ST4.10 | "A Lonely Patch of Earth"
OCTOBER 2026
ZAK BAGANS BETTER SHUT HIS FUCKING MOUTH
Everyone has wasted a random Tuesday afternoon watching ghost-hunting shows. Morons in fake glasses and too real cameras trying to record something that can’t be seen. But what if they actually recorded something real? What if they accidentally caught something worth killing over? This month, we want to know what happens when ghost hunters stumble over the scene of the crime. We want to see what happens when fresh blood is spilled in old haunted houses. We want to be scared not by what goes bump in the night, but instead what goes bang.
A LONELY PATCH OF EARTH
by Pete Ward
“Welcome as always to all our new viewers, especially those sent by Hauntometer. Or Edgar Whistenthorpe, as they called him at private school. You’d never be able to tell by that accent he puts on.”
Rose lowered the smartphone rig, mounted with a dimmable light, thermal imaging attachment and mic, and sighed: “You’re gonna dox him?”
“Why not? You know his great-uncle is the Viscount of Hereford or something? He called me out.”
“He called Ectoplasm out.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is it’s a healthy rivalry between anonymous creators. You shouldn’t bring his real name into it.”
“It’s not a healthy rivalry when I keep losing.”
“An even better reason not to dox him. It’s unclassy and unethical and I won’t be part of it.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Uh, the side of ethics, I guess.”
Steve slumped a little in his usual prowling outfit: dark hooded top and skeleton snood pulled over his nose, black tactical vest filled with the arcane implements of his trade. He was a ghosthunter. He had a YouTube channel. But no one was watching.
“I’m tired of losing to him.”
“That’s why we’re here. Tonight will be terrifying and real. No ‘cold spot’ bullshit. Those kids are well within their rights to take revenge.”
“That’s a good line. I’m gonna nick it.”
Rose raised the rig, and Steve dropped into a crouch, glancing as if pursued. She scuttled alongside him, filming the crumbling wall over his shoulder at an angle to suggest looming impenetrability. Steve half turned, a single eye unobscured, and stage-whispered:
“Every place can hold some evil, storing it like moisture in the bricks and timber. It may escape occasionally, may only be noticeable to the highly attuned, but—generally—the world stores our horrors well enough. But some places have endured too much: its material is soaked with suffering. It overflows. Here, at the infamous Northfield Children’s Hospital, the pain those children endured will not be contained, and nor will the souls of the children who died. Children who are well within their rights to take revenge.”
Steve took a beat, looked straight down the barrel:
“AND HAUNTOMETER BETTER SHUT HIS FUCKING MOUTH, THE POSH PRICK.”
“Yeah, that’s not making the final edit.”
Rose flicked the camera off.
***
Rose wore a pink bobble hat and a sensible green windbreaker. Steve grumbled about stealth, but ‘breaking in’ was usually an exercise in evading the open door. These sites were creepy, isolated and abandoned. At most, a cabin-bound security guard played the radio loud enough to let anyone know he was a) there and b) unwilling to pursue trespassers. No borders were defended with particular passion.
Northfield Children’s Hospital, however, was different.
“Huh. Shiny,” said Rose, regarding the new lock and chain wrapped around the main gate at the head of the drive. “That's unusual. Wait! You think it’s just gonna fall off?”
“Dunno. Maybe?”
“And if someone hears you rattling about?”
“Then we shouldn’t be doing this. We should hit it like a bell for half an hour.”
Rose studied Steve, who squirmed under the scrutiny and pulled up his snood. The skeleton jaw was faintly glow-in-the-dark.
“Oh. That’s ok. It always makes for a better video.”
“I’m not scared,” Steve snapped, catching her meaning immediately. “I’m . . . concerned. Why did he challenge us to this one? What does Lord Douchebag know? Maybe it’s a trap.”
“He knows what we do. That this is a terrifying building. That, even if ghosts are not real, evil is, and evil people did evil things here.”
“That’s a good line. I’m gonna nick it.”
“Hauntometer thinks you’re afraid, Steve. Nothing else. He thinks you’ll bottle it, post a video of an old shopping centre with some lies about the vengeful spirit of a duty manager, and his followers will bully you in the comments. You gonna let that happen?”
“Can’t do anything unless we get inside,” Steve said sullenly.
“God forbid we climb a wall. Maybe it’s a trap?” Rose mimicked, witheringly. “Sharpen up.”
***
They climbed a tree and shinnied along a branch to sit on the outer wall. Then Steve did it again, but for the camera. Higher up, they caught the smell of the sea and the cold. The institution had an eerie insubstantiality, like a solid shadow against the stars, untouched by the moon’s light.
Rose shivered.
“Christ this is bleak. I get putting a prison in the middle of nowhere, but a children’s hospital? Feels like a safeguarding red flag: Yep absolutely, very happy to cure the little tykes but I need to keep them isolated and unobserved.”
“Didn’t have safeguarding then. Barely had the concept of children, it feels like. They were just small shit adults who couldn’t fight back.”
Steve adjusted his cowl, and, at Rose’s command, the institution in frame behind him:
“Hearing the crash of the freezing sea, stung by wind and miles from anywhere else, your first thought is: Why would anyone put a children’s hospital out here? On this isolated, exposed stretch of the English south coast, it’s hard to imagine sunny days or kids at play. It’s easier to imagine instead that what happened here was always intended. That this was a cathedral of suffering from the very beginning. I read the comments, I know there are skeptics, but even if you don’t believe ghosts are real, you know evil is. And evil people did evil things here.”
Steve outlined some of those things with chilling restraint, rather than splashing around in viscera like that edgelord Hauntometer. Indeed, despite being the lead researcher, this account—the very place itself so near—made Rose nauseous with its subtlety, its invocation of unspeakable harm, and she focused on her breathing until she heard Steve's real voice.
“Film this transfer. I’ll breakfall into a roll, cut behind those hedges, then come back and help you down.”
“Sure. Do we have a way out?” She flicked to night vision.
“God forbid we climb a wall. Sharpen up.” Steve hit her on the arm a little, pulled his snood down and grinned: “I’m feeling it now. Good pep talk.”
He dropped nimbly to what was once lawn, long overgrown and wild, folding his legs beneath him and gliding into a shoulder roll before popping up and scurrying low to cover. For the benefit of viewers he moved his whole, hooded head, rather than just his eyes to indicate surveillance for threat.
Rose grinned, her nausea dissipated. This was going to be great.
***
The backdoor, rotten, was not so much forced as persuaded to open. Institutional dread filmed beautifully—all dutch-angled corridors and eerie symmetries. Rose was right. Being scared made for better video, and the usual collection of startled shivers or pensive stares had a different quality this time. Even the childish skeleton mask transformed, taking on the resonance of a classical memento mori, contributing to a luminous sincerity that enforced hushed, reverent tones even when they weren’t filming.
“But it’s an unmarked mass grave,” Steve whispered in the gigantic kitchen, as Rose tried to capture the way darkness warped in the scuffed stainless steel of industrial worktops. “By definition, there’s nothing to show so it doesn’t really matter where it was exactly. I’ll sprinkle dowsing dust and find a lonely patch of earth—”
Suddenly, the sound of vehicles: fast. At least one truck. At least a couple of cars too. Gravel-scrunch and slamming doors. Men, shouting in a mix of languages, angry.
Steve and Rose instinctively made themselves small, before, with eyes wide and terrified, they took control of themselves and enacted the protocols they’d practiced. Rose slipped the rig into its ruggedised case in her backpack while Steve silently checked windows and doors: locked, painted shut or windowless walk-in pantries. Nothing persuadable. On his phone, he pulled up blueprints they’d found online and pinch-navigated around the horse-shoe building with its large courtyard and delivery entrance that led directly to the kitchen—the wooden double doors they happened to be hiding behind, and through which they could hear everything.
Their only exit took them into a broken-windowed corridor, paved with crunching glass, past whatever was happening outside. They could risk crawling, or wait for the men to leave. Steve raised his hand in a Hold gesture, and Rose bit her lips into a flat blank line.
The voices got louder, angrier. Agonised shrieks of metal as bolts were drawn. A door flung open with a hollow toom. They heard gagging and understood profanities, even in languages they didn’t speak. An English voice said, “It’s not my job to drill airholes. It’s my job to drive. Where were the airholes?”
Some more shouting, and then precise, accented English, touched with a note of boredom: “Airholes were drilled.”
“Clearly the fuck not.”
“Sometimes, they panic. They fight to be near the airholes and block them.”
“Why not more airholes?”
A chuckle so dry it hurt: “Why not a window? They could wave goodbye.”
“All this sounds like a cost of doing business. But not my cost. So pay me, get this shit off my truck and forget we ever met.”
“You see a crane? They were supposed to walk off. The container is supposed to be returned.”
“I need to get this truck back. Tonight. You don’t want to—”
Distinctly, the sounds of violence: brief but effective.
“Now let me tell you what you don’t want to. You don’t want to be a problem on a problem. Not when the solution to the first problem is a large hole in the ground. If I were you—though I would never, ever be you—I’d help.”
Rose sobbed, biting down on her bobble hat, and after the first half-dozen whumps of bodies hitting the gravel, Steve was crying too. It took a long time for those sounds to stop, growing fainter as the landings got softer.
“I can’t bring it back like this, shit and blood everywhere.”
“Then clean it. Water still runs. Kitchen’s back there.”
“Is there a hose?”
“No? I don’t know.”
“How am I supposed to clean it without a hose?”
“With a bucket, dear Liza! Isn’t that what you English say?”
Steve and Rose scrabbled to a pantry, covered by the sound of uproarious laughter and the scraping sharpness of tools for digging, dragged along the ground. They eased the door shut behind them and squeezed into a cold, mildewed corner, grasping at each other in the dark as if for air, an animal desperation and an odd synchronicity making them singular. Then they heard voices so, so near: What the fuck is this? and It’s warm and, again with that note of boredom: A problem on a problem.
Steve felt Rose’s hair against his cheek, her body finding that perfect closeness in her fear.
The bobble hat was missing.
***
“And finally, a shout out to a fallen competitor. An In Memoriam, if you will. After my challenge to Ectoplasm a few weeks ago, he’s clearly followed my advice to shut his fucking mouth, packed up his terrible show and moved on. Good: too many charlatans and frauds in this business.”
Edgar Whistenthorpe—Hauntometer—laughed cruelly. The practiced ear would, perhaps, catch something of the artifice of his accent, but his laughter was authentic. The abandoned industrial building around him was perfectly dismal. Graffitied, scorched, idly smashed. Exactly the place you’d expect to find a body, and where a ghosthunter would be certain of finding the residue of a soul, perished in distress.
“Sound off in the comments if you think Ectoplasm was the biggest pussy in the paranormal, or if there’s some other loser I need to show the righteous path. Like, subscribe, and as always, remember: Not every grave is marked.”
PETE WARD (on Bluesky @phenryward.bsky.social) lives in Birmingham, England. His stories have been published or are forthcoming in Bristol Noir, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Frost Zone, Gavagai, Macabre Magazine, Rat Bag, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Thin Veil Press.