleep because when he closes his eyes, even for
a second, he's somewhere else inside someone else, looking out
through their drowned eyes. He's been investigating NonStop, and what
he's found Christ. He showed me his office, every wall
covered in photographs, but not just from this October, from
every October nineteen twenty four, eighteen seventy four, eighteen twenty four,
pictures that shouldn't exist, dageratypes showing the same faces we're
seeing now, the same children, the same drownings, the same pattern.
But here's the thing that made him stop sleeping. In
every photograph, in every cycle, there's a Morrison investigating, and
they all have the same scar on their left hand,
the same birthmark on their neck. It's not descendants. It's
the same man, the same Detective Morrison, dying and being
reborn every fifty years investigating his own murder. He says
he can remember it now, all of it. Five deaths,
five investigations, five times walking into the cemetery and lying
down in a grave that fills itself. He knows he'll
do it again tonight. He can feel his feet wanting
to walk there. But this time, he says, he's going
to document everything first, He's going to leave proof. He's
going to he's leaving. It's only six pm, but he's
walking out. I can see him through the window, walking
toward Riverside Cemetery. No, not walking. His feet aren't touching
the ground. He's floating six inches above the pavement, and
his shadow, his shadow is walking different direction toward the lake.
Two destinations, two deaths, which Morrison is real.
Speaker 1: Before I continue, you need to understand what these recordings
are doing to my mind. Each one doesn't just reveal
the pattern, it creates it. The act of listening, of documenting,
of witnessing, makes the horror real. If I stopped now,
if I destroyed the remaining records with the pattern, stop,
or would it complete itself anyway, just without a witness
to give it meaning. I can't risk finding out Day fifteen,
halfway through October, the hunting begins. Detective Ryan Morrison's office
was in chaos when I arrived. Not the organized chaos
of investigation, the chaos of revelation. Papers floating in mid air,
photographs developing themselves on blank walls, red string connecting points
that existed in different decades, creating a web that hurt
to perceive. Ryan was at his desk, but also at
the window, also at the door. Three versions of him,
all solid, all real, all investigating different aspects of the
same case. Don't be alarmed, all three said in unison.
This happens on day fifteen. The detective fragments has to
too much to investigate for one body. The Ryan at
the desk was reviewing files from eighteen twenty four. His
eyes were completely clouded, white as milk. The Ryan at
the window was watching something outside, his eyes clear but
weeping blood. The Ryan at the door was somewhere between
his left eye clouded, his right eye missing entirely. Which
one is real? I asked, all of us, None of us?
Does it matter? They spoke in rotation. Now one picking
up where another left off. We've found the truth. The
pattern isn't about drowning thirty people. It's about drowning one
person thirty times, the same person fractured across time. He
They showed me a de geratype from eighteen twenty four,
a formal police portrait. It showed a detective, but the
face had been scratched out, deliberately destroyed, but the hand
was visible a scar across the left palm, the same
scar Ryan had. Every Morrison serves the pattern the same way.
The desk, Ryan said, we investigate until we understand. Understanding
kills us, Death resets us. We're born again, grow up,
become detectives, investigate, understand die a fifty year loop, but
this time is different window. Ryan continued, this is year
two hundred and fifty one. The loop is breaking. I'm
remembering all my deaths at once. Iron walked over no glided,
his feet, not quite touching the floor. He pulled out
a revolver, an old service weapon. He placed it against
his temple. Want to see something interesting. He pulled the trigger.
The sound was deafening. Blood and brain matter sprayed across
the wall. His body crumpled, but he was still standing.
Another version of him occupying the same space, unfazed by
the corpse at his feet. I've been dead since October. First,
this new Ryan said. Every Morrison dies the moment the
pattern begins. We just don't stop moving, don't stop investigating,
can't stop It's our function. He pulled the trigger again.
Another body fell. Another Ryan remained, standing five deaths so
far this October. He said conversationally, twenty five more to go,
one for each day. On Halloween, the last Morrison dies
and the first Morrison is reborn. The cycle continues. I
backed toward the door, but found another Ryan there. This
one was wrong in a different way. His body was
inside out, organs on the outside, skin folded inward, but
he was alive, talking through a throat that was now external.
The Morrison line doesn't have ancestors. He wheezed through exposed lungs.
We have iterations, each one investigating deeper, each one understanding more,
each one dying worse. The office was filling with Ryans,
now dozens of them, all at different stages of death, decay, investigation.
Some were children Ryans who had died young in previous cycles.
Some were ancient Ryans who had lived past their time.
All had the same scar, all had the same clouded eyes.
We found the origin, they said, in horrible harmony, The
first murder, the one that created the pattern. They showed me,
not a picture, a memory, somehow projected on the office walls.
Before Millbrook, a Native American settlement, A young woman pregnant,
standing at the lake's edge. Behind her, something rising from
the water, not a creature, a concept, hunger given form.
It entered her through her mouth, her nose, her eyes.
She screamed as her belly expanded, not with child, with water,
black water, she burst. But from the water came thirty
thirty infants, all identical, all wrong. They scattered into the forest,
grew instantly, became the thirty founding families of Millbrook. We're
all its children, the Ryans whispered, every founding family born
from the same murdered woman. The pattern isn't a feeding schedule.
It's a family reunion. Every fifty years. It calls its
children home, one from each bloodline, to return to the
water womb. The office door opened. Another Ryan walked in,
but this one was current present, the real detective Ryan Morrison.
Looking exhausted but alive. He saw the room full of
his other selves and didn't react. You're here, he said
to me, good. I need a witness for this. He
pulled out a knife, not to attack. He rolled up
his sleeve, revealing his left arm covered in dense writing, names, dates, coordinates,
all carved into his skin. Every iteration adds to it.
He explained, the complete investigation, everything we've learned across two centuries,
but it only becomes visible on day fifteen. I read
the carvings. They revealed the locations of bodies. Never found
the names of the thirty for this cycle, but my
name wasn't among them. The true center of the pattern,
not the fountain, but something beneath it, And at the bottom,
carved deepest a single word, choose. You have a choice,
Ryan said. That's what we've been investigating, not the pattern itself,
but the choice hidden within it. The Blackwoods can reverse it, yes,
but the Morrisons can break it, end it entirely, stop
the cycle. How all the Ryans smiled at once, dozens
of grins, some on faces, some on corpses, some on
things that weren't quite either. By investigating the uninvestigatable, by
solving the unsolvable, by finding who murdered that woman in
seventeen seventy four, They all pointed at me. She was
a Blackwood, the first Blackwood. Your ancestor didn't make a
deal with it. Your ancestor was murdered by it, and
it has been feeding on her children ever since. The
room began to spin. All the Ryans were moving now,
walking in a circle around me, merging and separating, living
and dying, investigating eternally, find the murderer. They chanted solve
the first case, end the pattern, but know this, the
murderer is. They all collapsed at once, every version, every iteration.
All the detective Morrisons fell dead simultaneously. The office was
suddenly full of corpses in various states of decay, except one,
a child Ryan, maybe seven years old, standing in the corner.
He looked at me with eyes too old for his face.
The murderer is still here, he whispered, still in Millbrook,
still killing, And you know them, you've known them all along.
Then he too collapsed, dissolved into water that spelled out
a name on the floor, a name that changed everything.
The name was mine, not Margaret Blackwood, Sarah Blackwood, the
first Blackwood, the murdered woman. I was investigating my own murder,
a murder that happened two hundred and fifty one years ago,
a murder that created the pattern, a murder that hasn't
happened yet. Tomorrow I'll play October sixteenth. Tomorrow I'll learn
about the witness. Tonight, I'm sitting in an office full
of dead detectives, all versions of the same man who's
been investigating the same case for centuries, and I'm beginning
to understand that I'm not the witness to the pattern.
I'm the origin of it. And in sixteen days I'll
be murdered again.
Speaker 2: Ghost Scared Stories is a production of Calaroga 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.