Out of Character (OOC):
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Story: The Asylum
Chapter 3 – Scene 3 “Doppleganger”
Storyteller: Jerad Sayler
North Dakota State Hospital
Patient Case Study #1 The Doppelganger
You get in thanks to the backdoor STARK put in place
when you were still talking to him.
After several hours of rummaging around you finally find one case that
immediately draws attention. It was
compiled by an intern, Mathew Case (B.A.) who was working on his dissertation
on extreme psychiatry. He interviewed a
Charlene Brezniak in November of 2016.
She claimed at that time that a monster haunted the depression/suicide
ward of the La Haug Building that was drinking people’s breath. Transcript to follow:
Patient: Various
Attending Physician: Various — Report
Compiled by M. Case, B.A. (Student Intern)
Case Number: None
Incident Report
As part of my internship at the North
Dakota State Hospital, I have been interviewing as many of the patients as I
can, in part for my own research for my master’s thesis and in part to test out
some of the new psychological tests made available to the facility. Over the
course of my work, I have gotten to know many of the patients quite well
(especially in minimum security), and recently one of those patients shared a
strange story with me. I was recording the conversation; the transcription of
the relevant section follows:
Charlene Brezniak: There’s a monster here
in the La Haug.
Matt Case: A monster? What do you
mean?
CB: It’s a monster. It can
look like anyone it wants to.
MC: But you can recognize
it?
CB: No, not always. I don’t
think it comes around during the day. I see it most often at night.
MC: How do you know when
it’s here, if it can look like anyone?
CB: I don’t know. Sometimes
if you look at it right, you can see it kinda ripple. Like water or smoke.
Sometimes somebody walks into the room, and Mike’ll say, “Hi, Bill!” [Bill
refers to the orderly, Bill Carlyle] But then Josh’ll say, “That’s not
Bill, that’s Steve.” [Not sure who “Steve” is.] And that’s how I know to
look, when two people see somebody different.
MC: But if it can be
whoever it wants, why —
CB: No, no, not whoever it wants.
I think maybe it becomes who you expect to see. And then it drinks your
breath.
MC: What?
CB: I saw it in the corner.
It was kissing Amy [Amy Moore, a nurse currently on maternity leave]. At
least I thought it was kissing her, but then she stumbled and it disappeared.
MC: Disappeared?
CB: Like smoke.
Charlene, the woman who told me this
story, self-admitted to the hospital after her teenage son committed suicide.
She is lucid and intelligent, and only takes medication as needed for
depression. She has no history of hallucinations or any other kind of psychosis
or thought disorder, so when she told me this story, it gave me pause. I asked
her if anyone else had seen the “monster,” and she told me that no one wanted
to talk about it.
I interviewed a few other people in
minimum security, including Mrs. Moore (via telephone). She told me that she
had, some months ago, passed out while on the clock, but it was in the early
weeks of her pregnancy and she hadn’t eaten that day. She said that Charlene
was probably getting a little stir crazy (she has since been discharged, and is
apparently doing quite well), and might have been poking fun at me. I decided
to ask around some of the patients; Mrs. Moore advised me to avoid “priming”
them so as to avoid bias.
What I found was interesting, if not remarkable.
Of the 18 patients in minimum security at the time, 10 were unable or unwilling
to speak with me. Of the remaining 8, three of them told stories similar to
Charlene’s when I asked them if they’d
seen anything strange in here (all of them had stories to tell, but 5 out of
the 8 told stories consistent with their disorders). These three patients were
all self-admits, one for depression, one for anxiety and one for agoraphobia.
Similar to Charlene, none of them were predisposed to seeing things.
It’s possible, of course, that Charlene
told them what to say, but the details varied enough while remaining internally
consistent to make me think that something strange is happening in the
depression ward. All of these patients told specific stories about people
seeing someone walk into the room but “recognizing” the new arrival
differently. In all cases, the “people” whom witnesses saw made sense in
context; no one ever saw the Pope, for instance, but employees of the hospital
and family members were common. It was as though whoever walked through the
door appeared to these people as whomever they expected or wished to see.
This by itself was strange, but then I
looked into the hospital records and looked at the codes for the nights (always
nights!) that these incidents occurred. In all four cases, someone passed out,
vomited, tripped, fell asleep in a strange place or reported dizziness or
weakness. It was never the same person twice, and never the person who reported
seeing someone. Other such reports (dizziness, fainting, etc.) happen on other
nights, too, of course. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern, but rarely does a
week go by without something like this happening.
Charlene said that the monster drinks
people’s breath. Many cultures have legends about creatures that do exactly
that. We’re all familiar with Western legends of vampires. Ghosts, though, in
some stories do so as well. Even cats supposedly steal the breath of sleeping
people. A German legend talks about the doppelgänger or “co-walker,” a ghost
that takes the form of a living person. And here were have witnesses talking
about something that takes the form of whoever the people around it are
expecting to see. Meanwhile, other people collapse or grow weak when it is
near.
Obviously, all of this sounds rather
far-fetched. But the fact that people who have neither seen the “doppelgänger”
nor the people who witnessed the doppelgänger have collapsed, vomited or
otherwise been afflicted is significant because it implies that the
doppelgänger is attacking the people who don’t see it at all. It strikes only
at night, when staff is minimal and those on staff are tired, and most of the
patients are in bed. How many more patients might have had their breath stolen
while they slept?
One of the lingering questions is: Why this
building? Why does the doppelgänger not haunt the higher-security wards, where
many more people have died over the years? Note that I’m not suggesting there
is a ghost present in the hospital. I’m
simply stating that something is going on, and it requires us to keep
open minds about possible causes. I would like to stay on at Bishopsgate and
write my thesis on the doppelgänger, try to figure out where these stories come
from, whether Charlene Brezniak spread the story around before she left and, in
short, whether there is a rational explanation for these occurrences.
There is a sticky note taped to the scanned papers:
MATT: YOUR INTERVIEWS ARE GOOD, AND
YOU’VE GOTTEN GOOD
REFERENCES FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF
JAMESTOWN. SO I’LL LET YOU STAY. BUT YOU
CANNOT GO INTO THIS WITH THE ASSUMPTION THAT THERE’S A GHOST. YOU NEED TO
PROCEED LIKE A SCIENTIST, FIGURE OUT WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON AND THEN WRITE YOUR
THESIS ACCORDINGLY. THIS IS YOUR FIRST
AND FINAL WARNING.
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