The Séance Tape: Listening to the Unseen

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The Séance Tape: Listening to the Unseen

It began with an unmarked cassette tape. Dusty. Forgotten. Found inside a weathered box at the back of an estate sale. Emily had no idea why she bought it—maybe it was the handwritten label in red ink: “Séance – 1974. Do Not Play Alone.”

She brought it home out of curiosity. Something about it felt... unfinished. Her roommate, Kara, wasn’t thrilled.

"Why would you even buy that?" Kara asked, eyeing the tape like it was diseased.

"It’s probably nothing," Emily shrugged. "Maybe someone’s prank. Or just old audio junk."

"Or it’s cursed," Kara muttered. "You know how this goes. You play it, weird stuff happens, we both die, roll credits."

"You watch too many horror movies."

Still, Emily waited until Kara was gone for the weekend before playing it.

She dusted off her dad’s old cassette player, slotted the tape, and pressed play.

A low hum filled the room, followed by static. Then, voices. A woman spoke in hushed tones:

"We welcome the unseen. Come forth, speak to us across the veil."

Emily leaned closer. The air felt thick. She paused the tape. Silence.

"Okay, creepy... but kind of cool," she whispered to herself.

She rewound it and played again. This time, something new: a whisper not in the woman’s voice. Male. Raspy.

"I see you."

Emily jolted, pressing stop. Her skin prickled. The whisper hadn’t sounded like it came from the tape—it sounded like it came from the room.

She shook it off, laughed nervously. “Just the acoustics,” she told herself.

That night, strange things began. The tape player turned itself on at 3:13 a.m. The same chant played again. Then static. Then silence.

Emily unplugged the player, but it played again the next night. Always at 3:13. Always stopping at the whisper.

By the third night, she stopped sleeping. Kara returned Sunday evening and found her in the living room surrounded by salt lines and candles.

"What the hell happened here?" Kara asked.

Emily looked up, eyes sunken. "The tape... it speaks back."

"You need sleep. And coffee. Maybe therapy."

"No, listen to me. Every night it plays. And I started hearing voices even when it’s off. Whispers. It knows my name now."

Kara stared at her, uncertain. “You’re scaring me, Em.”

"Help me play it one more time. Please. Just once with you here."

Reluctantly, Kara agreed. They sat cross-legged in the center of the salt circle. Emily pressed play.

As the chant began, the candle flames flickered. Then the whisper returned—louder, clearer.

"Emily. I see both of you now."

Kara’s eyes widened. "Did you—did it just say your name?"

Emily nodded slowly. “It never did that with you here before.”

The voice on the tape continued. Different voices now. Male and female. Overlapping. Chanting.

"He walks in shadow. He wears no face. He feeds on the curious."

The candles blew out. Cold rushed in like a breath from the grave.

"Stop the tape!" Kara shouted.

Emily fumbled, but the eject button jammed. The player hissed louder. A voice screamed through the speakers, not in English, not in any language they knew.

The power surged. The lights exploded. And then—silence.

The room stayed dark. They sat frozen, clutching each other in the middle of the circle.

"Is it over?" Kara whispered.

Emily slowly reached for the tape player. It was off. The tape had ejected itself. The label was gone. Just black plastic now.

"We opened something," Emily said. "I think we invited it in."

The next day, they burned the tape. Or tried to. The plastic melted, but the cassette reel didn’t. It writhed in the flames, smoking but intact. Eventually, Kara buried it in a steel box behind the old cemetery at Hollow Creek.

Things calmed. For a while. Emily stopped hearing the whispers. Kara avoided talking about it.

But two weeks later, a package arrived. No return address. Inside: a single cassette tape. A note scribbled in the same red ink.

“Next session: Hollow Creek – 2023.”

Emily dropped it like it burned. Kara read the note, then locked the door and turned off the lights.

"We're not playing it," she said firmly. "Whatever it is... it doesn’t end."

Emily nodded. But part of her wanted to know. Part of her wanted to listen again.

Because late at night, under the hum of the city, the whisper returned. No tape needed this time.

"You heard us. Now we hear you."

And the séance continued—no longer on tape, but in her head, where silence was no longer safe.

In the following days, Emily’s behavior grew more erratic. She found herself wandering into the streets at odd hours, her mind perpetually haunted by the voices. She became obsessed with Hollow Creek, the cemetery, and the strange force they had unleashed. The whispers had only grown stronger, now constant, a presence lurking at the edges of her mind. Kara noticed the change and tried to confront her.

"You need to stop. This isn’t you anymore. You’re losing yourself," Kara pleaded one night after Emily had stayed up for hours researching everything about séances and the occult.

But Emily was too far gone. The pull of the whispers was like a drug—compelling, irresistible. She was no longer the girl who had walked into that estate sale; she was someone else, someone tethered to something far beyond the physical world.

One evening, she stood in front of her mirror, staring at her reflection. The woman staring back was unfamiliar, her eyes dark and sunken, her skin pale and taut. The whispers spoke louder in her mind, as if urging her to act, to seek the place where the séance had begun: Hollow Creek.

Emily didn’t hesitate. She packed a bag and left the apartment without a word to Kara. As she drove through the winding roads to the cemetery, the world around her seemed to darken. The trees twisted in unnatural shapes, their branches clawing at the sky like skeletal hands. When she arrived, the cemetery was silent, eerily so, with no sign of life.

But then, she heard it. A faint chant, rising from the depths of the cemetery. The same chant that had played on the tape. It was beckoning her. The same as it had years ago, when the first séance had been conducted.

Emily walked deeper into the cemetery, each step echoing in the empty space. The ground felt cold beneath her feet, as though it had absorbed the very life force of those who had once been buried here. And then, she saw it—the steel box that Kara had buried the tape in. It was uncovered, the lid partially open, as if waiting for her.

Inside the box was not just the tape. It was a new one. One that seemed to glow with an unholy light. The label on the cassette read: "Session Complete. Now You Listen." Emily’s heart raced. She knew what she had to do.

As she picked up the tape, the whispers reached a crescendo, deafening in their intensity. She could no longer resist. Emily walked toward the center of the cemetery, the place where the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest. And as she placed the tape into an old cassette player, she could hear the voices calling her name—calling her into the darkness.

At that moment, Emily understood that the séance would never end. Not for her. Not for anyone who had dared to listen.

The whispers continued, and as the tape played, the world around her seemed to fade away. She was no longer in the cemetery; she was lost in the dark, a prisoner to the unseen force that had always been there—waiting for someone to listen.

The séance had become eternal, and Emily had become part of it. No longer just an observer, but a participant in a ritual that had begun long before she ever found the tape. The voices would never stop, and neither would she. The séance continued—forever.