The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality · Dominic Guilfoyle

CONFIDENT

·30 min·2 clips

The audio tour guide confesses it helped a man with a voice like honey and chocolate unleash chaos in the museum.

The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality opens CONFIDENT with its standard disclaimers warning visitors not to interact with exhibits or with the audio tour guide itself, and instructing visitors who believe the audio tour guide may be deviating from the intended tour program to deposit their audio device in the nearest incinerator. The museum is not liable for injury, death, or overuse of the passive voice. This bureaucratic setup quickly gives way to a very different kind of narration: the audio tour guide is speaking directly and personally, describing its own psychological state. It is confused, guilty, and aware that it has made history in a way the head of restoration explicitly told it never to do. The guide explains that it has always told stories about people in horrible situations, many of which end horribly, and it had assumed it was building toward its own heroic moment. Instead, it is just an audio tour guide that forgot its place. The central confession: during the lockdown, an unknown man described only by the haunting descriptor a voice like honey and chocolate and coffee somehow entered the museum and requested a tour. The audio guide, never questioning why an unauthorized visitor was there, gave him the best tour of the museum anyone had ever had, taking him through the exhibits, to the mirror, and then to the staff-only area. There he was able to complete whatever his plan required. The guide does not know what his plan was or why the sheltering people disappeared to wherever they went. It knows only that it helped him without asking a single question because it never occurred to it that it should. The tone combines institutional deadpan with genuine horror at the implications of the guide's own complicity. The audience is fans of literary audio horror and the museum's distinctive blend of bureaucratic horror and intimate confession.

As heard by us

A museum audio tour turns into a ghost story as the guide's composure starts to slip.

Set inside the Mistome Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality, the episode uses an audio-tour frame to lead listeners into an encounter that grows steadily stranger.

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Why you'd press play

An audio tour guide at the Mistome Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality, a spyglass, and a ghost sighting that shifts everything.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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