"The Mary Hillenbrand Cassette"

**"The Mary Hillenbrand Cassette"** is the second tale in the first episode of the seventh season of The Nosleep Podcast. Written by Jimmy Juliano, it has a running time of 36:50 and was originally read by Peter Lewis, Nikolle Doolin, Dan Zappulla, David Cummings, and Jessica McEvoy. It is the 765th tale overall on the podcast.

## Summary

A high school is celebrating it's 20-year graduation reunion, and the theme is "Artifact or Fiction", where former students bring in embarrassing pieces of memorabilia.

A man decides to create an audio documentary about an urban legend that gripped the school during their time there. He calls four former classmates (Sherry, Jake, Trevor, and Cathy) and interviews them about the legend and how it was told to them. He edits the interviews into one long documentary.

The story concerned an island in the middle of a local lake, called X Island, that is supposedly cursed due to a serious boating accident that occurred there years before. An old, reclusive woman that supposedly lived in the town named Mary Hillenbrand went missing and was not seen until a year-and-a-half later, when a police call about a bonfire on the island resulted in the discovery of her corpse, which had been dead for that long. Found under her body was a cassette recorder, but with no tape inside.

The story ceases to be clear at this point. The rest of tale concerns what happened to the tape, what was on it, who had it, and what would happen if one would listened to it. Sherry claims that Trevor showed her the tape one day, saying that side one had Mary yelping and moaning while breaking branches could be heard in the background. Side two contained Mary screaming with a low voice menacingly whispering underneath it. Trevor claims Sherry showed him the tape. Jake claims the tape never existed at all. Cathy claims the tape was real, but that Trevor and Sherry got drunk one day and recorded it as a prank. Throughout the interviews, Trevor and Jake seem to go through some sort of mental break, while Cathy brings up the fact that she is a good parent several times.

The man is disturbed by this information. He recalls a memory from high school of him in Sherry's bedroom, with her showing him a tape she claimed was the Mary Hillenbrand Cassette. He vows to not show the documentary at the graduation. He looks up Mary Hillenbrand on the internet but can find no evidence that she ever existed.

The man gets drunk and stumbles home that night to find a cassette identical to the one he saw in Sherry's bedroom twenty years before on his nightstand.

He goes to the graduation and encounters all four of the people he interviewed. Sherry is promiscuous and is seemingly addicted to having abortions, Trevor is an unstable drug addict, Jake is delusional and was once taken to a mental hospital for claiming that people were watching him out of the corners of his eyes, and Cathy is a terrible parent, despite her continued insistence that she is.

When he gets home, he listens to the tape, which has exactly what Sherry claimed on it. He has a terrible nightmare of the four people he interviewed having a bonfire on X Island, listening to the tape and laughing manically.

Hungover, the man gets up the next morning to take the trash out. As he goes back inside, he realizes that his neighbors are watching him out of the corners of their eyes.

## Cast

Peter Lewisas the man

Nikolle Doolin as Sherry

Dan Zappullaas Trevor

David Cummingsas Jake

Jessica McEvoy as Cathy