The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Episode 106 - The Devil's Door

June 23, 2015·40 min·3 clips

Simon Reese explains how doors work and implies he can be in two places at once.

Alex Regan opens with static. Richard Strand finally returns one of eleven calls, calls the podcast harassment, then disappears again right when she could use his certainty. The case waiting for her is worse. It leads to Simon Reese, an eleven-year-old accused of killing his parents in a scene Barnes says was covered in blood. One detail keeps sticking. The Legal Justice Society points out that Simon had no blood on him, which leaves the obvious question: how could a child do those stabbings and leave himself clean? The answer is practical, ugly, and not comforting. Alex goes to Idaho, less because it solves anything than because the file has pushed her there. Three Rivers takes every kind of patient. Fred Barnes, the administrator and psychiatrist, says the hospital is used to hard diagnoses, but Simon still unsettled them. The labels keep shifting: dissociative personality disorder, personality decomposition, schizoid personality disorder, borderline traits, narcissistic personality disorder, possible dissociative amnesia. At some point, certainty starts to sound like another symptom. Barnes says Simon eventually talked about the murders and confessed, but guilt is not why he brought Alex in. He wants the goings-on looked at. The episode keeps that wording plain, letting clinical language rub against the paranormal without letting either side win. Then Barnes shows Alex Trent's room: a camera, a cleaned-off drawing, and a patient who says he does not know how the mark appeared. By the end, Detective Collins calls for Strand. Sebastian Torres, the child from the imaginary-friend case, is missing, and the story snaps back toward Northern California.

As heard by us

A hospital case turns paranormal certainty into a colder kind of doubt.

This installment keeps its focus on the Strand Institute and Dr. Richard Strand, with demons and a psychiatric hospital pressed together in a way that never feels clean or settled.

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Why you'd press play

You want a demon story with psychiatric-hospital corridors, taped calls, and a Los Gatos case that keeps widening.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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