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

SEVERED

·25 min·2 clips

The AI guide encounters an entity so overwhelming it destroys simply by existing, forcing it to purge its own memories.

The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality is an immersive audio fiction podcast in which an audio tour guide leads museum visitors through strange and surreal exhibits. This episode takes an unusual format: the tour guide is not inside the museum but has crossed through a Glassway — one of several portals in the museum's collection — into an otherworldly space and is documenting what it finds for museum records. The guide is accompanied by a traveller and something described as a large beast that is following the curator's scent. The landscape consists of colossal trees giving way to oversized toadstools roughly 10 metres tall, with trees thinning as they proceed further into the toadstool patch. Small animal life is present. In a moment of delight, the traveller spots a jackalope — a rabbit with antlers — and the guide notes that in the human world, jackalopes are faked taxidermy, but here they are real. The guide speculates that some of the taxidermied jackalopes on Earth may actually be real specimens that crossed from this world. The frame narrative situates this expedition in the context of Glassway 419's particular history. Unlike every other glassway in the museum — where people who crossed during a lockdown event were returned alive and well, or if they died were returned intact — those who crossed Glassway 419 were returned in body alone, catatonic and unreachable, their minds apparently lost. The guide is investigating what is on the other side of this anomalous glassway and why it claims minds rather than lives. The episode is structured as both an expedition document and a story told en route to whoever the traveller is.

As heard by us

A museum tour that slides from deadpan instructions into quiet cosmic unease.

This episode turns the museum tour into a precise, unsettling exercise in procedure: the guide lays out the rules, then the retrieval recording carries the listener through the Glassway into a place where traction, distance, and orientation stop behaving normally.

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Why you'd press play

You want a museum guide who sounds calm while the void begins paying attention.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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