ImmediatelyWriting's One Shots

#69. Buzzfeed Unsolved Supernatural/Ghost Files) Are You Recording?

. REC
21.46, 04-20-2023

"Are you recording?" Ryan asked the camera crew. "Yeah? Alright." He took a well rooted stance. "We are here-" Ryan said. His breath could be seen as he spoke to the camera, flying through the air.

It wasn't just chilly like it had been before clouds moved in front of the sun. In just an hour or so, it had become a cold, cold night with rainclouds looming above them. And while Shane knew that both he and Ryan would've rather been at home – both for their own reasons – they were here. Standing in front of yet another haunted mansion that has been said to be infested with ghouls and ghosts.

Shane's literal thoughts when Ryan told him he had found a new place to investigate, a place where people claimed to have found evidence, was "Wow. It almost feels like new haunted places keep spawning each time Ryan cracks open Google Search. It's insane.". The way they managed to find new places, even after more than seven years of doing this, was insane.

Somehow, they still hadn't run out of places.

This one, the one they were visiting on this cold evening in April – yes, somehow there were still chilly nights in April – had literally spawned overnight. Or so it seemed.

It was just a few days after Ryan started doing research for a new episode of Ghost Files, planning to visit a completely different place, when they got an e-mail from an anonymous source. The message about a haunted house up near Wisconsin, riddled with spelling errors and typos, sounded like a scam. Something to get Ryan and Shane – but especially Ryan – invested with something fake.

The person who had sent the e-mail wrote about their late grandparents' home, which was going to be passed onto the anonymous author before they started experiencing things while cleaning out the house. They had an entire list below, ending it off with a quote by a medium they contacted some time before reaching out to Ryan and Shane; "These are no ghosts. There's a demonic presence here."

Shane admitted he laughed aloud when Ryan forwarded the e-mail to him. While Ryan could only talk about how this sounded too good to be true; visiting an active haunted house rather than one that had been known for big activity far in the past. As the e-mail had mentioned, they'd be allowed into the house and do as they please in an attempt to contact the ghosts or whatever presence was inside. The anonymous viewer would even be open to interviews via text, as long as they didn't have to be filmed. It all did seem too good to be true.

Thus Shane believed it to be a viewer playing a joke on them, trying to get them all the way out to Wisconsin to find nothing at the given address. But when Ryan send him a few links leading to articles that had been posted about the same house, things began to look a bit more promising.

Apparently this person had allowed other ghost hunters and mediums into the house for a small price, since they weren't planning on living there until the house had been ridded of its ghouls anyway, and decided that they might as well make a buck while waiting for it to be cleansed. Some YouTubers had captured some average evidence on videos – nothing special, just the types of things Ryan and Shane would regularly catch on camera – as well as some blog posts that had been written about the authors' experiences at the house. The strange thing, though, was that Ryan hadn't run into this haunted house before. Not once had it crossed his path during his long scrolls through reddit-posts and blogs about the supernatural, despite this house apparently being fairly popular when you searched for it.

Somehow all these videos and blogs were badly tagged and unless you were searching for this house specifically, there was no way you were going to find it between all the bigger badder mansions.