The Ferris Wheel at Cranemoor Pier Kept Spinning After I Cut the Power | Horror Story Animated

📖 Free book of Kettleby Archive files: https://louloubooks.com/horror/free?ref=podcast-ferris-wheel-cranemoor-pier

The Ferris Wheel at Cranemoor Pier Kept Spinning After I Cut the Power | Horror Story Animated · Kettleby Archive · Episode 23

How does a damaged cable still power a Ferris wheel? Copper end out, completely clear of the socket, held in my own hands, and the Sunstar kept turning. It didn't creak or grind. It hummed, low and steady, like something alive and pleased with itself, while the rain came down and I stood underneath

Chapters:
0:00 The Wheel Never Stopped
1:48 Gondola Seven Sways
2:56 📖 The free book (louloubooks.com/scary)
3:21 Bone Dry Shoes
4:57 The Wheel Was Turning
6:32 He Said My Name
8:16 The White Rectangle

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

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How does a damaged cable still power a Ferris wheel? Copper end out, completely clear of the socket, held in my own hands, and the Sunstar kept turning. It didn't creak or grind. It hummed, low and steady, like something alive and pleased with itself, while the rain came down and I stood underneath it and could not make it stop.

That was the night I stopped working after dark. The handover, six weeks earlier, had given me no answer for this. Thin bloke, green wax jacket, never smiled. He stopped at the red breaker box bolted to the Sunstar ride housing, pressed his palm flat against it and looked at me. If the wheel ever stops mid-rotation, he said, cut the breaker, lift the cable clear, and do not move until every gondola has come to rest at the bottom.

That was his entire handover. Six weeks of probation ahead of me. Twenty-two pounds an hour. I was not about to ask twice. Shift started at eight. By nine the pier was mine, boards, dark water, nothing else. I logged each circuit in biro on a clipboard that was already warping from the salt air.

Loading-gate key in my right glove cuff, red-box key in my left boot. Seb had said log only what you can explain. So what was I supposed to do with the fact that on my very first walk, the clipboard already had a circuit marked that I had not yet done? At eleven o'clock I did my second check and stopped in front of the Sunstar.

Twelve gondolas, all still. Except seven. It was swaying, a slow rocking the others were not doing. Eleven-oh-three. Eleven-oh-four. I counted eight full rocks before it stopped. The wheel itself had not moved. Seb's breaker rule was not triggered. Then from somewhere behind the hub I heard one soft knock, like a fist on hollow steel, and then nothing.

Coming back from the far end of the pier I heard a low mechanical hum from the direction of the Sunstar. I stopped and switched on my torch. The wheel was completely still. But the access hatch on the central hub, a small square panel, chest height, was hanging open. I had latched it myself that morning.

I was certain. Then my torch found something taped inside the hatch frame: a strip of paper with two words in biro. Do not open. 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. He was standing at the locked gate to the loading area. Older man, stooped, olive jacket, face turned toward the gondolas. I called out. He turned a beat too slow.

Said he used to work here, gave a name I lost immediately. There was a smell of machine oil and damp wool. I looked down because something felt wrong and I could not find it at first. His shoes were bone dry. Every board for ten metres around him was soaked. He said the Sunstar had always run a little after hours.

Residual momentum in the flywheel, he said, like it was something you just knew. His voice was steady and flat. I almost believed him because he said it with such boredom. I radioed Faye, the night attendant at the pier entrance. She said she had no record of anyone matching that description on the approved visitors list.

Her voice came back thin and crackled through the rain. She sounded careful. Not alarmed. Careful. Faye told me to walk him off the pier. He looked genuinely sad, the way people do remembering something they cannot get back. I was still on probation. My radio battery was showing one bar, one bar left for the whole rest of the shift.

I did not want to burn it on a call about nothing. I know how that sounds. I turned back to the gate. The rain was louder now. The space where he had been standing was dry. That was the last normal moment of the shift. I walked back to latch the hub hatch. Ten metres out I stopped.

The Sunstar was turning, slowly, all twelve gondolas in a steady circle. No light on the control panel. No sound from the motor house except rain. I took the red-box key from my left boot, pulled the main breaker, lifted the orange cable, copper end out, clear of everything. The wheel kept turning.

I did not move. I climbed into the motor housing anyway. The space smelled of old grease and seawater. My phone signal dropped to nothing the moment I pulled the hatch shut behind me. The secondary shaft was still and locked, its pin in place, exactly as it should be. Nothing was driving the wheel.

Nothing I could see. Then my torch found the floor. A folded piece of paper. My name written on it in blue biro. Del. Inside the note, two words. Gondola seven. I looked up. The wheel had stopped. Rain, then thunder, then silence. I told myself a colleague was winding me up. Had to be.

I re-engaged the breaker, locked the red box, and headed for the staff hut. Behind me, and I want to be clear I did not look back in time, the Sunstar began turning again, faster, throwing slow arcs of amber light across the boards either side of my feet. Gondola seven came around to the top of the arc and he was sitting inside it. The man in the olive jacket, perfectly upright, hands in his lap.

He descended. He was level with me. He said my name, Del, and his lips did not move. I had four percent battery. I called Faye. I did not say what I was seeing. I told her the safety bar on gondola seven was unsecured, could she radio the incident code to the main gate. She knew what that meant.

I turned and ran. My torch swung wild arcs across the wet boards. I caught my boot on a raised plank and went down hard, both palms flat on the soaked wood, the torch skidding away. I got up and kept going. I hit the staff hut door, got it locked, and Faye was already standing with the desk phone pressed to her ear.

Her face was the colour of old paper. She said the CCTV showed gondola seven as a solid white rectangle. Just white. No image at all. Two officers arrived just after midnight, walked the pier, found the wheel still, the man gone, the breaker locked. They took the note. One said the handwriting was probably my own in a stressed state.

I know what my handwriting looks like. On the way out one of them paused at the pier entrance and said, very quietly, that a maintenance worker had fallen from the Sunstar motor housing in eighty-six. His name was G. Orviss. I did not ask what he looked like. I did not need to. Next morning I came back.

Grey sun, families with pushchairs, a man selling candyfloss near the gate. The Sunstar was locked out of service, a chain across the loading area. Faye met me and opened her laptop on the staff hut counter. The white rectangle in gondola seven's footage lasted exactly as long as the ride had been turning.

She turned the screen toward me and pointed at the metadata on that segment of footage. Last modified: nineteen eighty-six. I still work the pier. Days only now. Every morning before families arrive I walk past the Sunstar without looking up at gondola seven. Not because I am afraid to look.

On my third morning back I did look, and the safety bar was raised. In the seat there was nothing. Just a dry patch of wood, the exact size and shape of a man sitting down, on a pier soaked with overnight rain. I stopped logging things I cannot explain a long time ago.