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Case #8151920 - Statement of an anonymous man only referred to as ‘The Host’, regarding his experiences in an abandoned building in an undisclosed location.
Original statement given April 18, 2018.
Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Statement begins:
The Host had been on a walk through the forest, to clear his head. He had walked and walked, until he came to the realization that he didn’t know how far from home he’d gone. The Host knew he had been walking for hours.
He had come so far that he didn’t know where he was, but something had been… drawing him somewhere deep in the woods. The Host, though knowing he should turn back, go back to his home— but he couldn’t stop walking. He began to panic, the muffled silence of the forest only furthering his sense of terror.
The Host eventually found himself standing in front of a building, the change from the damp dirt of the footpath to the hard concrete of a walkway indicating what he stood before.
He didn’t want to go in, but the pull of whatever force manipulating him dragged The Host up the stairs of the building, forced his hand to open the door.
The Host walked in, the floorboards creaking beneath his feet. However, they did not feel old or worn, but new. The whole place felt well-kept and tidy. The Host felt as if he may have been intruding upon someone’s home, and yet, he did not stop.
He walked down a set of increasingly dusty and rickety stairs, an unexpected contrast from the seemingly perfect condition of the main floor.
The basement was even more unsettling than the far too quiet forest. A sound like white noise filled The Host’s ears, starting at a low, soft volume, something that could be passed off as a trick of the mind, that would slowly build and then abruptly stop.
The Host covered his ears and tried to will himself to just leave the hellhole of a basement. He only went farther into it.
A flash of angry red light seared through the darkness that was usually all The Host could see, and the static reached its crescendo, an unbearable volume, as deep, echoing footsteps joined the racket. The footsteps were definitely not his.
The Host let out an anguished cry, snapping out of the trance that he had been locked in for the past few hours. He began to run, collapsing onto his knees as he made the first step, but scrambled up and ascended the stairs, the footsteps growing faster and louder as he ran. The Host went as fast as he could to find the door, grasping frantically along the walls.
When he finally located the handle, he fumbled with it, his hands shaking as he turned it.
The Host shoved the door open, tumbling down the stairs from his momentum. He could’ve sworn a hand had reached out and grabbed at his coat for a split second, but he didn’t want to stick around to find out what who, or it for that matter, had been.
The farther The Host ran from the site, the quieter the static became.
Needless to say, The Host did not walk back into the woods for any reason since the incident.
End statement.
I will admit, the experiences of a blind man who spoke about himself in third person, narrating himself, and referred to himself as ‘The Host’, are rather hard to believe and could be written off as mental illness or the delusion of a deranged man, however, with the amount of strange case files in the Archives, I am slower to disbelieve this individual.
This case is not the first of its kind, as many of the files here have described flashing light, echoing footsteps and static. The case of ‘The Host’ may be worth investigating in the future, but until then, it will remain here in the Archives, growing colder and colder as time passes.
End recording.