October 5, 2025 • 22 mins
Recounts the fragmented and often unreliable memories of a narrator's childhood, particularly focusing on his friendship with Josh and a mysterious event involving a penpal letter. The narrative explores themes of memory's fallibility, the innocence of childhood adventures, and the unsettling realization of a deeper, darker reality lurking beneath seemingly ordinary experiences. It details the narrator's early life in a transitional, rural neighborhood, his close bond with his best friend Josh, and their shared explorations and entrepreneurial ventures, like a snow cone stand. As the story progresses, elements of suspense and mystery build around strange occurrences, such as waking up on a different bunk and unsettling encounters with Mrs. Maggie, an elderly neighbor. Ultimately, the text reveals a disturbing truth connecting the penpal project, the disappearance of Josh, and the death of Veronica, Josh's sister, suggesting a long-standing, sinister presence that profoundly impacted their lives.
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You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Penpal-Dathan-Auerbach/dp/098554550X?&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=5720703668cf57cd85c768720470b679&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the deep Dive. Today, we're doing something a
bit different. We're taking this single really personal and honestly
quite haunting narrative when you shared with us, and using
it to unpack some bigger ideas.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah, universal truths really about memory, about trauma, and I
think especially about the way secrets, hidden things can just sort.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Of fester exactly. So our mission today is to kind
of dissect this life, almost frame by frame, not just
to figure out what happened, but well, what can we
learn from it about psychology, about the burden of knowing things? Okay,
so let's set the scene. Imagine a little girl six
years old. She's in an ice cream parlor, totally overwhelmed
(00:37):
by the choices, tears welling up.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Anxiety, pure childhood anxiety.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Right, and then boom, a stranger hands her this massive
cone like five scoops high, and instantly tears turn into
just pure joy.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
It's such a potent image, isn't it a snapshot of
just simple happiness?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
It really is, and it's a beautiful moment, but it
also provides the stark contrast to the much more comfort
and frankly heartbreaking story we're about to piece together about
memory and truth and.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
That opening, that little flash of joy. It takes us
right to the heart of this deep dive, doesn't it
The nature of memory itself? Yeah, because the narrator says
something really profound early on. He says, most of the
frames that haven't been completely stolen by time are left
distorted and blurred.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Distorted and blurred.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
It's not just about forgetting things. It's about how our minds, factively,
sometimes maybe protectively, reshape what happened.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Like those gifts he talks about, remembering things how we
wish they.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Were exactly, or as he puts it, sometimes forgetting is
the gift a way to cope with stuff that's just
too painful. But then sometimes those little details we dismiss,
the insignificant ones, they turn out to be everything.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
That phrase he uses, mental archaeology. It sounds fascinating, but
I mean it also sounds kind of dangerous, doesn't it, Like, Yeah,
how do you know if you're finding the real thing
or just building a new story.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
That's the risk. Absolutely, And for him, this digging completely
changed how he saw his childhood home, the half house.
The half house, Yeah, a modular home up on these
concrete stilts out in the sort of rural transitional area,
and he says, even though he knows now they were poor,
back then he saw it as close to a palace.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Wow, a palace on stilt.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
And those columns, the stilts, he remembers wishing they were taller,
like pure childhood wonder. But later that space, underneath the
crawl space, it became this place of lurking fear.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
That shift is telling, isn't it, wonder turning to dread?
It feels like an early clue.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
It's a classic example, really, how spaces we think are safe,
innocent can get loaded with these later anxieties.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
It wasn't just the house, right, the woods behind it too.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Oh, definitely. Those woods were his playground, dense, wild. He
was out there every day, but there was a rule.
The rule, yeah, be on before dark. So to make
himself run faster, he'd invent these games. He'd imagine things
chasing him. What kind of things, oh, you know, ghouls
and beasts, hideous and ravenous wolves, enormous clutters of spiders,
(03:06):
scary stuff, but the scariest the one that really worked,
imagining that if he didn't get home in time, his
mother would just be gone.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Oh. Wow, that hits hard, using his deepest fear against himself, and.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
That's how the woods changed for him. Playtime turned sinister,
his own imagination, you know, weaponized by these subconscious fears,
creating monsters before maybe the real ones even showed up.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
And those fears they started creeping into the house too,
didn't they inside that palace?
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Mm hm. He remembers hearing footsteps, yeah, under the house
at night, footsteps, yeah, recurring. His mother just brushed it off,
said it was his imagination, okay, And something else even stranger.
He always slept on the top bunk bed, but sometimes
not always, but sometimes he'd wake up on the bottom bunk.
Wait what hew, He doesn't know. It happened often enough
(03:56):
that he remembers it clearly, But as he puts it in,
frequently enough.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
To dismiss that phrase is chilling, infrequently enough to dismiss.
It's like, yeah, normalizing the weirdness exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
It shows how we build these little defenses unconsciously against
things that just don't add up until until they do so.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Moving on a bit, kindergarten starts, but not smoothly.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
No, right before school, he falls out of his favorite tree,
a pine tree. Breaks his left arm.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Oh man, starting kindergarten with a cast that's rough.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, And around the same time, his mom brings home
a kitten de claude. He names it boxes. Boxes, okay
and boxes apparently like hiding in that crawl face under
the house.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Ah, the creepy cross space again.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Right, So they developed this system, this can opener conditioning.
He calls it to get the cat out using the
sound of the can opener, a.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Bit of control in a situation that feels increasingly uncontrolled.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Maybe it's a small detail, but maybe significant. Anyway, first
day of school, he's anxious, got the cast, worried about
mating friends.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Understandable, and then he needs Josh.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
They bond instantly because they have identical ninja turtles lunchboxes.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Huh, lunchboxes. Sometimes that's all it takes.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
It was the start of this really important friendship and
anchor really as things started to get.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yeah stranger and kindergarten is where this balloon project happens, right,
that becomes central.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yes, the balloon project. It was part of their community group,
really innovative idea for kindergarten.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Actually, what was the goal?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Each kid releases a helium balloon Attached is a note
asking whoever find it to send back a picture and
their address to find a penpoll.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Oh, that's kind of sweet, like a message in a bottle,
but airborne exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
And the teacher even changed the rule use pen not
pencil so the rain wouldn't wash the ink away. A
tiny detail but important later. Okay, So the narrator, he's
got his broken arm, making writing tough. He carefully writes
his note, includes a dollar bill inside that he's written
for stamps.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
On a whole dollar. That's big for a kindergarten, it was.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
He even accidentally gets the note of wet right before
they launched them. Then launch day, Yeah, classroom full of
colorful balloons, excitement, kids trading for their favorite colors.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I can picture it, pure chaos and joy.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Total chaos. Yeah, he mentions. One kid, Chris, let us
go too early inside. The teacher gave him a green
one so he wouldn't miss out. Then the big moment,
they all go outside, release them together, watching these like
two dozen brightly colored floating balls filled the sky. A
real expedition of hope.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
But the hope didn't last long for him, did it?
Speaker 2 (06:31):
No? Weeks go by? Other kids are getting replies, letters,
pictures from the new pen pals. Yeah, he gets nothing,
just disappointment.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Ah, poor kid.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Until finally an envelope arrives addressed to him. Yes, finally,
but as the teacher hands it over, she says, please
don't be upset.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Oh that's not a good sign, not at all.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
He opens it. There's no letter, no return address, just
a blurry polaroid picture, a picture of what, Just a
patch of desert, he says, blurry, meaningless.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Just a random desert picture.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
That's it. The teacher tacks it up on the classroom map,
but kind of out of the way that it didn't
quite fit. It wasn't the connection he wanted. It was
just weird, the.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
First sign that maybe his balloon didn't find a friendly
pen pole exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It was the first piece of a really sinister pattern,
an interception. And then more camp Oh yeah, more envelopes
started arriving week after week, same thing.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Just pictures, no letters, just.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Pictures, some blurry like the first one, some taking it
weird angles like he mentions, one that's just the top
corner of a building.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Strange, not exactly pen pole material, not at all.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
He ends up getting nearly fifty of these things, fifty polaroids.
Fifty Yeah, he just starts filing them away in a drawer,
an incomplete collection, he thinks, just oddities.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It's incredible how you can just sort of accept strangeness
when it comes piece by piece like that, accumulating evidence
you don't understand yet.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
You normalize it until you can anymore, until the sheer
volume or some other event forces you to look again.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Which brings us to the summer after kindergarten, and something
really bizarre happens.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, this is wild. He and Josh they decide to
start a little business selling snow cones. Little entrepreneurs totally.
He even makes a sign free snow cones, He's kidding,
but while making them, he cuts his finger on the
ice shaving machine.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Ouch occupational hazard.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Right. But later they're counting their earnings and in the
pile of bills he finds it finds web his dollar,
the one he put in the blow note, the one
marked for stamps.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
No way, how is that even possible?
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Exactly the improbability of it all, as he says, it
just floored him. Josh thought it was so cool, just
this amazing.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Coincidence coincidence or something else that feels like more than chance.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
It's a powerful symbol, isn't it That thing he sent
out into the world, that peace of his past, just
coming back to him in this totally unexpected way, like a.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Message, a message that the past isn't gone, it's still circulating,
still connected to him.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Precisely. It makes everything feel interconnected, you know, like pulling
one thread might unravel everything.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Okay, So that same summer, they're playing in their usual spot,
the ditch, yeah, their makeshift battleground, and they start hearing noises.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Rustling sounds, yeah, coming for the woods nearby, which isn't
maybe that weird in itself.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
But Josh thought it was weird.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Josh insisted. He said it didn't sound natural. It's had
a mechanical like a robot.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
A robot in the woods. Okay, that's specific.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And creepy, very creepy. Again, it's as detailed that gets
dismissed as just kids being kids. But it's like intuition
bubbling up and ignored warning.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And this all happens around the time of the dollar
coming back.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Right after, and then one night the narrator can't sleep,
he's restless. Maybe thinking about the dollar, the improbability. He
gets out all those polaroids, that fifty odd pictures he'd.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Filed away, the incomplete collection.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, he lays them all out on his floor and
he starts looking, really looking this time, and that's when
it hits him, the dawning, absolutely terrifying realization.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
What what did he see?
Speaker 2 (10:10):
He saw himself himself in the picture, in every single picture,
subtly but definitely there.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Wait, every single one happened.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
He says. He was always just there, off to the side,
in the back of a group, at the bottom of
the frame, never the focus, but always present.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Oh my god, that changes everything.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
That's not a collection, that's surveillance stalking from the very beginning.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Well, how could he have missed it for so long?
Fifty pictures?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
It speaks volumes about selective attention, doesn't it denial? Maybe
our brain's ability to filter out what doesn't fit, what's
too disturbing.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Until it becomes impossible to ignore.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Exactly, He describes his feeling of intense anxiety watching over him,
like he committed some irreparable transgression just by existing, by
being seen.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
It reframes the whole balloon project. It wasn't an innocent outreach.
It was like giving his stalk.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Or his location unintentionally. Yes. Yeah, in this realization, it's
a shattering moment. All those insignificant details, the glory photos,
the weird angles, they snap into horrifying focus.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So what does he do? He must have been terrified,
he is.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
He gathers at the pictures and runs to show his mother.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Okay, her reaction at first.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
She's calm, trying to see them, probably, But then she
looks at the pictures herself, and her calm just breaks.
She starts gasping.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
She sees it too, She sees it, and.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
She immediately frantically calls the police.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Right, okay, if that feels like the right reaction.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Finally, but while she's on the phone, the narrator notices
something else on his pillow, A letter, a note addressed
to his mother. It's a running away letter, signed with
his name, but his name is misspelled.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
He didn't write it.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
No, someone else did, planted there.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
This is getting worse and worse.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
And then his mother gets off the phone and she
tells him the real reason she call the police. Right then,
it wasn't just the old photos, a new polaroid had.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Just arrived that day, a new one of what of him.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
And Josh playing recently? Oh God, and the chilling part.
It arrived in the mail, but there was no postmark.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Someone delivered it by hand.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
They're close, They're close. It confirms everything. The fear is real,
it's current, it's escalating. The veil is completely torn away.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
The mother's secrecy, or her attempts to dismiss things it
couldn't hold anymore.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
No, the threat was undeniable now. And this brings other
buried things to the surface, like the story of their neighbor,
missus Maggie.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Right, the elderly woman with Alzheimer's.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Yes, kind, generous but confused. She had called the narrator
by her son's names Chris or john Sons. She was
estranged from, and her own tragedy, her husband Tom, a pilot,
He died years before, hit by a car while jogging.
Oh no, he was trying to get in shape, apparently
for a surprise anniversary trip to he was planning for Maggie.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Just awful, God, that's heartbreaking. How does this connect well?
Speaker 2 (13:05):
The narrator's mother eventually told him more after Maggie had
to go into care. Her house was condemned, and men
in hazmat suits strange orange biohazard suits were seen removing
black bags full of garbage from under the house.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
From under the house, like the crawl space, it seems
like it, and he cast this horrifying new light on
something missus Maggie had shouted at the narrator once in
her confusion.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Why did she shout Tom's home?
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Oh? No, Tom, her dead husband.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
It seems her fragmented memory, much like the narrator's distorted frames,
held his awful, buried truth. The horror was literally under
her house. Her confusion was reflecting something real and terrible.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Wow, secrets and trauma just radiating.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Outward exactly, affecting everyone nearby, even in cryptic ways, which
leads us forward a few years. The narrator is.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Ten and something terrible happens.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Josh disappears, his best friend just vanishes.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Oh God. After everything with the photos.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
And the narrator's she falls back into protection mode. She lies,
tells him Josh's parents moved away suddenly and don't want
him visiting their old house, which is now sitting.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Abandoned, another layer of secrecy, trying to shield him but.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Kids are persistent. The narrator and Josh, before he vanished,
had this idea. They thought boxes the cat might have
gone back to the narrator's old house, to the crawl space,
his original home.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
So after Josh disappears, the narrator decides to a look.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Not alone, he convinces actually wait, The timeline is slightly
different in the source. The expedition happens before Josh officially disappears,
but after things are clearly very wrong, they decide together
to sneak out at night to check the old house
for boxes.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Ah okay, so they go together into the dark woods.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yes, a nighttime expedition back through those woods had already
held so much fear for the narrator. He even notes
passing the pool float where he'd mysteriously woke it up
lost years.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Before, facing his past fears.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
And Josh. He's still talking about the woods, still insisting
he hears those mechanical sounds that robot ned to let
that go. Never. It shows that loyalty, that childhood conviction,
pushing against the fear, against the parental deception.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
They need answers, so they get to the old house,
abandoned now.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Dilapidating, creepy. They play rock paper scissors to decide who
goes into the crawl space to look for boxes.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
And the narrator loses.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
He loses, so he crawls under the house, Yeah, into
that space of lurking dread.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
What does he find?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Catfood, bulls, a blanket. He realizes his mother must have
been secretly coming back, leaving food, making a safe spot
for boxes even after they moved, another secret kept for
his protection.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
A bittersweet discovery maybe.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
But then Josh, while the narrator is under the house,
Josh goes inside the main house into darkness. They have
radios to communicate, okay, and Josh's voice comes over the radio.
At first, it's almost weirdly playful. He says, your walls, man,
ha ha, your walls are covered with polaroil of yourself.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Oh god, the picture is there in the house.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Everywhere, covering the walls. But then Josh's tone shifts instantly,
pure terror.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
What does he say?
Speaker 2 (16:11):
He says, He's got something. Man, it's a big bag.
He just threw it on the floor, a bag and
oh god, man, the bag I think.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
It just moved quietly. Oh no, oh no, no, no, that line.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I think it just moved. It's the point of no return,
absolute horror.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
What does the narrator do. He's under the house hearing this, He.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Panics, scrambles out, runs, He just flees, leads Josh there.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
You can't blame him.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
That's pure terror, absolutely not. And later after he gets home,
after the immediate shock, he's leaving Josh's house and he
whispers something haunting, just quietly to himself, what I thought
I closed the lid, referring to the crawl space entrance.
Maybe yeah, or something deeper. It's ambiguous, but heavy with guilt,
with the failure of protection his mother's and maybe his own.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
That night changes everything. Josh gone after that.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
That seems to be the implication, the turning point where
Josh vanishes from his life, and yet life just keeps going,
which is brutal in itself.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
First grade sounds like it was rough too. Pink eye bullies.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, a different kind of struggle. But it connects back oddly.
An older kid named Alex starts looking out for him.
Why because Alix had a crush on Josh's older sister, Veronica.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Veronica, Okay, so she comes back into the story.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Years later Yes, high school, the narrator reconnects with Chris,
the kid who lost his balloon early, and through Chris,
he meets Veronica again at this Rundown local cinema they
called the Dirt.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Theater, so he reconnects with Josh's sister. Does he try
to reconnect with Josh?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
He tries calling Josh's old number, but it's disconnected or
belongs to someone else. He realizes too much time has passed.
They're strangers now. He feels this immense guilt sadness, but
he focuses.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
On Veronica, the a connection to his lost friend.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Maybe perhaps they start dating normousy maybe, but even that
is tinged with strangeness. He notices this car in the
theater parking lot, sometimes one with a cracked back window.
Just another odd.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Detail, another threat of unease.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah. He even tells Veronica this creepy story about being
followed in a mall once, ending with him kicking a window,
trying to be tough. Maybe processing is past.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
And then tragedy strikes again.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Their time together ends horribly. Veronica is in a severe
car accident.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Oh no, not again.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
She's badly injured in the hospital. Does he see her, Yes,
and she whispers something to him. Confused, maybe delirious, She says, Josh,
he ran away. I should have told you fan away.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
That's not what happened, is it.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
It seems like a half truth or maybe what she
needed to believe or was told. It haunts him, but
the real horror comes later.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
There's more.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
His mother has to tell him. Veronica didn't survive Fort
Sire's She actually died weeks before he thought he visited her.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Wait, what he visited her after she died.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
No, that visit might have been real, but the timing
revelation is key because his mother then reveals something else.
Hundreds of pictures had been sent from Veronica's phone after
her death, and who to the narrator's old phone, an
old model couldn't receive pictures, so he never saw them,
but they were sent posthumously.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
That's monstrous using her phone after she died.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
And the final text he received, the one he felt
was just a weird sign off from her and read
see you again.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Soon, chilling. The stalker, the entity whatever it is it
was still watching, still active and tied to Veronica's death.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Somehow. It's the ultimate violation, pervasive, inescapable darkness, and it
leads to the final, most devastating revelation of.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
All the truth about Josh.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
His mother finally confesses everything. Years ago, Josh's father, who
worked in construction, had called her utterly distraught.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Why what happened?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
He was working on a construction site in their old neighborhood,
digging and he found owned a body in a hole.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Oh God, Josh.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Yes, Josh's body, But he wasn't alone.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (20:07):
There was another man buried in the hole with him,
a man Josh's father recognized, a man he himself had
been paid to bury there previously.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
He buried someone else there and then found his own son.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yes, and the man. The other body was described as
smiling smiling Yes. Josh's body showed signs of a struggle.
His hair been dyed dark brown, maybe as a disguise,
And pinned to Josh's shirt was a picture.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Of the narrator Oh no, linking him directly in.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
The final heartbreaking discovery. In Josh's pocket was their old map,
the map from their childhood adventures, a map his mother
realized he had resumed the expedition on his own. That
was our first great adventure and he had decided to
finish it for me, for us.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
He went back to figure it out for both of them.
Oh Josh.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
And the very last detail, Josh's father finding his son
like that with the man he'd buried. He lost it
in a rage. He pulled the other man's body off Josh,
and that final violent act caused Josh's lungs to release
the last bit of air, his last empty breath silence.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
That's almost unbearable, the sheer weight of all those secrets,
all that time leading to that horrific end.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
It's the brutal culmination. Every dismissed detail, every ignored fear,
every protective lie, it all led there. The cost was immense.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
What a truly heartbreaking, intricate story, a childhood just stolen
by these hidden truths, This whole deep dive. It just
shows how profoundly secrets can shape us, doesn't.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
It absolutely, And how that mental archaeology, that act of
remembering and piecing things together, it can be necessary, but
also maybe a.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Curse, a gift and a curse.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, it really drives home that idea that our lives
aren't just separate moments, isolated snapshots. It's all connected. Every
little insignificant thing, a sound, a picture, a weird feeling.
It can be the foundation for everything else.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
It really makes you think about the burden of knowledge,
the weight of care, these painful truths, especially like his mother,
when you're trying to protect someone you love.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
What a terrible choice to have to make protect them
from the truth or prepare them for it. There's no
easy answer no, and.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
It forces you to think about your own life too,
doesn't it? Those gaps, those voids in our narratives as
he calls them, the things we've forgotten or maybe chosen.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
To forget m hm, what might be buried there?
Speaker 1 (22:24):
And the way the narrator ends it wishing he'd never
seen the complete picture, wondering about all the what ifs,
like maybe someone else would have found my balloon and
everyone would be okay.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
That's the lingering pain, isn't it? The weight of causality.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
It leaves you with such a haunting question. If finally
knowing the whole truth makes you wish you could go
back to ignorance, back to forgetting, what does that really
say about the value we place on truth versus well
The comfort of
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Not knowing a profound and deeply unsettling thought to end
on the profound weight of knowing
Welcome to the deep Dive. Today, we're doing something a
bit different. We're taking this single really personal and honestly
quite haunting narrative when you shared with us, and using
it to unpack some bigger ideas.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah, universal truths really about memory, about trauma, and I
think especially about the way secrets, hidden things can just sort.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Of fester exactly. So our mission today is to kind
of dissect this life, almost frame by frame, not just
to figure out what happened, but well, what can we
learn from it about psychology, about the burden of knowing things? Okay,
so let's set the scene. Imagine a little girl six
years old. She's in an ice cream parlor, totally overwhelmed
(00:37):
by the choices, tears welling up.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Anxiety, pure childhood anxiety.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Right, and then boom, a stranger hands her this massive
cone like five scoops high, and instantly tears turn into
just pure joy.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
It's such a potent image, isn't it a snapshot of
just simple happiness?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
It really is, and it's a beautiful moment, but it
also provides the stark contrast to the much more comfort
and frankly heartbreaking story we're about to piece together about
memory and truth and.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
That opening, that little flash of joy. It takes us
right to the heart of this deep dive, doesn't it
The nature of memory itself? Yeah, because the narrator says
something really profound early on. He says, most of the
frames that haven't been completely stolen by time are left
distorted and blurred.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Distorted and blurred.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
It's not just about forgetting things. It's about how our minds, factively,
sometimes maybe protectively, reshape what happened.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Like those gifts he talks about, remembering things how we
wish they.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Were exactly, or as he puts it, sometimes forgetting is
the gift a way to cope with stuff that's just
too painful. But then sometimes those little details we dismiss,
the insignificant ones, they turn out to be everything.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
That phrase he uses, mental archaeology. It sounds fascinating, but
I mean it also sounds kind of dangerous, doesn't it, Like, Yeah,
how do you know if you're finding the real thing
or just building a new story.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
That's the risk. Absolutely, And for him, this digging completely
changed how he saw his childhood home, the half house.
The half house, Yeah, a modular home up on these
concrete stilts out in the sort of rural transitional area,
and he says, even though he knows now they were poor,
back then he saw it as close to a palace.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Wow, a palace on stilt.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
And those columns, the stilts, he remembers wishing they were taller,
like pure childhood wonder. But later that space, underneath the
crawl space, it became this place of lurking fear.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
That shift is telling, isn't it, wonder turning to dread?
It feels like an early clue.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
It's a classic example, really, how spaces we think are safe,
innocent can get loaded with these later anxieties.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
It wasn't just the house, right, the woods behind it too.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Oh, definitely. Those woods were his playground, dense, wild. He
was out there every day, but there was a rule.
The rule, yeah, be on before dark. So to make
himself run faster, he'd invent these games. He'd imagine things
chasing him. What kind of things, oh, you know, ghouls
and beasts, hideous and ravenous wolves, enormous clutters of spiders,
(03:06):
scary stuff, but the scariest the one that really worked,
imagining that if he didn't get home in time, his
mother would just be gone.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Oh. Wow, that hits hard, using his deepest fear against himself, and.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
That's how the woods changed for him. Playtime turned sinister,
his own imagination, you know, weaponized by these subconscious fears,
creating monsters before maybe the real ones even showed up.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
And those fears they started creeping into the house too,
didn't they inside that palace?
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Mm hm. He remembers hearing footsteps, yeah, under the house
at night, footsteps, yeah, recurring. His mother just brushed it off,
said it was his imagination, okay, And something else even stranger.
He always slept on the top bunk bed, but sometimes
not always, but sometimes he'd wake up on the bottom bunk.
Wait what hew, He doesn't know. It happened often enough
(03:56):
that he remembers it clearly, But as he puts it in,
frequently enough.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
To dismiss that phrase is chilling, infrequently enough to dismiss.
It's like, yeah, normalizing the weirdness exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
It shows how we build these little defenses unconsciously against
things that just don't add up until until they do so.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Moving on a bit, kindergarten starts, but not smoothly.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
No, right before school, he falls out of his favorite tree,
a pine tree. Breaks his left arm.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Oh man, starting kindergarten with a cast that's rough.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, And around the same time, his mom brings home
a kitten de claude. He names it boxes. Boxes, okay
and boxes apparently like hiding in that crawl face under
the house.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Ah, the creepy cross space again.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Right, So they developed this system, this can opener conditioning.
He calls it to get the cat out using the
sound of the can opener, a.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Bit of control in a situation that feels increasingly uncontrolled.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Maybe it's a small detail, but maybe significant. Anyway, first
day of school, he's anxious, got the cast, worried about
mating friends.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Understandable, and then he needs Josh.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
They bond instantly because they have identical ninja turtles lunchboxes.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Huh, lunchboxes. Sometimes that's all it takes.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
It was the start of this really important friendship and
anchor really as things started to get.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yeah stranger and kindergarten is where this balloon project happens, right,
that becomes central.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yes, the balloon project. It was part of their community group,
really innovative idea for kindergarten.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Actually, what was the goal?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Each kid releases a helium balloon Attached is a note
asking whoever find it to send back a picture and
their address to find a penpoll.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Oh, that's kind of sweet, like a message in a bottle,
but airborne exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
And the teacher even changed the rule use pen not
pencil so the rain wouldn't wash the ink away. A
tiny detail but important later. Okay, So the narrator, he's
got his broken arm, making writing tough. He carefully writes
his note, includes a dollar bill inside that he's written
for stamps.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
On a whole dollar. That's big for a kindergarten, it was.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
He even accidentally gets the note of wet right before
they launched them. Then launch day, Yeah, classroom full of
colorful balloons, excitement, kids trading for their favorite colors.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I can picture it, pure chaos and joy.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Total chaos. Yeah, he mentions. One kid, Chris, let us
go too early inside. The teacher gave him a green
one so he wouldn't miss out. Then the big moment,
they all go outside, release them together, watching these like
two dozen brightly colored floating balls filled the sky. A
real expedition of hope.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
But the hope didn't last long for him, did it?
Speaker 2 (06:31):
No? Weeks go by? Other kids are getting replies, letters,
pictures from the new pen pals. Yeah, he gets nothing,
just disappointment.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Ah, poor kid.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Until finally an envelope arrives addressed to him. Yes, finally,
but as the teacher hands it over, she says, please
don't be upset.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Oh that's not a good sign, not at all.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
He opens it. There's no letter, no return address, just
a blurry polaroid picture, a picture of what, Just a
patch of desert, he says, blurry, meaningless.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Just a random desert picture.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
That's it. The teacher tacks it up on the classroom map,
but kind of out of the way that it didn't
quite fit. It wasn't the connection he wanted. It was
just weird, the.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
First sign that maybe his balloon didn't find a friendly
pen pole exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It was the first piece of a really sinister pattern,
an interception. And then more camp Oh yeah, more envelopes
started arriving week after week, same thing.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Just pictures, no letters, just.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Pictures, some blurry like the first one, some taking it
weird angles like he mentions, one that's just the top
corner of a building.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Strange, not exactly pen pole material, not at all.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
He ends up getting nearly fifty of these things, fifty polaroids.
Fifty Yeah, he just starts filing them away in a drawer,
an incomplete collection, he thinks, just oddities.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It's incredible how you can just sort of accept strangeness
when it comes piece by piece like that, accumulating evidence
you don't understand yet.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
You normalize it until you can anymore, until the sheer
volume or some other event forces you to look again.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Which brings us to the summer after kindergarten, and something
really bizarre happens.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, this is wild. He and Josh they decide to
start a little business selling snow cones. Little entrepreneurs totally.
He even makes a sign free snow cones, He's kidding,
but while making them, he cuts his finger on the
ice shaving machine.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Ouch occupational hazard.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Right. But later they're counting their earnings and in the
pile of bills he finds it finds web his dollar,
the one he put in the blow note, the one
marked for stamps.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
No way, how is that even possible?
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Exactly the improbability of it all, as he says, it
just floored him. Josh thought it was so cool, just
this amazing.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Coincidence coincidence or something else that feels like more than chance.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
It's a powerful symbol, isn't it That thing he sent
out into the world, that peace of his past, just
coming back to him in this totally unexpected way, like a.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Message, a message that the past isn't gone, it's still circulating,
still connected to him.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Precisely. It makes everything feel interconnected, you know, like pulling
one thread might unravel everything.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Okay, So that same summer, they're playing in their usual spot,
the ditch, yeah, their makeshift battleground, and they start hearing noises.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Rustling sounds, yeah, coming for the woods nearby, which isn't
maybe that weird in itself.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
But Josh thought it was weird.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Josh insisted. He said it didn't sound natural. It's had
a mechanical like a robot.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
A robot in the woods. Okay, that's specific.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And creepy, very creepy. Again, it's as detailed that gets
dismissed as just kids being kids. But it's like intuition
bubbling up and ignored warning.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And this all happens around the time of the dollar
coming back.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Right after, and then one night the narrator can't sleep,
he's restless. Maybe thinking about the dollar, the improbability. He
gets out all those polaroids, that fifty odd pictures he'd.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Filed away, the incomplete collection.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, he lays them all out on his floor and
he starts looking, really looking this time, and that's when
it hits him, the dawning, absolutely terrifying realization.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
What what did he see?
Speaker 2 (10:10):
He saw himself himself in the picture, in every single picture,
subtly but definitely there.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Wait, every single one happened.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
He says. He was always just there, off to the side,
in the back of a group, at the bottom of
the frame, never the focus, but always present.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Oh my god, that changes everything.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
That's not a collection, that's surveillance stalking from the very beginning.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Well, how could he have missed it for so long?
Fifty pictures?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
It speaks volumes about selective attention, doesn't it denial? Maybe
our brain's ability to filter out what doesn't fit, what's
too disturbing.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Until it becomes impossible to ignore.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Exactly, He describes his feeling of intense anxiety watching over him,
like he committed some irreparable transgression just by existing, by
being seen.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
It reframes the whole balloon project. It wasn't an innocent outreach.
It was like giving his stalk.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Or his location unintentionally. Yes. Yeah, in this realization, it's
a shattering moment. All those insignificant details, the glory photos,
the weird angles, they snap into horrifying focus.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So what does he do? He must have been terrified,
he is.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
He gathers at the pictures and runs to show his mother.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Okay, her reaction at first.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
She's calm, trying to see them, probably, But then she
looks at the pictures herself, and her calm just breaks.
She starts gasping.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
She sees it too, She sees it, and.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
She immediately frantically calls the police.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Right, okay, if that feels like the right reaction.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Finally, but while she's on the phone, the narrator notices
something else on his pillow, A letter, a note addressed
to his mother. It's a running away letter, signed with
his name, but his name is misspelled.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
He didn't write it.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
No, someone else did, planted there.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
This is getting worse and worse.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
And then his mother gets off the phone and she
tells him the real reason she call the police. Right then,
it wasn't just the old photos, a new polaroid had.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Just arrived that day, a new one of what of him.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
And Josh playing recently? Oh God, and the chilling part.
It arrived in the mail, but there was no postmark.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Someone delivered it by hand.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
They're close, They're close. It confirms everything. The fear is real,
it's current, it's escalating. The veil is completely torn away.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
The mother's secrecy, or her attempts to dismiss things it
couldn't hold anymore.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
No, the threat was undeniable now. And this brings other
buried things to the surface, like the story of their neighbor,
missus Maggie.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Right, the elderly woman with Alzheimer's.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Yes, kind, generous but confused. She had called the narrator
by her son's names Chris or john Sons. She was
estranged from, and her own tragedy, her husband Tom, a pilot,
He died years before, hit by a car while jogging.
Oh no, he was trying to get in shape, apparently
for a surprise anniversary trip to he was planning for Maggie.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Just awful, God, that's heartbreaking. How does this connect well?
Speaker 2 (13:05):
The narrator's mother eventually told him more after Maggie had
to go into care. Her house was condemned, and men
in hazmat suits strange orange biohazard suits were seen removing
black bags full of garbage from under the house.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
From under the house, like the crawl space, it seems
like it, and he cast this horrifying new light on
something missus Maggie had shouted at the narrator once in
her confusion.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Why did she shout Tom's home?
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Oh? No, Tom, her dead husband.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
It seems her fragmented memory, much like the narrator's distorted frames,
held his awful, buried truth. The horror was literally under
her house. Her confusion was reflecting something real and terrible.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Wow, secrets and trauma just radiating.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Outward exactly, affecting everyone nearby, even in cryptic ways, which
leads us forward a few years. The narrator is.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Ten and something terrible happens.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Josh disappears, his best friend just vanishes.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Oh God. After everything with the photos.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
And the narrator's she falls back into protection mode. She lies,
tells him Josh's parents moved away suddenly and don't want
him visiting their old house, which is now sitting.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Abandoned, another layer of secrecy, trying to shield him but.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Kids are persistent. The narrator and Josh, before he vanished,
had this idea. They thought boxes the cat might have
gone back to the narrator's old house, to the crawl space,
his original home.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
So after Josh disappears, the narrator decides to a look.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Not alone, he convinces actually wait, The timeline is slightly
different in the source. The expedition happens before Josh officially disappears,
but after things are clearly very wrong, they decide together
to sneak out at night to check the old house
for boxes.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Ah okay, so they go together into the dark woods.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yes, a nighttime expedition back through those woods had already
held so much fear for the narrator. He even notes
passing the pool float where he'd mysteriously woke it up
lost years.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Before, facing his past fears.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
And Josh. He's still talking about the woods, still insisting
he hears those mechanical sounds that robot ned to let
that go. Never. It shows that loyalty, that childhood conviction,
pushing against the fear, against the parental deception.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
They need answers, so they get to the old house,
abandoned now.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Dilapidating, creepy. They play rock paper scissors to decide who
goes into the crawl space to look for boxes.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
And the narrator loses.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
He loses, so he crawls under the house, Yeah, into
that space of lurking dread.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
What does he find?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Catfood, bulls, a blanket. He realizes his mother must have
been secretly coming back, leaving food, making a safe spot
for boxes even after they moved, another secret kept for
his protection.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
A bittersweet discovery maybe.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
But then Josh, while the narrator is under the house,
Josh goes inside the main house into darkness. They have
radios to communicate, okay, and Josh's voice comes over the radio.
At first, it's almost weirdly playful. He says, your walls, man,
ha ha, your walls are covered with polaroil of yourself.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Oh god, the picture is there in the house.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Everywhere, covering the walls. But then Josh's tone shifts instantly,
pure terror.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
What does he say?
Speaker 2 (16:11):
He says, He's got something. Man, it's a big bag.
He just threw it on the floor, a bag and
oh god, man, the bag I think.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
It just moved quietly. Oh no, oh no, no, no, that line.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I think it just moved. It's the point of no return,
absolute horror.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
What does the narrator do. He's under the house hearing this, He.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Panics, scrambles out, runs, He just flees, leads Josh there.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
You can't blame him.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
That's pure terror, absolutely not. And later after he gets home,
after the immediate shock, he's leaving Josh's house and he
whispers something haunting, just quietly to himself, what I thought
I closed the lid, referring to the crawl space entrance.
Maybe yeah, or something deeper. It's ambiguous, but heavy with guilt,
with the failure of protection his mother's and maybe his own.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
That night changes everything. Josh gone after that.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
That seems to be the implication, the turning point where
Josh vanishes from his life, and yet life just keeps going,
which is brutal in itself.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
First grade sounds like it was rough too. Pink eye bullies.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, a different kind of struggle. But it connects back oddly.
An older kid named Alex starts looking out for him.
Why because Alix had a crush on Josh's older sister, Veronica.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Veronica, Okay, so she comes back into the story.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Years later Yes, high school, the narrator reconnects with Chris,
the kid who lost his balloon early, and through Chris,
he meets Veronica again at this Rundown local cinema they
called the Dirt.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Theater, so he reconnects with Josh's sister. Does he try
to reconnect with Josh?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
He tries calling Josh's old number, but it's disconnected or
belongs to someone else. He realizes too much time has passed.
They're strangers now. He feels this immense guilt sadness, but
he focuses.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
On Veronica, the a connection to his lost friend.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Maybe perhaps they start dating normousy maybe, but even that
is tinged with strangeness. He notices this car in the
theater parking lot, sometimes one with a cracked back window.
Just another odd.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Detail, another threat of unease.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah. He even tells Veronica this creepy story about being
followed in a mall once, ending with him kicking a window,
trying to be tough. Maybe processing is past.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
And then tragedy strikes again.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Their time together ends horribly. Veronica is in a severe
car accident.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Oh no, not again.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
She's badly injured in the hospital. Does he see her, Yes,
and she whispers something to him. Confused, maybe delirious, She says, Josh,
he ran away. I should have told you fan away.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
That's not what happened, is it.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
It seems like a half truth or maybe what she
needed to believe or was told. It haunts him, but
the real horror comes later.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
There's more.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
His mother has to tell him. Veronica didn't survive Fort
Sire's She actually died weeks before he thought he visited her.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Wait, what he visited her after she died.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
No, that visit might have been real, but the timing
revelation is key because his mother then reveals something else.
Hundreds of pictures had been sent from Veronica's phone after
her death, and who to the narrator's old phone, an
old model couldn't receive pictures, so he never saw them,
but they were sent posthumously.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
That's monstrous using her phone after she died.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
And the final text he received, the one he felt
was just a weird sign off from her and read
see you again.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Soon, chilling. The stalker, the entity whatever it is it
was still watching, still active and tied to Veronica's death.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Somehow. It's the ultimate violation, pervasive, inescapable darkness, and it
leads to the final, most devastating revelation of.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
All the truth about Josh.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
His mother finally confesses everything. Years ago, Josh's father, who
worked in construction, had called her utterly distraught.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Why what happened?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
He was working on a construction site in their old neighborhood,
digging and he found owned a body in a hole.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Oh God, Josh.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Yes, Josh's body, But he wasn't alone.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (20:07):
There was another man buried in the hole with him,
a man Josh's father recognized, a man he himself had
been paid to bury there previously.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
He buried someone else there and then found his own son.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Yes, and the man. The other body was described as
smiling smiling Yes. Josh's body showed signs of a struggle.
His hair been dyed dark brown, maybe as a disguise,
And pinned to Josh's shirt was a picture.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Of the narrator Oh no, linking him directly in.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
The final heartbreaking discovery. In Josh's pocket was their old map,
the map from their childhood adventures, a map his mother
realized he had resumed the expedition on his own. That
was our first great adventure and he had decided to
finish it for me, for us.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
He went back to figure it out for both of them.
Oh Josh.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
And the very last detail, Josh's father finding his son
like that with the man he'd buried. He lost it
in a rage. He pulled the other man's body off Josh,
and that final violent act caused Josh's lungs to release
the last bit of air, his last empty breath silence.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
That's almost unbearable, the sheer weight of all those secrets,
all that time leading to that horrific end.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
It's the brutal culmination. Every dismissed detail, every ignored fear,
every protective lie, it all led there. The cost was immense.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
What a truly heartbreaking, intricate story, a childhood just stolen
by these hidden truths, This whole deep dive. It just
shows how profoundly secrets can shape us, doesn't.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
It absolutely, And how that mental archaeology, that act of
remembering and piecing things together, it can be necessary, but
also maybe a.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Curse, a gift and a curse.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, it really drives home that idea that our lives
aren't just separate moments, isolated snapshots. It's all connected. Every
little insignificant thing, a sound, a picture, a weird feeling.
It can be the foundation for everything else.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
It really makes you think about the burden of knowledge,
the weight of care, these painful truths, especially like his mother,
when you're trying to protect someone you love.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
What a terrible choice to have to make protect them
from the truth or prepare them for it. There's no
easy answer no, and.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
It forces you to think about your own life too,
doesn't it? Those gaps, those voids in our narratives as
he calls them, the things we've forgotten or maybe chosen.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
To forget m hm, what might be buried there?
Speaker 1 (22:24):
And the way the narrator ends it wishing he'd never
seen the complete picture, wondering about all the what ifs,
like maybe someone else would have found my balloon and
everyone would be okay.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
That's the lingering pain, isn't it? The weight of causality.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
It leaves you with such a haunting question. If finally
knowing the whole truth makes you wish you could go
back to ignorance, back to forgetting, what does that really
say about the value we place on truth versus well
The comfort of
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Not knowing a profound and deeply unsettling thought to end
on the profound weight of knowing
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