The Black Tapes S01E08 - Board to Death

Alex Reagan: The Black Tapes is brought to you by Rocket Sound, who provide cutting-edge sound services for modern media. Searching for the song that will end the world? Questing after that one perfect note that will destroy all of reality? Too tired to do your own foley work? Let Rocket Sound do the dark acoustic work for you.

Alex Reagan: Richard Strand is, and I know this statement will come as a shock to you, an enigma. On the one hand, he is a devout skeptic and evangelist for the scientific method. On the other hand he has a closet full of proof that the supernatural is not only real, but that it is deadly. And when asked about his inability to disprove these occult occurrences, his reply is always the same: he sticks his fingers in his ears, squeezes his eyes shut, holds his breath until his face turns red, and then screams “apophenia” at the top of his lungs. When asked about his less-than-professional response, Dr. Strand asks which one of us has his PhD, and which one of us has to continually explain what a “podcast” is to everyone she meets.

Alex Reagan: Hi Charlie! I just wanted to apologize again for tearing open old wounds that had just barely begun to heal, and for thrusting you unsuspecting into the public limelight!

Charlie Strand: No worries Alex! It turns out that having my name and location revealed to a bunch of conspiracy nuts who believe that my dad murdered my mom in a fit of satanic rage is a great story to tell when you’re picking up guys!

Alex Reagan: I bet it is! So I’d like to ask about your relationship with your father, and why you ran away from home?

Charlie Strand: Well it certainly wasn’t because he murdered my mother, and it especially wasn’t because he made some dark pact with an evil entity in order to find her, only to be denied because the boon he offered was too small and the demon he contacted demanded my eternal soul as payment!

Alex Reagan: Speaking of demons …

Charlie Strand: Oh hey look at the time I have to run off now with this mysterious voice mumbling in the background, but don’t worry it’s totally not an agent of some vast occult conspiracy who has infiltrated my life in order to gain an advantage over their keenest adversary, who just happens to be my father! Tootles!

Alex Reagan: Hey, did your mother ever talk about someone named “Warren?”

Charlie Strand: Sorry, I’ve got to make it to the darkling grove before moonrise! I mean get to the pharmacy before it closes! Bye!

Alex Reagan: My work with Richard Strand has made me believe that investigating the supernatural from a skeptics viewpoint is wholly unsatisfying, leaving no room for wonder or mystery, and therefore I have decided, as a service to the listeners, to throw objectivity to the wind and go full Mulder on this bitch.

Alex Reagan: Don’t you find it odd that nobody knows who kidnapped Sebastian Torres, or why, or what happened to him in the woods? Don’t you think it’s frustrating that all of our research and investigation has come up empty handed?

Richard Strand: Alex, I have a PhD in comparative religion and English literature, and I run a foundation dedicated to proving that flashlights turning on and off isn’t proof that the immortal soul exists and that demons are real. I am perhaps the least employable man in the entire West coast, and I am certainly not qualified to investigate a kidnapping that has flummoxed the local authorities, the California state police, and the FBI.

Alex Reagan: But what about all of the creepy photographs and ominous sigils and portentive signs?

Richard Strand: Alex, are you really suggesting that a child’s scribblings on a closet wall and the fact that the bars in a window cast the shadow of a cross on a cabin are proof that a family has been stalked for decades by a mysterious, shadowy figure so that it could take their son and perform some dark ritual in the woods?

Alex Reagan: Exactly!

Richard Strand (via text message): Bertrand Russell: Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities

Alex Reagan (via text message): new phone who dis?

Richard Strand: In today’s Black Tape, I have a video recording of a Ouija board experiment. For the most part, this is a clear demonstration of the ideomotor effect, wherein focused concentration causes muscular contraction without conscious effort.

But, and this is interesting, you can see in the middle of the tape that the man carrying out the experiment is lying to the participants. When they are blindfolded, and thus unable to move the planchette even subconsciously, he tells them that the board is spelling out answers, even when it is not.

But the really interesting thing happens in the last section of the tape, when a board that was carved from a tree planted over the grave of a child murderer, which was struck by lightning and cut down on All Hallow’s Eve, fashioned with tools hewn from stone that has never seen the light of the sun, and stained red with the blood of thirteen dead men, is used:

Professor McCreepy: Simon, Simon, are you there?

Simon (via Ouija board): NO

Professor McCreepy: All right Simon, can you tell us when you were born?

Simon (via Ouija board): MURDER DEATH KILL MURDER DEATH KILL MUDER DEATH KILL

Professor McCreepy: All right, and how about when you died? Can you tell us when you left us?

Simon (via Ouija board): REDRUM REDRUM REDRUM

Professor McCreepy: Excellent, and do you have a message for us today? Some wisdom you’d like to impart?

Simon (via Ouija board): THE END OF ALL THINGS IS UPON US. YOUR SOULS SHALL SUFFER HORRORS UNIMAGINABLE AS THE WRATH OF THE FALLEN IS POURED OUT UPON THE EARTH. THE SEAS WILL BOIL AND THE STARS WILL FALL, AND MAN WILL BEG FOR DEATH BUT DEATH WILL BE DENIED. TREMBLE MORTAL, FOR YOUR DOOM IS AT HAND. WEEP, FOR MERCY SHALL FLEE THEE, AND MISERY SHALL BE THINE ONLY COMPANION.

Professor McCreepy: Great, great, and do you have any requests, any business that needs to be completed before your soul may rest?

Simon (via Ouija board): CLEAR MY BROWSER HISTORY.

Alex Reagan: The man who conducted this experiment was Dr. Isiah Roth, but since he died a few years ago I decided to track down and harass his assistant, Dr. Peter Sodenfeld. Dr. Sodenfeld wasn’t in the room that day, but he was able to provide me with wild speculation and a great deal of conjecture.

Peter Sodenfeld: Thanks for calling, Alex, it’s been real lonely up here since I was banned from the University for trying to grant people psychic powers via targeted electrical shock. Anyway, the coolest part of our experiment with demon-summoning boards, er, I mean the ideomotor effect, was when the power went out, the emergency lights came on, and Dr. Roth saw a large, shadowy figure, part man and part goat, looming in the corner, staring down like some kind of infernal emperor, the sullen glow in its eyes a dim reflection of the tormenting fires of hell.

Alex Reagan: Oh my god that’s incredible! What do you think that figure was?

Peter Sodenfeld: Well, if I had to make a guess I’d say it was a “trick of the light” or a “result of Isiah Roth’s brain tumor pressing up against his ocular cortex,” but it certainly wasn’t a physical manifestation of a child-stealing nightmare unleashed by our careless use of a blood-stained occult relic, I can tell you that much!

Alex Reagan: After several phone calls, three of which required me to impersonate a police officer, I tracked down the owner of the demon board used in Dr. Roth’s experiment, Devon Williams.

Devon Williams: And this is the Revelator, and this is the Graveyard Gabber, and this is the Forbidden Oracle of Profane Knowledge, and this board was carved from a hangman’s tree, and this planchette was assembled from the hand bones of an apostate priest, and this one …

Alex Reagan: He’s really into Ouija boards.

Alex Reagan: Hey, so I was looking into a demon board that was crafted by a dark conjurer driven mad by the evil revelations offered him by the spirits he contacted, which may or may not have been the key necessary to free a particular spirit from it’s unholy prison, a spirit which will call forth an army of hell’s minions and lead them in the final war against all that is good and pure. Sound familiar?

Devon Williams: Oh yeah, the Pzuzu board! I keep that in my study, next to my complete collection of Playboy Magazine and my growing collection of ritual daggers, each of which has been used in a verified Satanic sacrifice.

Alex Reagan: Excellent! And just for giggles, can we unite the demon board and its planchette and allow the foul demon Pzuzu to speak his unutterable blasphemies to us?

Devon Williams: Absolutely.

Alex Reagan: :-D

Devon Williams: Not.

Alex Reagan: D-:

Alex Reagan: Hi Dr. Strand! I took a bunch of pictures of the demon board from the video, and I discovered that it’s dedicated to the Babylonian king of demons, and decorated with the same pentagram within two concentric circles and scrawled with the same demonic numerology as the cabin they found Sebastian Torres in!

Richard Strand: Could you email me those photos, Alex? Purely to aid in my debunking of this phenomena, of course, and not because this unimaginable coincidence has shaken my faith in truth and light.

Alex Reagan: Sure! It’s carlsaganlover69@yahoo.com right?

Richard Strand: Exactly.

Alex Reagan: Hi Michelle! Thanks for agreeing to this interview. Can you please tell me what happened when you participated in Dr. Roth’s Ouija board experiment?

Michelle Braid: Sure Alex! Well the first day was kind of boring. We were just using some old game board that came out of a cardboard box, and a little plastic pointer thing. We moved the pointer to YES and NO to answer questions, but as soon as we put the blindfolds on, our answers stopped making any sense.

Alex Reagan: And on the second day?

Michelle Braid: Yeah, on the second day Dr. Roth gave us this board that seemed to whisper quiet sacrileges in a voice like burning glass, and touching it made us all go cold, as if we had been lowered into our own graves while still alive, and it seemed as if the room was spinning and the walls were bleeding, and when I yanked off my blindfold I was confronted with the visage of some unimaginable thing dredged up from the deepest pits of hell, a part-man, part-animal abomination covered in greasy black hair and smiling with teeth that glinted like knives.

Alex Reagan: Okay, interesting, and how did that affect you?

Michelle Braid: Well I talked to Dr. Roth about it after, and he explained that prolonged use of a blindfold had lowered me into a self-hypnotic state, and that my experience was simply the result of my powerful imagination and in no way evidence that someone was using University students as fodder for an apocalyptic plan to unleash the armies of shadow upon an innocent, undefended world.

Alex Reagan: Right, right, and the part where the blindfolded group spelled out the fifty names of Marduk, the Terrible, the Master of Magicians and Knower of All Things, Wielder of the Flaming Sword, Holder of the Secret Things, He Who Shall Raise the Dead, the Lord of Baleful Magicks, et cetera, et cetera? Were you coached on that, or did it just sorta happen by itself?

Michelle Braid: Hey, I think my laundry is calling gotta go nice talking to you bye bye now!

Richard Strand: So I’ve done some research into the Demon Board you found. It turns out that it’s an original created by Anton Divaldi, a pseudonym for Carson Mordecai who, along with Alan Cardic, was one of the fathers of modern spiritism. Divaldi essentially invented what we now know as a talking board, but became angry when he saw his invention used as parlor entertainment.

Alex Reagan: How did he respond?

Richard Strand: His plan was to make talking boards more esoteric, mostly by spreading rumors about the bloodletting, human sacrifice, and dark rituals used in the construction of his boards. The church of course banned these devices, after what they referred to as the “great demonic manifestation of 1987,” in which they claim that the skies turned to fire, the moon and seas to blood, and the voices of the inconsolable damned cried out, warning all who would listen to turn from their godless ways.

Alex Reagan: And you think all of this was …?

Richard Strand: Really good marketing. PNWS Boom

Alex Reagan: Hey Richard? I was looking at this tape again, and when Michelle Braid is using the Ouija board, it looks almost like something brushes her hair off her shoulder.

Richard Strand: Oh yeah, that’s actually why this is a Black Tape. I did an extensive study on the air currents created by the heating and cooling system in that room, correlated with how the movements of the study participants and confounded by either an open or closed door, but I cannot figure out exactly how the wind could have done that to her few strands of hair.

Alex Reagan: Wait. So we have an occult item designed to communicate with the denizens of hell, constructed from cursed wood and desecrated in a profane ritual, clear, video evidence that this board was actually used to contact a malevolent entity, and an eyewitness account of a manifestation of the demon Pzuzu, and this is in you “unsolved” collection because someone’s hair moved?

Richard Strand: Of course, Alex. Hair doesn’t simply move … by itself. PNWS Boom

Alex Reagan: Join us next time, when I back Dr. Strand into a corner and refuse to let him leave until he shares with me the haunted emotional trauma caused by listening to a recently-discovered audio recording of his long-dead wife, and I blow the lid off of the disappearance of Coralee Strand using a suite of rumor, innuendo, and other fabrications that would in no way be considered evidence in a court of law. It’s the Black Tapes Podcast, and we’ll be back in two weeks.