Terror in the Shadows vol. 18: Terror in the Shadows Anthology

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

“Situated deep in this lush and peaceful forest, far away from civilized society, the Plumstone Asylum, home for the criminally insane, harbors a dark secret. Many dark secrets, actually,” I intone, my voice sober. “Over its 113-year history, Plumstone has endured dozens of deaths—some of them natural, many others unexplained.”

The debris crunches beneath my boots as I walk from position 1 to stand beside the hole in the wall that once served as the front doors to the asylum. The doors though, have long been broken out, leaving the doorway standing open like a mouth missing teeth.

“Opened in 1874, Plumstone operated continuously until 1987, making it one of the oldest working mental asylums in the country when it closed,” I recite from the script we’ve worked up. “Despite its closure, Plumstone has continued to be occupied by the spirits of former residents. And tonight, on Ghost Stalkers, we will dig deep until we find proof that although Plumstone closed its doors more than thirty years ago, it hasn’t stopped housing the insane.”

“And cut!” JC calls then switches the camera off and grins at me. “That was the take. Nice work.”

“Thanks. That one felt right,” I reply.

We step into the main lobby of the former asylum, and Peter flips the switch on the generator, powering up all the equipment in our makeshift control room. A six-foot banquet table is set up with three computer monitors stationed side by side. Each monitor has a quad-screen split of the stationary cameras we’ve set up at hotspots within the asylum earlier and will be recording everything.

The lobby of the building is cavernous, and everything of any value—real or perceived—has already been stripped out. The front windows have all been shattered; the tiles and concrete that remain are broken and pitted. The plants and trees that surround this place have begun to aggressively reforest this building. Another decade like this, and Plumstone is going to be as much of a forest inside as the one that’s all around it.

“Dude, this is going to be epic,” Ben says, his voice tinged with excitement. “I’ve been wanting to do Plumstone forever. I’m so stoked.”

Plumstone is the largest building we’ve investigated to this point. Ordinarily, we do smaller sites and investigate in teams of two—two hours inside for each team, with one remaining on the control table. But because Plumstone is so vast, it’s all hands on deck. We’re all investigating different areas inside at one time, and the control table will be left to record on its own.

We don’t like the idea of the control table being unattended, but it’s our biggest show yet, and there’s a lot of ground to cover, so we’ll do what we must. It’s not how we usually roll, but I’m excited to get this started. I think we’re going to give our viewers something special here.

“We had 160,000 views on our last broadcast,” I say. “I want to double that with this one.”

Peter whistles low. “Ambitious.”

“I think we can get there,” I say. “We just need to give them something they haven’t seen before.”

“Don’t worry,” Klay says. “We’re going to do just that, man.”

I look at our small group—JC, Klay, Amy, Peter, Ben, and me—and smile to myself. We’ve all met in high school and bonded over a mutual love for the paranormal. On Friday nights we all gather at one of our houses and spend the night watching then critiquing the various shows. We point out the obvious fake scenes, overly dramatized situations, and made-for-TV ratings grab garbage.

After high school, we’ve stopped criticizing and decided to make our own show. We’ve learned that the Internet makes it easy to put together your own program and blast it out to the world. Whether you make it or not is up to the people rather than some stuffed suits sitting in a boardroom who do nothing but look at charts and graphs full of numbers. That people-powered viewership allows us to do things the right way. The honest way. And conversely, it tells us what they don’t like—things we can improve on.

It was slow going at first; I’m not going to lie. And our production quality wasn’t that great. But over the last year and a half or so, as we’ve polished our act and have gotten better equipment, we’ve improved our show a hundredfold. And we’ve seen the people responding to it. We may not make it into a network, but thanks to the power of the Internet, we don’t have to.

I think what makes our show unique is that we do things the right way. When we started Ghost Stalkers, we wanted to give our viewers a fully transparent look at ghost hunting. We wanted our show to be honest—no fake jump scares, no pretending to hear something just to hype up the drama. We’ve decided we don’t want to do any of that melodramatic junk.

It is a gamble because people want to be entertained every single minute, and let’s be honest, when nothing’s happening, a ghost hunt can be boring as hell. But looking at our numbers and feedback right now, it seems to be a gamble that’s paying off. Sometimes we find things, and sometimes we don’t.