Unlicensed S2 E2: "Magnetic Fields"

November 4, 2024·36 min·3 clips

Shelby explains that real hauntings happen not at gothic houses but at seminaries, group homes, and plantations—because shame, secrets, and injustice are what make ghosts.

The ELMO is broken. Shelby and Benjamin are down in the dirt with a black PVC pipe, an antenna, and some lights, trying to make their ghost-hunting instrument read electromagnetic radiation. Jamie waits nearby while the narrator attempts sympathy, then tries honesty. She tells him she is a detective, though not the sort he expected. That word matters to him for a second. Detective sounds like order. It sounds like someone might treat his friend's death as something worth looking at. Then she keeps explaining, and the title starts falling apart. She is not with the police. She is not quite private. She is more like a concerned citizen who sometimes gets paid to be nosy. She can hear how weak it sounds as she says it. Each clarification makes Jamie look a little less sure of what he is seeing. Still, he listens. Lou is obsessed with ghost-hunting. A girl disappeared here. The motives around that disappearance may connect to a case, or may not. Jamie stays confused, but confusion is better than the silence he has been given. The cops let him down. He expected questions, lab work, forensic care, anything that looked like effort. Instead, nothing. So when this unofficial investigator shows up with busted equipment and a story that barely holds together, he asks if he can help. The scene stays dry and uncomfortable. Its dread comes from the space between ghost gear and plain neglect, where a grieving person does not want spectacle. He wants someone to try. Even the ELMO feels shaky and homemade, but somehow it still feels more responsive than the authorities.

As heard by us

A deadpan noir mystery where ghost-hunting and loss keep colliding.

The episode follows an unlicensed private investigator with a loose grip on his own story as he drifts into a case shaped by ghost-hunting gear, police frustration, and the uneasy sincerity that comes with trying to help after a friend dies.

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Why you'd press play

You want a noir case where the ghost-hunting gear steals the scene.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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