I Ran the Ghost Train at Crestfall Pier | Horror Story Animated

📖 Free book of Kettleby Archive files: https://louloubooks.com/horror/free?ref=podcast-ran-ghost-train-crestfall

I Ran the Ghost Train at Crestfall Pier | Horror Story Animated · Kettleby Archive · Episode 22

Why was the seat in cart four warm when no paying customer had sat in it for forty minutes? I'd run Hollow Crossing all summer, eight quid a ride, cold tea going stale on the brake panel, and that warmth under my palm was the kind a body leaves. Not a heating strip. A body. Whatever had been sitting

Chapters:
0:00 One Extra Passenger
1:42 Carla Waves It Off
3:13 The Laminated Card
3:47 📖 The free book (louloubooks.com/scary)
4:47 The First Knock
6:23 The Bulb Goes Out
7:43 The Cable Word, Said Twice
9:27 The Card Is Gone
11:09 📣 Like & subscribe

Written and narrated by Alice Kettleby.
Original fiction — names, places and events are invented.

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Why was the seat in cart four warm when no paying customer had sat in it for forty minutes? I'd run Hollow Crossing all summer, eight quid a ride, cold tea going stale on the brake panel, and that warmth under my palm was the kind a body leaves. Not a heating strip. A body. Whatever had been sitting there had climbed on without a ticket, ridden the full loop in the dark, and I had counted every cart out.

I had counted every cart back. Six out, six back, it never varied. But the counter above the brake panel read seven. One extra trip, logged, timed, real. That was the number I couldn't explain. Carla had given me one rule on my first morning: six carts, six rooms, count every one in and out, no exceptions.

She said it the way you say a rule that already got broken once. Why had she needed to say it at all? That was supposed to be the last normal night. Torch battery at eighty percent, forty minutes to shutdown, and I was already thinking about the bus home. Cart four rolled back in and I stepped forward to log it, then stopped.

The lap bar was fully raised. Not sprung loose. Raised from the inside, the way a rider lifts it themselves before the brake even catches. Someone had ridden that cart. I just hadn't seen them get off. I mentioned the bar to Carla. She said worn spring, happens all the time, and her keys were already jangling before I could finish the sentence, eleven forty-seven on my phone, I checked.

No log entry. Nothing written. I watched her go. When I looked back at the exit ramp, Mr Buttons was standing at the far end, grey and still in that mustard waistcoat, one brass button eye catching the neon, facing the track instead of the crowd. I ran one final empty cart through for the shutdown check.

Six carts out. The counter ticked to seven again. I walked the exit chute and pressed my palm flat on cart four's seat. Body warm. Not equipment warm, the specific warmth skin leaves on vinyl when someone has been sitting still for a long time. Who had been sitting that still, in the dark, riding loops, without making a sound?

At eleven thirty-two Carla came back for her bag and left again. Sixty pounds cash if I finished the checklist alone, rent was four days late, so I said yes before she finished asking. That was the mistake and I knew it even then. Somewhere behind me in the dark of the loading bay, a cart bumped softly against its stop.

No motor running. No reason for it to move. I opened the breaker panel. A laminated card was taped inside, handwritten in blue pen, not printed, which meant it wasn't official. The Cemetery. The Mirror Maze. The Flooded Crypt. The Scarecrow Field. Then a fifth name below them: Return Passage.

The note beneath it said: Do not send a cart if the counter reads five. Wait. I looked at the counter. It read four. Behind me a cart rolled one slow notch forward on its own. One thing before we carry on. There's a story I've never told on the channel. A woman was paid four hundred pounds to be filmed while she slept, and on the seventh night the camera caught someone sitting on the edge of her bed.

It's in a free book of Kettleby Archive files. Go to LouLouBooks.com slash scary. That's LouLouBooks.com slash scary. The booth was supposed to be the safe room, locked door, panic button, radio on charge. I pulled out my phone and photographed the card. Flash hit the laminate, pure white glare, every word gone.

Torch app, no flash: too dim, just darkness and a pale rectangle. Torch battery had dropped to fifty-three percent already. I had two useless photos, one rule I didn't understand, and I was already stepping over the entry gate into the dark when the counter above the panel clicked to I was already moving through the first room when the count went wrong. The Cemetery smelled of mildew.

The Mirror Maze threw my torch back from every cracked panel. The Flooded Crypt soaked through my trainers. The Scarecrow Field had sixteen figures, I had never once counted them before. I was on seventeen when I heard it. One low metallic knock, far ahead, rolling along the rails toward me.

Past the last scarecrow the track curved and a short passage opened up that was never on any map I had ever seen. No theming, no props, no painted walls. Just bare wooden boards and a single pull-cord bulb hanging dark from the ceiling. The air in there was colder by several degrees and smelled of nothing, which was wrong.

Every other room smelled of something. This smelled of nowhere. I stood at the entrance and my torch found only more dark ahead. I pulled the cord. The bulb swung and for one half second I saw fingers curled around the edge of the left hand bend. Grey, padded, torn seam at the knuckle.

The bulb swung back and the fingers were gone. I spun around. Nothing behind me. Just the track and the dark. Then a second sound came, not a knock this time but a slow, steady creak, like weight settling into a seat somewhere back toward the loading bay. The radio crackled. Carla's voice said she was two minutes away.

I started back toward the booth, and then I stopped. Why would the pull-cord bulb click off on its own the moment I turned away from it? Dry, clean, final. Through the passage mouth the red brake light on the booth panel began to strobe in a slow, even pulse I had never once seen it do before.

I checked my torch. Sixty percent battery. I came through the passage mouth into the loading bay and stopped. Cart four was sitting at the brake stop facing the wrong way, pointing inward toward the ride instead of outward toward the exit. The lap bar was down and locked, pressed tight as if weight held it.

Nobody visible in the seat. I looked at the counter on the panel. It read five. At eleven forty the cart began to roll. Slow, even, no motor sound, just the soft click of wheels on rail, moving back into the dark on its own. I stood at the panel and did not touch a single switch.

Then, from inside the ride, past the cemetery room, something said my name. I had told only one person my name on this pier, and she was outside on the ramp. I picked up the radio. Kept my voice level, which was the hardest thing I have ever done. I told Carla I thought the brake cable on cart four needed her eyes on it right now, and that the cable looked wrong from where I was standing.

Cable, twice. That was the word we used between ourselves on the crew: come now, no questions. I was already backing toward the entry gate, torch forward, not looking behind me. Carla was there in under two minutes, face tight. She had heard it too, one metallic roll from deep in the ride just before I called.

The person she brought with her was Doug, the pier security guard, and the first thing he said was that the ghost train had been locked and alarmed since the previous October. The three of us walked the full track. Every cart was accounted for except cart four, which was sitting at the exit stop, lap bar raised, facing outward toward the pier. Nobody had driven it there.

The pier had one CCTV camera covering the loading bay exterior. Doug and I watched the eleven forty footage together on his monitor. Cart four sat at the brake stop, me at the panel, everything clear. Then the camera angle ran out just above the top of the cart seat. Whatever was or was not in it was simply off screen.

On the footage, just before I called Carla, the seat cushion depressed, visibly, slowly, and Doug scrolled straight past it without a word. I asked Carla about the laminated card in the breaker panel. She looked at me the way you look at someone speaking the wrong language. There is no card, she said.

We opened the panel together. The inside face was bare, no tape marks, no shadow of old glue, nothing. I asked for the full seasonal staff list. I needed to know if anyone else had been inside that ride after hours before me. Thirty-one names on the list. I read every one. Number twenty-seven was listed as a ghost train operator, start date three seasons back, no end date, no termination note, just a name and a locker number.

Locker four. I asked the office manager about it. She glanced at the entry, then spoke quietly, the way people speak when they are not sure they should. That person had stopped showing up on the last closing night of their season. Nobody ever found out why. I count every seat before I sit down anywhere.

Empty train carriage, cinema row, fairground bench. I press my palm flat and check for warmth first. I cannot stop doing it. Months after Crestfall I was at a bus stop when I glanced up at my reflection in the shelter glass. Mr Buttons stood at the far end, perfectly still, painted smile fixed, one brass button eye hanging loose.

The next-bus display read four. Then it ticked to five.