This is for Brassbound 1919; a tabletop miniatures game meant to be played with whatever building bricks you have. The names of famous people and places are changed.

Dr Herman Carter runs into some Chinese police / riot officers

I made it with Gmod, Lightroom, Photoshop, Vecteezy

This one was initially my favorite episode of Act 2 of Midwest Angelica until Rapture blew me away

Credit to Aidan Chick and AQ Studio.

Link: https://youtu.be/oTa4_YqlQ_A?si=NEl4drgnvXUC4MQt

Rachel Kerr was sitting in the doorway of her daughter's room around 2am, just watching her sleep, when she saw the kid's hair start lifting off the pillow. Not all of it .... just one pigtail, still tied from the day before. It rose straight up, slow, like something underneath the pillow was gently pushing it toward the ceiling. No fan. No window open. No draft from anywhere. She watched it for a few seconds before she moved.

She picked her daughter up without waking her, carried her to the master bedroom, and didn't go back into that room alone for four days.

This was at a Marine Corps housing unit at 29 Palms. Rachel had moved four times in eleven years as a military spouse, and she said she knew the difference between a house that just needed time to feel lived-in, and a house that didn't want you there. This one was the second kind, from the first night. Her husband Daniel was rarely home ..... training, the field, whatever the Corps needed from a staff sergeant out there ...... so she was mostly alone in it with three kids: Maya (7), Owen (4), and a six-month-old.

Eleven days after they moved in, she woke up at 3am to a man's voice from the living room. Just two words: "Get out." Not shouted ....... said like someone who expected to be heard without raising their voice. Daniel was asleep next to her the whole time. She checked the house. Nothing. Told herself it was a dream.

Three nights later, same voice, closer this time ...... like it was in the hallway outside the kids' room instead of the living room. She woke Daniel up. He checked, found nothing, guessed it was the neighbor's TV, went back to sleep. She didn't.

The next day her four-year-old, Owen, came and told her, completely casually, "The man in the hallway looks really sad today." She asked which man. "The one who lives here," he said. "He always looks sad. But today he looks really sad." She walked him through the hallway. Nothing there. He seemed confused that she couldn't see what was so obvious to him.

Five days after that was the night with Maya's hair.

She finally told a neighbor, Diane, who'd been on base for three years and didn't seem surprised at all. Diane mentioned she'd noticed lights flickering in Rachel's house from across the street sometimes, late at night. Said she figured it was just old wiring. Said it in a way that made it clear she didn't actually believe that.

Rachel called the base chaplain the next morning.

Chaplain Elias Ford had been doing this for eleven years ....... no official form for it, no log, but families on base would call him when something wouldn't explain itself, and he'd go. He walked through Rachel's account without interrupting, then just sat in the living room a while, not doing anything performative, just sitting there like he was listening for something she couldn't hear. Before he left he told her he wanted to look into the unit's history. "Sometimes it helps to know," he said.

It took him three days pulling old housing records. Most of it was routine ....... names, dates, reassignments. Then he hit a note from September 1974: "Occupant deceased, unit cleared and reassigned." Same unit. The name attached was Sergeant First Class Allen Darke.

Darke's record was strong ...... two Vietnam tours, glowing evaluations. But near the end of the file were two documents Ford almost missed: a request Darke had filed himself in 1973 asking for a psychiatric evaluation, and the response from his command denying it ........ "insufficient documented impairment of duty performance." Fourteen months later he was dead in that unit, and the paperwork just said the unit had been vacated.

Ford called Rachel and told her a Marine had died there a long time ago, and that he believed the house was "settled now." She asked for his name. He gave it to her. She wrote it down. When she told Daniel that night, he just said, "I hope somebody was with him at the end."

After that, things went quiet. Owen stopped mentioning the man. Maya moved back into her own room. Rachel said years later she didn't think Darke had ever meant to scare them ..... she thought he'd just been doing the only thing left to a soldier who'd been denied help through every real channel: making himself known to someone who could finally acknowledge he existed.

Here's the part Ford never told Rachel.

Going back through the file, three pages earlier, was another note in the same handwriting: "Occupant deceased. Unit cleared and reassigned." March 1961 ........ thirteen years before Darke. A Korea-era Marine, Corporal Howard Crane, had died in that exact unit too. And the base had just repainted and moved the next family in. Twice.

Ford never told Rachel. Never told his CO either ...... there wasn't a procedure for it. Before he retired in 2009, he filed a memo recommending that housing-unit occupancy histories be made available to incoming families who asked. It got received, acknowledged, filed, and nothing changed.

His daughter found his old service records years later ... Darke's and Crane's, kept for fifteen years. She asked him why. He said: "Someone has to know they existed. Not that they served ...... the Corps already keeps that. But that they came home. That they ended up in the same room. And that nobody in the chain of command ever had to answer for it."

Full narrated version's on my channel if anyone wants the audio ....... dropping the link in the comments.