Poltergeist

Calliope is a weekly (mostly) session in Journalism where we gather to write and share pieces based on the selected topic! Enjoy the creative variety of poems and scroll to the end to find a couple of intriguing (and somewhat disturbing) short stories!

Poltergeist, German for “rumbling ghost” or “noisy spirit”, is a type of ghost or spirit that is responsible for physical disturbances, such as loud noises and objects being moved or destroyed.

Ryan

The easiest thing to do

pov: you’re a poltergeist being replaced by technology

this                    poltergeist                    is 

moving  

   this

                                                           text

                    around

but it’s doing                                                         a worse                                    

job

                                     than                                    microsoft       word 

when    you

    try to move

                                               a                    picture acro ss             text

                it                                     does not

                             want it’s job                                         replaced

 i                had no competition                before

       but  now

                                                                               it seems i am not                 needed

(why does it do that)

( it stole the rest of the poem 😯 and my creativity 😥 )

Eleos

I can hear you

But I cant hear you

Out there

Breaking

The pipes

And walls

And furniture

HAHA YES, 

HOW FUN THIS IS

CHAOS

An elusive little tiger

Crashing and clanking

Groaning and bashing

I AM MOST ALIVE IN MY ELEMENT AND AT MY TIME.

RUNNING

AND RUNNING

GLIDING

AND GLIDING

UP THIS CORRIDOR

I SMELL LIFE

ROUND THIS CORNER!

I can feel you

But I cant feel you

I can see you

But I cant see you

Here I lie

Crouched in the emptiness

Waiting

And waiting

And waiting

For you

Annoyance and

Unexpectedness

Personified

CLANK!

*STEPSTEPSTEP*

I can hear you now

I can feel you now

I cant see youuuuuuuuuudqsofebgrjwnmds. Fdgwje cda

Gd.gr hhtjojrfewrendddddddd,..

Janani

what am i?

to me,

i’m floating in the abyss,

wandering,

confused.

the world is afloat,

underneath my view.

i watch from afar,

as the world goes by,

a ghost.

to others,

i’m a child

cheerful, free

unconstrained and silly.

i know what i want,

and do as i wish.

in some ways a jester,

free of constraint.

what am i?

a poltergeist.

Danyson

Poltergeist? No,  Polteageist. 

Cheng Jie

I am a free spirit

Whose pranks know no bounds

Those who are timid 

Avoid me like hounds

Fun is what runs through my veins

I’m always so refreshed

They call me many names

But I’ve never been seen in the flesh

Ariel

I Hate Po

An irking spectre

gifting life

to those without.

What could be 

pressing the coin

into my palm?

What could be

imparting this 

movement?

What could be

everywhere, but nowhere,

haunting all?

It must be the

Poltergeist.

There’s no such thing

as a 

Gravitational Field.

Go home.

Elgin

A single human corpse sits on a sterile table in the middle of this room, sealed from the rest of the base by a 4-layer quarantine process. Several ridiculously clean surgical tools lie beside him, their polished steel bodies reflecting off light from the ceiling lamps, and a camera is mounted at the corner to record the whole process. One single tag is attached to the corpse’s feet, it reads: OHIO ANOMALY, CASUALTY #540 

Jayda Roberts and her two surgical assistants in large clumsy white PPE suits bend over to study the poor man’s body. His hands are twisted into grotesque angles, fingers black and narrow, a thumb missing each. One foot is missing, and the other boasts a huge gaping wound full of dried, brown blood, exposing the bones, tendons and muscles within. Gashes, contusions and circular wounds litter the greenish skin of his torso, legs, arms and neck.

His entire genital area appears to have been cleanly sliced off, with his bladder and other tubes visible. All of his skin appears to have been dyed orange, and a rusty green dagger has penetrated deep into the skin above his left lung. But most horrifying is his face – frozen into a shocked expression, eyes, and mouth wide open like he had died mid-scream.  Jayda can feel the immense pain and horror this man must’ve felt before passing, just by gazing into his eyes.

“What happened to him?” she asks her assistants.

“We found him outside a house on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, quite badly injured but insisted he was fine. Was cooperative when we sailed him back here. He fell asleep once he arrived here, but 1 hour later woke up and started screaming his head off. 10 of us rushed into the room to sedate him, but he went INSANE, man, he kept shouting about someone called Danny was coming to get him, wouldn’t calm down even after we administered the drugs. After about 10 minutes he flatlined on the monitor but was somehow still alive and screaming for another 5 minutes, until his whole body contorted, and he stopped making a sound. 3 of us had to visit the psych ward to erase the trauma with amnesiacs. Anyway, you’re the only doctor we could find who was brave, and qualified enough to autopsy him!”

Jayda begins her work. Using the scalpel, she cleanly slices open the corpse’s belly; it cuts away like butter, exposing the internal organs. Disbelief engulfs her face, and the two assistants, and the other scientists watching from the camera. All his internal organs are green, shrivelled, and riddled with tiny holes. Almost no good tissue samples can be extracted; all tissues are either dried up or gone. “I’ve seen Egyptian mummies in better condition than this…:

The corpse’s heart is in the best condition out of all his internal organs. Still, it has completely blackened, as if it absorbed a Harry Potter death curse. A household wrench has impaled right through it, starting at the right ventricle and ending at the aorta. With the intention to remove the wrench, Jayda touches it with tweezers, and an inhuman shock runs through her body.

She falls back, swept into a trance, her head leaning back enough to see the ceiling directly, her legs and feet still rooted to the ground. Her vision of the autopsy room fades away, only to be replaced by the house the man was found outside…

A dark room, filled with human bones, old books and ornaments. The Ohio anomaly’s orange glow shining through the window. Jayda gets up, dazed, when a book suddenly flies out and strikes her head, followed by another book, then a bone, then a table lamp. Soon enough, the whole room has declared war on her body.

“HELP!” But no one hears her plea, only the objects that continue chasing her out of the room, downstairs into the ground floor. The pounding does not stop. A television slams into her back. A kitchen knife strikes between her legs. She fights for her life, screaming and kicking, crawling each painful inch towards the front door, at last knocking it open with an outstretched arm and tumbling down the front stairs. Freedom! 

At the last moment, she glances back at the house, only to see a ghostly figure holding a household wrench rush into her body. A phantom voice echoes in her head, “MY NAME IS DANNY”, it roars, its deep voice quavering with a primal thirst for murder.

“Dr. Roberts, are you okay……”

The white room slowly rematerializes into her vision. Jayda gets up, her body trembling in shock 

“Danny’s a Poltergeist. A Poltergeist killed that man.”

Zachary

Ascension

Mr. Grutz sat on his chair. He’d once been Dr. Grutz, but that had changed after the entire Transformist fiasco. He sighed. He was getting older, his health was worsening (could it be a result of his constant tests on himself?), and he was running out of the limited amount of money that he still had. If only he had time. Well, that problem would be solved today. He stepped into his lab. Stains of things no sane person would want to know the names of adorned the walls. Broken, rusting machines lay in one corner, while a dangerously stacked tower of chemicals lay in another. And in the centre, his magnum opus. A white tube, large enough to accommodate one hunchbacked old man, lay hooked up to tubes and wires that ran all over the ceiling and the floor. Grutz held a remote. All it had was one button: ON. Grutz stepped inside his tube, firmly closing the door. It was airtight, he believed. And then, he pressed the button. An eerie blue light enveloped him, liquid filled the floor, and he had the oddest sensation, like his body was floating up into the sky. He let out a cackle. It would have sounded like a normal, slightly hoarse laugh had it not been for the trace amounts of insanity present. Then again, where really was the line between ingenious and mentally ill? And as Grutz closed his eyes, he fully ascended into his new form.

“I’ve done it!” Grutz exclaimed to himself. “I’ve ascended! I’m immortal!” He immediately began to test his newfound immortality, attempting to cut himself with a knife. It had no effect on his new, pale blue skin, nor did he feel even a twinge of pain. He let out another demented cackle. “Time to prove those fools wrong!” he said, heading off to the Central. After years of mockery and ridicule, he could finally prove that his theories and ideas were right. Immortality was possible after all… albeit at the cost of some of his looks. But it didn’t matter. If anyone opposed him, he didn’t even need to lift a finger. He could just outlive them. Hang around until they died. He’d won. Permanently.

Grutz threw open the doors of the science facility of the Central, or, as he’d once called in when he worked there as a respected scientist, the Facility. “All of you, listen up!” he yelled. No one took notice of him. In fact, one of the scientists had the gall to shut the door in his face. He threw it open once again, even louder this time. A scientist complained. “What’s opening the door? Is something broken?” Could they… not see him? Was he invisible? Could they not hear him? He walked in. No one took notice of him. And then, he decided, he’d use his newfound powers to get his revenge at last.

He broke experiments. Destroyed equipment. In under half an hour, the Facility was sheer chaos. Grutz had laid waste to the entire first floor of the Facility. And as he began his descent to the lower floor, people started to notice his pattern. The security attempted to catch him with a weighted net. But Grutz had laughed it off. “I’m ascended! You can’t hurt me!” he’d yelled, flying out of the way. He used his newest ability to wreak sheer havoc on the crowd. And eventually, he reached the last floor. The deepest and most secure one. His old rivals were there. The ones who’d gotten him thrown out. The ones who he still blamed for the Transformist incident. They would pay, dearly. Old Mr. Sniders appeared to be working on some sort of weapon. Grutz had an idea. While Sniders was fixing something in front of the barrel, Grutz grabbed the gun. Sniders was in shock for one brief, fleeting moment before a rod of steel punched through his chest.

Grutz stood in the middle of the blood and gore. All around him, the others were screaming. Panicking. Fleeing. He laughed. His laughing turned into a cackle, which soon turned into insane, maniacal peals of laughter. He chased the other scientists with his new weapon. He shot and shot and shot, until the Facility was filled with blood and corpses. He’d done it. He’d had his revenge. But it wasn’t enough. He hungered for more. The ceaseless murder had awoken something inside of him that he needed more of. The Academy. He’d wanted to be a professor there. But he’d been blocked and denied. But now he was ascended. He could do whatever he wanted. And as he flew in, smashing one of the windows as he did, his insane laughter returned.

Armed with a variety of weapons he’d obtained from the Facility, Grutz began yet another rampage. Corpses and corpses surrounded him. In one room, he was quite literally up to his ankles in blood. An entire generation of the nation’s finest prospective scientists had been murdered in one afternoon. No one could figure out how to stop him. When imprisoned, he simply walked through the glass. No prison could hold him, and he couldn’t die. And over the next month, Grutz exacted his revenge on every place and everyone that he’d felt ever wronged him.

Eventually, Grutz had learnt that the government had concentrated all their scientists inside a new Facility, the most secure in the country. No weapons could be brought or built inside, to prevent Grutz from getting his hands on another tool. But when he did get inside, he was still determined to kill. And so he used his hands. He ripped apart scientists’ faces and bodies with inhuman strength. And eventually, it was done. They were all dead. Grutz stared at the ceiling and gave an insane, sobbing cackle. His mind had fully snapped. Grutz was dead. Because even Grutz wouldn’t have gone this far. But he’d ascended past Grutz. All that was left… was the Poltergeist.