Kaidankai: Ghost, Supernatural, and Dark Short Fiction · Linda Gould

The Faces in Morgan Alley by Rick Kennett

November 5, 2025·31 min·2 clips

A student filmmaker's phone video captures ghostly figures reenacting a 1922 murder in Morgan Alley.

1. Kaidankai host Linda Gould presents The Faces in Morgan Alley, a ghost story by Melbourne author Rick Kennett, set around a real 1922 murder in a Melbourne city laneway. 2. Rick Kennett is described as a lifelong Melbourne resident, retired after 42 years in the transport industry, whose stories have appeared in magazines, anthologies, and podcasts. 3. The episode's premise is that a student filmmaker accidentally captures ghostly images of the historical murder he is trying to recreate for a student film project. 4. The story opens with an intercut third-person scene describing a hangman and his assistant calibrating chain lengths and stretching a rope for an execution — the scene's identity is withheld until the story's end. 5. Moss, the student director, is shooting a recreation of the 1922 Morgan Alley murder in Melbourne, using his friends Owen and Nat as actors playing Josh Branick and victim Ginny Lee. 6. The historical account: Josh Branick, a draper's shopkeeper, hid in Morgan Alley on the morning of November 12, 1922 and attacked Ginny Lee, his employee, in a jealous rage after seeing her dolled up, suspecting she had been with another man. 7. Branick was convicted partly on a cellmate's hearsay confession, which Owen immediately identifies as legally unreliable; Moss notes the judge accepted it regardless. 8. After the shoot, Moss notices something wrong in the footage and asks Owen and Nat to describe what they see on his phone screen: two blurred figures at the alley entrance, resolving into a man in a striped blazer and a woman in a green dress, struggling — neither of whom was there during filming. 9. Owen narrates the footage in real time, then flinches back when the man in the striped blazer strikes the woman in the face; the word 'shit' escapes him involuntarily. 10. The cafe waitress, when Moss pays, volunteers that Nat's dress is the wrong color — Ginny Lee wears green, not gray-blue — and confirms that the ghost still walks the alley. 11. Moss, disregarding Owen's concern that the situation has become 'weird and dangerous,' walks to the alley entrance and begins calling out 'Ginny Lee!' while filming with his phone. 12. A rapid slideshow of the stills Moss captures animates Ginny Lee's ghost — flickering in distress, stepping forward, face filling the screen in grief — before Branick's ghost appears behind her. 13. Branick's ghost turns to face the camera, grins with a 'lustful leer' from a 'scratched face,' and thrusts his hand through the phone screen, causing pain to all three students and burning out the device. 14. The phone smells of burning, its screen cracks into a cobweb of lines, and Moss discards it in a nearby bin; all three students experience temporary loss of vision that clears after the waitress touches them. 15. Nat makes the key observation: a shopkeeper opening his draper's on a Sunday morning would not wear a striped blazer, straw boater, and bow tie — but a man attending a Saturday-night gala event would. 16. Owen suggests the argument between Branick and Ginny was about sex, implying they had attended the same gala and their confrontation arose from an intimacy that the standard historical record omitted. 17. The story closes with the intercut execution scene completing: the hangman escorts Branick to the gallows, and walking behind the procession is the ghost of Ginny Lee in green, arms raised, sobbing 'No.' 18. Linda Gould's closing commentary reflects on the injustice of how Branick's case was prosecuted — noting that a 'foreign-sounding name' and apparent oddness made him easy to convict — and on how frequently women's lives are endangered by a partner's jealousy. 19. The story's tone is controlled and literary, intercutting the supernatural student-film plot with the clinical execution-day procedural in a way that only resolves fully in the final paragraph. 20. Best for listeners who enjoy literary ghost stories grounded in real history and crime, particularly stories that use a supernatural lens to reexamine questions of justice and testimony.

As heard by us

A murder story where the evidence never quite settles.

A student filmmaker sets out to document a historic murder, and the story slowly circles the feeling that some people in it never really leave. By moving between old records and present-day inquiry, it offers a local, measured account of a case that still hangs over Morgan Alley.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play for a murder story that turns records, faces, and alleys into a slow haunting.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Kaidankai: Ghost, Supernatural, and Dark Short Fiction