The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Episode 103 - The Unsound

June 2, 2015·38 min·3 clips

Richard Strand explains why he's sharing his black tapes: to be the voice of reason in a culture he thinks is infantilized by the paranormal.

A recording turns into the case. Alex is still orbiting the Strand Institute when the unsound arrives, a noise wrapped in urban legend and handled with caution. Strand answers like Strand: curt, skeptical, and tired of the premise before the evidence has finished making its case. The sound does not go away cleanly. An analyst says it behaves like a low-frequency wave, the kind people are not supposed to hear. Then the pattern gets stranger. The plotted waves shrink and expand with a precision that points toward machinery, yet the expert keeps leaning toward something organic. Alex asks the plain questions. A generator, a synthesizer, some manufactured source would make more sense, but the answers will not settle there. The expert thinks voice. Not with certainty, and not with drama, but enough to push the case past easy debunking. Strand does not convert. His skepticism works like a hard filter, scraping off the romance before facts can turn into folklore. Alex changes lenses anyway. She visits Francis Dreiser, a demonologist at Pacific Christian Academy in southeast Washington state, who treats hell less like spooky scenery and more like a theological location problem. If the universe is God's creation, then hell needs an explanation: separation, access, borders between realms. The episode gives belief room to talk. It also lets disbelief answer, dryly, without handing either side a verdict. Then Travis Collingwood returns through absence. Strand says Collingwood left when his contract ran out. Alex adds that he died four months later after being hit by a cyclist and thrown into a bus. The pattern still will not complete itself. What remains is not proof of hell, just the feeling that sound, belief, and coincidence are lining up a little too neatly.

As heard by us

A measured, eerie turn that treats a strange signal like a real threat.

The Black Tapes settles into a journalist-led ghost story that keeps analysis close to dread. The unsound starts as a low frequency wave, then shifts into something that might be a human voice, and Francis Dreiser's portal-to-hell theology gives it a colder edge by rooting the…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a signal, a skeptic, and a demonologist all in one hour, start here.

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