The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings - Lot 019 : Return To Sender // 12 Minutes

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

A budding social influencer goes missing followed by the tragic and disturbing events surrounding the Sunday morning lineup at an Atlanta tv station.Return to Sender - Written by Manen LysetStars Allison CossittEngineering, Production, Sound Design by Lauren Shand12 Minutes - Written by RoboKyStars Dan Wachs, Reverend Marly SachsEnginnering, Production, Sound Design by Trevor ShandFeaturing Stephen Knowles as the Antique DealerTheme music by The Newton BrothersAdditional sound fx by AV ProductionsAdditional music by:Trevor ShandKarl Casey @ White Bat AudioCO.AG ([e-mail])Unseen Horrors by Kevin MacLeodFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/4569-unseen-horrorsLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseFalling From His Graces by Tim KuligFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9827-falling-from-his-gracesLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseAncient Basement by Tim KuligFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/8486-ancient-basementLicensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ha ha ha. Now I must be psychic because I knew you were going to come by today. Well, step in from the cold. Don't be shy. Have I got just the most wonderful things for you? And wouldn't you know it? We are having a two-for-one sale. First up, a little miracle of technology that has been described to me as a vlog camera. Now, I know what a camera is, obviously. but I'm unfamiliar with the vlog part

perhaps this story might shed some light. I call it return to send her. Welcome to the antiquarium of sinister happenings and odd goings on. Right,

so my neighbor is one of those annoying, wannabe YouTube personalities. You know the type. Over the years, I've seen him cough out of cinnamon, whatever that was about, lay flat on the hood of his car as it slowly creeps down the driveway and the one where he doused himself in Lukehorn water, all the while screaming, epic win or epic fail or fuck epic maintenance of the status quo. For all I know, I can get tiring to watch him go about his shenanigans in the pursuit of viral fame, but, you know, you do you. He's this teeny guy.

When I first saw him, I honestly, I thought he was a kid. Anyway. So when he knocked on my door the other day, he told me he was going away for a few weeks, and he asked that I get his mail. And honestly, honestly, it was a relief. I cannot explain the peace of mind I had knowing that I didn't have to brace myself for any of his stupidity for a while. I was always afraid his stunts would wind up bleeding over into my life.

So, I don't know, things were pretty normal for the first couple of days. He received a few bills, a bit of spam, and what I could only assume was his birthday card. Then one evening, I got home to find a cardboard box waiting on his front porch. In big red letters was written, return to sender. I admit, I had trouble lifting the box on my own. It was really freaking heavy. So I lucked it across the road to my house. That was even harder.

And I quickly realized that there was no way I was going to drag it up the stairs and through my front door. So I decided I'd leave the package in my garage. And it wasn't like I kept my car in there. The garage door is a piece of shit that refuses to open without a good thug and a whack. It was less trouble just leaving the car in the driveway than it was to fight with the garage door every morning and night. In hindsight, I should have set the package down while I struggled to open the tricky door, but you know how it is when you've got a good grip on something. No point in setting it down if you don't have to, right?

So it was as I kicked the door open for a third time, that I lost my grip on the package, and it fell to the ground. I heard a light crack inside. I think I cursed. Shit, fuck, something like that. I hoped I hadn't broken up. anything important, but I figured I figured I just wouldn't tell my neighbor about it and let him assume the break happened en route. So hands-free, I finally managed to get the garage door

and stuck and why did it screech in protest as it rolled up and over me? And I dragged the box the rest of the way, setting in the corner for whenever my neighbor would come back to claim it. And then I forgot all about it. until a few days passed, that is. And I'm not sure exactly how long it took for the smell to waft in from the crack under the garage to house door, but it came in slow progression. It was a sickly sweet odor, similar to a skunk.

And for the first few days after I smelled it, I genuinely assumed that's exactly what it was, roadkill that had left its mark on my house. It was only when I realized that the scent was growing more intense instead of fading, that I went looking for a source. That's when I opened the garage door, and that's when the odor knocked me back, holding my nose. And the culprit, it was not hard to identify. The only change in my garage was the box in the corner.

I remember thinking it must have been one of those meat-of-the-month subscription boxes. the meat must have gone rancid from being left out of the fridge for so long. And, like, how much meat could have been in there for the box to have been so large and heavy? An entire freaking cow? So, oh, I covered my nose as I approached the box, a pair of scissors in my hands. I probably wouldn't have needed them to open it, though, as it had become really soggy at the bottom. Oh, enough to poke through with a finger, but I would have. was not about to poke my finger into spoiled meat juices.

That soggy bottom was the reason I had to open up the box in the first place. If I tried to drag it out whole, everything would just spill onto the floor. I was going to have to dump the pieces of meat one garbage bag at a time and take them down to the dumpster, a process I was not looking forward to. So my scissors tore through the tape along the top of the cardboard box, and I thought, I thought the smell couldn't get any worse, but as I flipped the flaps open, oh, God, I discovered a whole new gamut of stink. It was like opening a burning oven, but instead of a heat wave, I was met with waves of of piss, sweat, shit, and putrefaction. It was so bad that I staggered back and had to force down the puke beginning to come out of me.

I don't think I could have handled that scent mingling with the horrors coming out of the box. I'm not ashamed to admit. I ran out of the door for a breath of fresh air, but in the short time I'd spent in the garage, the smell had become so ingrained in the fabric of my clothes that it clung to me like a shadow. And nothing I tried could keep the smell out of my nostrils, not air fresheners, not a face mask, not three sheds. showers and a change of clothes. Every second that box lay open in my garage was another second the smell was allowed a foothold into my home. Oh, I had to bite the bullet. So I returned to the

garage. The flaps of the box still open as though inviting me to look. I was prepared at a clothes pin pinning my nostrils shut, a garbage bag in one hand and the strongest cleaner I could find in the other and long, long rubber gloves to keep my skin from having to touch whatever was inside. But, as it turns out, I needed none of those things. I, um, I wouldn't have to touch or clean the contents of that box. I would only have to suffer the nightmares every night. You see, you see, there, there was meat in the... that box, but it didn't come from a cow or a pig. No, no, it was...

It was worse than that. It was my neighbor. Dead. Still in one piece, but... Dead. So I called the cops, and naturally they took me in for interrogation. It's kind of hard not to suspect the woman with a corpse in her garage, after all. Thankfully, they soon realized that I...

I wasn't involved. My DNA might have been all over that box and the smell might have left a mark throughout my own house, but there was one piece of irrefutable evidence in my neighbor's own hands that proved my innocence, a vlogging camera.

They showed me the footage just once. I'm not sure if they were allowed to or if they felt so bad for me they figured it couldn't hurt. Either way, I saw it. So my neighbor was sitting in a box outside of a shipping facility, laughing, as he told the world how he was going to mail himself across state lines. He'd brought pee bottles, food, a pillow, a few flashlights.

His friend, some guy I'd seen at his place a couple of times to help him with his stunts. He closed the lid and presumably dropped him off for shipment. throughout the next couple of hours or days, I'm honestly, I'm not sure. My neighbor recorded a few short clips about his progress. I remember him saying, I think I'm on a truck now. I can feel it moving. Must be in a warehouse, pretty warm here, but still got plenty of food, that kind of stuff. And then, on that last entry, the box toppled over.

He broke his neck and that was it. The camera recorded until either the memory card got too full or the battery died. There's one thing that I didn't tell the police after they showed me the video. One thing I heard in the footage that will haunt me to the day I die. Just after the tumble that broke his neck, I heard the familiar screeching sound of my garage door. My, my, a tragic tale indeed. I've been told people have been dying to subscribe to his channel.

You'll have to dig around a bit to find it, as his content is kind of buried. There's time for one more. Let me go and tend to another customer, and I'll be all yours in a spell. Thanks so much for your kind and courteous patience. So, the next item, I really debated about showing you this at all. It's been known to, well, you'll discover that yourself.

It's a box of videotapes from WSB TV of Atlanta, the only to survive, in fact. All remaining copies were ordered to be destroyed. For this reason, I issued. you a note of caution with a story you're about to tune into called 12 minutes. 87, local news channel, WSB, TV2 of Atlanta, Georgia, was attempting to fill a scheduling gap in their Sunday morning lineup. After a few solicitations by local business owners, they decided to allow the young Reverend Marley Sachs to take the available hour block to do a religiously themed show.

It premiered October 18th with little promotion. The show was standard religious fair and consisted of the reverence sitting in a simple chair reading passages from the Bible to the camera and discussing their interpretation and significance to our modern day-to-day life. The show received a reasonable number of viewers and continued to be shown until early December.

It was then that the studio began to receive extremely strange complaints from viewers of Words of Light with the Reverend Marley Sachs. The calls were from women and women only, who vaguely referred to uncomfortable feelings they had at very specific intervals during the program. They described feelings of nausea, back pain, dizziness, and dizziness, and borkman. blurred vision. These callers, for no discernible reason, were convinced that it was the viewing of this program that was causing these symptoms. It was later determined after three weeks of complaints that these feelings were happening at roughly 12-minute intervals during the course of the program.

The small studio staff checked all recording equipment, both audio and video, and found nothing faulty. When the Reverend was made aware of these incidents, he merely shrugged and stated cryptically that some can't handle the voice of God. Head of the studio had a loss to explain the cause of these complaints, decided to continue running the program. By February, viewership had dropped sharply, and it was decided to pull the plug on the show. The studio had figured it would be more prudent to spend as much time as possible on the news story that had the other two local news networks abuzz, the miscarriage epidemic.

Starting somewhere in November, the number of healthy pregnant women miscarrying in the Atlanta metropolitan area had reached over 300. That's why some investigators are privately worried about this investigation in Atlanta. The CDC could find no discernible cause, for this terrifying occurrence.

The Reverend took the show's cancellation with what could be only described as abject indifference. When informed, he made no protest, merely nodded, almost knowingly. He left the studio after the last episode was filmed without so much as a word and dropped off the face of the earth. No one ever heard from him again. not his former congregation or any member of the church. The studio moved on, filling the slot with an infomercial,

and continued to concentrate on the miscarriage story. To describe this story as horrifying would be an understatement. A year and a half later, an intern at the WSP studios discovered the tapes of the words of light and began going through them. In an attempt to find stock footage for an upcoming piece the station was doing, on the impact religion had on the city. The Atlanta incident, as the miscarriage epidemic became known in medical journals, petered out three months after the studio canceled Reverend Saxis show and had already began to fade

from the public consciousness. As the intern went through the tapes, he accidentally made a disturbing discovery about the footage. While attempting to stop one recording at 10 minutes and 45 seconds, he mistakenly jam the fast forward button down. While the footage whizzed by, he attempted to pry up the button with a screwdriver. Just as he succeeded, the tape stopped at 32 minutes and one second. The intern actually fell out of his chair when he looked up at what was frozen on the screen of a badly decomposed, severed head filling up the entire frame.

He collected himself, he moved the film back a few frames, then forward, and realized that his mind was not playing tricks on him. He began going through the rest of the recording and soon discovered that at exactly 12-minute intervals, the image would appear for one frame.

One of the still frames, of the severed head. Thinking at some practical joke being played on the new guy, he presented it to one of the film technicians, ready to be mocked. The technician was just as puzzled as him. No one had touched the footage since the cancellation of the show. After the studio had closed for the night, the intern convinced the tech to help him go through all the tapes of the words of light.

They discovered that every single episode had this same horrifying anomaly. They also realized that as the show progressed, the image had become more disgusting. As maggots began to eat away at the loose flesh, and pieces of hair and skin seemed to have fallen off exponentially. The tech made clear to the intern what they were saying was technically impossible,

since the film itself showed absolutely no signs of splicing. And he himself had been at every filming of the show and knew of no time when this image could have been inserted into the frame. All of this was presented to the studio head, who fearing for some kind of backlash over allowing this to get on the air, ordered all the tapes destroyed. He told the intern and attack that he had no interest in knowing who, did it at this point, only that covering their collective asses is all that's important now.

They mention this to no one. The tech easily moved on, remembering the incident as a darkly funny personal anecdote. But the intern wouldn't let it go. He made copies of as many tapes as he could before they were wiped, and took them to see if he could find anything else that might point to who did this, or why they would. A week later, he attempted to rope the tech into helping him again, saying that he believed he had discovered something even more disturbing

than the images themselves. When the single frames were edited together in chronological order, the head's mouth appeared to be moving as if trying to form words. The tech, fearing for his own words. job told him to get rid of the copies and not talk about it again. Police responded to a 911 call made by an elderly woman in one of the Atlanta suburbs at dusk. She had heard horrible noises coming from her next door neighbor's house where a young couple lived. She told the emergency responder that the wife was pregnant and she was terrified that something had happened. The officers arrived on the scene

20 minutes later. They found no lights on in the window. And the front door, inside, Dimmon slashed open and was jagged. And a trail of blood led from the body to the couch, sat her husband. The stute naked. The corpse of his unborn child at his feet,

in his hand he held the rusty piece of metal siding he had used to gut his pregnant wife. The television was on. playing an 18-second loop of silent footage of a decomposing head mouthing some unintelligible words. The story at the police precinct to this day goes that the intern kept saying under his breath over and over again as they let him away. The light of God calls them. Pitch my hand out to you now and believe with all my heart that God is going to work a miracle for you.

Reach out. Let's make a contact of faith and believe God by the power of the spirit of God, by the blood of... Thank you for your patronage. Hope you enjoyed your new relic as much as I've enjoyed passing along its sordid history. It does come with our usual warning, however. Absolutely no refunds, no exchanges, and we won't be held liable for anything that may or may not occur while the object is in, your possession.

If you've got an artifact with mysterious properties, perhaps it's accompanied by a history of bizarre and disturbing circumstances. Maybe you'd be interested in dropping it and its story by the shop to share with other customers. Please reach out to antiquarium shop at gmail.com. A member of our team will be in touch. Till next time, We'll be waiting for you whenever you close your eyes in the space between sleep and dream. During regular business hours, of course, or by appointment, only for you, our best customer.

The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings, Lot 019, 12 minutes, written by Robokai, starring Dan Walks, and Reverend Marley Sacks. Engineering production and sound design by Trevor Shand. Return to Sender. Written by Manon Lyset. Starring Alison Kossett. Engineering production and sound design by Lauren Shand. Featuring Stephen Knowles as the antique dealer.

Theme music by the Newton Brothers. Additional sound effects by AV Productions. Additional music by Coag, Kevin McLeod, Tim Kulig, Trevor Shand, and Carl Casey at White Bat Audio. The Antiquarium of Sinister Happenings is created and curated by Trevor and Lauren Shand. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Antiquarium Pod.

Call the Antiquarium at 646-481-7197.