Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What psychic experiences shaped the narrator's perspective?
I had my first psychic experience when I was three years old.
What if I told you that the rest of my life up until this point has been a dance with the other side? The strange thing isn't that the impossible happens. It's that we keep pretending it doesn't. The ether. Spirit. The fifth element. the connective tissue of our universe. What if the calls from the silence, the echoes of the abyss, are meant to bring us closer?
Join me, your host, Nick, as I explore real accounts from my own life, and with a guest, uncover what it means to give form to the formless. The Ether, premiering on SpectraVision Radio August 13th. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
My name is William Royden. In October of 2005, I was checking the local paper for job listings, looking to make a few extra dollars with my video camera between wedding gigs, when I came across an ad from a man looking for a videographer for a day. He was offering $500 to anyone with a high-quality camera who was willing to sign a confidentiality agreement about the job.
I sent an email explaining why I was suitable for this task, and two days later I got a response. I was to meet this man, who said his name was Forsh Cording, in the town of Robinsong, Virginia, where I was born and lived until I was 12 years old. I returned there from my home in Annapolis two or three times a year to visit my grandfather.
According to Cording's deal, I would be paid in cash and I would be asked to turn over the tapes I had made at the end of the day, never speaking of them again. Before the day I met Cording, he asked me to call him so he could explain what we would be shooting. The footage he needed to acquire was for a personal research project about the area.
Mostly what he wanted to know on the phone was my history with the town of Robinsong. And if I had been aware growing up of just how many unexplained crimes and disappearances there had been in the town, I truly was not. He told me I might think of it very differently after the 9th of October. I didn't understand what he meant, but I said I didn't think it would be a problem.
When I got off the phone, I looked up the name Forsh Cording online. I could find out very little about my employer. Other than that, he had apparently been a professor in the Ancient Studies Department at the University of Toronto within the past five years. His name also came up in vague relation to something called the Projet du Meridional.
This was mentioned on three different academic sites having to do with the study of anthropology. The phrase came up a fourth time on a dubious-looking site dealing with the paranormal.
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Chapter 2: What unusual job offer did the narrator receive in Robinsong?
The sounds of the breeze and faraway traffic were still there, but something else was on the audio track too. It was completely clear. It was the voice of an old woman singing what sounded to me like a sad folk song in a thick African dialect. She sang weakly and faintly. It sounded like she was standing only about 10 feet away from the microphone. This went on for almost 60 seconds.
I was baffled. I'd heard nothing as I was recording and there had certainly been no one around us. When the camera panned, the voice was heard more faintly, suggesting the singer was standing very close to Cording and was briefly abandoned by the unidirectional microphone.
On the video screen, I could see Cording turn his head slightly in the middle of the song when there was an unusually long pause between words. He didn't seem surprised as he watched the tape. He told me to start recording again from that point, and we moved on.
I wanted to play the tape again and again to figure out just what had happened, but it was obvious that recording had not come here to entertain my questions. In Robin's song, there is a small muddy creek called Rachel's Arm that flows out of the Beloit River. Sometime around eleven I followed a courting along its bank.
The drizzle had stopped completely, and the sky above us was thick with clouds but dry. He stopped near the creek's end point and turned to me. He appeared to be appraising me somehow, considering how to proceed with me. Then he began to speak. I suppose he suddenly felt the need to start to slowly explain things, but he gave me no background about himself or his task.
Instead, he told me a frightening story, one that I was already somewhat familiar with, but I didn't reveal this to him. He said that about 15 years ago, a couple of kids had been playing beside this creek when one of them noticed a hand sticking out of the water. When they pulled on it, a mannequin came out streaked with mud.
It was dressed clumsily in a suit, and its face was very carefully painted to look like someone specific right down to the brown eyes. The mannequin's pink plastic skin had been painted over from head to toe with a more realistic beige color. Clumps of human hair, real human hair, had been very carefully fastened
Inside the suit was a wallet, and it belonged to a psychiatrist who had gone missing the month before while on his way to see some relatives in Washington, D.C. His name was Steen. The face of the mannequin looked just like Steen did on the driver's license photo inside the wallet. The resemblance was uncanny.
The police had already talked to all of his patients since his disappearance and gone through his private notebooks looking for any clues about who might possibly have abducted him. But then they realized that the creek called Rachel's Arm was only about 500 yards away from the home of a patient of his who was named Irwin Settle.
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Chapter 3: What secrets about Robinsong does the narrator uncover?
But, quote, she got them first, unquote. Once again, he left me with questions I didn't feel ready to ask. I put a new tape into the camera and we moved on. My legs were getting tired. Cording never slowed his step. The day was unexpectedly divided in two after a bizarre incident. As we crossed through a small park off Lord Street, Cording suddenly stopped and swore angrily under his breath.
He was looking to the edge of the park, where a man was sitting slumped awkwardly against a bench, as if his body were completely broken. Cording started to walk toward him, and I followed. But he turned and told me to stay where I was. Cording went over to the man and crouched before him. I could tell he was speaking to him, but I couldn't hear anything.
The man was dressed only in torn sweatpants and an old Domino's Pizza t-shirt, and he wore nothing on his feet at all. He had pulled what looked like a white sheet around his neck for warmth. It bunched awkwardly around him and draped down almost to the ground. He moved only his head, turning it very, very slowly toward the sound of a courting voice.
He looked to be only in his twenties with long, unwashed hair. Cording spoke to him for almost five minutes. More and more I noticed how awfully pale the man's skin was, drained of all color, almost a light gray hue. When Cording stood and walked back towards me and the camera, leaving the man to sit undisturbed, he seemed furious. He said nothing to me as he passed me.
I got one last shot of the man on the bench and then kept up with Cording. The man's head was cocked back and he gazed at the sky. Cording went only as far as the closest bus stop. He said he had something to do. A bus came quickly and we got on board. Cording asked the driver if it went straight down Lawrence Street. I could have told him that it did.
This was the same bus, the A3, that I had taken home from school sometimes when I was growing up. We traveled about a mile and then got off the bus in a lower-income residential neighborhood called Glendon. We walked deep into it, past modular houses and a few trailer homes, until the road simply ran out. There was a small green house beside the dead end.
Its lawn was overgrown, and no one had yet made any attempt to rake the fall leaves out of it. Cording crossed the lawn quickly and strode up to the front door. He had obviously been there before. He moved so quickly that I almost had to trot to keep up. Cording banged on the front door.
At first there was no answer, so Cording began calling out loudly again and again for someone named Mr. Coakland. Eventually he got a response. We heard a weak, gravelly, drunk-sounding voice from behind the door. The man would not open it, though. Cording demanded that Mr. Coakland tell him why we had just seen his son in the park. The answer came back after a long pause. I don't know.
This upset Cording even more. He informed Mr. Coakland that his son was still, quote, holding the sheet you wrapped him in, end quote. He asked Coakland what he intended to do about it. Again, the answer came in a sad, tired voice. I don't know. Cording yelled at Coakland through the door, saying that this was absolutely the last time anything like this was going to happen.
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Chapter 4: What supernatural events occur during the filming process?
We were on Marquette Street. It was as if we had merely been displaced by a few hundred yards. It was twilight and we were both exhausted beyond words. Looking back, I saw the path was still there, waiting for us to return if we were insane enough to do it. At the Sam and Ma'am Diner, we sat and drank strong coffee as night came.
There in our booth in the corner, courting down cup after cup, he spoke for a full hour, telling me things I will never be able to forget. It all finally came out uninterrupted in a very calm monotone, as if he were delivering a lecture to a class of one. He told me of a ten-year-old girl who lived in Robinson 25 years ago.
and of the freakish twist of fate that had befallen her to turn her into something that was less than human. He told me how his mentor had traveled across the world to Robinsong in order to kill the girl and remove her horrible influence from the town. But over the past few years, Corning had come to doubt entirely that the task had truly been completed.
He believed that the girl named Gretchen Plauser had survived somehow and had been sheltered in Robinsong since that time by people who surely knew how destructive she was. Cording told me how every act of madness, every unnatural emergence, and every corruption of reality in Robinson was due to Clouser's presence, and how she had to be found at all costs.
He needed help from people he would not tell me about, but without documentation of her effects on the town, he would not get it. He told me not just about Gretchen Plauser and Robinson, but of two other small, unnoticed areas in this world where a similar sickness had descended over people who were unaware that anything was truly wrong.
It was obvious that Cording could not rest as long as these places continued to fester. I believe the only time Cording ever spent in the United States was spent in Robinson, two or three times a year if he had to. He was an old man with the body of someone in his thirties.
He reminded me to keep to the confidentiality agreement I had signed at the beginning of the day, and that was when I knew he might not be long for this world. If he was so deluded into thinking that I or anyone could possibly go to my grave without confessing the events of that day to a single person, his mind was not operating logically.
I wondered how many other people he had unwittingly brought into his secrets. I realized what I had to do to bring the night to an end. And so I did it. I used the payphone inside the restaurant to call my grandfather. When he answered, I concocted the most plausible lie I could to get him out of the house. I asked him to drive well outside of town to rescue me from car trouble.
Of course he offered to help me. When it was done, I went back to the table where Cording was waiting. He said, let's go. With night came temperatures in the 40s. We walked through the emptying streets and passed only a single person on the way to our destination, a young girl walking her dog. We stopped only once after that to buy a flashlight. Cording hadn't expected to be in town this late.
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Chapter 5: What chilling story does Cording share about a local crime?
It wasn't far to the commuter train station, which was unattended and dimly lit. I got onto a waiting train car with my return ticket and collapsed alone inside. Tears and sweat were pouring down my face. I was bleeding from dozens of small cuts, but I felt no pain. Blessedly, the train left almost immediately, taking me far away.
But just before it began to move, I caught sight of a solitary figure on the piled platform, a woman walking along very slowly and with seemingly no thought toward boarding the train. She was holding one arm as if injured. As the rear car I was in rolled slowly past her, I saw that she had long, straight black hair. I jerked my head away from the window before she could see me.
I spent the rest of that trip trying to bind my wounds with the sleeves I ripped from my shirt. I've tried several times to write down what I think I saw in that cellar, but the words always fail me. The tapes I shot that day have stayed in a bottom drawer, unwatched. Once I dialed Cording's phone number, but it had been disconnected. And I have not contacted my grandfather, not at all.
I've begun to subscribe to Robin Song's local newspaper. Every night before I go to bed, I scan it briefly to take note of the missing persons cases that spring up. And every other unusual occurrence that is written off as vandalism, weather damage, freak behavior from someone passing through from out of town, or isolated and forgettable incidents of violence.
Last week, the front page carried a story that riveted Robinson for several days. An independent film producer named Trent, who had not so long ago supervised the shooting of a horror movie in Robinson, and then moved into town with his family, stabbed his wife to death as she slept. The police found him sleeping naked in the woods. No motive for the killing could be gleaned.
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