Tape A

February 23, 2021·33 min·3 clips

A man on the tape is chased through the woods by a screaming, humanoid creature made of bark.

The first tape arrives with a format. Jack says strange cassettes have been mailed to her since she was a kid, and Lina frames the show as an investigation that is not promising tidy answers. Nobody sounds sure yet, which is the right kind of uneasy. The setup matters because both women keep returning to format, theories, and the limits of what they can honestly claim about the tapes. Then the recording shoves all of that aside. The narrator is already running, hearing grunts above and behind them while something breaks through branches and gains ground. The road becomes the whole plan. That strip of pavement feels like a rule, maybe a border, maybe the only thing between the narrator and whatever is coming. Then they fall. The leap turns into a hard tumble, and the narrator curls up waiting for impact because the thing behind them does not seem built to miss. But nothing hits. Farther down the road than expected, the figure has stopped at the shadowed edge of the woods, as if the light itself is holding it there. The reveal stays rough and ugly. No clean monster pose, just a hazy look at a massive sick body, with dark growths that make it seem partly made of bark. That is the image that sticks. The narrator reaches for an old memory of a magazine article about a man called the Tree Man, because a normal comparison is the only tool left. Then it screams. The sound is wrong, not the low animal roar the scene seems to set up, and the tape hangs there in a way the frame cannot explain. Lina wants structure again. Jack asks for room to think before the format hardens, and they close by asking listeners to send questions for a later breakdown.

As heard by us

A tape-case mystery that turns a simple chase into something close, sick, and hard to shake.

Tapes From Beyond opens with Jack and Lina trying to make sense of the mysterious cassette tapes Jack has been getting since childhood, and Tape A turns that setup into a tight chase through the woods.

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Why you'd press play

A childhood-tape mystery that opens with a first-episode setup and turns a woods chase into a brutal scream.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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