Transcript

A case like this tempts a host to declare a verdict, to stake a claim, to be the adult in the room. Here is the truth. If you need the truth to be a spot of ventriloquism and a few nights of petty fraud, you will find material to confirm that instinct. If you need the truth to be a haunting that hid itself as a small beast, you will find lines that satisfy that appetite. If you want a third way, the psychoanalytic curve, the family mind theory, you can make a map from that too. But the more you chase a straight line, the more the story curls. That is the only verdict I trust.

So let us give the last word to the landscape. The Isle of Man is a place where roads keep secrets and farm walls outlast families. The farm at Cashen’s Gap sat on a ridge that sees storms early and keeps them late. A man bought it and tried to make it a life. A woman kept it clean. A girl grew inside its boards. Then a voice appeared. Perhaps they made it. Perhaps it found them. Perhaps both are true in a way that only makes sense to the part of us that understands hunger, and jokes, and rooms that carry sound like a living thing. The voice demanded bacon fat and attention. The family paid what they could. The island paid what it wanted to pay, in gossip and jokes and a little cruel joy. The world paid with column inches. Then winter after winter took what winter always takes. The voice faded. The house changed hands. Time got to do the thing it prefers to do. It moved on without explaining itself.

And yet here we are, telling the story again. If that is not a kind of haunting, I do not know what is. A small creature with a high voice that liked to listen at keyholes and break into song continues to borrow our attention. A father with a habit of writing everything down still hands us notes from his table. A daughter who did not want to be a character continues to be cast in roles by people who never met her. An island with its own stubborn silence endures while the wind smudges old paths. A talking mongoose strides along the top of the wall and smiles at our need to decide whether he is a joke or a sign.

He is neither. He is a story with teeth.

If you ever visit the island and walk up the track toward where the farmhouse stood, you might feel foolish for expecting anything at all. That is fair. Foolishness is part of the fee. Stand there anyway. The wind will come across the ridge. The grass will bend. You will think about a night when a family heard tapping in the walls and then a whistle and then a song. You will think about a voice that kept them company and kept them on edge for years. You will think about all the investigators who tried to bottle that voice and carry it home and could not. Then listen, not for a laugh, but for the possibility that makes all hauntings work. The possibility that something is in the room with you that loves attention and hates being known.

If you hear nothing, count yourself lucky. If you hear a chuckle, count yourself warned. If you hear a small request for bacon fat and bread, you have a choice to make. Feed it and it will be yours for a time. Refuse it and it will learn a new house to haunt.

Either way, when you walk back down the lane and the sea comes into view and the lights on the coast line up like pearls, you will realize that you have done what the island asked you to do. You have carried the story with you. You have become another small tube in a larger speaking wall.

This is Strange. Tonight we listened to a voice that should not have been a voice at all, and we let it say what it wanted to say. Somewhere, I hope, it is pleased. Somewhere, it is rolling its small eyes and telling me I got the dates wrong and the punch lines right. Somewhere, it is still hungry. Next time, we present the Patterson-Gimin film with a special