****
Correspondence
To: Nick Daschel, Federal Bureau of Investigations
From: Office of the District Attorney
Subject: FW: PLEASE INVESTIGATE IMMEDIATELY
Nick,
We’ve known each other a long time. You know I would never send you something like this as a joke. Please take this seriously. It’s extremely important.
Forwarded message:
--------------------
To: H______ M____
From: Office of the District Attorney
Subject: Re: Please, I just need to know
Mrs. M____,
I empathize with your situation. Not knowing the fate of your spouse must be very difficult for you. I’ve discussed the situation at length with our legal consultants, and our hands are tied by the government. This partial transcript of classified court proceedings is the most that I can do, and even this is crossing certain gray areas. Please take the greatest caution in keeping this private. If you reveal this to anyone, we’ll disavow knowledge of it. I hope it provides some closure, despite the nature of the contents.
[Stenographer for __th Circuit Court in _______]
[December __, 201_]
[Day __ of Court Hearings regarding fiscal and legal liability in Case of The United States Government vs. _______ Productions]
Prosecutor: I’d now like to call to the stand Mr. J______, on-site crew manager for Season __ of the Haunting Investigators production run.
Judge: Mr. J______, please come up.
[Mr. J______ approaches the stand, sits]
Bailiff: Do you swear or affirm that the testimony that you are about to give is the truth?
[Mr. J______ looks nervously at the judge, then at the CEO of _______ Productions, Mr. R________, seated at the defense table]
Mr. J______: Yes…
[Prosecutor approaches]
Prosecutor: Mr. J______, please tell us about your experiences throughout the season, up to and including the taping of the final episode, the events therein, and the circumstances surrounding the fates of the filming crew.
[Mr. J______ pauses, looks at Mr. R________ again]
Mr. J______: Well… personally… I think it all started with a marketing gimmick.
Prosecutor: How so?
Mr. J______: After the last season, with the ratings dropping, we had to think of something. One day, Thompson comes in. He was a…
Prosecutor: Was?
[Mr. J______ fidgets]
Mr. J______: Is… a real believer in the paranormal. As the lead of the show, he actually believes in the stuff, and wants to find real ghosts. Me… it’s just a paycheck. Anyway, Thompson comes in one day after the prior season ended, says he realized what the problem is. Says it’s the electromagnetic fields from our cameras and equipment; that they suppress paranormal activity. He spent maybe like twenty grand of his own money on specially designed equipment that reduced the crew’s EM signature by like… ninety-five percent.
Prosecutor: So this new equipment wasn’t the idea of _______ Productions?
Mr. J______: No. They… just found out about it after Thompson had spent the money, and decided to run with it in our advertising. With the other shows like Ghost Hunters and Paranormal Files already done filming their next seasons, we were the only show with this ‘new capability’ to investigate hauntings…
Prosecutor: Sounds good for an ad campaign.
Mr. J______: Yes. It was better than anyone expected, in fact. They did some test ads before we even started filming the season, and the ratings spike on re-runs was tremendous.
Prosecutor: Ok. So what happened when the filming actually started?
Mr. J______: First couple of shoots went the same as always. The crew would explore some dark, supposedly haunted locale, and act all jumpy. The camera guys would art it up, you know, try to make the stuff scary. But it was still just the same old song and dance, none of it real. I overheard Thompson complaining more than once that he was disappointed in his investment, and that we should be seeing more unusual activity than we were.
[Defense Attorney, seated next to Mr. R________, nods]
Prosecutor: And then?
Mr. J______: Around the fourth shoot, after his complaints… things got weird.
Prosecutor: Weird?
Mr. J______: I was watching from the production trailer. I remember this so vividly. The team was in the _________ Dance Academy, the one that burned down fifty years ago, and got renovated recently. They were standing in the dark with the night vision on, as usual, and kind of being like… ‘oh what was that,’ or ‘did you see something?’… when a kind of silence hit the place. I could see them talking, but couldn’t hear them, and they couldn’t hear each other either… the five of them, two camera men included, left immediately. It took them two minutes to get out. By the time they got to me, they were soaked in sweat, and Kelly, the poor girl, had third-degree burns on her hands. I couldn’t figure out how Thompson did it.
Prosecutor: So your contention is that Thompson faked some sort of fire to improve the show?
Mr. J______: Not fire. Just heat. The camera never saw any light. And then it started getting worse after that.
Prosecutor: How so?
Mr. J______: We’d picked an especially brutal line-up of haunted places for the season. The next one was a prison. Some time during the filming, Nester, the other lead guy, got the living hell beat out of him. Came back bruised and bleeding… he swore up and down he was alone in the dark when it happened, but Thompson was also alone somewhere. No camera was on him at that time.
Prosecutor: And how was Thompson acting at that time?
Mr. J______: He seemed elated. He was going on and on about how the new equipment was working. Kelly and Nester were scared, but his excitement was infectious. They were convinced they’d experienced real paranormal activity. Out of concern, I added two burly guys, one to go with each camera man, and I told them never to let any of the team go off alone.
Prosecutor: Did that help?
Mr. J______: Christ, it got even worse. The next shoot was in a church graveyard that was over three hundred years old. Thompson went so far as to hire actors to come harass the crew.
Prosecutor: Actors?
Mr. J______: Yeah, guys dressed up really good like, to look like corpses. They waited in a mausoleum, and attacked Kelly, a guard, and a camera man. They barely got out, sealed the damn building. The guard had a huge bite on his arm; almost lost the limb to infection.
Prosecutor: And where was Thompson during this?
Mr. J______: In another area of the graveyard. By the time we came back to that mausoleum, was nothing but normal corpses in there. Kelly swore up and down they were the same ones, but of course the actors would have dressed like them. The actors even planted bits of the guard’s skin and blood in the teeth of one of the corpses.
Prosecutor: After all this, you continued filming?
Mr. J______: I mean… the episodes were the best we’d ever done. The crew was loving it, despite the danger. They were more excited than they’d ever been. I suspected Thompson by then for sure, but I just told people to keep an eye out and be wary. I never thought he’d go so far as to use explosives.
Prosecutor: But apparently, he didn’t. There were no accelerants or chemicals found at the cliffs.
Mr. J______: I… don’t know how he did it then. All I know is he put on this big show of ‘provoking the spirits’ at the suicide cliffs. You know, insulting them, calling them out. Then… boom. I used to work in construction. That was like five, six sticks of standard dynamite. They felt it in the damn town nearby.
Prosecutor: Yet every member survived?
Mr. J______: Wasn’t a miracle or anything… the explosion was below the cliffs, down at the bottom. Still, a lot of them damn near died when the rock collapsed. Damnedest thing though, how he got the fire to be spectral white like that instead of orange like you’d expect. Mus
t have been some chemical.
Prosecutor: So you’re now claiming that Thompson had high-level chemical engineering knowledge?
Mr. J______: Maybe he hired someone who did. All I know is, well all I don’t know, is that I almost quit after the next one. He must have spent a fortune on a machine, or bombs somewhere.
Prosecutor: You’re talking about the earthquake at the _______ Burial Mounds?
Mr. J______: Yeah.
Prosecutor: What happened there?
Mr. J______: I mean, you can see it in the videos. The crew was in a frenzy by then, excited as hell that they were finding real supernatural sh-, er, stuff. They were kind of getting more violent and aggressive towards… towards the paranormal I guess you could say. Danced on the mounds, spit on them, screamed out racial slurs towards the Indi-, er, Native American ghosts there. By then, they were kind of scaring me themselves, actually… it was only the severe danger of Thompson’s spectacles that kept me working there, trying to protect these guys when they kept insisting on filming.
Prosecutor: And the earthquake?
Mr. J______: I felt it. I felt it in my damn bones, all the way from the production trailer, before it started. I knew Thompson had something big planned, from the way he had the guys whipped up like that. Even Kelly was dancing around, screaming like a madwoman and insulting the spirits. When it hit… Jesus Christ. The whole place must have been full of sinkholes beforehand. The ground tore itself apart… cracks fifty feet deep like someone took a giant axe to the place. From watching the footage, I swear it seems like the holes were actively chasing them. Thompson must have planned it like that, or they were lucky as hell… ‘cause still, nobody died.
Prosecutor: So you’re claiming Thompson used bombs or some other engineering device to destroy a National Park, all for the sake of this show?
Mr. J______: That’s it, yes.
Prosecutor: And what about the final episode?
[Mr. J______ pauses for several moments, looks at Mr. R________]
Mr. J______: Thompson ran off, along with the whole crew, and took all the video and images from it with him. I was sick that day, took the day off work, didn’t see any of it. We think they’re planning to sell it to a major network or something. You know, break contract.
Prosecutor: Are you sure that’s the story you want to go with?
Mr. J______: Yes…
Prosecutor: Because we performed reconstructive data analysis on your computer. We found the videos from the final episode. We know you went to work that day, and we know you know what happened.
[Defense Attorney stands suddenly]
Defense Attorney: Your Honor,-
Judge: Sit down! You’ll have your turn. Mr. J______?
[Defense Attorney sits, and whispers continuously to Mr. R________, who looks angry]
Mr. J______: Um.
Prosecutor: Why don’t you tell us what really happened?
Mr. J______: Have you watched… it…?
Prosecutor: The file’s password encrypted. We can crack it, but we’d rather save the money and have you tell us the password now. We’ll watch it together, right here.
Mr. J______: Is that… do I get a chance to talk to my lawyer? This is…
Prosecutor: This private hearing is a courtesy, Mr. J______. You’re in far more trouble than you seem to realize.
[Bailiff brings out a television hooked to a laptop]
Mr. J______: Please, we don’t…
Prosecutor: The password.
Mr. J______: _______.
[Prosecutor opens the file]
Prosecutor: Please, describe the events as they happen
Mr. J______: I… well… it’s a mountain temple. The _________. It’s said to be over four thousand years old.
[Voices from the video can be heard as the crew explores the temple]
Mr. J______: By this time, the crew they… seemed like different people. They were so eager to explore these places, with a strange zeal. Their eyes were so wide as they talked about it, smiling so hugely and strangely and fervently. After the Burial Mounds incident, I wasn’t… I mean. I bought a gun. I wasn’t sure what I would use it for.
[The crew can be seen entering the main room of the temple, excited]
Mr. J______: It was that day that I had received analysis back from the guy I sent a piece of our ‘new equipment’ to. It wasn’t what Thompson had said it was at all.
[The camera taking the video is left on the ground as the camera man walks forward to join the group at a huge altar shaped like a strange creature]
Prosecutor [voice rising to be heard over the video]: What was it?
Mr. J______: He lied. The damn things… they were God-damned nuclear-powered. They didn’t cut EM fields at all. They made them stronger. My guy said the gear we were carrying was probably generating an EM field as strong as a dozen nuclear bombs, in a very controlled radius. The worst part was, it was designed to seem like it would do what Thompson thought, meaning someone probably deceived him. He didn’t know where Thompson got the stuff, but it was way beyond…
[The people in the video begin shouting and dancing frenetically]
Prosecutor [even louder now]: What’s this have to do with the final episode?
Mr. J______: I was scared. I… started thinking. Why would someone give something like that to a team of actors? Then it hit me… who else would unknowingly carry this equipment around to all the most spiritually energetic locations in the world? Who else would purposely seek out the most depraved, the most evil, the most -
[The temple begins to shake. Spectral white flames seem to spontaneously appear around the strange statue]
[Mr. J______ watches the video, tears begin running down his face]
[The shouts from the furiously dancing people grow suddenly louder, almost like a roar]
Prosecutor: What the hell…
[The spectral flames begin to coalesce into a sphere in the air, in front of the strange statue. Clouds of orange fire set against crimson skies can be seen in the sphere]
Judge: Is this real? What is this?
[A dark mass seems to approach the sphere from a great distance within the clouds of fire]
Mr. J______: I had no choice!
[Mr. J______ runs on screen, firing a gun wildly. Blood erupts from the heads of Thompson, Nester, and Kelly. One camera man is shot in the chest. The other falls off of the high ledge of the altar. The two security guards, eyes red, turn and run at Mr. J______, who frantically reloads. They almost reach him, but he shoots each one in the face, and they fall to the stonework, dead]
[The spectral sphere vanishes, leaving only a grainy image of Mr. J______ in the automatic night vision, on his knees, sobbing]
Prosecutor: The…
[Prosecutor looks at Mr. R________, who holds a hand over his mouth, face pale]
[Defense Attorney stares in shock at the image of Mr. J______ sobbing in the dark]
[Prosecutor looks at Judge]
[Judge shakes head, unable to speak]
Mr. J______: I had no choice…
[Transcript censored here]
As you can see, Mrs. M____, your husband fell for a series of elaborate hoaxes perpetrated by Mr. Thompson, and became delusional. We apologize for the time it took to find you, as you two do not have the same last name.
Towards the end, Mr. J______ became convinced that the hoaxed ‘events’ were actually caused by good human souls attempting to destroy his increasingly-evil film crew. This delusion led to his murdering the seven of them during the final hoax. After coming to the conclusion that the final hoax he felt he ‘prevented’ was in fact a more concerted effort on the part of the human afterlife to destroy his film crew before their souls could be possessed by some sort of eldritch abomination, he started telling his caretakers that he had ‘failed,' and that 'death only made it stronger.' He took his own life in one of our cells.
Again, I’m sorry we couldn’t locate you earlier.
Terrence S
mith
Public Relations Manager
Office of the District Attorney
-----------------------
To: Office of the District Attorney
From: H______ M____
Re: Re: Please, I just need to know
Is this some sort of sick joke? Since our last correspondence, my husband came home, and is perfectly fine. What is wrong with you? Don’t email me again!
-------------------------
END OF FORWARDED MESSAGE
Terrence Smith
Public Relations Manager
Office of the District Attorney