Case #0161704, Melanie King
Release date: July 6, 2016
First listen: Somewhere between the 20th October and the 5th November. On the way into work I think, I have vague memories of walking out of the cul de sac as Melanie was talking about cigarette smoke.
As someone who greatly enjoys the antics of The Ghoul Boys and BuzzFeed Unsolved and Watcher’s Ghost Files, I would subscribe to Ghost Watch UK in a heart beat. As an aside, starfleetrambo has an au within an au with Jon and Martin in the roles of Ryan and Shane in Ghost Files that sustains me.
- Once again, in the style of Grizzop drik acht Amsterdam around the 41minute mark of RQG 92 – Bringing Down The House LYDIA!… wait… ah, the introduction of Ms Melanie King, taker of no shit, giver of no quarter. I love her. I love this rabid terrier of a woman.
- The TMA to RQG pipeline is real fam.
- ‘People like a show. People like our show.’ Do I watch Ghost Files because I what proof of the exisitance of ghosts? No. Do I watch it to see two idiots, one having a great time and the other skirting the edges of self inflicted heart failure. Yes, absolutely. Melanie knows it’s a show, that it’s showbiz, at least at this stage of her understanding. And showbiz is a vicious battle for attention and survival. You’ve got to get the audience to like you as much as what you are presenting. She can be forgiven for P.T. Barnum-ing it up a little.
- ‘We are not ‘paranormal investigators’. We are researchers. Scholars.’ Hear as Jon clutches his Oxford degree to his chest like it’s his maiden virtue. I don’t think there’s that much between what Melanie and Jon do, just that it either the research is implemented or catalogued. Probably why they rub each other up the wrong way so much; they are some very similar in a lot of ways, one key one being the all encompassing need to appear in control and competent at all times.
- ‘…when you can just tell a story to the Magnus Institute!’ Stories. Stories man. We’ve being doing it since communication was a thing. I may be neck deep in The Sandman meta at the moment but in Rusty Quill Gaming, Alexander spoke of the team and said ‘No, we're not commoners, we're wildly unoptimized bards’ and I have taken that to heart my friends. Stories,. Songs. Let me drown in them. OK, gushing aside, it does come down to the stories for the Institute and The Eye. Jon finds himself tracking down stories from people on the street in series 4, just to make it thought the day. They’re not statements any more, not accounts of events for inspection and dissection. They’re stories, priceless as they are.
- ‘None of your ‘respectable’, paranormal investigators would believe you?’ That’s got to be hard though, when you know your own tribe won’t get it, won’t support you.
- Cambridge Military Hospital. Right, had no idea where this was going to be, I did not anticipate it being in Cambridge despite the name, and I was right there. It’s part of Aldershot Garrison town in Hampshire, population 10,500, which blows my mind a little. I mean, I knew garrisons are a thing, but it’s basically a company town… run by the army. Anyway, it’s a heck of a lot further outside of London than I anticipated. And I have a new level of respect that Ghost Hunt UK managed to talk they way into a MOD strong hold.
- January 2015, she’s been sitting on this for over a year at this point.
- According to the wiki, the hospital was closed on 2 February 1996 due to the high cost of running the old building as well as the discovery of asbestos in the walls. stares of into the middle distance with the knowledge of just how close I come to being in contact with the devil’s insulating candy floss on the regs. In 2014 permission was granted for the hospital to be converted to provide housing. The hospital building was given a Grade 2 listing and redeveloped at a cost of £60 million for residential use by Weston Homes in May 2019, 3 years after this statement was given. The main building finished in 1879 has been converted to include 74 apartments with large communal foyers and spaces in addition to a large penthouse incorporating the building's clock tower… And a part of my soul just died.
- ‘Illegal?’ ‘Unorthodox! And hey, the worst that we’ve ever got before was a fine.’ Ok, so you lose points you had gained when I thought you’d managed administrative and logistical wizardry, and Melanie, this is a site on an operational garrison town, the worst you could have gotten this time around could have been a lot more than a fine.
- I’m just saying, you need a Tim on your team. You need someone who can flirt you through the door.
- I wonder how hard Jon had to bite his tongue to keep from saying anything when Melanie mentions Georgie Barker. Ah Georgie, another TMA lady who I love dearly. I can only imagine Melanie isn’t looking at Jon in that moment because I imagine the face was doing something.
- Sarah Baldwin, pretty sure that’s a MAG001 Anglerfish name. Yup, disappeared from around Old Fishmarket Close in August 2006. So it’s been a little over 9 years she’s been part of The Stranger. Got into sound engineering, interesting, but The Stranger did always seem to come for the artistic types. I wonder how Georgie came across her, and if her ‘anti-fear’ vibes fucked with Sarah in anyway? Or was the ‘bit unsocial’ Sarah keeping out of range of Georgie’s magnetic field?
- ‘…but when we pulled up the building seemed dark. I don’t think it was abandoned or anything like that, but it certainly didn’t seem like anyone was home.’ Do all of The Anglerfish’s victims just live together now in one abandoned flat complex? I’d watch that show.
- ‘…because if we don’t have a sound tech, we don’t have a show.’ I’m looking at you Alexander Jalexander Newall. I see you and I love you, but sweet mercy man, you need to take care of yourself. Don’t you try to sidle out Jonny, you’re in this discussion too.
- ‘I was just about ready to scream in frustration,’ Melanie was such an easy target for The Slaughter, with rage so close to the surface.
- The close cropped hair, the seemingly temperature inappropriate clothing. I don’t think Sarah’s experiencing some things like she once did. Like, maybe, endothermic metabolism. If you keep your hair cropped close, probably going to be harder for folks to realise it isn’t growing.
- Smoking maybe something Sarah had retained from before she was ‘fished’, The Anglerfish asked for cigarettes after all, or it may be to mask the lack of a natural scent or the mustiness of taxidermy. It’s probably just Melanie’s word choice, but the fact that Sarah’s ‘puffing away’ makes it sound like she’d having to work for it. Or is this just another case of ‘Spike smokes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, despite not needing to breath’?
- I was wondering if the ‘sharp and faintly floral’ smell may have been the result of taxidermy related chemicals, but the key one I found, Borax, apparently doesn't have a scent?
- ‘It’s a pretty imposing building, the sharp-tipped clocktower above the main hall.’ I suddenly flash forward 170 odd episodes to the tower in London.
- Yeah, from Sarah’s reaction, I’m sticking with my theory that The Slaughter and The Stranger really don’t like each other, even if they share some behaviour patterns.
- Give me the emotional angle, give me The Grey Lady’s tale. I want to go watch BBC’s Ghosts now.
- ‘…the shade of red they had used kept making me think that they were blood splashes…’ Might not be the surveying teams, might be The Slaughter not cleaning up after itself.
- ‘Silk will not stitch the butcher’s meat’. Erm… Ok I have thoughts. First off, raw ass line, wow. Next, are we seeing a commentary on the plight of veterans after conflict, how sometimes token and guilded efforts of support won’t fix what’s happened, fine silk to gussy up butchered flesh? Or am I seeing The Flesh and The Web poking in?
- Yeah, Sarah probably doesn’t require sleep and more than likely had just been lying there. Waiting.
- Melanie makes some interesting choices when she goes looking for Sarah; not waking the others, even just to have someone watching the equipment, not taking a torch instead using one of the cameras. Gives a little bit of an insight into her priorities that one, the work comes first.
- The unaccountable presence of the place, The Slaughter in the very bones of the building.
- ‘It smelled of copper, with another scent beneath it, acrid and sour, with the faintest hint of ammonia.’ Old blood and piss.
- Sarah speaking to whatever face of The Slaughter resided in the Cambridge Military Hospital in a ‘low, quick and desperate’ voice, ‘like pleading’. I wonder if Sarah went looking to make contact with The Slaughter, looking to treat and explain and apologise, rather than wait for whatever wrath the invasion might earn. She could have potentially have waited the night out, but the retribution may have come all the harder.
- ‘With her bag next to her,’ had she been planning on running?
- Whatever has happened to Sarah since becoming an agent of The Stranger, it appears to have left her human enough to leave ‘a smear of blood left on the wall’.
- ‘She shouted something into the room, this time in a language I didn’t understand’… Huh?
- Dear reader, when I heard the description of Sarah peeling her own arm, I had to stop and take a few fortifying breaths. I’ve kept horses for a lot of my life, and I had one idiot gelding de-glove his back leg. If you don’t know what de-gloving is, by the stars and all the little green planets, do not google image search it, just don’t. But yeah, my boy had a wound about the length of my forearm on him. That’s what I see when I hear Melanie talk about Sarah peeling her own skin.
- ‘…the recording is so distorted that you can’t really make anything out.’ The Entities once again fucking with digital media.
- I mean, Melanie’s quick to fly into a temper about the dreaming question, but Jon isn’t coming across great.
- With the reports of a nurse/grey lady figure and the stories of the apparitions being benign, how does that fact into the place being a strong hold of The Slaughter? Was it a tools that was to elicit conflicting feelings about comfort and care, making patients nervous of their carers at all hours?
- And just how did you go about contacting ‘Georgina Barker’ then Jon? Hey? How’d you do it? Did you have someone else call and made them promise not to mention your name?
- The name ‘Sarah Baldwin’ does set alarms ringing in Jon’s head, so it’s good to know he’s retailing information, even if he can’t do the old mind google yet.
- ‘The other figure is much taller, and appears to be pointing, though no features can be made out, it does not appear to be touching the ground.’ Jonny? Is there any significance to this description? Or is it merely to give us the heebiest of jeebies?
