This episode follows the statement of Kieran Woodward following a housefire.
Woodward works as a garbage man who enjoys to save some things he deems valuable before hauling them off to the landfill. He talks about how he is used to sometimes finding strange things, making some commentary on how people seem to forget that their trash continues to exist after throwing it away. He says he and his work buddies sometimes can’t help but to judge the people they’re picking up trash for based on what they find (which is such a real human experience that reminds me of working in the food industry).
You can wrap something up when you throw it away, but Woodward says use enough layers and the garbage men are bound to wonder what you’ve hidden.
One day while working, Woodward picks up a black garbage bag that’d had a hole in it, allowing a small, severed doll head to fall out. When he opened up the bag, he discovered that, rather than simply being one, the entire bag was filled with severed doll heads. Hundreds of them. He said the heads looked more worn than what would be considered normal, like they’d been dragged against something rough purposefully. Apart from that, there were no signs of wear, implying that the doll heads had been new when they’d received the damage.
Woodward and his coworkers made a few jokes about this discovery, but nothing else came from it at that moment. However, the incident was apparently memorable enough to dub the house they’d picked it up from as “the doll house.” Subsequently, out of curiosity, they tended to pay more attention to the trash they picked up from that house. Woodward says its quite normal for garbage men: once they find something strange from a particular house, they just want to see if there’s anything else interesting happening.
The next few months didn’t have anything happening from the doll house. If there was anything interesting, it was hidden well. Finally, they came across another strange garbage bag from the doll house. It was obvious that it wasn’t holding normal trash, as the bag wasn’t stretched out and whatever was inside was remarkably light. However, unlike the doll bag, this trash bag didn’t have a tear in it. To investigate meant they’d be purposefully invading on someone’s privacy. Allen, their truck driver, decided that if they didn’t open it there, he was just going to open it at the landfill. He was curious. Eventually, they decided they’d just open it up for a quick look.
Apparently, the bag didn’t hold papers at all. Rather, it was one single strip of paper, like a very long receipt roll. It filled the entire bag all on its own, and some of the edges were strangely singed. According to one of the garbage men who’d grown up Catholic, the paper had the Lord’s Prayer written on it in Latin, over and over again for the paper’s entire length. It was clearly handwritten as well, not printed.
While still incredibly strange, this find didn’t interest people quite as much as the doll heads had and did not leave as much of an impact.
Two weeks later, they found another strange garbage bag from the doll house. No one even needed to be convinced to open this one; everyone was curious. Woodward picked this bag up and noticed instantly that it was heavier, and whatever was inside made a strange sound. On accident, Woodward scraped the bag against a cement wall, and once the bag teared, a few human teeth spilled out. The bag was filled with thousands of them.
This was more than enough cause for concern. The men put their work on hold and call the police. Woodward mentions that they find many incriminating things in the garbage, most notably discarded drugs. While they typically leave those people be, a potential serial killer was much too dangerous to not mention. The police arrived, and after a few talks with the garbage men, they went to investigate the house. The door opened to reveal an elderly couple, and they were absolutely horrified by the teeth, seemingly having no idea about where it came from. They claimed to not know anything about the other odd finds, as well.
Regardless, the police say that they will handle the situation from here on. Weeks and months passed without a follow up, so the men simply continued on with their jobs.
Eventually, Allen–the driver–noticed his mental health began to decline. He was irritable and constantly exhausted. He always seemed to speed up around “the doll house,” interestingly enough. Eventually he admitted to visiting the house when he wasn’t working, interested in seeing if he ever spotted whoever was leaving the incriminating trash. Woodward eventually felt compelled to do the same, much too interested in the case and wanting to know what happened. Woodward says he eventually suppressed the desire, but he had still felt it nonetheless.
One day, Allen fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a parked car. No one was hurt, fortunately, but Allen had to be fired due to his negligence. Apparently, over the past months, Allen had been sort of alienated by the rest of the crew to the point where no one was particularly upset when he was let go.
The company eventually hired a new driver and work continued as normal. However, about a month after Allen was fired, Woodward was woken up around 2am by a text from the man. All the text said was “Found him.” Woodward responded, asking if Allen meant the ‘suspect’ from the Doll house. However, he received no answer. Woodward sent another text, with no success. He even sent another to ask if Allen was okay, which also received no response. The night continued, and Woodward was worried enough to try calling Allen, which he received no answer. Half-asleep but worried, Woodward made the decision to head to the doll house to check on the other man, or to see if he could find out what had happened.
The house was within walking distance of Woodward’s house, so he made the journey on foot, reaching the house just as the sun began to rise. He found another garbage bag, and upon inspection found it to be full of packing peanuts and a life-size copper human heart. On the side of the heart was Allen’s full name.
Woodward took the heart with him, making mention that his mind wasn’t at its sharpest due to lack of sleep. He ended up taking the heart to a friend who worked in the medical waste disposal branch and got access to a high-grade incinerator, with which he tossed in the heart, hoping to destroy it.
Woodward continued to work as a garbage man, and at the time of his interview with the Magnus Institute, nothing else strange had happened and Allen was still declared missing. He does his best to not think about what happened, lest he get consumed by guilt. The only reason he brought the story to the institute was to get the strange events off his chest.
This story is a bit hard to pin down, but the theme seems to be the idea that, eventually, everything is thrown away, and everything eventually becomes trash. I believe that it wasn’t the old couple who was leaving out these strange things, but this still begs the question of if not them, then who? Was it one person, or multiple? Regardless, this episode is a sure indicator that something weird is going on, and Woodward’s act of burning the copper heart isn’t lost on me. In fact, it is remarkably similar to the book in the previous episode being burnt.
Overall, this episode leaves MANY things unanswered. And yet, that is one of the most compelling things about this series: the more you learn, the more that goes untold. The only way to know everything is to keep listening. Keeping digging deeper. Keep going until there’s no way to possibly turn back.
