File# 004 What if No One is Lying?

Last week, I thought someone was lying.

Maybe the anonymous man with the altered voice. Maybe the county. Maybe whoever keeps sending me the emails. Someone, in all of this, had to be the one deliberately misleading everyone else.

That's what I believed when I drove to St. Matthews Church. I expected the abandoned church parking lot to be empty. 

It wasn't.

In File 004, Avery Quinn follows the one piece of advice an anonymous, unnamed, badge-less stranger gave before vanishing: ask ten people when the train station closed. What Avery finds instead is Bell Night. An annual gathering at an abandoned church that every single person in Millbrook knows about, attends, and cannot explain. They bring flowers and photographs and leave them as offerings for something none of them can name.

And at exactly 8:59 p.m. with no announcement, no signal, or anyone asking for silence, the almost full parking lot of people simply stopped talking. All at once. Like everyone reached the same thought at the same moment.

Then the bell rang.

What Avery uncovers in this episode isn't a cover-up or a conspiracy. It's something far more unsettling, a town full of people with false memories who genuinely believe their own answers, who aren't hiding anything, who are just… missing the part that explains why any of it matters.

This isn't mass hysteria. This isn't collective memory loss. This is something someone engineered.

And for the first time since starting this podcast, Avery is facing a question they genuinely doesn't know how to answer:

What if the problem isn't that people are lying? What if something happened that no one is capable of remembering correctly… and that's exactly how someone is benefiting from it?

The Millbrook Files is an investigative horror podcast presented as a real case in real time. New files drop every week. 

Subscribe to follow the investigation from the beginning…before the evidence disappears.

If you love small town mystery, found footage horror, paranormal investigation, audio drama horror, or deeply unsettling ghost stories told like they actually happened this podcast is for you. 

Avery Quinn is not responsible for what you remember after listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Last week I interviewed a man who claimed people in Millbrook were being lied to. He said someone had intentionally created stories like The Man in the Hat to keep people away from something. But he never told me what. He also claimed he was law enforcement, but he never gave me his name, and he never showed me a badge. And he spent most of our conversation answering questions with other questions, which, if you've ever watched a conspiracy documentary, is usually not a great sign. So no, I don't suddenly believe mysterious strangers with altered voices. If someone tells me there's a government cover-up involving shadowy people, my first instinct isn't to blindly follow. It's to grab a flashlight and follow the evidence. And that's exactly what I spent this week trying to find. Because before we assume there's some massive conspiracy, there should be something we can actually prove. Last week before he left, the man gave me some homework. He told me to ask 10 people when the train station closed. So I did. And I really wish I hadn't. I'm Avery Quinn, and these are the Millbrook Files. I'm Avery Quinn, and before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to address the approximately 700 emails. Okay, I it wasn't 700, I might be being dramatic, but it was enough that my inbox now looks like I accidentally started some kind of a cult. Half of you think the anonymous guy from last week was completely legit. The other half think I got catfished by someone who watched way too many conspiracy videos at 3 o'clock in the morning. Personally, I'm leaning towards option two. But look, it was a very interesting interview. It was very creepy, very mysterious, there was lots of dramatic pauses, but let's review what we actually know. He wouldn't tell me his name, he wouldn't tell me where he worked, he wouldn't tell me who they are. He answered maybe 20% of the questions, and somehow managed to leave me with more questions than I started with, which is pretty impressive because I have a lot of questions. So no, I'm not ready to conclude that there's some secret organization rewriting history in Millbrook. Not yet. But there was one thing he said that kept bothering me. And not because it sounded like impossible or anything, but because it sounded testable. He told me to ask people when the old train station closed, which is simple enough. It's one building, one date. There should be one answer, right? I mean, maybe people would be off by like a year or two, or maybe some older folks would remember better than the younger people. Like that's all completely normal, like our memories are messy, you know, we're not computers. So I figured I would spend one afternoon just asking around town. And then I'd come back here, tell you all the anonymous guy was full of it, and we'd all move on with our lives. But instead, I somehow ended up questioning whether everyone in this town remembers the same history. And honestly, I still think there's a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I just I haven't found it yet. So here's how I decided to do this. I wasn't going to interview historians or librarians or county officials, not yet. I wanted to start with normal people, people who grew up here, people who have lived here their whole lives. Because if the anonymous guy was wrong, this experiment should be over in about 15 minutes. Question, answer, done. Easy. My first victim, I mean volunteer, was my mom. And my mother is one of those people who remembers absolutely everything. Birthdays, phone numbers, what I wore on the first day of kindergarten, which, by the way, apparently was a dinosaur t-shirt that I insisted made me run faster. I have no memory of this. She remembers it vividly, so if anyone would know, it would be her. So I asked her the simple question, hey Ma, when did the old train station close? And she didn't even hesitate. 1968. She was confident with her immediate answer. Like I had asked what color the sky was. Perfect, exactly what I expected. So I know I said I wasn't gonna ask librarians, but I did stop by the library. I can't help myself. At this point, I'm beginning to think that the librarians are going to start hiding when they see me pull into the parking lot, but I just I wanted to know. They seem like they have a lot of information. So I found the same woman that I had talked to a few times before, and yes, I do know her name. We all do, everyone in Millbrook does. But since she has been so patient with me and not one time actually consented to being talked about on this podcast, I just kind of want to leave that part alone. Anyway, we chatted for a minute, we talked about the weather, I pretended like I wasn't about to ask her another weird question, and then I just casually slipped in. Do you happen to remember when the train station closed? Smooth. She smiled and she said she believed it was 1954. So I did laugh, and not because I thought she was wrong, but because I thought she misunderstood which train station I meant. Even though we only have one now that I think about it. But I did clarify with her that it was the one downtown and she nodded, yeah, and then repeated herself, it closed in 1954. Interesting. Two people, two completely different answers. Still not that strange, people remember dates differently. So I drove over to my second home, which is work, and I went to see my boss, Kelly, to ask her because she's lived in Millbrook almost her entire life. And if you need to know who owned a house 30 years ago, Kelly knows. If you need to know who dated who in high school, Kelly definitely knows. If you need to know why somebody suddenly moved away, Kelly probably knows that too. So I asked her, when did the train station close? And she looked at me like it was obvious. She laughed and said she didn't remember the exact date, but it was the early 80s for sure. And then she hit me with one of those, you really don't remember? Which is kind of a strange question considering that I wasn't even alive in the 80s, so no. No, I don't remember. But anywho, now we are at three people. Three people with three different answers. Interesting. And now I'm officially invested in this. I want to know who was right. Or I guess more accurately, who was wrong. So I kept asking. A man eating breakfast at the diner said it never officially closed. A retired teacher told me it burned down, a mechanic said they converted it into a freight depot, which I'm not 100% sure what that is, but I'm guessing it is exactly what it sounds like. One teenager looked at me completely confused and said, What train station? That one caught me off guard. Because whether or not you know when it closed, the building is still there, like it's still standing. You can literally drive by it. So I told him, no, it's the brick building by Main Street, which he then told me to quit messing with him because there isn't a building there. So I actually had to look over his shoulder. I was half expecting someone to like jump out at me and tell me I was on some kind of hidden camera prank show, but he genuinely had no idea what I was talking about. So I asked a few more people, and none of them hesitated. None of them said, I don't remember. Every single person answered immediately and sounded completely certain of their answer, even if the answer was it doesn't exist. And honestly, if this were just one or two people, I would not even be telling you about it. Different people give you different answers all the time, it really isn't all that out there. But it was the confidence, is the it the confidence is what got me. It's just different. Like nobody guessed, nobody like shrugged and said, I think. They all knew, or at least they believed they did. And that was the first moment all week when I really started thinking about what the anonymous man had said about people's memories. I still don't believe it's possible. I I don't, I actually don't. There has to be another explanation. There has to be. So I decided to make the experiment bigger. Because at this point I still wasn't worried. And actually, honestly, I was kind of having fun. Because this is exactly how local history works sometimes. If you ask enough people about anything that happened 40 or 50 years ago, eventually someone is going to insist the grocery store used to be where the post office is, when it's actually two blocks away. So I feel like that's normal, or at least relatively normal. I've heard that people tend to remember feelings better than facts. So I thought maybe the train station is just one of those things that maybe everyone has attached some kind of different memory to, which is perfectly reasonable, right? Case closed. Except I couldn't stop thinking about it. So instead of asking one question, I made a list of questions. Questions that everyone in town should know. Questions with objective answers, things that happen one time one way. Nothing controversial, nothing paranormal, just local history. So I asked people when did the church stop holding services? When was the original high school torn down? What happened to Miller Farm? Did Blackwood Road always exist? The simple questions that should have simple answers. Or at least they should have been. But as it turns out, they weren't, not even close. One woman told me St. Matthew's Church burned down sometime in the 70s, and an older gentleman next to her laughed and said it didn't burn down, it flooded. Kelly told me the congregation merged with another church. The librarian said services just stopped because people moved away. And then my mom, who looked genuinely confused when I asked her the question, just said, What do you mean? The church still holds services. Alright, now before anybody listening starts panicking, yes, the building is still standing. You've heard me mention it before. At least I'm pretty sure you have. If not, uh, I guess if you're not from here or if you haven't heard it before St. Matthews, it's an abandoned church, so there's really no question. The windows are boarded up, the bell tower leans kind of slightly to one side, and you can literally drive past it. So naturally I did. Really just to make sure that I hadn't somehow missed that Sunday services for the last 20 years were still going on. But nope. It is still there, it's still abandoned, still empty, and still exactly the way I remembered it. Which is somewhat reassuring, because at least something matched reality, or at least what I thought reality was. Then I asked about the old high school, which one person said it was turned into an apartment building, another person said it was demolished, someone else insisted that it was condemned after asbestos was discovered. One guy looked at me and said there was never a high school here, which is BS because I went to it. That's where I graduated from. Now all of this was starting to get pretty interesting because people weren't just remembering dates differently anymore, they were actually remembering entirely different histories. And I guess not wildly different histories, just like shifted a little bit. Like everyone had read a slightly different version of the same book. And the strangest part wasn't that people were disagreeing on these things. Again, it was just how confident they were. Like nobody paused or guessed or looked uncertain. Like every answer just came instantly. Like they weren't really memories at all, they were like facts like they had studied for a test. And every single person assumed everyone else would give the exact same answer. But it did get me thinking, if I asked the same people again the next day, would they answer differently? Or would they remember remembering something else? That actually sounded a lot less creepy in my head, so let's move on. Because at this point, I'm still thinking that all of this has a perfectly logical explanation. I just needed evidence, like real evidence, not memories. Something solid, like records. And the records, they're supposed to be the easy part, right? Human memory is notoriously unreliable. That's why we write things down and we keep records. Newspapers, county records, historical archives, photographs, maps. These don't have opinions, or at least they're not supposed to. So I went back to the library again, and at this point I'm beginning to suspect they might have started a group chat specifically about me. Something like, oh my god, Avery's back, hide the maps, everyone act busy. But fortunately, the librarian was much nicer this time. I think she's warming up to my charm. Or maybe she just simply accepted that this is her life now. But I told her that I was looking into local history again, and she pointed me towards the newspaper archives, again, and I started digging. First, the train station. I found an article mentioning repairs to the train station in 1978, which is interesting, except if the station closed in 1954, why would anybody be repairing it 24 years later? But maybe the repairs happened for a certain reason, maybe they just needed to repair it for something. Which is possible. Then I found another article, and this one mentioned freight shipments arriving at the station in 1981. That didn't make much sense either. Unless maybe it stayed partially open. Someone did say it turned into a freight depot at some point. And then I found something that completely stopped me. A photograph from the annual Tom Parade. It was dated 1986, and right there in the background was the train station, standing exactly where it stands today. So nothing unusual, except for one thing. There was a banner hanging across the front of it, and it read Millbrook Depot. Not train station, but depot. And now I'm not a train scientist, maybe those words are used interchangeably, and I am just reading way too much into it. But it caught my attention, so I kept looking. And then I found another photograph. It was the same building, but this time the sign said Millbrook Passenger Terminal. So same building, different name. Okay, that's odd. But then there was another photograph where there was no sign at all. It was just bare brick. So three photographs, the same building, three different versions. Now, before any of you have a heart attack, you can go ahead and put your comment-making thumbs away. I know that signs change. I know businesses remodel and buildings get renamed. I know all of that is completely normal. Except here's the thing. All three of those photographs claimed to be taken during the same summer festival, during the same year, 1986. So I stared at those pictures for a long time. It was long enough that I eventually convinced myself that there had to be like a filing mistake or some kind of a clerical error. Maybe the photos were put in the wrong order or dated wrong, or maybe somebody mislabeled them even. And honestly, true or not, that explanation made me feel a whole lot better. Until I started looking at the newspapers again, because the newspapers were disagreeing too. One article talked about the station being reopened, another described a closing, and both were published within months of each other. And neither referenced the other. So neither suggested anything unusual, and both read like perfectly ordinary local news. So at that point I leaned back in my chair, I closed my notebook, and for the first time since I started this podcast, I had a genuinely uncomfortable thought. And it's not that ghosts are real, and it's not that anonymous man was right. It was nothing like that. It's just that like if people remember different histories, and the records remember different histories, what exactly am I using to decide which one is true? Because suddenly the evidence wasn't helping me. It's arguing with itself. So I went home, I spread everything out across my dining room table, had the newspaper copies, the maps, photographs, notes, interview transcripts, way too many sticky notes, and enough coffee to legally qualify as a personality trait. If someone had walked into my house at that moment, they probably would have assumed I was trying to solve a serial killer case, or trying to create a conspiracy theory meme. All I was really missing was the red string and the corkboard. Instead, I was just trying to figure out why nobody in Millbrook could agree on when the damned train station closed, which somehow feels just as ridiculous. I started writing down all the possibilities. Was it bad memories, small town rumors, poor record keeping, misprinted newspapers, maybe different historical revisions, the Mandala effect, government mistakes, county mistakes, which I guess are technically the same thing. Or like, what if it was some kind of a medical thing? Like, is there some kind of natural gas or something that could cause mass confusion? Maybe that's why there's a restricted zone in the Blackwood Forest. But then I wrote one more thing down. Does someone benefit from the confusion? And before anybody starts thinking that the government has planted memory-altering satellites over small town USA, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying confusion could be useful, right? Like if nobody agrees on what happened, then nobody really asks why it happened. So think about Blackwood Road. Like nobody officially closed it, and nobody tells you not to use it. Instead, they just let stories spread and people stop going. So problem solved. There's no barricades, no questions, just folklore. And honestly, that's kind of brilliant. If the road really does lead somewhere dangerous, then why create curiosity with warning signs? When a ghost story really accomplishes the same thing. And I'm assuming it's much more cost effective. But that thought kind of bothered me, like not because I believe it, but because it actually kind of made sense. But then I remembered something else that the anonymous man had said. The hat man isn't the danger. He's the scarecrow. At that time I dismissed it as being dramatic nonsense, because truthfully he was pissing me off. But now I'm not so sure. I'm not siding with him, but I also can't explain why I keep finding these little pieces that fit his stupid story. But I am sticking with there as a rational explanation. Like I have to, right? Because there has to be one. This was supposed to be a fun podcast to kill some time and talk about weird shit. Not one that actually makes me go crazy. But anywho, a few days after the episode aired, I got another weird ass email. The subject line, Bell Night. That's all it said. And all it said in the body of the email, if you want to see it in real time, go watch what they do tomorrow night, 8 45 p.m., Old St. Matthew's Church. That was it. Nothing else. And my first thought was, and probably always will be skeptical, and that somebody is just messing with me, which I really don't blame you, it's it does sound like something I would also do. But my second thought was, I've never claimed to be a smart person, and I have zero survival instincts. So the next evening, I hopped in the Civic and drove down to St. Matthew's Church. And I expected the church to be empty, so you can about imagine my surprise when I pulled into the almost full abandoned church parking lot. There was families, couples, teenagers, older folks, people carrying lawn chairs, little kids chasing each other through the grass. It looked like everyone had showed up for some kind of a community event. Except nobody looked excited to be there, but they also didn't look mad about it either. And there was also nothing set up. The church looked like its usual abandoned self. And it wasn't sad like a funeral, but it also wasn't happy. It just was. So I grabbed my recorder and I started walking around. I figured out of everyone here, someone could probably explain what Bell Knight actually was. So I walked over to an older couple standing near the sidewalk, and I asked, Is this Bell Knight? And if it is, what is it? And they just looked at each other funny and then looked back at me, and then replied in a somewhat flat and confused tone that yes, it was Bell Knight, like I was supposed to know that. So then I asked them again, well, what is it? What is Bell Knight? And then there was another really awkwardly long pause when they said, I'm not even kidding you. They said, you know, Bell Knight. No, no, I don't know. I have no idea what you're talking about. And the woman just kind of frowned and said, Well, I guess I never really thought about it. And then the guy she was with said, Yeah, I guess we've always just come. So when I asked why they come and how long have they been coming, they just said they didn't know. They didn't know why they came and they didn't know how long they've been coming. They've just been coming as long as they can remember. And neither one of them seemed particularly bothered by that answer. They simply smiled and wandered away, which is terrifying in and of itself. So I tried asking more people, but it was all the same thing. Every single person knew about Bell Knight, and they attended it every year because it's an annual thing, but no one could tell me why. And at exactly 8 59 p.m., as I am trying to wrap my head around this and to try to see what it is that I'm missing to make this make sense, all the conversation stopped. All of it. Nobody like announced anything, and there was nobody had asked for silence. The entire crowd simply just stopped talking. Like everyone had reached the same thought at the same time. And then, like something out of a horror movie, the church bell rang. Once, twice, three times. I counted them all. The bell rang 13 times, and then silence. And nobody like did anything, like everyone just stood there with their heads lowered for like maybe 30 seconds, and then without anyone saying a word, they just started walking back to their cars. Like, what in the children of the corn bullshit did I just watch? The whole thing was just over, and I stood there like completely confused. I didn't even know what to do. I stopped one woman before she reached her car, and like as normally and calmly as I could, I asked her what just happened. And she looked at me like I was a moron and said, that was Belle Knight. Like, no shit, Sherlock Holmes. I figured that part out. But one by one the parking lot just emptied, and within 15 minutes, I was alone. Or at least I thought I was. I just happened to look back towards the church, and the front doors were wide open. And now I'm almost positive that they were closed earlier, and maybe someone had opened them during whatever the hell that was. So I walked over, mostly because I was curious, and partly because after the last few weeks, curiosity seemed to have replaced common sense as my defining personality trait. I went inside and the sanctuary was empty, and dust was floating through my flashlight beam like something out of a classical movie. There were old wooden pews, faded hymn books, nothing unusual that I wouldn't expect to find in a church. But then I noticed something up near the altar. It was flowers. Not like one bouquet, but like dozens of them. There were fresh ones and then some were completely dried out. They were all laid carefully out like people had been leaving them there for years. And beside the flowers were photographs, hundreds of them. They were families, children, couples, old black and white portraits, colored photos from the 70s-ish, school pictures, pictures of soldiers in military uniforms, wedding photos, but nothing explained who they were or why they were there. It looked like a memorial, but a memorial to what? I turned to leave and then I stopped because something suddenly occurred to me. I'd spent almost an hour talking to people outside, and not one person mentioned the flowers, the photographs, or going inside the church at all. I stood in that church for another minute just looking, and then the bell rang again. One time. I looked up and the bell tower was empty. There was not anybody else there with me. So I've replayed that night in my head probably a hundred times now. And here's what's bothering me. It's not the bell or the flowers or the people leaving flowers all the time. It's not even the photographs or the people leaving stuff there. That's all normal. What isn't normal is that no one thought any of that was worth mentioning. No one said, go look inside at the stuff we bring, or we bring flowers and pictures every year to leave at the memorial. Nothing. It's as if everyone remembered Bell Knight, but nobody remembered what the point of it was. I know how ridiculous this sounds, and trust me, I have replayed and relived what happened over and over and over again in my head, and it sounds just as ridiculous every single time. But last week I thought somebody was lying. Maybe it was the anonymous man. Maybe it was the county. Maybe it was whoever keeps sending me these weird ass emails. But this week, I'm not so sure. Because the people I talked to weren't hiding anything. They weren't trying to avoid my questions. They genuinely believed their answers. And for the first time since starting this podcast, I found myself asking a question I genuinely don't know the answer to. What if the problem isn't that people are lying? What if something happened? Something that no one is capable of remembering correctly. And that is exactly how someone is benefiting from it. And that is our show for today. And I don't know about you guys, but I am ready to be done. Next week we're staying at St. Matthew's, not because I think it's haunted, and not because I think there's anything supernatural, but because I really think something happened there. Something important enough that an entire town still gathers every year, even if no one remembers why. I'm Avery Quinn, and these are the Millbrook Files.