The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Episode 105 - The Devil You Know

June 16, 2015·36 min·3 clips

Brayden Court accuses Richard Strand of murdering his fiancée, Coralie.

A girl is held down. The tape puts 12-year-old Jessica Weldon on a bed, restrained by four huge men while two priests pray over her in Latin. Alex walks through what is happening in the room, and then the phone messages start again. Someone says Strand is lying. Alex cannot brush it off like the usual anger around his skepticism. Nick hates the meeting but goes anyway, wary enough to frisk the source before Alex sits down with him in a crowded coffee shop. The man is Brayden Court. He says he was going to marry Coralie before she met Strand, and he keeps the accusation simple: Strand cannot be trusted. Alex pushes for proof of what Strand might have done, but Brayden mostly sounds like a man still carrying the wound around Coralie. That is where the hour gets colder. Near the end, the tape seems to hold Coralie's voice years after she vanished, plus loose questions about Warren and another man on the recording. The case goes back to 1997. If Alex and Nick are hearing it right, they have something police and Strand never heard in context. So they decide Strand has to hear it too, even as the episode keeps asking whether he can be neutral about any of this. Nothing lands neatly. The exorcism, the calls, and Coralie's voice leave Alex with evidence that matters before anyone knows what it means.

As heard by us

An exorcism recording, a strange phone message, and a missing-wife thread keep the tension steady.

The Black Tapes episode draws its unease from a tight mix of an exorcism recording, a strange phone message, and the thread around a missing wife.

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Why you'd press play

When a missing-wife tape starts circling back to Strand.

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