October 23, 2025 • 12 mins
Check out our Halloween Pop-up Channel here.
Thomas Brennan, ninety-three years old, reveals he actually died in 1924 at age forty-two—drowned in his bedroom with no water present—but got up the next morning and has been dying in reverse for fifty years with his heart beating backward, pulling blood in instead of pushing out. In his gravity-confused house where furniture exists on ceilings, Thomas demonstrates his death by separating into age layers on his bed, drowning in water that doesn't exist until a smaller water-Thomas crawls from his corpse's mouth, explaining "it" kills you then wears you while you remain conscious inside.
When Thomas pulls Margaret into a mirror, she sees the truth: everyone in Millbrook is a fragment of Sarah Blackwood's shattered death from 1774, not people but pieces of an ending that won't stop. The room floods with real water revealing an underwater neighborhood where hundreds of dead Brennans live in perpetual drowning, and when Margaret breathes water instead of air, she experiences being everyone and no one simultaneously. After Thomas pulls her back and melts into water himself, Margaret's scaled arm has written "TOMORROW" obsessively across all its scales, knowing something crucial will happen in the next recording.
Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Shark Media! Get all our shows on any player you love, hassle free! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app. For Spotify or other players, visit caloroga.com/plus. No plug-ins needed!
Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show!
We now have Merch! FREE SHIPPING! Check out all the products like T-shirts, mugs, bags, jackets and more with logos and slogans from your favorite shows! Did we mention there’s free shipping? Get 10% off with code NewMerch10 Go to Caloroga.com
Get more info from Caloroga Shark Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is info@caloroga.com
Thomas Brennan, ninety-three years old, reveals he actually died in 1924 at age forty-two—drowned in his bedroom with no water present—but got up the next morning and has been dying in reverse for fifty years with his heart beating backward, pulling blood in instead of pushing out. In his gravity-confused house where furniture exists on ceilings, Thomas demonstrates his death by separating into age layers on his bed, drowning in water that doesn't exist until a smaller water-Thomas crawls from his corpse's mouth, explaining "it" kills you then wears you while you remain conscious inside.
When Thomas pulls Margaret into a mirror, she sees the truth: everyone in Millbrook is a fragment of Sarah Blackwood's shattered death from 1774, not people but pieces of an ending that won't stop. The room floods with real water revealing an underwater neighborhood where hundreds of dead Brennans live in perpetual drowning, and when Margaret breathes water instead of air, she experiences being everyone and no one simultaneously. After Thomas pulls her back and melts into water himself, Margaret's scaled arm has written "TOMORROW" obsessively across all its scales, knowing something crucial will happen in the next recording.
Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Shark Media! Get all our shows on any player you love, hassle free! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app. For Spotify or other players, visit caloroga.com/plus. No plug-ins needed!
Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show!
We now have Merch! FREE SHIPPING! Check out all the products like T-shirts, mugs, bags, jackets and more with logos and slogans from your favorite shows! Did we mention there’s free shipping? Get 10% off with code NewMerch10 Go to Caloroga.com
Get more info from Caloroga Shark Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is info@caloroga.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Calarugu Shark Media. Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the
October Records, a month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode
twenty three, the first.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Death October twenty third, nineteen seventy four, Silas Crane. Thomas
Brennan is ninety three years old. He died in nineteen
twenty four. He's very clear about this. Died October twenty third,
nineteen twenty four, at age forty two, drowned in his bedroom.
(00:43):
No water present, just drowned, but he got up the
next morning, went to work, lived another fifty years. He
called me tonight, said I needed to hear this, said
Margaret would need to know. Thomas died first in nineteen
twenty four, first death of that October, but death didn't take.
(01:03):
He remembers drowning, remembers his lungs filling, remembers his heart stopping,
then remembers it starting again, but beating wrong, backward, pulling
blood in instead of pushing it out. He's been dying
in reverse for fifty years, getting younger inside while his
outside ages. He says, by Halloween he'll be a baby again,
(01:26):
but a baby that remembers being old, a baby that
remembers dying. He wants me to come see him, says
he needs to show me something. Show me what happens
when you die, but don't stop when you rot, but
keep walking when you remember things that haven't happened yet.
He knows how I die, knows how everyone dies, because
(01:47):
he's already dead. We're all already dead. We just haven't
stopped moving yet.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
My scaled arm won't stop writing all night. It wrote names, deaths, dates.
By morning, my entire desk was covered in its prophecies.
According to my arm, I die in eight days, but
also I died yesterday and I died tomorrow, all simultaneously true.
(02:23):
Thomas Brennan lives in the same house where I heard
the first recording, where his grandson Timothy learned words from
his dead grandmother. Three generations of Brennan's, all touched by death,
all still walking around. I knocked the door opened before
my knuckles made contact. Thomas stood there, ninety three years old,
(02:48):
but his eyes were infant's eyes new, barely able to focus. Margaret,
he said, in a voice that came from his stomach,
not his throat. Sarah, Elizabeth, whoever you are today, come in,
come see what death looks like after fifty years of practice.
(03:12):
His house was wrong. Furniture on the ceiling, carpet on
the walls, windows in the floor, as if gravity had
forgotten which way to pull. It happens when you die,
but don't, he explained, walking on the wall while I
stood on the floor. Reality gets confused, doesn't know where
(03:33):
to put you. He led me to his bedroom. The
bed was there, but also not there. It existed in layers,
the bed from nineteen twenty four, from nineteen seventy four,
from twenty twenty five, all stacked in the same space.
This is where I died, he said. October twenty third,
(03:54):
nineteen twenty four. Three in the morning, my lungs forgot
how to process air, started processing water instead, water that
wasn't there. He lay down on the bed. All the
beds his body separated into age layers. Ninety three year
old Thomas on top, forty two year old Thomas in
(04:14):
the middle, newborn Thomas at the bottom. Want to see
how I died. Before I could answer, he was drowning,
actually drowning water that didn't exist, filling lungs. In nineteen
twenty four, I could see it happening fifty years ago
while watching it happen. Now, his chest stopped moving, his
(04:38):
eyes went flat. He was dead. Then his chest moved,
but wrong, inflating from the inside, his ribs spreading like wings.
His dead mouth opened and something crawled out another Thomas, smaller, younger,
(04:58):
made of water and memory. This is what it does.
The water, Thomas said, kills you, then wears you. But
you're still conscious inside, still aware, feeling yourself be worn
like a suit. The ninety three year old corpse sat
up the water. Thomas climbed back inside through the mouth.
(05:22):
The body reanimated. I've been dead for fifty years, Thomas said, standing.
His movement's puppet jerky. But it needs me to walk
around to father children, to grandfather Timothy, to complete the bloodline.
So I walk, I talk, I breathe unnecessarily. He grabbed
(05:43):
my scaled arm, where he touched the scales spread up
to my elbow. Now you're dying too, he said, have
been since you played the first recording. The death just
hasn't caught up to your whole body yet, but it will.
Look He pulled me to a mirror, but I wasn't reflected. Instead,
(06:06):
I saw Sarah Blackwood in seventeen seventy four, in labor, dying,
and inside her belly thirty babies. But they weren't babies.
They were us, all of us, the entire town of Millbrook, unborn,
waiting inside a dying woman. We're all her death, Thomas explained.
(06:29):
Every person in Millbrook is a piece of Sarah Blackwood's death.
When she died, her death shattered into thousands of pieces.
Each piece became a person. But we're not people. We're
fragments of a death that won't end. The mirror cracked
behind the glass water, behind the water, something moving, a hand,
(06:55):
then a face, My face so not. This face had
been underwater for centuries. The features were soft, melted, reformed
by pressure. Hello, death, it said to me, Ready to
remember what you are. The mirror exploded outward. Water rushed
(07:18):
into the room, real water, this time, cold, dark, full
of things that had been growing in the deep. Thomas
laughed as the water rose. This is the best part,
when the drowning stops being metaphorical. The water was at
my waist, my chest, my neck, But I wasn't afraid.
(07:43):
My scaled arm was happy it belonged in water. It
pulled me down under the surface. The room was different, bigger,
connected to other flooded rooms, other flooded houses, an entire
underwater neighborhoo. And there were people, hundreds of them, all
(08:05):
the Brennans who had ever lived, all underwater, all conscious,
all drowning perpetually, but unable to die because they were
already dead. Welcome to the real mill Brook, they gurgled
(08:26):
in unison, the one that exists below the surface, where
all the dead live, where you've always lived. I tried
to surface, but there was no surface, just more water,
layer after layer of drowned spaces than I saw him. Timothy,
(08:46):
seven year old Timothy, but not the current one. All
of them, every Timothy, from every generation. They were the
same child, the same dead child, being reborn over and over.
Grandmother taught me to breathe water. All the Timothy said,
want to learn. They opened their mouths. Inside instead of
(09:08):
throats were pools, deep pools that led down to something vast.
Just stop breathing air, they instructed, Start breathing water. It's easy.
You've been doing it since seventeen seventy four. My lungs
were burning. Had to breathe had to. I breathed water
(09:30):
rushed in, but it didn't hurt. It felt right, natural,
like coming home. I was drowning, I was breathing, I
was dying, I was living. I was Sarah Blackwood, murdered
in seventeen seventy four. I was Margaret Blackwood playing recordings
(09:52):
in twenty twenty five. I was everyone. I was no one.
Thomas pulled me up of the water, out of the truth,
back into the lie of air and life. Not yet,
he gasped himself, dripping, melting slightly. Eight more days, eight
(10:15):
more deaths. Then you can stop pretending to be alive.
I coughed at water, so much water, and in that
water swimming were tiny people, microscopic margarets, all drowning, all breathing,
all dying, all living. The first death never ends, Thomas said,
(10:38):
aging rapidly now, his ninety three years catching up. It
just spreads person to person, generation to generation, until everyone
is the first death, until everyone is Sarah Blackwood dying
in seventeen seventy four. He collapsed, turned to water, soaked
(10:59):
into the carpet, but his voice remained. Check your arm,
See what it wrote while you were underwater. My scaled
arm had written one word over and over covering all
the scales. Tomorrow, Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, Tomorrow, I'll play
October twenty fourth. Tomorrow I learn about the cover up.
(11:22):
Tonight I'm drying off, but I can't. The water won't leave.
It's inside me now and I can feel it, thinking, planning,
waiting for tomorrow when something happens, something my arm knows
but won't tell me, something that makes tomorrow the most
(11:43):
important day yet.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Calaroga Shark Media.
Some elements of AI may have been used in this production,
but it was written, edited, mixed, and produced by Real
Live People Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott
Calarugu Shark Media. Welcome to ghost Scary Stories and the
October Records, a month long Halloween nightmare. This is episode
twenty three, the first.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Death October twenty third, nineteen seventy four, Silas Crane. Thomas
Brennan is ninety three years old. He died in nineteen
twenty four. He's very clear about this. Died October twenty third,
nineteen twenty four, at age forty two, drowned in his bedroom.
(00:43):
No water present, just drowned, but he got up the
next morning, went to work, lived another fifty years. He
called me tonight, said I needed to hear this, said
Margaret would need to know. Thomas died first in nineteen
twenty four, first death of that October, but death didn't take.
(01:03):
He remembers drowning, remembers his lungs filling, remembers his heart stopping,
then remembers it starting again, but beating wrong, backward, pulling
blood in instead of pushing it out. He's been dying
in reverse for fifty years, getting younger inside while his
outside ages. He says, by Halloween he'll be a baby again,
(01:26):
but a baby that remembers being old, a baby that
remembers dying. He wants me to come see him, says
he needs to show me something. Show me what happens
when you die, but don't stop when you rot, but
keep walking when you remember things that haven't happened yet.
He knows how I die, knows how everyone dies, because
(01:47):
he's already dead. We're all already dead. We just haven't
stopped moving yet.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
My scaled arm won't stop writing all night. It wrote names, deaths, dates.
By morning, my entire desk was covered in its prophecies.
According to my arm, I die in eight days, but
also I died yesterday and I died tomorrow, all simultaneously true.
(02:23):
Thomas Brennan lives in the same house where I heard
the first recording, where his grandson Timothy learned words from
his dead grandmother. Three generations of Brennan's, all touched by death,
all still walking around. I knocked the door opened before
my knuckles made contact. Thomas stood there, ninety three years old,
(02:48):
but his eyes were infant's eyes new, barely able to focus. Margaret,
he said, in a voice that came from his stomach,
not his throat. Sarah, Elizabeth, whoever you are today, come in,
come see what death looks like after fifty years of practice.
(03:12):
His house was wrong. Furniture on the ceiling, carpet on
the walls, windows in the floor, as if gravity had
forgotten which way to pull. It happens when you die,
but don't, he explained, walking on the wall while I
stood on the floor. Reality gets confused, doesn't know where
(03:33):
to put you. He led me to his bedroom. The
bed was there, but also not there. It existed in layers,
the bed from nineteen twenty four, from nineteen seventy four,
from twenty twenty five, all stacked in the same space.
This is where I died, he said. October twenty third,
(03:54):
nineteen twenty four. Three in the morning, my lungs forgot
how to process air, started processing water instead, water that
wasn't there. He lay down on the bed. All the
beds his body separated into age layers. Ninety three year
old Thomas on top, forty two year old Thomas in
(04:14):
the middle, newborn Thomas at the bottom. Want to see
how I died. Before I could answer, he was drowning,
actually drowning water that didn't exist, filling lungs. In nineteen
twenty four, I could see it happening fifty years ago
while watching it happen. Now, his chest stopped moving, his
(04:38):
eyes went flat. He was dead. Then his chest moved,
but wrong, inflating from the inside, his ribs spreading like wings.
His dead mouth opened and something crawled out another Thomas, smaller, younger,
(04:58):
made of water and memory. This is what it does.
The water, Thomas said, kills you, then wears you. But
you're still conscious inside, still aware, feeling yourself be worn
like a suit. The ninety three year old corpse sat
up the water. Thomas climbed back inside through the mouth.
(05:22):
The body reanimated. I've been dead for fifty years, Thomas said, standing.
His movement's puppet jerky. But it needs me to walk
around to father children, to grandfather Timothy, to complete the bloodline.
So I walk, I talk, I breathe unnecessarily. He grabbed
(05:43):
my scaled arm, where he touched the scales spread up
to my elbow. Now you're dying too, he said, have
been since you played the first recording. The death just
hasn't caught up to your whole body yet, but it will.
Look He pulled me to a mirror, but I wasn't reflected. Instead,
(06:06):
I saw Sarah Blackwood in seventeen seventy four, in labor, dying,
and inside her belly thirty babies. But they weren't babies.
They were us, all of us, the entire town of Millbrook, unborn,
waiting inside a dying woman. We're all her death, Thomas explained.
(06:29):
Every person in Millbrook is a piece of Sarah Blackwood's death.
When she died, her death shattered into thousands of pieces.
Each piece became a person. But we're not people. We're
fragments of a death that won't end. The mirror cracked
behind the glass water, behind the water, something moving, a hand,
(06:55):
then a face, My face so not. This face had
been underwater for centuries. The features were soft, melted, reformed
by pressure. Hello, death, it said to me, Ready to
remember what you are. The mirror exploded outward. Water rushed
(07:18):
into the room, real water, this time, cold, dark, full
of things that had been growing in the deep. Thomas
laughed as the water rose. This is the best part,
when the drowning stops being metaphorical. The water was at
my waist, my chest, my neck, But I wasn't afraid.
(07:43):
My scaled arm was happy it belonged in water. It
pulled me down under the surface. The room was different, bigger,
connected to other flooded rooms, other flooded houses, an entire
underwater neighborhoo. And there were people, hundreds of them, all
(08:05):
the Brennans who had ever lived, all underwater, all conscious,
all drowning perpetually, but unable to die because they were
already dead. Welcome to the real mill Brook, they gurgled
(08:26):
in unison, the one that exists below the surface, where
all the dead live, where you've always lived. I tried
to surface, but there was no surface, just more water,
layer after layer of drowned spaces than I saw him. Timothy,
(08:46):
seven year old Timothy, but not the current one. All
of them, every Timothy, from every generation. They were the
same child, the same dead child, being reborn over and over.
Grandmother taught me to breathe water. All the Timothy said,
want to learn. They opened their mouths. Inside instead of
(09:08):
throats were pools, deep pools that led down to something vast.
Just stop breathing air, they instructed, Start breathing water. It's easy.
You've been doing it since seventeen seventy four. My lungs
were burning. Had to breathe had to. I breathed water
(09:30):
rushed in, but it didn't hurt. It felt right, natural,
like coming home. I was drowning, I was breathing, I
was dying, I was living. I was Sarah Blackwood, murdered
in seventeen seventy four. I was Margaret Blackwood playing recordings
(09:52):
in twenty twenty five. I was everyone. I was no one.
Thomas pulled me up of the water, out of the truth,
back into the lie of air and life. Not yet,
he gasped himself, dripping, melting slightly. Eight more days, eight
(10:15):
more deaths. Then you can stop pretending to be alive.
I coughed at water, so much water, and in that
water swimming were tiny people, microscopic margarets, all drowning, all breathing,
all dying, all living. The first death never ends, Thomas said,
(10:38):
aging rapidly now, his ninety three years catching up. It
just spreads person to person, generation to generation, until everyone
is the first death, until everyone is Sarah Blackwood dying
in seventeen seventy four. He collapsed, turned to water, soaked
(10:59):
into the carpet, but his voice remained. Check your arm,
See what it wrote while you were underwater. My scaled
arm had written one word over and over covering all
the scales. Tomorrow, Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, Tomorrow, I'll play
October twenty fourth. Tomorrow I learn about the cover up.
(11:22):
Tonight I'm drying off, but I can't. The water won't leave.
It's inside me now and I can feel it, thinking, planning,
waiting for tomorrow when something happens, something my arm knows
but won't tell me, something that makes tomorrow the most
(11:43):
important day yet.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Ghost Scary Stories is a production of Calaroga Shark Media.
Some elements of AI may have been used in this production,
but it was written, edited, mixed, and produced by Real
Live People Executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!