The SCP Experience - He Tried to Summon His Dead Wife. Something Else Answered | SCP-060

Episode Date: October 19, 2026

After losing his beloved wife, a grieving farmer turns to forbidden occult rituals in a desperate attempt to speak with her one last time. But when strange lights appear over his isolated property and an impossible storm descends upon the trees, he begins to realize that some doors should never be opened. This story is derived from ⁠The SCP Foundation Database⁠ and is released under Creative Commons Sharealike 3.0.⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/⁠⁠⁠ Author:  James Gullickson * * * CONTENT DISCLAIMER: This episode contains explicit content not limited to intense themes, strong language, and depictions of violence intended for adults. Parental guidance is strongly advised for children under the age of 18. Listener discretion is advised.  #thescpexperience #scp #scpfoundation #scpencounters #securecontainprotect #scpstories Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Call 1866-531-2600 to visit connectxontera.ca. Your Uncle Dale is the undisputed king of hot takes. Buffalo, they're a lot because his barber said so. Don't listen to Dale. Go with the score bet. Breaking news, live odds, and real-time stats right at your fingertips. Everything you need for game day is one tap away. Don't go with hot takes.

Go with the score bet. 19 years or older, Ontario only. If you or somebody you know as gambling concerns, call Connects Ontario 247 at 1866-531-2-60. Texas at 247, 247. Our chat with us at www.comnettsontario. Standard message and data rates may apply. The farm was called Ten Tree.

Most of the county figured, Ten Tree was the name of whoever had the land before the Corr Hills. Some funny-sounding word chewed up by the Ellis Island Welcoming Committee. That wasn't the case, though. Ten Tree featured, you guessed it. Ten trees. Ten white oaks standing tall in a rough line, not too far from the house.

Just as stones throw away from the Goodfield. The Coor Hills did their best. to work that land, watching those oak trees grow slowly toward the heavens. The family had been there for a while, long before there was any sort of county road running that way. You know, you don't normally see a lot of white oak around these parts. In fact, the only white oaks for damn near 100 miles grow right there on 10 tree, just north of the Laurentian divide. The earth gives up white and black spruce, a bit of tamarack in the wet ground, birch and Aspen coming in. after every burn like weeds. No one knows for sure why white oak was growing on dentry,

but there are better things to wonder about anyway. Who cares, right? A tree is a tree. A thing can stand in front of folks their whole lives and be out of place the entire time and, so long as it was there when they were born, it is only scenery. The true patriarch, Elias Corrhill, first put up the house in 1911. The trees were already. there, and they were plenty big, too. There were ten of them then, plenty more than ten now, some 80 years later. The last count was 18, if I'm not mistaken. The original ten still stand tall. The younger, newer trees wandered from the group a bit, and sprouted behind them. Funny how nature does that. Jonathan Corhill was not always what he was known to be. He was Elias' great-grandson.

Jonathan took on the farm at 26. During the spring, his father's heart quit on him in the barn. He was a big man through the shoulders, dark-haired, quiet, and stoic in the way a great many men are. Jonathan could fix most anything with a motor in it, and generally wouldn't take money for his trouble. When a local boy fell through the ice on Bear Lake back in 78, Jonathan Corrhill was one of four men who crawled out on their bellies with a rope to get him. He was the one at the front. The farm was never going to make anybody rich.

Jonathan knew that. It was a rock with a little dirt smeared over the top and about 110 frost-free days if God was feeling generous. He ran hay and oats and a potato patch along with eight or nine head of beef cattle. The barn sat off the north corner of the house on the grove side, and the stock tank sat at the corner of the barn, where the well line came up, fed by a float, that kept it to the lip whether anyone was paying attention or not.

Most importantly, though, Jonathan had Gertie. Gertie Corhill, born Gertrude Atkins, came from a family so large that, for 20 years, most weddings, christenings, and the like were standing room only. She was small but mighty. She ran the church suppers. She ran the 4-H, and she ran Jonathan. He was well aware, and he quite liked it.

A quiet man with a loud wife gets to be out in the world without having to do much talking at all. Gertie was Jonathan's true love. Gertie died in April 1995. Only took about four days from start to untimely finish. It started at Sunday supper when she fell into a mean coughing fit while laughing at Vern Lundy's joke. By Wednesday, she was hanging on by a thread in Duluth. The doctor said it was pneumonia. The sickness worked its way through the small woman in four days, like fire through dry brush.

On her last day, Jonathan stepped out for a moment to move a tractor into the barn before it started raining. He wasn't even gone for five minutes. When he came back, Gertie had passed. That summer, after Gertie died, the farm came in like nothing anyone had ever gotten out of it. See, 1995 was a bad year for most folks. year, a wet June, and then it shut off dry in July and stayed dry. The McTaggerts lost a whole second cutting. Half the county didn't burn the diesel to go get their oats, and Jonathan Corhill's ground put up so much hay that you could lose a horse in it. His potatoes came out the

size of two fists together. His oats stood chest high out by the road with heads on them like a seed catalog. He had put the crop in that May as a way to cope, but he soon quothed. Tending to it. It sure came in anyway. Jonathan never said a word about it, didn't brag, didn't explain it, and didn't sell any of it either. That last part was what really started the talk. He never took anything to the market. He never took it anywhere, matter of fact. He cut some of it and stacked it and let a good half of it stand and eventually rot in the field. He couldn't see selling the best crop that ground ever gave, the year it took her, but nobody knew that. And when a man has a miracle year and lets it go to waste, people are going to go looking for a reason.

Sure enough, the reason they landed on was Satan. It started as a joke at the Legion Hall, a little snarky comment. Somebody said Corhill had taken on a new partner, and people laughed. A bit of time went by, and folks stopped laughing when they said it. That's how things go in a small town like this. By the spring of 1996, there were people in the people. in that county who would tell you straight-faced that Jonathan Corhill had traded Gertie to the devil himself for a crop. It was ludicrous, but it was believed. Jonathan had been

in deep mourning, fighting off a profound sadness. One can only know from true love lost. Jonathan barely worked the land. Lord knows how the cattle stayed alive. In fact, Jonathan barely did anything at all. He cut himself off from the world. Word around town is that he was sleeping in a chair in the front room on account of not being able to get back in bed without Gertie. Old Miss Whitman, bless her heart, carried a hot dish out there that fall, and swears she saw the bedroom door boarded shut with a stool wedged underneath the knob. Miss Whitman talked about what she saw, and it got around. Folks had grown real weary of Jonathan Corhill, and his new hobby didn't do him any favors either. He started ordering books about eight months

after Gertie's funeral. Ruth Parsons ran the post office most days, and Ruth was not what you would call a discreet woman, when she saw what was going out to Tendree from shops in Chicago, Boston, and, on more than one occasion, England. She became real certain about the Jonathan Corhill rumors. The shops had strange names that frightened Ruth, names like esoteric ephemera, and beyond worlds. The books he ordered were from the Victorian era. most of them at least, big old tomes about spiritualism, table wrapping, and the like. No need to dance around it any further. Jonathan Corhill had begun dabbling in the occult.

That's how he was coping. He worked through the old books like they were another chore on the farm. He would start early and go late. Soon, Jonathan believed he had a good bit of it all figured out. Ansel Ketterman dropped by 10 tree in June. With a hydraulic hose Jonathan had loaned his. son and never asked back. This was an excuse on Ansel's part to drop in on Jonathan unannounced. Both of them knew that. The yard had seen better days. The barn door hung off its top hinge.

Last year's hay still stood gray and flattened in the field. A tractor had been taken over by vegetation. Ansel knocked on the door, took a step back, and waited with a smile on his face. Soon, Jonathan stepped out on the porch, and it took Ansel a second to place his neighbor of 30-odd years. Jonathan had grown thin and frail. Gone was the broad-chested working man Gertie had married. Still, Jonathan made a passable effort at Smalltalk. He asked after Ansel's wife, Marion. He asked after their boy.

It was mighty hot, but Jonathan did not invite Ansel to step inside, though the door stood open behind him. Just past Jonathan. Ansel could see a table in the front room with the leaves extended out. Old books were stacked on at two and three high, and handwritten notes were strewn about the piles. Ansel also noticed a ring of some stain on the floor in front of the fireplace, scorched blackened places and mopped at, like somebody had set a fire where no fire ought to be. Ansel stood on the porch for another five minutes, and the men chawed on easy topics like the weather and hay prices. When Ansel ran

out of small talk, he said he would let Jonathan get back to it. Jonathan came down one step off the porch, the only time he moved the entire visit, and said in a stern voice, Don't come back here. Ansel was taken aback by this. Nothing about their conversation had warranted such a response. Before Ansel could say anything, Jonathan went inside and shut the door. Jonathan ended up saying some version of that to any visitor who dropped by over the next few weeks. There were perhaps six men in that county he would still have opened his door for. By the end of the season, he had told all six to stay gone. They all did just that, and every one of them got to drive home feeling he had done the best he could by a grieving man.

It was Thursday, the 12th of September, 1996. It was clear, three-quarter moon. The Milky Way lay across the sky like frost on a window pane. Not a cloud between there and Canada. It had been dry for three weeks, and the Department of Natural Resources had a firewatch on. He'd tried it in the house first, back in the spring, and near about burned the place down. The books said it wanted the open air and living wood. The oaks were the only living wood he had, worth the name. Jonathan carried the books out behind the house and into the grove,

among the old ten, and laid it all out before him. He carved figures, shapes, and sigils into the to the dry dirt with his fingers. He lit a circle of stout pillar candles. He placed a beat-up tin cup of well water in the center of the candles. Gertie's wedding ring was submerged in the cup. Jonathan thought he had figured out how to do it, how to speak with Gertie from beyond the grave. He wanted, no, needed, just 90 seconds with her to say one last thing. He started around 11 and worked at it for two hours. Finally, at one in the morning, the sky opened. opened. It all came without warning and without any sound at all, without any feeling either. A heavy rain fell on that grove in sheets so thick, he could not see his own house from 30 feet,

but it made no noise, not on the leaves, not on the barn roof, not on him. He could see it striking the ground and kicking the dust up, and he could see the branches going over under the weight of it, and all of it happened in a quiet place like the inside of a church. The lightning was red and green, crooked bolts one after another, red and then green and then red again, out of a sky with no cloud in it anywhere. The bolts all seemed to come down in the one place, somewhere about the fourth tree from the north end, though when it was over, there wasn't a mark on it. The stars stayed visible straight through. He could make out the dipper behind it the entire time. Jonathan looked around for his wife, for Gertie to emerge from wherever she was hiding in all

this. It went on for about five minutes and then quickly tapered off. Jonathan was bone dry, hair dry, shirt dry, the books lying open on the ground with the pages not so much as puckered. The candles were still burning. Everything he'd drawn into the dry dirt was just as it was before the strange storm. He walked out to the field road where the ruts hold water three days after a shower and found nothing in them but dust and last year's oat straw. He went to the stock tank, and the level stood exactly where it had stood that morning. Eight or nine people saw something that night. Ruth Parsons saw it while she tossed and turned in bed.

Ansel was up with his wife's hip, and watched the bedroom ceiling turn light shades of green and red. He got out of bed and went to the window and saw a low light off to the northwest, green as a bottle, that went red and then went out. There was no thunder. He told his wife Marion, it was heat lightning and got back into bed. Christopher Corhill had not heard his brother's voice since last winter. He had driven out to the farm twice that spring and got no answer at the door either time. So when the phone rang in his kitchen in Aurora on Friday afternoon, and it was his brother on the other end, Christopher stood there and let Jonathan go on.

Jonathan talked about books and candles and putting Gertie's ring in a cup of well water the way another man talks about a new tractor. He talked about rain that made no sound. And at the end of it, Jonathan said, I think I can do it, Chris. Tonight's the night, I'm really going to do it. Christopher didn't know what to make of all this. He said maybe he would drive out to Tentree on Sunday after church for a visit. No, Jonathan said. His excitement suddenly gone. His voice dropped low. Last night, you now has opened the door. Then Jonathan hung up. Christopher meant to drive out Sunday after church anyway. He never got the chance.

A couple weeks later, when the sheriff came around, Christopher told them that his brother had telephoned him Friday afternoon and told him never to make contact again, and that this was the last he heard from him. Now, that wasn't true. I don't condone lying of any sort, but I do understand why Christopher said that. Unlock unlimited free grocery delivery with PC Express Pass.

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Friday the 13th was the annual Sadie Hawkins fall dance. If he didn't feel like dancing, Ansel was there making his version of barbecue. The festivities were held at the Legion Hall in town, and most of the town was there. Everyone would have been there, had Jonathan attended. Instead, he sat on his porch with Gertie's ring on a length of baling twine around his neck, working up the nerve to do the ritual again out by the oak trees. The storm came in quick off the west around 9.30, the last gasps of summer, fighting against the incoming fall weather. Jonathan hoped the storm would pass soon. He sat off to the side

of the porch and the chair he had used most nights that year. He faced toward the White Oaks. The weather came over hard and fast, wind and rain going sideways, and all the good, honest noise of it. The storm began to settle a bit, thunder rumbling quietly in the distance. That was when the bolt came down. It struck the fourth tree from the north end of the old ten. The sound and the the light arrived as one thing, and the sight briefly stunned Jonathan. When his eyes came back, the crown of that oak was gone, and the whole standing trunk was a fire from the ground to 60 feet up, one column of flame in the storm. The oak burned bright in the rain. It was still coming down hard, and that tree burned like a torch soaked in fuel oil. Jonathan sat and watched the storm

go off east, 15 minutes, then 20. The thunder got up over the device. and quit. The rain slacked and then stopped altogether. The clouds broke enough to show stars and the gaps, and the tree still burned. A struck tree burns out, you know. Most things do eventually. The flame takes the branches and the leaves real quick. It smolders in the heartwood. It drops limbs and goes sullen, then smokes for a bit. This held steady, top to bottom, with hardly any smoke, and the color of it kept changing. Orange first, then up into yellow, then paling off toward white like steel in a forge. The heat crossed 80 feet of wet yard and touched Jonathan's face.

He lifted his hand to shield it and looked on. The 17 others stood there and never took a spark. Wet leaves 20 feet from a white hot fire, and not one of them curled. He went down the steps into the yard. He got about halfway and stopped. The fire was white all the way through now, and had quit looking like a burning tree at all. The flames began to dance and curl into an oblong, almost circular shape.

Like a sinkhole, Jonathan thought. It appeared as if the tree had been taken out of the world, and what remained was the shape of the light where it had been standing. Something at the center of the fire caught his eye, a mass of some kind. It grew larger and larger, and Jonathan realized the thing was coming forward from the middle of the flame. Toward Jonathan. He thought it was her. The shape, clearly that of a human figure now, was thin, and it was standing straight.

It was about the size of a petite person, almost the size of, no, couldn't be. Jonathan Corhill put both hands over his mouth. He went down on his knees in the mud. He thanked God. He had spent so many months and every dollar he had and lost every friend chasing this exact moment. It all felt worth it. The sacrilege, the occult, the whole lot of it. Jonathan hollered for her from where he knelt. Gertie!

Gertie! Is that you in there, honey? The figure came further into view. The flames revealed the truth. Whoever was in there wasn't some sweet petite thing. Jonathan's eyes widened, more bewildered than awestruck. It stepped out of the flames in one fluid motion. It adjusted its posture and stood tall. Maybe seven or seven and a half feet, Jonathan estimated.

The light cast from the flames showed that this figure wasn't a woman, not a man either. It was a skeleton, all of its bones, the ribs, the hips, the little knuckle bits, plain as a schoolroom chart. Every inch of its sheathed in white fire that moved over it, as though driven by wind. It had no face to speak of. It turned its head slowly, looking around and examining the new world around it. Finally, its gaze seemed to subtle on Jonathan. Shell shocked, Jonathan realized he was still on his knees. The skeleton crossed the ground between them before he could stand. It lunged for his throat, wrapping both bony hands around his neck.

The stiff bones felt like they were going to puncture the skin and tear into his throat. Jonathan struggled and managed to get a few fingers under the skeleton's grip. The two tumbled to the ground, and Jonathan continued to fight. The skeleton throttled it, driving its bony knee into Jonathan's stern. him over and over while still choking him. Jonathan weezed hard. He began to feel soft and heavy, consciousness slipping away.

Suddenly, the skeleton let go and, in one quick motion, the thing grabbed his ankle and effortlessly threw Jonathan across the yard. 200 pounds of grown man went through the air like a sack of feed. He came down 30 feet away on his shoulder, with his face in the mud of his own yard. And it was nothing but luck that he hadn't been thrown into the porch posts

and finished there. Jonathan scrambled to his feet, his head and shoulder pulsing with pain. God knows how he managed it, but he had little choice. He needed to get inside and call for help. Now! Jonathan hustled toward the house as fast as he could.

He looked back and saw the skeleton standing still, watching him flee into the night. He scrambled up the steps on his hands and knees, made it to the door, then slammed it shut and locked it. The phone hung on the kitchen wall by the refrigerator. Jonathan knew exactly who he was. would call. It was instinct. There was no calling the sheriff. There wasn't a deputy in the county who hadn't laughed about the devil at the Legion, and there was nothing Jonathan could say to one of

them that wouldn't prove it. Christopher was the only one left who wouldn't laugh. He dialed his brother, and it rang once, twice, three times, four times, and he hung up. He slammed the receiver down and dialed again. Once, twice, three times. He slammed the receiver down again, then redialed. Jonathan had no what time it was. He just needed Christopher to pick up. It rang and rang, and Jonathan could see through the window over the sink that the skeleton was still standing by the burning tree. He couldn't tell where exactly it was looking, but it hadn't appeared to move. The phone kept ringing. He wasn't going to hang up this time. He wasn't going to take his eyes off the thing in his yard either. The ringing carried on. Why wasn't Christopher picking up? Jonathan felt his eyes getting hot with tears.

The consequences of his actions washed over him. What had he led into this world? Where did it come from? Why didn't it follow him to the house? The ringing suddenly stopped. The dial tone now droned. The call had dropped. Jonathan roared in fear and frustration

and quickly dialed his brother again, still watching the entity in his yard. We're sorry. This number is out of service. Please check the number you dialed. Jonathan slammed the receiver down again and realized he was now too frantic to dial without looking at the buttons.

It would only take a moment. Then he could look back at the yard. Five, five, five. He fat-fingered the seven and had to start over. Five, five, five, seven, eight, three, two. The phone began to ring. Jonathan looked back to the window. The skeleton was gone.

Jonathan's heart sank. A lump formed in his throat. He let out a helpless whimper. Please. Jonathan whispered. Please pick up. Christopher was groggy, still half asleep. Do you know what time in it?

Help me. Jonathan blurted out. I need you to get over. What's going on now? I did something, Christopher. Something bad. And I don't know. A thunderous crash sent Jonathan cowering to the floor.

The phone still glued to his ear. He looked up and saw the front door blown to pieces, fragments scattered across the room. Why this had happened? Or who had done it? Were questions Jonathan didn't want to consider. He tucked his head. head between his knees. Christopher, he said quietly.

I, I let something in. I... A white hot heat suddenly washed over Jonathan. He looked up and saw the skeleton standing over him now, radiating such an intense heat, that the curtains and wooden cabinets began to smoke and then burst into flames. What did you say? Christopher was awake now. Johnny?

I didn't catch that last bit. Jonathan dropped the phone. The abomination grabbed Jonathan by the scalp and effortlessly lifted him off the ground. lifted him off the ground. He felt the skin under his hair sizzling. He kicked and struggled, trying to break free. Jonathan could hear the tinny sound of his brother yelling for him on the other end. I thought I found Gertie. Jonathan shouted. I just wanted to tell her. SCP 60 is a grove of white oak trees spread across approximately eight acres in rural northeastern Minnesota. When burned, SCP 60 will produce an entity henceforth designated SCP 60 Elph.

SEP 60 Alpha appears to be an animate adult human skeleton standing approximately 2.3 meters tall and surrounded by bright white flames. The property containing SCP 60 contained a burned-out, secluded house upon foundation acquisition. According to civilian sources, the house's previous owner was one Jonathan Corhill, who was reported to have been a somewhat solitary eccentric, with a tendency towards bitterness and nihilism. Nileism. Mr. Corhill was reported as a missing person several months after having suddenly cut off all ties to family members and friends. The last person to have had contact with Jonathan Corhill was his brother, Christopher. According to neighbors, Corhill had developed an interest in the study of Victorian-era occultism. Jonathan Corhill's whereabouts, and whether he is dead or alive, are currently unknown.

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