My Haunted Attraction Coworker Wasn't Part of the Cast | Horror Story Animated

Have you ever looked at someone standing in the dark and thought, that person is too still to be doing a job? I worked haunted attractions for three seasons. I thought I knew every trick, every actor, every way fear gets manufactured. I was wrong about all of it.

Chapters:
0:00 Too Still to Be Working
2:06 Cara Shrugs It Off
3:56 I Chose the Money
5:45 Scene 16
7:12 Scene 20
9:08 Scene 25
10:57 Scene 30
12:44 Scene 35

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

Read the story

Have you ever looked at someone standing in the dark and thought, that person is too still to be doing a job? I worked haunted attractions for three seasons. I thought I knew every trick, every actor, every way fear gets manufactured. I was wrong about all of it. Hollowgate Manor was a three-floor walk-through horror maze in an old textile mill outside Salford.

Ground floor was the crypt, first floor the asylum corridor, top floor the void room. Nine pounds an hour. One rule kept us safe in the dark: every actor wore a green glow wristband, always. My zone was the first-floor asylum corridor, all flickering fluorescents and padded cell props.

I knew roughly thirty actors by face or wristband. The top-floor void room was pitch black and accessed through one locked door. Milo, our security guard, did a walk-round every forty minutes. I clocked his route by habit. Third night in, at exactly quarter past eight, I glimpsed a figure at the void room doorway.

No wristband. Every actor I knew fidgeted, shifted weight, worked the silence. This one just stood there, arms flat, head tilted eleven degrees to the left, an angle nobody performs, because nobody can hold it that long. I moved closer. The smell hit me first: cold outdoor air and something damp, like wet earth in November.

His outfit was wrong. Plain dark jacket, jeans, no costume, no stage makeup, no lanyard, no wristband. And his eyes tracked me without the theatrical energy every trained actor uses to work a crowd. I told Cara and watched her face for doubt. She had none. Management kept adding walk-ons, she said, happened all week.

I almost believed her. Then I glanced toward the stairwell. His paper cup of tea, sitting on the top step, was still steaming. But he was gone. An hour later I spotted him on the first-floor asylum corridor. He should not have been there if he was assigned to the void room upstairs.

He was standing inside an alcove between two prop cabinets. A guest brushed past him and he did not flinch. Not even the smallest micro-performance. Nothing. Under the UV strip every wristband bloomed green. Martin's wrist caught the light and showed nothing. I thought: if he has no band, how did he get past the front desk?

That question had no good answer. And then I noticed his shoes, ordinary trainers, no grip tape, no costume tag. During the fifteen-minute break at half nine I told Donna. While I was still speaking, the drag-and-pause sound pressed down through the ceiling directly above us, closer than before, slow, deliberate, then gone.

Donna lifted her radio, called it in, got static, and went back to her clipboard. Martin stepped through the staff-only fire door at the end of the asylum corridor. He looked up at the CCTV bubble on the ceiling, then moved with complete deliberateness to stand exactly beneath it, in the one position where the camera could not catch his face. Petra was twenty feet away and never looked.

I overrode my gut because I needed the money. Rent was due Friday. I'd already checked my banking app, sixty-three pounds until payday. Then I noticed a note tucked under the logbook: 'Don't let anyone into the void room tonight, D. ' It was dated yesterday. Nobody had told me that.

At ten fifteen I heard the drag-and-pause again, void room floor, directly above me. Forty-two percent battery left; I'd been using my torch since the strip light went. The sound moved east, toward the stairwell door, then stopped. A second later someone tried that door from the inside.

At ten forty Milo's walk-round was late. I used the staff corridor to cut to the break room, phone torch on. I passed the prop trolley and stopped. Martin was standing at the far end, facing me. Not performing. Not moving. Just facing me, in a corridor no guest ever enters. FAILED PROOF ATTEMPT: Petra raises her phone and takes a photo of the corridor but when she checks it a second later the image shows only the empty corridor and the prop trolley, Martin is not in it, she takes two more photos and he is in neither, even though he has not moved and she can still see him with her own eyes.

I backed out through the guest-facing door and went the long way. I showed Cara the photos, empty corridor, no Martin, just the trolley. She said the lighting in there had always been bad. She said it like someone who had said it before, about something else, to someone else. That was the last normal moment of the night.

SOUND MOTIF SECOND STAGE: At eleven twenty the drag and pause sound comes again, this time from directly above the asylum corridor ceiling, meaning it is on the void room floor, and it is closer, not theatrical shuffling but a deliberate measured pace, and then it stops exactly over the spot where Petra is standing. SHRINKING RESOURCE INTRODUCED: Petra checks her phone: twelve percent battery, the charging cable is in her bag in the break room on the third floor, last guests are due at half eleven and the venue closes at midnight, she has forty minutes left on shift, she tells herself she just needs to get through forty minutes. FALSE RELIEF: At eleven thirty the last guest group clears through and someone radios all clear, the house lights come up to a dim work level and actors start pulling off costume pieces and laughing and the whole building feels ordinary and warm, Petra decides she imagined the worst of it and heads upstairs to collect her bag. FALSE RELIEF BROKEN: She pushes open the void room door, which should be empty and lit up for strike, and the work light inside is off, the room is black, and standing in the far corner without moving is Martin, and his eyes catch the thin light from the doorway and he says quietly, in a flat tone, that she left her bag.

BREACH TIMESTAMPED: At eleven forty-two the void room door handle turns from the inside while Petra is braced against it on the corridor side, she has not gone in, she backed out the moment she heard his voice, and the handle turns slowly and steadily three full rotations, and she hears him say, just below the door, her name: Petra. CLEVER MOVE: Petra calls Milo on her eight-percent battery phone and says in a completely normal voice that she needs a hand shifting a heavy prop on the top floor because her back is playing up, she keeps her voice level, and Milo says he is on his way, two minutes, and she stays against the door and the handle stops moving. MILO ARRIVES: Milo rounds the corner with his yellow flashlight already on, takes one look at Petra braced against the door, clicks the radio and calls Donna, and when they push the void room door open with Milo in front the room is empty, the work light is now on, and Petra's bag is sitting in the centre of the floor. AUTHORITY DISMISSAL: Donna arrives with Martin's shift lead Gareth, who is a calm soft-spoken man, and Gareth says there is no one on the payroll or the walk-on list matching what Petra describes, shows her the clipboard, and suggests she may have encountered a guest who slipped a cordon, happens every season, they will review the CCTV and let her know.

Next afternoon, Donna called. CCTV on the top floor had corrupted frames, ten forty to midnight, gone. The asylum corridor camera caught nothing; blind spot. No name, no footage: nothing to log. But the fire exit seal, Donna said quietly, had been broken from the outside. WHAT THE POLICE SAY: The officer Petra speaks to on the phone is polite and brief, he says the broken seal suggests someone entered through the fire exit, probably a thrill-seeker trying to get a free walk-through, very common at this time of year, but he pauses before he hangs up and says they found a small penknife just inside the fire exit door, bagged and kept.

SOUND MOTIF THIRD STAGE: That night Petra is lying in her flat, lights on, window locked, and she hears it again: a slow drag and a pause, from somewhere above her ceiling, her flat is on the top floor of a converted building, there is nothing above her but the roof space, and the sound comes twice and then stops. FOUND NOTE: Two days later Petra goes back to collect her last pay slip from the Hollowgate office and finds a sticky note pressed to her locker, not her handwriting, not anyone she can identify, that says only: you were the only one who looked. REFRAME PLANTED EARLIER PAYS OFF: Petra thinks back to every moment she saw Martin and realises he was always positioned where actors naturally look away, the UV blind spot, the CCTV dead zone, the gap between two performer zones, someone had surveyed the building before opening night and this was not an impulse. I lost two shifts of pay and I didn't care.

Now I check every wristband, every lanyard, on every coworker in every job I take. I can't stop myself. I'm doing it right now, actually, and someone across this room isn't wearing one. ESCALATION INFORMATION: Three weeks later a different actor from Hollowgate messages Petra to ask if she ever found out who the man without the wristband was, because two other people from the second-floor zone saw him too, one of them on the ground floor crypt as early as the first night of the season, before Petra ever noticed him.

REFRAME TWIST DEEPENS: Petra realises the first night she worked at Hollowgate she told the shift manager her name and locker number in front of the whole orientation group in the crypt, an open room with no way of knowing who was in the dark corners listening, and she had thought nothing of it at the time. I changed my number and moved to a sublet across town. Fresh start. First morning, I opened the kitchen window and stopped.

On the outer ledge, wet from overnight rain, was a single long drag mark through the grime, as if something had been pulled slowly away from the glass. ENDING SETUP: She photographs the mark, sends it to Milo who drives over and looks at it and says it is probably a pigeon or a cat, and he is almost certainly right, and Petra knows he is almost certainly right, and she closes the window and locks it anyway and does not open it again for the rest of the winter. Months later, conference venue, day shift. I looked up and across the atrium stood a man in a dark jacket, completely still, arms at his sides, head tilted at that angle.

My body moved before my mind did. He turned, wrong face, just someone waiting. But my lanyard check had already started. PAY-OFF AND STING: The glow wristband from her last shift at Hollowgate is still on her bedside table, she never handed it back, and one night she wakes up at two in the morning for no reason and it is glowing green, which it should not be, because those bands only glow under UV light, and there is no UV light in her room.

FINAL LINE: She has not slept with the light off since, and she still checks every wristband, and she still does not know what she looked at in that void room, only that whatever it was, it already knew her name before she ever spoke it.