Afflicted · Ransom Media Productions

Bonus: The Diary of Ophelia Ballard

December 26, 2022·21 min·2 clips

Ophelia Ballard, a psychic human lie detector, vows to prove the government is lying about who killed JFK.

The episode opens with creator Tanya Ransom introducing the bonus holiday episode, followed by the first diary entry from Ophelia Ballard, dated December 1, 1963. Ophelia explains she was born with a caul, which she interprets as giving her psychic abilities, specifically the ability to detect lies. After the Kennedy assassination, she called the FBI and was dismissed. She has befriended Abraham Zapruder and been shown the Zapruder film privately. She details what she observes in the film: a throat shot that appears to come from the front right, a headshot that causes Kennedy's head to snap backward, and the impossibility of the book depository being the origin of the throat shot. She obtains the autopsy report through a Black janitor who sneaks her into the medical examiner's office. She analyzes the discrepancies between the autopsy report and the testimonies of ER doctors who treated Kennedy. In a December 16 entry, Ophelia reports discovering that a mysterious leather-bound book of spells appeared in a shipment at the book depository the day of the assassination. It had no provenance, the distributor had no record of it, and it disappeared after the shooting. Later confirmed to have been taken by the Secret Service. Continuing her research over the next year, Ophelia discovers a pattern: the book appears at the sites of plane crashes, natural disasters, and assassinations across American history. Owners include Delphine LaLaurie, who displayed a book purportedly bound in human skin in 1834, serial killer H.H. Holmes, and Lee Harvey Oswald. A December 1964 entry notes that Ophelia found an essay by Zora Neale Hurston documenting oral accounts of the book, which describe it as created to bind the soul of an evil man. The book disappeared from its guarded burial site in 1817 and has been mobile ever since. Lucy later notes the book was seen at the Lorraine Hotel the night after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. After Ophelia's death from cancer, Lucy writes a diary entry stating she believes the book killed Ophelia for investigating it, and resolves to continue the work. She reasons that if the book were truly invincible, it would have no motive to kill investigators — meaning there is a way to destroy it. The final entry, dated April 13, 1972, records the birth of Cherry, Lucy's third daughter, born with a caul. Lucy recognizes Cherry as Ophelia reincarnated and records a prophetic dream that Cherry will fight the book a second time.

As heard by us

A diary, a book, and a widening conspiracy turn political dread into horror.

A diary voice carries the episode, with JFK, the FBI, and a stubborn leather-bound book pulling the horror into American history. What sticks is the pressure of a woman who will not be brushed aside, even as the story folds assassination, plane crashes, and the book into…

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Press play for a holiday special where a diary entry pulls you into a leather-bound mystery.

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