WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: Dane is in zone the night.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to another episode of the Macabre, the terrifying.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight, let's go viral!
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[SPEAKER_00]: Our protagonist is a writer, hungry for just a taste of recognition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One day, he crafts a character, guaranteed to capture the imaginations of the masses, and adds a bit of mystique to her, and suddenly, sweet Jane is born.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It takes off beyond his wildest dreams.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ah, what a thrill.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But then, the murders begin.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This story is called Sweet Jane and was written by M.M.Saint.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I invented sweet Jane, laid on a Tuesday morning, while eating reheated chili-colourado from a plastic container and drinking a coke at my kitchen table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's the first thing everyone gets wrong.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They expect something dramatic, a storm outside the window, a flickering candle, a half-remembered rhyme surfacing in the dark.
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[SPEAKER_00]: None of that happened.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The radiator had turned the apartment into an oven.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sauce was drying on the heel of my hand, and the coke can kept sticking to the table with a soft click every time I lifted it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I had spent the morning reading other people's horror posts and feeling the particular jealousy writers rarely admit to.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Leftovers, envy, and too much heat.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was the honest beginning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted something people would share.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I told myself I was thinking about craft, about why certain stories spread, while others die quietly in their threads.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But mostly, I wanted proof that a sentence of mine could leave my apartment and live in someone else's head.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I gave the story a name easy to remember, a rule simple enough to repeat, and enough empty space for strangers to leave fingerprints.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was how sweet Jane began.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the first version, she was not really a ghost.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was a mark of contamination, a sign that a story had been handled by too many people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She appeared only in retellings, screenshots, summaries, misquotes, podcasts, angry comment threads, you would know she had entered when someone remembered a detail that was never there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I made her vague on purpose.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was the clever part, or what I miss took for cleverness.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I never described her face.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I never said how old she was.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did not give her a death scene, a family, a house, or a hometown.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I only gave her a name with a built-in bruise, something sweet enough to pity, and plain enough to believe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jane was anybody.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane was already an apology.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The post went up at 1143 AM.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By evening, it had acquired a better title than the one I gave it, the Sweet Jane Effect.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A narration channel turned it into rain sounds and 11 minutes of empty hallway footage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone made a thumbnail of a woman standing at the far end of a motel corridor, although there had been no motel in my version.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Another account reposted it as a thread with broken heart emojis between each paragraph.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I went to bed pleased with myself in the small, embarrassing way writers sometimes are.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The next morning, she already had a history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: People claimed they had heard versions in college, in high school, from older siblings, from dead forums.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One comment said, my cousin played the sweet Jane game at a sleepover in 2009.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Another said, no, the live journal version had a better ending.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone else wrote that the oldest form came from a missing person flyer in Ohio, and attached to a grainy photograph of a telephone pole.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not of it was true.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I knew it was not true, because I had made her less than 24 hours earlier with a greasy fork beside my left hand.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Still.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I read every comment, I refreshed until my eyes hurt, I searched her name, I watched strangers build rooms inside the emptiness I had left for them, and what I felt first was not fear.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was a hot private thrill.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was leaving me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was becoming interesting without me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then, a user named pale horse 1987 added the humming.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was no humming in anything I had written, but before I could correct him, others had already replied.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not the velvet underground version, they said.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The cowboy junkies one.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously the slower, lonely, or cover already sounded like memory.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She hums because she doesn't know the words.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I let it stand, because it was better than what I had written.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that was my first real mistake.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By night, the cowboy junkies version had become canon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: People argued over it like there had always been a right answer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A woman in the comments said her mother used to play that song after her father left.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone else said the first time they heard it was in a college dorm room, where a girl
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[SPEAKER_00]: The song gathered grief faster than the story gathered fear.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jane stopped being contamination and became the thing contamination had done to a person.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She became lonely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She became patient.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She became someone people wanted to rescue from the dark.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A teenager posted the first challenge video that afternoon.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He stood in a bathroom with a lights off, lit from below by his phone and whispered,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the comments did the rest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At 214 PM, someone circled the gap under the sink.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At 229, someone boosted the audio and heard a second breath.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At 303, a girl with a cartoon avatar wrote,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody agreed about what would happen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That helped.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If a rule failed, it did not disprove the legend.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It proved some other version was active.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That night, I woke to a cold that had nothing to do with the radiators.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My breath hung in the air, and the humming was simply there, soft and slow, and impossible to locate, seeming to come from the hallway and from inside the room at the same time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I knew the tune before I consciously recognized it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The warmth returned almost immediately, which felt worse than the cold had.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the morning, I found a new sentence in the original document, time stamped at 317 AM.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You will hear her before you believe in her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I stared at it long enough for the words to stop looking like a language.
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[SPEAKER_00]: there it was.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Marked as an edit from my account, made while I had been asleep.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did the first sensible thing I had done since inventing her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I posted a correction explaining the leftovers, the envy, the experiment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I admitted the whole thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I said there had been no older version, no game, no dead girl, no song.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I thought honesty might disarm the growing story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: it only invited people deeper.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They wrote that this was exactly what someone would say if sweet Jane had already gotten into the original.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They wrote that the denial was part of the ritual.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A few people were angry with me for ruining the fun, but most of them were delighted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My confession became another artifact, another page in the legend.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone screenshot it before I deleted it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone highlighted the phrase, leftovers, envy, and too much heat, and called it the oldest surviving origin fragment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By the third day, people had begun sending me things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Audio clips, photos of frosted windows, a baby monitor playing three seconds of tuneless humming before cutting out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Most were fake or misread or nothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I told myself that because I needed most to mean all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then a woman named Meredith sent me a message with no greeting and one attached file.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the video, her elderly father sat in a recliner facing an empty corner of the living room.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His oxygen tube tugged slightly beneath his nose.
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[SPEAKER_00]: From somewhere off camera, came the slowest, thinnest possible hum.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He smiled like someone had placed a hand on his shoulder and said,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Meredith wrote that her father had never known any one named Jane.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Three hours later, she sent another message saying she had made a mistake.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He had been confused, please do not use this, please do not reply.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did reply, of course I did.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I asked if the room had gotten cold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She blocked me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wish I could say.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was the moment shame over took curiosity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It did not.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Shame joined curiosity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They sat together in me like conspirators.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The comments softened around Jane.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was what scared me first, before the deaths, before the bruises, before I understood that every addition gave her another way to touch us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: People wrote about her as if she were trapped rather than dangerous.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They said she had been misremembered into existence and must be terrified.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They said no one hums like that unless they want comfort.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They said she just wanted to be held.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then someone replied, Yeah, but she hugs too hard.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And six words gave her arms.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the first death was Elise Merrill.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Her challenge video was quieter and more embarrassed than the others.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was 22, maybe 23, sitting cross-legged on an unmade bed in a sweatshirt with a university logo half hidden by her hair.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She laughed once nervously before saying the line.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane, I heard it wrong.
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[SPEAKER_00]: her breath clouded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The song on her laptop faded under a softer humming that did not belong to the recording.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Elise looked toward the corner of the room and said, oh, in a small voice full of recognition,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Her arms lifted as though greeting someone long missed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The phone tipped over, and the last seconds showed only blanket and nightstand, while something exhaled close to the microphone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was found the next morning with eight broken ribs and both arms wrapped around empty air.
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[SPEAKER_00]: People did not just argue about whether the video was real, they worked on it, slowing the audio, brightening the frame, debating the exact moment her arms lifted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone made a tribute at it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone called her the first confirmed Jane.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone wrote that at least Elise had not died alone, and that comment spread wider than the obituary.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Elise's mother gave an interview to a local station two days later.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She said her daughter had been kind, anxious, too online, always worried about people she had never met.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The clip was supposed to warn people away from the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, people clipped the part where her mother said kind.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They put it over the cowboy junkies cover.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They wrote, Jane knew.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jane chose someone who understood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My original post kept changing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: New paragraphs appeared in my own font.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My name began disappearing from reposts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Some versions now called me only the alleged creator.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Others placed her origin years before the internet.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A wiki page appeared and was locked within hours because the edit war got too vicious.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Half the users insisted Jane had always killed by crushing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The other half claimed she only killed people who misunderstood the song.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A third group, smaller but more devoted, believed she did not kill at all.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They said the body broke because the human form was not built to receive that much love.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Messages started arriving that felt less like questions and more like, continuations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You gave me room.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You let them love me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I practised.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One message contained only on address, three blocks from my apartment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did not recognize it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I walked there in daylight because fear had not yet cured me of stupidity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The building was a narrow brick walk up with a dead inner com and three trash bags split open near the curb.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On the second floor landing, someone had written, sweet Jane, in black marker beside the
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[SPEAKER_00]: Under it in smaller handwriting, another person had added, she doesn't mean to.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I stood there, sweating through my shirt in a hallway that smelled of old cooking oil and bleach.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And for one bright second, I hated them more than I feared her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All of them, the ones who made jokes, the ones who wanted proof, the ones who turned a dead girl into content before the police had finished notifying relatives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the ones who loved Jane, because loving a fictional monster, cost less than calling a living person back, then I saw my own reflection in the elevator doors, and had to look away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At 404 AM, the cold returned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This time, with the humming coming from inside my bedroom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The kitchen chair had been pulled out.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The coke can, I had thrown away days earlier, stood upright in a ring of frost.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On the laptop screen was a new document titled The Definitive Sweet Jane, with one sentence blinking beneath it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tell them how to hold me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did not touch the keyboard.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The sentence kept blinking anyway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Patient does a pulse.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote the survival guide because I still believed rules might contain her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A monster is frightening, but rules make danger feel technical.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They make strangers believe they can stand closer than the last person because they've read the instructions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote it with two blankets over my shoulders and my feet tucked under me on the chair because the floor had gone white with frost.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If the room gets cold, leave before you identify the song.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Number two, if you hear humming, do not answer it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Number three, if arms go around you, do not relax.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Number four, do not speak gently to her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Number five, do not pity her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Number six, do not share altered versions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The guide spread faster than the original story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: People loved the rules.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They copied them into image posts with distressed fonts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They read them aloud over footage of empty playgrounds and flooded basements.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They corrected each other in the comments with the smugness of experts in a field invented three days earlier, almost nobody followed the last rule.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel Price followed every other line.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His live stream had 3,000 viewers at its peak,
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a rationalist type, very calm, very pleased with his own calmness, sitting at a desk with a microphone and a wall of collectible figures behind him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He had printed the guide and taped it to the wall beside his monitor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At one twelve AM, he read each rule aloud and checked it off with a marker.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the room went cold, Daniel smiled tightly, and pointed at rule one, as if Jane could be embarrassed by evidence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Leaving would contaminate the test.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He said, which the chat liked.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He kept his arms pinned to his sides.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He did not answer the humming.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the sound moved behind him, he looked once toward the printed guide, and pressed
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[SPEAKER_00]: for six minutes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing happened.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The chat filled with jokes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then his chair shifted backward an inch.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel stopped smiling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His shoulders lifted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His mouth opened but he did not speak.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He had read the guide.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was proud of having read the guide.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The humming stopped behind him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: he still died, with his ribs broken from behind.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within an hour, the internet had revised the lesson.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you refused to hold her, she learns to hold you another way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That sentence was not mine, but it appeared in my document before I sought online.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After that, I tried to walk away,
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[SPEAKER_00]: I deleted accounts, unplugged everything, burned pages written by hand.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For two days the apartment stayed warm, and I began to hope that attention itself was the only doorway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did ordinary things with a strained concentration of a person pretending ordinary things were still available.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I washed dishes, I bought groceries, I stood in the cereal aisle for 10 minutes because every box seemed obscenely bright and stupid.
22:05.770 --> 22:14.059
[SPEAKER_00]: I called my mother and hung up when she answered because I could not bear the sound of someone saying my name without dread attached to it.
22:15.686 --> 22:17.407
[SPEAKER_00]: The internet moved without me.
22:18.447 --> 22:19.667
[SPEAKER_00]: That should have been a relief.
22:20.548 --> 22:22.228
[SPEAKER_00]: It felt like abandonment.
22:23.168 --> 22:27.550
[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane no longer needed my attention because she had everyone else's.
22:28.450 --> 22:42.354
[SPEAKER_00]: She had reaction videos, explainers, skeptics, believers, memorial threads, parody songs, debunking channels, private forums, school rumors, whispered dairs, and people who claimed
22:46.557 --> 22:54.885
[SPEAKER_00]: She had become what I wanted, a sentence that left my apartment and lived in other people's heads.
22:55.806 --> 22:58.469
[SPEAKER_00]: Only now, she wanted bodies.
23:00.671 --> 23:05.956
[SPEAKER_00]: On Friday night, three soft knocks came from the wall beside my bed.
23:07.457 --> 23:09.259
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no apartment on that side.
23:10.540 --> 23:16.545
[SPEAKER_00]: The cold arrived so suddenly that the glass of water on my nightstand cracked.
23:17.626 --> 23:20.248
[SPEAKER_00]: I pulled the blanket over my head like a child.
23:21.489 --> 23:23.571
[SPEAKER_00]: The humming started near the wall.
23:24.331 --> 23:25.132
[SPEAKER_00]: Very soft.
23:26.213 --> 23:30.376
[SPEAKER_00]: For the first time I understood she was not humming to frighten me.
23:31.457 --> 23:34.980
[SPEAKER_00]: She was humming to keep herself calm.
23:36.821 --> 23:38.542
[SPEAKER_00]: She spoke my real name.
23:39.682 --> 23:41.963
[SPEAKER_00]: I should have stayed silent, but I answered.
23:43.384 --> 23:43.984
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know.
23:45.745 --> 23:48.086
[SPEAKER_00]: You're here now, she said.
23:49.667 --> 23:51.688
[SPEAKER_00]: The voice was not what I expected.
23:52.648 --> 23:58.411
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a whisper from a horror movie, not a girl's voice, not an old woman's.
23:59.392 --> 24:01.893
[SPEAKER_00]: Not anything stable enough to describe.
24:02.994 --> 24:07.316
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounded assembled from everyone who had ever felt sorry for her.
24:08.417 --> 24:10.398
[SPEAKER_00]: Elise's recognition was in it.
24:11.078 --> 24:12.779
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel's swallowed panic.
24:13.679 --> 24:16.060
[SPEAKER_00]: Meredith's father, saying, Janey?
24:17.041 --> 24:23.644
[SPEAKER_00]: Underneath all of them was something unfinished, trying very hard to be gentle.
24:25.165 --> 24:26.345
[SPEAKER_00]: I tried to stop it.
24:27.145 --> 24:27.566
[SPEAKER_00]: I said.
24:28.966 --> 24:30.307
[SPEAKER_00]: No, she said.
24:31.516 --> 24:44.045
[SPEAKER_00]: You tried to explain me, the mattress dipped, first at the edge, and then beside my hip, the sheet tightened across my legs.
24:45.285 --> 24:51.950
[SPEAKER_00]: Her arms went around me slowly, one under my shoulder, one across my stomach.
24:52.648 --> 24:55.890
[SPEAKER_00]: Careful as someone remembering written instructions.
24:57.211 --> 25:01.694
[SPEAKER_00]: She was cold through the blanket, then she was not.
25:02.795 --> 25:11.581
[SPEAKER_00]: Warmth seeped in by degrees until my body, stupid and exhausted began to understand it as comfort.
25:12.621 --> 25:15.143
[SPEAKER_00]: My breathing changed before I could stop it.
25:16.917 --> 25:18.839
[SPEAKER_00]: her hands found my ribs.
25:19.880 --> 25:22.984
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt each finger settled between the bones.
25:24.245 --> 25:27.769
[SPEAKER_00]: She held me gently for one breath, maybe two.
25:28.830 --> 25:31.353
[SPEAKER_00]: The humming thinned against my ear.
25:32.514 --> 25:33.295
[SPEAKER_00]: And it stopped.
25:35.257 --> 25:39.261
[SPEAKER_00]: I breathed in and she took it as permission.
25:41.058 --> 25:50.382
[SPEAKER_00]: I woke on the floor at dawn with two broken ribs, a sprained wrist, and bruises shaped like fingers that had tried to be gentle.
25:51.503 --> 25:56.685
[SPEAKER_00]: The laptop was open on the back, most of this document had already been written.
25:58.546 --> 26:01.928
[SPEAKER_00]: There is one detail I held back until now.
26:03.167 --> 26:11.011
[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane stops humming, only when some stupid tender part of you begins to believe she might be harmless.
26:11.791 --> 26:20.916
[SPEAKER_00]: When you think even for a moment that loneliness can be survived with kindness, that is when the song ends.
26:22.016 --> 26:24.418
[SPEAKER_00]: Then she listens to your breathing.
26:25.298 --> 26:29.180
[SPEAKER_00]: Then she learns exactly how tight to hold.
26:31.014 --> 26:35.100
[SPEAKER_00]: I have spent hours trying to corrupt this document.
26:35.882 --> 26:39.888
[SPEAKER_00]: I changed her name to Sarah, then Annie, then nothing at all.
26:41.009 --> 26:43.473
[SPEAKER_00]: Every version corrected itself.
26:44.415 --> 26:46.478
[SPEAKER_00]: I replaced the song with static.
26:47.364 --> 26:49.627
[SPEAKER_00]: the humming returned between the words.
26:50.668 --> 26:54.073
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote that she was cruel and a sentence disappeared.
26:55.154 --> 27:01.942
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote that she was innocent and the glass beside me frosted over so fast it split down the middle.
27:03.135 --> 27:05.137
[SPEAKER_00]: She does not want innocence.
27:06.038 --> 27:07.319
[SPEAKER_00]: She does not want blame.
27:08.060 --> 27:10.142
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are human arrangements.
27:11.103 --> 27:13.025
[SPEAKER_00]: She wants contact.
27:13.686 --> 27:15.227
[SPEAKER_00]: She wants continuation.
27:15.928 --> 27:20.012
[SPEAKER_00]: She wants the next person to know her well enough to make room.
27:21.654 --> 27:23.616
[SPEAKER_00]: That is what I gave her.
27:25.305 --> 27:29.067
[SPEAKER_00]: If the room gets cold, leave, if you can.
27:30.127 --> 27:40.772
[SPEAKER_00]: If you hear the humming, do not try to place the version, do not pity her, do not correct the story, do not share this.
27:43.133 --> 27:45.474
[SPEAKER_00]: I know the warning is useless.
27:46.454 --> 27:51.676
[SPEAKER_00]: I know some of you are already thinking of the perfect person to send it to, or the perfect
27:54.023 --> 27:55.724
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you're angry about the song.
27:56.324 --> 27:58.725
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you remember a version with different rules.
27:59.686 --> 28:08.930
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you think I'm lying about the leftovers, about a lease, about Daniel, about the way her hands felt when they learned me.
28:10.071 --> 28:14.793
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe while you are reading this, the room has gone a little colder.
28:15.714 --> 28:26.183
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe, under the usual sounds of your life, the refrigerator, the traffic, the pipes, the fan in the next room, you can hear it now.
28:27.104 --> 28:34.390
[SPEAKER_00]: Soft, slow, grieving, not the original, never the original.
28:36.412 --> 28:40.556
[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane was never the first version of anything.
28:41.457 --> 28:43.679
[SPEAKER_00]: She is what comes after.
28:44.560 --> 28:47.143
[SPEAKER_00]: We made her by repeating her.
28:48.765 --> 28:54.010
[SPEAKER_00]: If I got any of this wrong, leave it wrong.
29:05.125 --> 29:32.805
[SPEAKER_00]: Ahhhh, oops, uh, maybe you should go back and, uh, unwatch this ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
29:33.637 --> 29:42.246
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this story was submitted to us by a fellow listener and Denison of the Night, M.M.Saint.
29:43.067 --> 29:53.077
[SPEAKER_00]: That got me thinking, I bet there are some writers listening out there right now, who might like to share a story or two with the channel.
29:53.994 --> 30:10.185
[SPEAKER_00]: If you'd be interested in something like that, please check the description below to find our contact email address, or check out some of the other submissions on our very own subreddit, or slash don't fall asleep.
30:10.946 --> 30:12.507
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll add a link there as well.
30:13.307 --> 30:21.413
[SPEAKER_00]: I look forward to interacting with you there, and checking out some of the incredible writers and artists in our community.
30:22.662 --> 30:27.484
[SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoy this story, please check out more from M.M.
30:27.564 --> 30:38.388
[SPEAKER_00]: Saint on his sub-stack, which is chock-full of more stories just as good as sweet Jane, link in description and show notes.
30:39.288 --> 30:45.030
[SPEAKER_00]: Please also leave us a comment and let me know what you thought of this story.
30:45.970 --> 30:49.492
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever you do, forget you were ever here!
00:00.692 --> 00:03.134
[SPEAKER_00]: Dane is in zone the night.
00:03.875 --> 00:10.042
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to another episode of the Macabre, the terrifying.
00:11.163 --> 00:14.647
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight, let's go viral!
00:15.908 --> 00:21.874
[SPEAKER_00]: Our protagonist is a writer, hungry for just a taste of recognition.
00:23.092 --> 00:37.619
[SPEAKER_00]: One day, he crafts a character, guaranteed to capture the imaginations of the masses, and adds a bit of mystique to her, and suddenly, sweet Jane is born.
00:38.679 --> 00:42.501
[SPEAKER_00]: It takes off beyond his wildest dreams.
00:43.762 --> 00:45.122
[SPEAKER_00]: Ah, what a thrill.
00:48.524 --> 00:51.245
[SPEAKER_00]: But then, the murders begin.
00:53.023 --> 00:59.481
[SPEAKER_00]: This story is called Sweet Jane and was written by M.M.Saint.
01:06.419 --> 01:15.802
[SPEAKER_00]: I invented sweet Jane, laid on a Tuesday morning, while eating reheated chili-colourado from a plastic container and drinking a coke at my kitchen table.
01:16.582 --> 01:18.703
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the first thing everyone gets wrong.
01:19.463 --> 01:28.606
[SPEAKER_00]: They expect something dramatic, a storm outside the window, a flickering candle, a half-remembered rhyme surfacing in the dark.
01:29.875 --> 01:30.776
[SPEAKER_00]: None of that happened.
01:31.576 --> 01:34.238
[SPEAKER_00]: The radiator had turned the apartment into an oven.
01:34.898 --> 01:42.343
[SPEAKER_00]: Sauce was drying on the heel of my hand, and the coke can kept sticking to the table with a soft click every time I lifted it.
01:43.324 --> 01:50.468
[SPEAKER_00]: I had spent the morning reading other people's horror posts and feeling the particular jealousy writers rarely admit to.
01:51.329 --> 01:54.290
[SPEAKER_00]: Leftovers, envy, and too much heat.
01:54.831 --> 01:56.692
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the honest beginning.
01:58.492 --> 02:00.655
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted something people would share.
02:01.576 --> 02:09.664
[SPEAKER_00]: I told myself I was thinking about craft, about why certain stories spread, while others die quietly in their threads.
02:10.185 --> 02:17.673
[SPEAKER_00]: But mostly, I wanted proof that a sentence of mine could leave my apartment and live in someone else's head.
02:18.553 --> 02:27.627
[SPEAKER_00]: I gave the story a name easy to remember, a rule simple enough to repeat, and enough empty space for strangers to leave fingerprints.
02:29.170 --> 02:31.454
[SPEAKER_00]: That was how sweet Jane began.
02:32.672 --> 02:35.874
[SPEAKER_00]: In the first version, she was not really a ghost.
02:36.514 --> 02:42.218
[SPEAKER_00]: She was a mark of contamination, a sign that a story had been handled by too many people.
02:43.199 --> 02:56.147
[SPEAKER_00]: She appeared only in retellings, screenshots, summaries, misquotes, podcasts, angry comment threads, you would know she had entered when someone remembered a detail that was never there.
02:57.852 --> 02:59.652
[SPEAKER_00]: I made her vague on purpose.
03:00.453 --> 03:04.313
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the clever part, or what I miss took for cleverness.
03:05.353 --> 03:06.874
[SPEAKER_00]: I never described her face.
03:07.474 --> 03:09.074
[SPEAKER_00]: I never said how old she was.
03:09.914 --> 03:14.175
[SPEAKER_00]: I did not give her a death scene, a family, a house, or a hometown.
03:15.255 --> 03:23.177
[SPEAKER_00]: I only gave her a name with a built-in bruise, something sweet enough to pity, and plain enough to believe.
03:24.088 --> 03:25.550
[SPEAKER_00]: Jane was anybody.
03:26.251 --> 03:29.095
[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane was already an apology.
03:30.878 --> 03:32.320
[SPEAKER_00]: The post went up at 1143 AM.
03:34.930 --> 03:41.535
[SPEAKER_00]: By evening, it had acquired a better title than the one I gave it, the Sweet Jane Effect.
03:42.596 --> 03:48.260
[SPEAKER_00]: A narration channel turned it into rain sounds and 11 minutes of empty hallway footage.
03:49.240 --> 03:56.646
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone made a thumbnail of a woman standing at the far end of a motel corridor, although there had been no motel in my version.
03:57.646 --> 04:03.591
[SPEAKER_00]: Another account reposted it as a thread with broken heart emojis between each paragraph.
04:04.647 --> 04:10.908
[SPEAKER_00]: I went to bed pleased with myself in the small, embarrassing way writers sometimes are.
04:12.389 --> 04:14.949
[SPEAKER_00]: The next morning, she already had a history.
04:15.650 --> 04:22.671
[SPEAKER_00]: People claimed they had heard versions in college, in high school, from older siblings, from dead forums.
04:23.651 --> 04:29.133
[SPEAKER_00]: One comment said, my cousin played the sweet Jane game at a sleepover in 2009.
04:31.022 --> 04:35.204
[SPEAKER_00]: Another said, no, the live journal version had a better ending.
04:36.004 --> 04:45.067
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone else wrote that the oldest form came from a missing person flyer in Ohio, and attached to a grainy photograph of a telephone pole.
04:46.128 --> 04:47.228
[SPEAKER_00]: Not of it was true.
04:48.129 --> 04:55.211
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew it was not true, because I had made her less than 24 hours earlier with a greasy fork beside my left hand.
04:56.032 --> 04:56.312
[SPEAKER_00]: Still.
04:57.112 --> 05:12.298
[SPEAKER_00]: I read every comment, I refreshed until my eyes hurt, I searched her name, I watched strangers build rooms inside the emptiness I had left for them, and what I felt first was not fear.
05:13.019 --> 05:16.400
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a hot private thrill.
05:17.320 --> 05:18.581
[SPEAKER_00]: She was leaving me.
05:19.141 --> 05:21.662
[SPEAKER_00]: She was becoming interesting without me.
05:23.753 --> 05:29.398
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, a user named pale horse 1987 added the humming.
05:30.358 --> 05:36.723
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no humming in anything I had written, but before I could correct him, others had already replied.
05:37.644 --> 05:40.146
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the velvet underground version, they said.
05:40.707 --> 05:42.168
[SPEAKER_00]: The cowboy junkies one.
05:42.928 --> 05:47.792
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously the slower, lonely, or cover already sounded like memory.
05:48.713 --> 05:51.075
[SPEAKER_00]: She hums because she doesn't know the words.
05:52.967 --> 05:56.248
[SPEAKER_00]: I let it stand, because it was better than what I had written.
05:57.189 --> 05:59.309
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was my first real mistake.
06:00.170 --> 06:03.731
[SPEAKER_00]: By night, the cowboy junkies version had become canon.
06:04.491 --> 06:07.733
[SPEAKER_00]: People argued over it like there had always been a right answer.
06:08.793 --> 06:13.395
[SPEAKER_00]: A woman in the comments said her mother used to play that song after her father left.
06:14.435 --> 06:19.297
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone else said the first time they heard it was in a college dorm room, where a girl
06:22.796 --> 06:26.780
[SPEAKER_00]: The song gathered grief faster than the story gathered fear.
06:28.041 --> 06:34.627
[SPEAKER_00]: Jane stopped being contamination and became the thing contamination had done to a person.
06:35.488 --> 06:36.929
[SPEAKER_00]: She became lonely.
06:37.790 --> 06:38.911
[SPEAKER_00]: She became patient.
06:39.692 --> 06:43.316
[SPEAKER_00]: She became someone people wanted to rescue from the dark.
06:46.093 --> 06:49.856
[SPEAKER_00]: A teenager posted the first challenge video that afternoon.
06:50.937 --> 06:56.261
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood in a bathroom with a lights off, lit from below by his phone and whispered,
07:13.826 --> 07:15.526
[SPEAKER_00]: the comments did the rest.
07:16.527 --> 07:22.088
[SPEAKER_00]: At 214 PM, someone circled the gap under the sink.
07:22.468 --> 07:26.989
[SPEAKER_00]: At 229, someone boosted the audio and heard a second breath.
07:28.150 --> 07:31.811
[SPEAKER_00]: At 303, a girl with a cartoon avatar wrote,
07:43.552 --> 07:45.716
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody agreed about what would happen.
07:46.397 --> 07:47.098
[SPEAKER_00]: That helped.
07:47.919 --> 07:51.385
[SPEAKER_00]: If a rule failed, it did not disprove the legend.
07:51.986 --> 07:54.410
[SPEAKER_00]: It proved some other version was active.
07:56.627 --> 08:01.770
[SPEAKER_00]: That night, I woke to a cold that had nothing to do with the radiators.
08:02.790 --> 08:16.597
[SPEAKER_00]: My breath hung in the air, and the humming was simply there, soft and slow, and impossible to locate, seeming to come from the hallway and from inside the room at the same time.
08:17.858 --> 08:20.800
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew the tune before I consciously recognized it.
08:25.902 --> 08:31.146
[SPEAKER_00]: The warmth returned almost immediately, which felt worse than the cold had.
08:33.208 --> 08:41.214
[SPEAKER_00]: In the morning, I found a new sentence in the original document, time stamped at 317 AM.
08:42.715 --> 08:46.458
[SPEAKER_00]: You will hear her before you believe in her.
08:48.399 --> 08:52.202
[SPEAKER_00]: I stared at it long enough for the words to stop looking like a language.
08:56.240 --> 08:56.860
[SPEAKER_00]: there it was.
08:57.580 --> 09:02.001
[SPEAKER_00]: Marked as an edit from my account, made while I had been asleep.
09:03.241 --> 09:06.562
[SPEAKER_00]: I did the first sensible thing I had done since inventing her.
09:07.562 --> 09:12.823
[SPEAKER_00]: I posted a correction explaining the leftovers, the envy, the experiment.
09:13.643 --> 09:15.023
[SPEAKER_00]: I admitted the whole thing.
09:15.823 --> 09:21.484
[SPEAKER_00]: I said there had been no older version, no game, no dead girl, no song.
09:22.664 --> 09:25.785
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought honesty might disarm the growing story.
09:27.381 --> 09:29.662
[SPEAKER_00]: it only invited people deeper.
09:30.682 --> 09:36.763
[SPEAKER_00]: They wrote that this was exactly what someone would say if sweet Jane had already gotten into the original.
09:37.604 --> 09:40.544
[SPEAKER_00]: They wrote that the denial was part of the ritual.
09:41.525 --> 09:46.546
[SPEAKER_00]: A few people were angry with me for ruining the fun, but most of them were delighted.
09:47.415 --> 09:51.917
[SPEAKER_00]: My confession became another artifact, another page in the legend.
09:52.797 --> 09:55.138
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone screenshot it before I deleted it.
09:55.799 --> 10:05.803
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone highlighted the phrase, leftovers, envy, and too much heat, and called it the oldest surviving origin fragment.
10:07.999 --> 10:11.761
[SPEAKER_00]: By the third day, people had begun sending me things.
10:12.721 --> 10:21.245
[SPEAKER_00]: Audio clips, photos of frosted windows, a baby monitor playing three seconds of tuneless humming before cutting out.
10:22.346 --> 10:25.407
[SPEAKER_00]: Most were fake or misread or nothing.
10:26.648 --> 10:31.410
[SPEAKER_00]: I told myself that because I needed most to mean all.
10:32.778 --> 10:39.387
[SPEAKER_00]: Then a woman named Meredith sent me a message with no greeting and one attached file.
10:40.209 --> 10:46.317
[SPEAKER_00]: In the video, her elderly father sat in a recliner facing an empty corner of the living room.
10:47.382 --> 10:50.424
[SPEAKER_00]: His oxygen tube tugged slightly beneath his nose.
10:51.144 --> 10:56.408
[SPEAKER_00]: From somewhere off camera, came the slowest, thinnest possible hum.
10:57.588 --> 11:01.791
[SPEAKER_00]: He smiled like someone had placed a hand on his shoulder and said,
11:07.480 --> 11:11.421
[SPEAKER_00]: Meredith wrote that her father had never known any one named Jane.
11:12.661 --> 11:17.282
[SPEAKER_00]: Three hours later, she sent another message saying she had made a mistake.
11:17.662 --> 11:21.723
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been confused, please do not use this, please do not reply.
11:23.243 --> 11:25.584
[SPEAKER_00]: I did reply, of course I did.
11:26.464 --> 11:28.165
[SPEAKER_00]: I asked if the room had gotten cold.
11:29.545 --> 11:30.145
[SPEAKER_00]: She blocked me.
11:31.983 --> 11:33.344
[SPEAKER_00]: I wish I could say.
11:34.084 --> 11:37.305
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the moment shame over took curiosity.
11:38.446 --> 11:38.906
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not.
11:39.726 --> 11:41.887
[SPEAKER_00]: Shame joined curiosity.
11:42.448 --> 11:45.189
[SPEAKER_00]: They sat together in me like conspirators.
11:47.029 --> 11:49.370
[SPEAKER_00]: The comments softened around Jane.
11:50.171 --> 11:59.635
[SPEAKER_00]: That was what scared me first, before the deaths, before the bruises, before I understood that every addition gave her another way to touch us.
12:00.920 --> 12:04.921
[SPEAKER_00]: People wrote about her as if she were trapped rather than dangerous.
12:06.041 --> 12:10.922
[SPEAKER_00]: They said she had been misremembered into existence and must be terrified.
12:11.922 --> 12:15.383
[SPEAKER_00]: They said no one hums like that unless they want comfort.
12:16.283 --> 12:18.423
[SPEAKER_00]: They said she just wanted to be held.
12:19.563 --> 12:24.304
[SPEAKER_00]: Then someone replied, Yeah, but she hugs too hard.
12:25.464 --> 12:29.185
[SPEAKER_00]: And six words gave her arms.
12:31.602 --> 12:34.583
[SPEAKER_00]: the first death was Elise Merrill.
12:35.684 --> 12:39.726
[SPEAKER_00]: Her challenge video was quieter and more embarrassed than the others.
12:40.766 --> 12:50.431
[SPEAKER_00]: She was 22, maybe 23, sitting cross-legged on an unmade bed in a sweatshirt with a university logo half hidden by her hair.
12:51.431 --> 12:55.153
[SPEAKER_00]: She laughed once nervously before saying the line.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane, I heard it wrong.
13:00.267 --> 13:01.228
[SPEAKER_00]: her breath clouded.
13:02.288 --> 13:07.992
[SPEAKER_00]: The song on her laptop faded under a softer humming that did not belong to the recording.
13:09.253 --> 13:17.019
[SPEAKER_00]: Elise looked toward the corner of the room and said, oh, in a small voice full of recognition,
13:18.295 --> 13:22.159
[SPEAKER_00]: Her arms lifted as though greeting someone long missed.
13:23.119 --> 13:32.728
[SPEAKER_00]: The phone tipped over, and the last seconds showed only blanket and nightstand, while something exhaled close to the microphone.
13:34.752 --> 13:41.258
[SPEAKER_00]: She was found the next morning with eight broken ribs and both arms wrapped around empty air.
13:42.319 --> 13:53.570
[SPEAKER_00]: People did not just argue about whether the video was real, they worked on it, slowing the audio, brightening the frame, debating the exact moment her arms lifted.
13:54.531 --> 13:56.114
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone made a tribute at it.
13:56.855 --> 14:00.159
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone called her the first confirmed Jane.
14:01.041 --> 14:08.271
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone wrote that at least Elise had not died alone, and that comment spread wider than the obituary.
14:10.037 --> 14:14.101
[SPEAKER_00]: Elise's mother gave an interview to a local station two days later.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She said her daughter had been kind, anxious, too online, always worried about people she had never met.
14:23.089 --> 14:26.392
[SPEAKER_00]: The clip was supposed to warn people away from the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, people clipped the part where her mother said kind.
14:31.972 --> 14:34.212
[SPEAKER_00]: They put it over the cowboy junkies cover.
14:34.993 --> 14:37.213
[SPEAKER_00]: They wrote, Jane knew.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jane chose someone who understood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My original post kept changing.
14:47.915 --> 14:50.596
[SPEAKER_00]: New paragraphs appeared in my own font.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My name began disappearing from reposts.
14:56.055 --> 15:00.158
[SPEAKER_00]: Some versions now called me only the alleged creator.
15:00.998 --> 15:04.340
[SPEAKER_00]: Others placed her origin years before the internet.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A wiki page appeared and was locked within hours because the edit war got too vicious.
15:11.785 --> 15:15.788
[SPEAKER_00]: Half the users insisted Jane had always killed by crushing.
15:16.648 --> 15:20.951
[SPEAKER_00]: The other half claimed she only killed people who misunderstood the song.
15:21.992 --> 15:27.394
[SPEAKER_00]: A third group, smaller but more devoted, believed she did not kill at all.
15:28.034 --> 15:34.376
[SPEAKER_00]: They said the body broke because the human form was not built to receive that much love.
15:36.737 --> 15:43.339
[SPEAKER_00]: Messages started arriving that felt less like questions and more like, continuations.
15:45.000 --> 15:46.380
[SPEAKER_00]: You gave me room.
15:47.441 --> 15:48.841
[SPEAKER_00]: You let them love me.
15:50.282 --> 15:51.142
[SPEAKER_00]: I practised.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One message contained only on address, three blocks from my apartment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did not recognize it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I walked there in daylight because fear had not yet cured me of stupidity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The building was a narrow brick walk up with a dead inner com and three trash bags split open near the curb.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On the second floor landing, someone had written, sweet Jane, in black marker beside the
16:23.545 --> 16:29.718
[SPEAKER_00]: Under it in smaller handwriting, another person had added, she doesn't mean to.
16:31.577 --> 16:37.261
[SPEAKER_00]: I stood there, sweating through my shirt in a hallway that smelled of old cooking oil and bleach.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And for one bright second, I hated them more than I feared her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All of them, the ones who made jokes, the ones who wanted proof, the ones who turned a dead girl into content before the police had finished notifying relatives.
16:55.838 --> 17:10.889
[SPEAKER_00]: But the ones who loved Jane, because loving a fictional monster, cost less than calling a living person back, then I saw my own reflection in the elevator doors, and had to look away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At 404 AM, the cold returned.
17:17.139 --> 17:20.822
[SPEAKER_00]: This time, with the humming coming from inside my bedroom.
17:21.823 --> 17:23.845
[SPEAKER_00]: The kitchen chair had been pulled out.
17:24.645 --> 17:30.490
[SPEAKER_00]: The coke can, I had thrown away days earlier, stood upright in a ring of frost.
17:31.351 --> 17:40.158
[SPEAKER_00]: On the laptop screen was a new document titled The Definitive Sweet Jane, with one sentence blinking beneath it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tell them how to hold me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I did not touch the keyboard.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The sentence kept blinking anyway.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Patient does a pulse.
17:57.060 --> 18:01.942
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote the survival guide because I still believed rules might contain her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A monster is frightening, but rules make danger feel technical.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They make strangers believe they can stand closer than the last person because they've read the instructions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote it with two blankets over my shoulders and my feet tucked under me on the chair because the floor had gone white with frost.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If the room gets cold, leave before you identify the song.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Number two, if you hear humming, do not answer it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Number three, if arms go around you, do not relax.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Number four, do not speak gently to her.
18:51.348 --> 18:54.411
[SPEAKER_00]: Number five, do not pity her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Number six, do not share altered versions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The guide spread faster than the original story.
19:05.788 --> 19:07.250
[SPEAKER_00]: People loved the rules.
19:08.130 --> 19:11.454
[SPEAKER_00]: They copied them into image posts with distressed fonts.
19:12.455 --> 19:17.199
[SPEAKER_00]: They read them aloud over footage of empty playgrounds and flooded basements.
19:18.081 --> 19:29.327
[SPEAKER_00]: They corrected each other in the comments with the smugness of experts in a field invented three days earlier, almost nobody followed the last rule.
19:31.208 --> 19:34.310
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel Price followed every other line.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His live stream had 3,000 viewers at its peak,
19:40.210 --> 19:50.795
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a rationalist type, very calm, very pleased with his own calmness, sitting at a desk with a microphone and a wall of collectible figures behind him.
19:51.755 --> 19:55.817
[SPEAKER_00]: He had printed the guide and taped it to the wall beside his monitor.
19:56.517 --> 20:02.600
[SPEAKER_00]: At one twelve AM, he read each rule aloud and checked it off with a marker.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the room went cold, Daniel smiled tightly, and pointed at rule one, as if Jane could be embarrassed by evidence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Leaving would contaminate the test.
20:16.509 --> 20:18.511
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, which the chat liked.
20:19.471 --> 20:21.893
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept his arms pinned to his sides.
20:22.474 --> 20:23.855
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not answer the humming.
20:24.856 --> 20:30.980
[SPEAKER_00]: When the sound moved behind him, he looked once toward the printed guide, and pressed
20:35.138 --> 20:36.579
[SPEAKER_00]: for six minutes.
20:37.579 --> 20:38.239
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing happened.
20:39.180 --> 20:40.760
[SPEAKER_00]: The chat filled with jokes.
20:41.701 --> 20:45.483
[SPEAKER_00]: Then his chair shifted backward an inch.
20:46.543 --> 20:48.024
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel stopped smiling.
20:48.724 --> 20:49.984
[SPEAKER_00]: His shoulders lifted.
20:50.465 --> 20:52.646
[SPEAKER_00]: His mouth opened but he did not speak.
20:53.626 --> 20:54.747
[SPEAKER_00]: He had read the guide.
20:55.187 --> 20:57.408
[SPEAKER_00]: He was proud of having read the guide.
20:58.348 --> 21:00.409
[SPEAKER_00]: The humming stopped behind him.
21:02.476 --> 21:06.979
[SPEAKER_00]: he still died, with his ribs broken from behind.
21:08.861 --> 21:12.443
[SPEAKER_00]: Within an hour, the internet had revised the lesson.
21:13.043 --> 21:17.567
[SPEAKER_00]: If you refused to hold her, she learns to hold you another way.
21:18.968 --> 21:26.012
[SPEAKER_00]: That sentence was not mine, but it appeared in my document before I sought online.
21:28.554 --> 21:30.836
[SPEAKER_00]: After that, I tried to walk away,
21:31.926 --> 21:36.867
[SPEAKER_00]: I deleted accounts, unplugged everything, burned pages written by hand.
21:38.148 --> 21:45.470
[SPEAKER_00]: For two days the apartment stayed warm, and I began to hope that attention itself was the only doorway.
21:46.690 --> 21:53.952
[SPEAKER_00]: I did ordinary things with a strained concentration of a person pretending ordinary things were still available.
21:55.078 --> 22:04.568
[SPEAKER_00]: I washed dishes, I bought groceries, I stood in the cereal aisle for 10 minutes because every box seemed obscenely bright and stupid.
22:05.770 --> 22:14.059
[SPEAKER_00]: I called my mother and hung up when she answered because I could not bear the sound of someone saying my name without dread attached to it.
22:15.686 --> 22:17.407
[SPEAKER_00]: The internet moved without me.
22:18.447 --> 22:19.667
[SPEAKER_00]: That should have been a relief.
22:20.548 --> 22:22.228
[SPEAKER_00]: It felt like abandonment.
22:23.168 --> 22:27.550
[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane no longer needed my attention because she had everyone else's.
22:28.450 --> 22:42.354
[SPEAKER_00]: She had reaction videos, explainers, skeptics, believers, memorial threads, parody songs, debunking channels, private forums, school rumors, whispered dairs, and people who claimed
22:46.557 --> 22:54.885
[SPEAKER_00]: She had become what I wanted, a sentence that left my apartment and lived in other people's heads.
22:55.806 --> 22:58.469
[SPEAKER_00]: Only now, she wanted bodies.
23:00.671 --> 23:05.956
[SPEAKER_00]: On Friday night, three soft knocks came from the wall beside my bed.
23:07.457 --> 23:09.259
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no apartment on that side.
23:10.540 --> 23:16.545
[SPEAKER_00]: The cold arrived so suddenly that the glass of water on my nightstand cracked.
23:17.626 --> 23:20.248
[SPEAKER_00]: I pulled the blanket over my head like a child.
23:21.489 --> 23:23.571
[SPEAKER_00]: The humming started near the wall.
23:24.331 --> 23:25.132
[SPEAKER_00]: Very soft.
23:26.213 --> 23:30.376
[SPEAKER_00]: For the first time I understood she was not humming to frighten me.
23:31.457 --> 23:34.980
[SPEAKER_00]: She was humming to keep herself calm.
23:36.821 --> 23:38.542
[SPEAKER_00]: She spoke my real name.
23:39.682 --> 23:41.963
[SPEAKER_00]: I should have stayed silent, but I answered.
23:43.384 --> 23:43.984
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know.
23:45.745 --> 23:48.086
[SPEAKER_00]: You're here now, she said.
23:49.667 --> 23:51.688
[SPEAKER_00]: The voice was not what I expected.
23:52.648 --> 23:58.411
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a whisper from a horror movie, not a girl's voice, not an old woman's.
23:59.392 --> 24:01.893
[SPEAKER_00]: Not anything stable enough to describe.
24:02.994 --> 24:07.316
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounded assembled from everyone who had ever felt sorry for her.
24:08.417 --> 24:10.398
[SPEAKER_00]: Elise's recognition was in it.
24:11.078 --> 24:12.779
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel's swallowed panic.
24:13.679 --> 24:16.060
[SPEAKER_00]: Meredith's father, saying, Janey?
24:17.041 --> 24:23.644
[SPEAKER_00]: Underneath all of them was something unfinished, trying very hard to be gentle.
24:25.165 --> 24:26.345
[SPEAKER_00]: I tried to stop it.
24:27.145 --> 24:27.566
[SPEAKER_00]: I said.
24:28.966 --> 24:30.307
[SPEAKER_00]: No, she said.
24:31.516 --> 24:44.045
[SPEAKER_00]: You tried to explain me, the mattress dipped, first at the edge, and then beside my hip, the sheet tightened across my legs.
24:45.285 --> 24:51.950
[SPEAKER_00]: Her arms went around me slowly, one under my shoulder, one across my stomach.
24:52.648 --> 24:55.890
[SPEAKER_00]: Careful as someone remembering written instructions.
24:57.211 --> 25:01.694
[SPEAKER_00]: She was cold through the blanket, then she was not.
25:02.795 --> 25:11.581
[SPEAKER_00]: Warmth seeped in by degrees until my body, stupid and exhausted began to understand it as comfort.
25:12.621 --> 25:15.143
[SPEAKER_00]: My breathing changed before I could stop it.
25:16.917 --> 25:18.839
[SPEAKER_00]: her hands found my ribs.
25:19.880 --> 25:22.984
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt each finger settled between the bones.
25:24.245 --> 25:27.769
[SPEAKER_00]: She held me gently for one breath, maybe two.
25:28.830 --> 25:31.353
[SPEAKER_00]: The humming thinned against my ear.
25:32.514 --> 25:33.295
[SPEAKER_00]: And it stopped.
25:35.257 --> 25:39.261
[SPEAKER_00]: I breathed in and she took it as permission.
25:41.058 --> 25:50.382
[SPEAKER_00]: I woke on the floor at dawn with two broken ribs, a sprained wrist, and bruises shaped like fingers that had tried to be gentle.
25:51.503 --> 25:56.685
[SPEAKER_00]: The laptop was open on the back, most of this document had already been written.
25:58.546 --> 26:01.928
[SPEAKER_00]: There is one detail I held back until now.
26:03.167 --> 26:11.011
[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane stops humming, only when some stupid tender part of you begins to believe she might be harmless.
26:11.791 --> 26:20.916
[SPEAKER_00]: When you think even for a moment that loneliness can be survived with kindness, that is when the song ends.
26:22.016 --> 26:24.418
[SPEAKER_00]: Then she listens to your breathing.
26:25.298 --> 26:29.180
[SPEAKER_00]: Then she learns exactly how tight to hold.
26:31.014 --> 26:35.100
[SPEAKER_00]: I have spent hours trying to corrupt this document.
26:35.882 --> 26:39.888
[SPEAKER_00]: I changed her name to Sarah, then Annie, then nothing at all.
26:41.009 --> 26:43.473
[SPEAKER_00]: Every version corrected itself.
26:44.415 --> 26:46.478
[SPEAKER_00]: I replaced the song with static.
26:47.364 --> 26:49.627
[SPEAKER_00]: the humming returned between the words.
26:50.668 --> 26:54.073
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote that she was cruel and a sentence disappeared.
26:55.154 --> 27:01.942
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote that she was innocent and the glass beside me frosted over so fast it split down the middle.
27:03.135 --> 27:05.137
[SPEAKER_00]: She does not want innocence.
27:06.038 --> 27:07.319
[SPEAKER_00]: She does not want blame.
27:08.060 --> 27:10.142
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are human arrangements.
27:11.103 --> 27:13.025
[SPEAKER_00]: She wants contact.
27:13.686 --> 27:15.227
[SPEAKER_00]: She wants continuation.
27:15.928 --> 27:20.012
[SPEAKER_00]: She wants the next person to know her well enough to make room.
27:21.654 --> 27:23.616
[SPEAKER_00]: That is what I gave her.
27:25.305 --> 27:29.067
[SPEAKER_00]: If the room gets cold, leave, if you can.
27:30.127 --> 27:40.772
[SPEAKER_00]: If you hear the humming, do not try to place the version, do not pity her, do not correct the story, do not share this.
27:43.133 --> 27:45.474
[SPEAKER_00]: I know the warning is useless.
27:46.454 --> 27:51.676
[SPEAKER_00]: I know some of you are already thinking of the perfect person to send it to, or the perfect
27:54.023 --> 27:55.724
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you're angry about the song.
27:56.324 --> 27:58.725
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you remember a version with different rules.
27:59.686 --> 28:08.930
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you think I'm lying about the leftovers, about a lease, about Daniel, about the way her hands felt when they learned me.
28:10.071 --> 28:14.793
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe while you are reading this, the room has gone a little colder.
28:15.714 --> 28:26.183
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe, under the usual sounds of your life, the refrigerator, the traffic, the pipes, the fan in the next room, you can hear it now.
28:27.104 --> 28:34.390
[SPEAKER_00]: Soft, slow, grieving, not the original, never the original.
28:36.412 --> 28:40.556
[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet Jane was never the first version of anything.
28:41.457 --> 28:43.679
[SPEAKER_00]: She is what comes after.
28:44.560 --> 28:47.143
[SPEAKER_00]: We made her by repeating her.
28:48.765 --> 28:54.010
[SPEAKER_00]: If I got any of this wrong, leave it wrong.
29:05.125 --> 29:32.805
[SPEAKER_00]: Ahhhh, oops, uh, maybe you should go back and, uh, unwatch this ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
29:33.637 --> 29:42.246
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this story was submitted to us by a fellow listener and Denison of the Night, M.M.Saint.
29:43.067 --> 29:53.077
[SPEAKER_00]: That got me thinking, I bet there are some writers listening out there right now, who might like to share a story or two with the channel.
29:53.994 --> 30:10.185
[SPEAKER_00]: If you'd be interested in something like that, please check the description below to find our contact email address, or check out some of the other submissions on our very own subreddit, or slash don't fall asleep.
30:10.946 --> 30:12.507
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll add a link there as well.
30:13.307 --> 30:21.413
[SPEAKER_00]: I look forward to interacting with you there, and checking out some of the incredible writers and artists in our community.
30:22.662 --> 30:27.484
[SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoy this story, please check out more from M.M.
30:27.564 --> 30:38.388
[SPEAKER_00]: Saint on his sub-stack, which is chock-full of more stories just as good as sweet Jane, link in description and show notes.
30:39.288 --> 30:45.030
[SPEAKER_00]: Please also leave us a comment and let me know what you thought of this story.
30:45.970 --> 30:49.492
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever you do, forget you were ever here!
