Work Text:
Case#0200424
Statement of Alex Carmichael regarding their encounter with the infamous podcast The Magnus Archives.
First of all, I just want you to know that I don’t typically believe in the supernatural. Sure, I’ll listen to my fair share of ghost stories, but they’re just that: stories. I might be momentarily scared, but in the end, that doesn’t really mean anything. You just wake up in the morning and everything is fine. Or… at least, that’s what I had thought. Before, you know. This happened.
I’m sorry, I’m rambling. I know how much you guys hate that, but… it’s just so hard to actually get out there. I doubt you’ll even believe me. But at the very least, it’ll give me some closure. So I might as well get on with it.
It all started a while ago several of my friends started listening to The Magnus Archives, or tma for short. Now this is in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re all in quarantine, so of course all I’m only going to be in contact with them digitally. If I had been able to see them in person, or even decided to visit them anyway, I would have known something was wrong. But… well, it’s too late now. They’re already dead.
Sorry. Back on track. Two of my friends had started listening to tma around the same time, and as I would expect when they get into a new fandom, I saw a ton of posts about it on all their social media. Tumblr, twitter, you name it. They were posting everywhere. That’s what you do when you find something new. They’d been at it for about a week with post after post about tma, and enough of it caught my attention that I decided, you know what, I’ll give it a listen. I’d been wanting to get more into horror, and this could be a good way to do that. So that’s what I did.
At first, it was just like any other show. It was pretty good, so I’d listen to a couple episodes a day. It drew my interest for a little bit but then I’d move on to other things. My interest in it grew naturally as things started to connect. When I got to the end of the first season, I was thoroughly enjoying tma. Nothing unnatural about it.
Then I started the second season.
In the podcast itself, the protagonist Jonathan Sims gets more and more paranoid, so it seemed normal that I would experience a little bit of that myself. I think if I had stopped there, then maybe it wouldn’t have continued. It didn’t really bother me, because it just meant that the writers were good storytellers. I kept listening to it far longer than I should have, but I’ve gotten really into shows before and stayed up all night watching it, so this was nothing new. But… I remember, it was episode 65 when I started to consider something might be wrong. I think that’s were it gets you fully. In the episode, there was a programmer who had gotten a haunted file that had forced her to watch a 13-hour video of a man eating his computer. No matter where she went, it would follow her until she watched the whole thing. To add to it, there’s a supplemental at the end, where Jon talks about the case and sometimes his assistants will come in and have some sort of conversation. Well, him and his assistant Tim had been having problems, and Tim came in to show how angry he was. Jon tried to tell him if he hated it so much, he could just quit. Tim realized that no matter how much he wanted to, he physically could not. Something had tied to the organization, and he simply could not.
I was deeply unsettled by this since it was a little too meta for me, so I decided this would be my last episode for the day. But -and I swear I’m not making this up- every time I tried to pause the video, the button wouldn’t work. It just kept playing. I tried clicking on a new video, but every time I clicked on one, it would somehow be that exact same episode in the exact same place. I tried exiting out of my browser, and once again, nothing. I even tried to shut down my computer.
I had decided that the best plan of action would be to manually unplug the computer. The issue was that when I went to sit up, I physically couldn’t. There was no way to stop this. So I figured I could ask for help. I still had my phone after all. When I tried to type, all that would come out was related to tma. I could vent about a great episode, analyze a character, but I couldn’t type anything else. Whenever I tried it would be edited into tma content. My whole existence was tma for the 3 full days. I didn’t know what would happen when I finished the whole thing, but if exhaustion or lack of food or water didn’t kill me first, I had a feeling that getting to the end of that podcast would.
The thing that saved me was a power outage. I’ve never been more glad to not have power in my whole life than that one moment. My computer shut off and I was free to go. I almost cried tears of happiness before remembering that my friends had been listening to it as well. I called the police two different times, and on each one told them one of their addresses, saying something vague about a break-in before hanging up. If I told them the truth they probably wouldn’t believe me. I just hoped that it wouldn’t take the police as well. But by the time they got there, all the police found at both places were a body slumped at a computer screen with a large slash all the way across their neck. The news called it an armed robbery, but I know better.
I got rid of my computer later. I know that it probably wouldn’t have brought the video back up if I turned it back on, but I just couldn’t risk it. I also started a whole new account, one without those videos in their history. I know that it’s probably just that one, but I haven’t been able to listen to another podcast since.
I really hope that it got taken down, but I can’t bring myself to check.