coming in June

P.S. If you’re the type of listener who likes a bit of visual atmosphere with your audio stories, SpectreVision has summoned some casual night-drive video accompaniment for deep, as well as a running on-screen transcript, and will likely do something similar for the next several new tales. Watch on YouTube (or on Spotify Premium): https://www.youtube.com/@SorenNarnia

And now, dear reader, you look a bit peckish... why don't you have a nice big plate of something at...

On October 12, 2018, dessert photographer David DeLoob was driving home from a party on a remote, twisting country road near Americus, Georgia when his car suddenly broke down. The cause was a simple lack of routine maintenance—specifically, running out of transmission fluid. Instead of walking just across the road to a police station for assistance, he chose to approach a spooky dark old mansion on a hill with a bloodstained door because, as he recalled later, “I thought I smelled popcorn, so, you know, I thought I might get lucky.”

What DeLoob encountered inside that house changed him forever. “They weren’t just ordinary ghosts that came out of the walls,” he wrote in A Fresh Coat of EVIL, his bestselling memoir of the incident. “They were more like were-ghosts, but where the wolf part would be, there was a dead pirate.” When unearthly wind gusts started to tear through the hallways and glowing orange goo began to pour from a Wi-Fi router behind him, he ran screaming into the night, rescued only by chance when a busload of exorcists coming home from a group trip to Atlanta to see Hamilton almost ran him over.

But though he had escaped almost certain goo, DeLoob’s haunting never really stopped. From that day on, he was utterly terrified of the prospect that his car might break down again someday because of his own negligence, making him again vulnerable to supernatural horrors. So skittish did he become, in fact, that he began taking his car to Jiffy Lube for their Signature Service Quick Oil Change and Safety Check two times each day—once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Within six weeks he had spent more than $1200 on replacement cabin air filters alone, even when ChatGBT pointed out they did absolutely nothing. So disturbed did one Jiffy Lube staff member become by his maintenance obsession that he resorted to the unheard-of measure of being honest with DeLoob about the state of his vehicle. Even the CEO wrote him a personal email pleading with him to cease his madness—but attached to the email, by pure habit, was a coupon for $8 off a Signature Service Quick Oil Change and Safety Check.

Today, locals are frightened of encountering what they call “The Fluid-Level Psycho” at the Macon Towncenter Jiffy Lube. “He almost looks kind of normal,” one resident has said. “But then you hear him talking to the dude at the counter about topping off his battery water or something, and his eyes get kind of spinny.” There is a gnarled oak tree, the more superstitious townsfolk say, on which his old Jiffy Lube 3,000-mile reminder stickers accumulate one by one as if by a phantom hand.

“I forgot to say that the ghosts not only knew my name, but my banking information and Social Security number,” poor David DeLoob added in the epilogue to A Fresh Coat of EVIL. “Running out of that house with a nice hot bag of the best popcorn I ever tasted has been no consolation during my sleepless nights of knowing how easy it is to let your tire pressure get a little low—and even a little low, I tell you, could cost you your life.”