At her last job, Ellen had spent the better part of a decade dealing with some of society’s most awful people on a daily basis. It wasn’t because she didn’t believe in ghosts. Just that, by comparison, they weren’t all that scary. In Ellen’s experience, it was the living who were usually far more concerning.
Just as she thought this, a loud knock emanated from the wall beside Ellen and she immediately halted. Slowly, Ellen turned and approached the wall. She raised a hesitant fist and, after a moment of consideration, knocked…
KNOCK-KNOCK
Those two had come from inside of the wall, as if responding to Ellen, and she let out a startled yelp. For a moment she just stood there, awestruck. And then Ellen’s own words came back to her (“or it IS old pipes and you knocking on the wall MADE them do that…”) and she immediately felt stupid.
Something popped out of the wall and clattered to the ground just to the left of where Ellen was standing. She kneeled down to examine the object and saw that it was an electrical outlet which had somehow been ripped free of its screws and dislodged from the wall.
Ellen turned to examine the exposed wall-socket. And that’s when she saw it: just behind the mess of tangled wiring, a single eye was staring back at her. Then the eye blinked and Ellen screamed.
She told her legs to stand and run but they refused. The eye vanished and suddenly a pale bloody hand was reaching through the hole and grabbing her by the wrist. Feeling those clammy fingers wrap around her, Ellen finally snapped out of it and tore free of its grip as she fell onto her back and frantically started kicking at the hand.
“Please,” begged a faint quivering voice. “…help me.”
Ellen let out an audible sigh and continued, “Basically, the head scientist there had converted part of his private lab into what the cops described as ‘a human rat-maze.’ Apparently, this guy had been conducting a bunch of sick experiments and stuff on homeless people he’d pull in off the street. I don’t know what kind of experiments exactly but when the firemen pulled that poor man out of the wall he was missing his ears, all of his teeth, and both feet.”
“…Wow,” was the only response I could muster.
“I know,” Ellen said and paused as if she were still trying to process the image herself. “The company that owned the facility shelled out a lot of money to keep people quiet and I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement before I even started working there, which is pretty standard when you get hired by a place like that. But yeah, that’s why you never heard about the case on the news and why I can’t really go into much more detail than I have already. ”
At this point, I was listening so intently that I almost forgot I was supposed to be hosting a radio show. “Right, of course. Please, Ellen, don’t get yourself sued on our account.”
“It’s okay as long as I don’t name the company. If they tried to bring me to court over this, it would just be them outing themselves. Anyway, no offense, but I doubt anyone’s even listening right now.”
But they were. My first show ended up breaking the station’s record for number of reported listeners during our timeslot. Ten seconds into “Wake Up, Maggie”, and every line (all three of them) was ringing with people who had some tale they wanted to recount on-air.
