August 27, 2025 • 8 mins
For thirty years, his job has been to erase the impossible. As the sole archivist for a defunct government agency, he is the janitor of history, professionally making the world's most terrifying and unexplainable events disappear into the incinerator. It’s a quiet, methodical job. Until today.
Today, he pulled File #8H3. A cold case from 1983, detailing a strange entity that appeared in a quiet suburban home. The file contains grainy surveillance photos, chilling witness reports, and a child’s crayon drawing of a tall, faceless man in a black suit.
But as he reads on, a horrifying realization dawns. The address is his childhood home. The witnesses are his parents. And the terrified six-year-old boy who drew the picture… is him.
This is the story of a man who discovers that his most frightening childhood memory wasn't a dream, and that the "imaginary friend" he was told to forget was real, and under government surveillance. What he does next will change everything.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-confession-booth--6717039/support.
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Today, he pulled File #8H3. A cold case from 1983, detailing a strange entity that appeared in a quiet suburban home. The file contains grainy surveillance photos, chilling witness reports, and a child’s crayon drawing of a tall, faceless man in a black suit.
But as he reads on, a horrifying realization dawns. The address is his childhood home. The witnesses are his parents. And the terrified six-year-old boy who drew the picture… is him.
This is the story of a man who discovers that his most frightening childhood memory wasn't a dream, and that the "imaginary friend" he was told to forget was real, and under government surveillance. What he does next will change everything.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-confession-booth--6717039/support.
You May also Like:
🚑MyDisasterPrepKit.com
Create Your Perfect Disaster Preparedness Kit
🤖Nudgrr.com (🗣'nudger") - Your AI Sidekick for Getting Sh*t Done
Nudgrr breaks down your biggest goals into tiny, doable steps — then nudges you to actually do them.
🎁ThePerfectGift.app
Find the Perfect Gift in Seconds
⭐SkyNearMe.com
Live map of stars & planets visible near you
✔DebtPlanner.app
Your Path to Debt-Free Living
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Declassification Log, October twenty sixth Archivist Miller's sole proprietor. This
is entry four thousand, one hundred and twelve, or is
it thirteen? The days bleed into one another? Down here,
the air is recycled, the light is artificial. Time is
a theory. The official project code name is the Dustpan Initiative.
(00:22):
A bit of bleak humor from the founders. I suppose
we're the men who sweep the impossible under the rug
of history. We redact, we sanitize, we incinerate the files
that prove the consensus reality is a carefully curated fiction.
For thirty years, I've been the janitor of the zeitgeist,
the silent librarian for the books that must never be read.
(00:45):
I've held photographs of impossible geometries hanging over suburban cul
de sacs. I've read transcripts of radio signals that answered
back in Sumerian. I've cataloged coroner's reports on bodies that
cast no shadows. And I have dutifully, professionally and with
a carefully cultivated sense of detachment, made it all disappear.
(01:06):
You build a wall inside your head, you have to
on one side is the work on the other, the
world and the wall must never ever be breached. Until today.
Today I pulled file number eight h three. It was
in the bottom of the crate. As always, they always
put the strange ones at the bottom. It feels cold,
(01:28):
not a metaphorical cold, a physical one, A damp cellar
like chill that clings to the Manila folder. The stamp
is a faded red a classification I haven't seen in years,
idelong class phenomena A ghost. They called it a ghost.
The location listed is Okhaven, Illinois, a pinprick of a
(01:50):
town known for its corn and its quiet graveyards. My town.
The date on the initial field report is November nineteen
eighty three, my year. A cold knot titens in my stomach.
The summary is brief typed on a rattling old underwood.
The ink faded to a hazy purple report of a
class three tulpiform entity manifesting in a suburban residence. Subject
(02:14):
exhibits localized reality distortion, auditory and thermal anomalies, and direct
nonverbal communication with a miner. Operation Nightlight initiated successfully concluded
recommend permanent archival under Protocol UMBRA Standard Language bureaucratic exorcism.
They use these sterile words to neuter the terror. I
(02:36):
open the file, my fingers feeling strangely numb, ready to
do my job, scan, redact, incinerate, forget, and then I
saw the name of the miner. Section two witness reports.
Subject's name David Miller, age six, My name, my age.
(02:56):
The wall inside my head didn't just breach, it vapor.
I told myself it was a coincidence. My hands were
shaking so badly. I had to set the file down
a common name. It had to be, but the address
for twelve Maple Street, my house, the house with the
weeping willow in the front yard, and the loose floorboard
in my bedroom that I used to hide my comic
(03:18):
books under my parents' names are listed as witnesses. Interviews conducted.
Subjects cooperative but deemed psychologically unreliable due to parental attachment.
The report details three weeks of relentless invisible surveillance. Men
in unmarked sedan's pretending to be telephone repairmen parked down
the street. They took notes. They logged my night terrors,
(03:42):
my sudden drops in body temperature. They documented my conversations
with him, my mother called him mister Chuckles. She told
the family doctor it was a cute, if slightly morbid
name for a boy's imaginary friend, a phase i'd grow
out of. The report calls him Subject eight h three.
They described him with chilling precision, an entity of unusual height,
(04:06):
approximately seven feet tall, wearing a dark, ill fitting, single
breasted suit. Appears vaguely human, but facial features are consistently
obscured by shadow, even in direct light. They wrote it
all down. The way he would stand in the corner
of my room, perfectly still for hours. The way he
(04:27):
would hum a low buzzing frequency that didn't have a
melody but made the fillings in my father's teeth ache.
I remember that humming. I remember the way I would
tell my parents that mister Chuckles was sad because he'd
lost something important, that he was looking for it in
the walls. I remember my father's face pale and drawn.
(04:50):
I remember my mother's forced smiles. They told me the
old house had a gas leak, that it was making
us all imagine things. I remember the men in suits
who came to fix the pipes. They were kind, They
asked me questions about my friend. They gave me a
lollipop that tasted bitter. They told me I had a
wonderful imagination and that soon I would forget all about
(05:13):
mister Chuckles. And I did. For thirty years, I did.
I'm looking at the evidence section now, Exhibit A, a
child's drawing on faded yellow construction paper, attached with a
rusted paper clip. The crayon strokes are heavy, angry, pressing
right through the paper in places. It's a drawing of
(05:35):
my bedroom. There's my bed, my little red toy box,
and in the corner a tall, impossibly thin man in
a scribbled black suit. He has no face, just a
wide white crescent moon smile, like a gash in the darkness.
Long spidery fingers with too many joints reach almost to
the floor underneath it. In my own clumsy, six year
(05:58):
old print is the name mister Chuckles. They told us
these were delusions, mass hysteria, shared psychosis, the brain's pathetic
attempt to explain the unexplainable. But this is my handwriting.
I was six, and I drew a picture of the
man who lived in our walls. And now I'm looking
(06:18):
at Exhibit B, a photograph, grainy, black and white, a
long lens shot taken from across the street through a
curtain of rain. There's my house. There's my bedroom window
with the little glow in the dark rocket ship sticker
I put on it, And standing under the weeping willow
in our front yard, half hidden by the dripping branches.
(06:39):
Is him, same suit, same impossible height, head tilted at
an unnatural angle, as if listening to the rain. He
was real, He was standing right there. It wasn't a
gas leak, it wasn't a dream. He was real. My
job is to destroy this file, to take this photograph,
(07:00):
this drawing, this proof of my own stolen memory, and
feed it to the incinerator, to turn this impossible truth
into ash and smoke. That is my function, to be
the man who forgets and helps the world forget with him.
But there's one last page, Exhibit SE, the final report
for Operation Nightlight. It details the pharmacological intervention administered to
(07:24):
the Miller family, a mild experimental amnestic delivered via an
aerosol under the guise of a fumigation. Side effects temporary confusion,
vivid dreams, and a high probability of memory fragmentation. They
didn't just watch They didn't just document. They came into
(07:44):
my home and they cut a piece of my life
out of my head. They didn't just file away the monster.
They made me forget him. Why what did he want?
What was he looking for in the walls of my house?
This is Archivist Miller Declassification Log, October twenty sixth, final entry.
(08:04):
I have reviewed file number eight h three. I am
not redacting it. I am not sanitizing it. I am
not destroying it. I am copying every last word, every photograph,
every terrifying drawing, and I am walking out that door.
The janitor is quitting. You can't burn a ghost. You
can't redact a memory that refuses to die. You can
(08:27):
only open the door and let it out into the light.
Declassification Log, October twenty sixth Archivist Miller's sole proprietor. This
is entry four thousand, one hundred and twelve, or is
it thirteen? The days bleed into one another? Down here,
the air is recycled, the light is artificial. Time is
a theory. The official project code name is the Dustpan Initiative.
(00:22):
A bit of bleak humor from the founders. I suppose
we're the men who sweep the impossible under the rug
of history. We redact, we sanitize, we incinerate the files
that prove the consensus reality is a carefully curated fiction.
For thirty years, I've been the janitor of the zeitgeist,
the silent librarian for the books that must never be read.
(00:45):
I've held photographs of impossible geometries hanging over suburban cul
de sacs. I've read transcripts of radio signals that answered
back in Sumerian. I've cataloged coroner's reports on bodies that
cast no shadows. And I have dutifully, professionally and with
a carefully cultivated sense of detachment, made it all disappear.
(01:06):
You build a wall inside your head, you have to
on one side is the work on the other, the
world and the wall must never ever be breached. Until today.
Today I pulled file number eight h three. It was
in the bottom of the crate. As always, they always
put the strange ones at the bottom. It feels cold,
(01:28):
not a metaphorical cold, a physical one, A damp cellar
like chill that clings to the Manila folder. The stamp
is a faded red a classification I haven't seen in years,
idelong class phenomena A ghost. They called it a ghost.
The location listed is Okhaven, Illinois, a pinprick of a
(01:50):
town known for its corn and its quiet graveyards. My town.
The date on the initial field report is November nineteen
eighty three, my year. A cold knot titens in my stomach.
The summary is brief typed on a rattling old underwood.
The ink faded to a hazy purple report of a
class three tulpiform entity manifesting in a suburban residence. Subject
(02:14):
exhibits localized reality distortion, auditory and thermal anomalies, and direct
nonverbal communication with a miner. Operation Nightlight initiated successfully concluded
recommend permanent archival under Protocol UMBRA Standard Language bureaucratic exorcism.
They use these sterile words to neuter the terror. I
(02:36):
open the file, my fingers feeling strangely numb, ready to
do my job, scan, redact, incinerate, forget, and then I
saw the name of the miner. Section two witness reports.
Subject's name David Miller, age six, My name, my age.
(02:56):
The wall inside my head didn't just breach, it vapor.
I told myself it was a coincidence. My hands were
shaking so badly. I had to set the file down
a common name. It had to be, but the address
for twelve Maple Street, my house, the house with the
weeping willow in the front yard, and the loose floorboard
in my bedroom that I used to hide my comic
(03:18):
books under my parents' names are listed as witnesses. Interviews conducted.
Subjects cooperative but deemed psychologically unreliable due to parental attachment.
The report details three weeks of relentless invisible surveillance. Men
in unmarked sedan's pretending to be telephone repairmen parked down
the street. They took notes. They logged my night terrors,
(03:42):
my sudden drops in body temperature. They documented my conversations
with him, my mother called him mister Chuckles. She told
the family doctor it was a cute, if slightly morbid
name for a boy's imaginary friend, a phase i'd grow
out of. The report calls him Subject eight h three.
They described him with chilling precision, an entity of unusual height,
(04:06):
approximately seven feet tall, wearing a dark, ill fitting, single
breasted suit. Appears vaguely human, but facial features are consistently
obscured by shadow, even in direct light. They wrote it
all down. The way he would stand in the corner
of my room, perfectly still for hours. The way he
(04:27):
would hum a low buzzing frequency that didn't have a
melody but made the fillings in my father's teeth ache.
I remember that humming. I remember the way I would
tell my parents that mister Chuckles was sad because he'd
lost something important, that he was looking for it in
the walls. I remember my father's face pale and drawn.
(04:50):
I remember my mother's forced smiles. They told me the
old house had a gas leak, that it was making
us all imagine things. I remember the men in suits
who came to fix the pipes. They were kind, They
asked me questions about my friend. They gave me a
lollipop that tasted bitter. They told me I had a
wonderful imagination and that soon I would forget all about
(05:13):
mister Chuckles. And I did. For thirty years, I did.
I'm looking at the evidence section now, Exhibit A, a
child's drawing on faded yellow construction paper, attached with a
rusted paper clip. The crayon strokes are heavy, angry, pressing
right through the paper in places. It's a drawing of
(05:35):
my bedroom. There's my bed, my little red toy box,
and in the corner a tall, impossibly thin man in
a scribbled black suit. He has no face, just a
wide white crescent moon smile, like a gash in the darkness.
Long spidery fingers with too many joints reach almost to
the floor underneath it. In my own clumsy, six year
(05:58):
old print is the name mister Chuckles. They told us
these were delusions, mass hysteria, shared psychosis, the brain's pathetic
attempt to explain the unexplainable. But this is my handwriting.
I was six, and I drew a picture of the
man who lived in our walls. And now I'm looking
(06:18):
at Exhibit B, a photograph, grainy, black and white, a
long lens shot taken from across the street through a
curtain of rain. There's my house. There's my bedroom window
with the little glow in the dark rocket ship sticker
I put on it, And standing under the weeping willow
in our front yard, half hidden by the dripping branches.
(06:39):
Is him, same suit, same impossible height, head tilted at
an unnatural angle, as if listening to the rain. He
was real, He was standing right there. It wasn't a
gas leak, it wasn't a dream. He was real. My
job is to destroy this file, to take this photograph,
(07:00):
this drawing, this proof of my own stolen memory, and
feed it to the incinerator, to turn this impossible truth
into ash and smoke. That is my function, to be
the man who forgets and helps the world forget with him.
But there's one last page, Exhibit SE, the final report
for Operation Nightlight. It details the pharmacological intervention administered to
(07:24):
the Miller family, a mild experimental amnestic delivered via an
aerosol under the guise of a fumigation. Side effects temporary confusion,
vivid dreams, and a high probability of memory fragmentation. They
didn't just watch They didn't just document. They came into
(07:44):
my home and they cut a piece of my life
out of my head. They didn't just file away the monster.
They made me forget him. Why what did he want?
What was he looking for in the walls of my house?
This is Archivist Miller Declassification Log, October twenty sixth, final entry.
(08:04):
I have reviewed file number eight h three. I am
not redacting it. I am not sanitizing it. I am
not destroying it. I am copying every last word, every photograph,
every terrifying drawing, and I am walking out that door.
The janitor is quitting. You can't burn a ghost. You
can't redact a memory that refuses to die. You can
(08:27):
only open the door and let it out into the light.
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