The Hollow Hill Covenant Origins

Unknown Speaker

Welcome, dear listeners, to another shadowed corner of the Frightengale Files. I’m Dr. Elijah Blackwood, here with the unflappable Florence Frightengale, Florence, my spectral partner in exploration, are you ready for what’s sure to be an especially unsettling descent?

Florence Frightengale

I wouldn’t dream of missing it, Elijah. If you’re just joining us, you’ve stumbled right into Hollow Hill’s darkest secrets, this episode, we’re peering under the shroud of the hospital’s original conspiracy. New listeners, do hang onto your nerves. And, for those who recall our ventures into the basement and the Hag’s Rounds… this episode is where so many roads begin.

Unknown Speaker

Indeed. Tonight, we unearth the origins, the covenant. The first whispers, the overlooked warnings, and the very price of medical miracles. If you thought the midnight code was chilling, wait until you see what silence itself can conceal.

Florence Frightengale

We noticed something… odd from our earliest days investigating Hollow Hill. Mention the hospital to a local say, a neighbor at the grocer or a bartender after hours—and you’d think we’d suggested summoning the devil. Eyes dart away. Conversations stumble—sometimes quite literally into silence, sometimes into stories about the weather or football, never the hospital.

Unknown Speaker

That’s right. And this wasn’t merely social awkwardness, was it? Florence, I remember asking after a patient who’d died—under, shall we say, less than natural circumstances. You’d expect at least the barest complaint. Yet, not a single relative ever appeared. You mentioned it yourself, and I thought at first, surely you must have missed them, but no… nothing. Almost as if the hospital’s patients simply had no families at all.

Florence Frightengale

Or perhaps the families had no words, Elijah. Perhaps they’d learned to keep their grief, like everything else locked behind closed doors. And it went further. Local grocers began refusing to deliver supplies after dark. Taxi drivers from neighboring towns would refuse fares, claiming their engines sputtered and died if they so much as approached the hospital after sundown. Coincidence? Or the first ripples of a supernatural boundary?

Unknown Speaker

It felt orchestrated, didn’t it? An invisible hand, nudging everyone back toward silence. And I’ll admit, the deeper we probed, the colder the nights grew. That kind of silence is a warning in itself.

Unknown Speaker

When you want answers, you dig through records, so to the town library we went. One expects dust and the occasional coffee stain, not entire years missing. Every hospital file from 1923, vanished. The librarian, Mrs. Henderson, could barely look me in the eye. “A flood,” she whispered. Only, I couldn’t find any mention of a flood in the town’s history.

Florence Frightengale

That “flood” is rather selective, isn’t it? But while Elijah was politely menacing the poor librarian, I stumbled, quite by accident of course, upon a hidden archive beneath the old town hall. Imagine my delight—flickering gas lamps, and there it was: the original charter, signed by thirteen families. A “medical covenant,” they called it. Promises of prosperity and, my favorite, “protection from natural death.”

Unknown Speaker

And the newspapers… 1924 clippings praising the hospital for miraculous recoveries, then, several weeks later, entirely different tales. These same patients suffered… let’s say, odd changes. Personalities inverted, eyes that shimmered, skin ashen. We’d seen it before, but until then, I refused to call it supernatural.

Florence Frightengale

Our silence was being written before our eyes, erased from memory, page by page. It all started here.

Florence Frightengale

Of course, the whispers grew flesh. One chilly afternoon, a Sarah Hartwell approached Elijah, nervously glancing over her shoulder. She handed him a photograph, her aunt, Margaret, from 1930. In that photo, a young woman whose face looked older than her mother’s. Fifty years aged overnight, Sarah claimed.

Unknown Speaker

Sarah’s hand shook as she described what came next. Margaret’s preserved remains, yes, preserved locked in the town hall basement. A warning for anyone thinking of breaking the “arrangement.” And this wasn’t a family secret; for generations, the Hartwells had quietly kept these records, watching every would-be whistleblower’s fate spiral into tragedy. It was… systematic. Ritualistic, really.

Florence Frightengale

If you listened to our episode on the Hag’s Rounds, you’ll recall the theme: not all hauntings end with peace. Here, rebellion meant transformation, a lesson immortalized in flesh and bone.

Unknown Speaker

In the modern day, the shadow is subtler but no less deadly. The town established, well, let’s call it a highly professional online presence. Glowing testimonials. “My cancer vanished overnight!” and the like. Miraculous, certainly. Suspicious? Absolutely.

Florence Frightengale

Dig a little deeper…and you find the hospital board and town council hold weekly meetings, not about care, but cover-up. They bribe journalists, honestly, the amounts would make politicians blush, while snuffing out every negative review. Even state politicians have intervened, men and women who were once terminally ill, now miraculously vital and fiercely loyal to the institution that saved them. Hard to argue with a cure, isn’t it?

Unknown Speaker

Yes, if you’re willing to ignore the price lurking behind every miracle.

Florence Frightengale

Nothing inspires loyalty quite like financial dependency. Every business in Hollow Hill receives… generous “support” from hospital coffers. It’s a web, each strand sticky with obligation.

Unknown Speaker

Try to leave, or seek treatment elsewhere, and the punishment is swift. Mortgages called. Insurance revoked. Jobs lost, sometimes within days. I might be getting ahead of myself, but it’s more sophisticated than any bureaucracy I’ve ever known. Even families who suspect the truth are forced back, over and over. And yet, “free” healthcare is dangled in front of every resident, provided you sign a consent form so broad, I had to read it twice. “Experimental procedures may be performed at our discretion.” Quite the bargain, eh Florence?

Florence Frightengale

A bargain with consequences. Consent, twisted into a shackle.

Unknown Speaker

Now, this next piece, you’d think it the stuff of ghost stories. But both of us began to sense it, didn’t we, Florence? The feeling of being watched. Shadows loitering where lamps should banish darkness. I found my medical files, private, supposedly, had been accessed. And video from my home security? Silhouettes entering, nothing touched, just… examined.

Florence Frightengale

My own home, my quiet haunt, no longer private. Every building with those little “emergency” devices, only, they weren’t medical at all. Hidden microphones, tiny cameras. I suspect… the hospital’s reach knew no walls. When we tried to speak openly, our phones glitched, alarms tripped, emails vanished. And yet, the pressure only made silence heavier.

Florence Frightengale

Dig enough graves, and you’ll start to see a pattern in the bones. Anyone who tried to expose Hollow Hill met their end in a fashion mimicking their curiosity. Case in point: Thomas Mueller, journalist, 1934. He pried into surgical secrets, and he became one. Found, skin so translucent you could map every organ, yet still conscious enough to make eye contact with the coroner.

Unknown Speaker

Or Father O’Brien in 1941. Prayers and rituals—an exorcism gone disastrously wrong. The accounts say his body was turned inside out, yet his voice—almost unrecognizable—kept praying. Backwards. In Latin. It haunted the chaplaincy for years. What we learned: each punishment fits the trespass, as if shaped by the hospital’s own vindictive creativity.

Unknown Speaker

You might think, “Why not just call in the Feds?” Well—we found classified files, their edges singed, suggesting several government agencies attempted just that. Each team spiraled into tragedy or madness. In 1947, three agents simply… shut down. Bodies alive, but no consciousness, just sitting in the diner window ’til they withered away.

Florence Frightengale

Current federal databases? Muddied. Falsified. Breadcrumbs of an active cover-up stretch to the highest echelons of government. Even in the digital age, Hollow Hill weaves a shroud tight enough to strangle any light of truth.

Florence Frightengale

Newcomers to Hollow Hill don’t receive the usual fruit basket. No, theirs comes with a pamphlet: orientation materials, featuring vivid imagery of those who defy the town’s code of silence. Smiling neighbors become watchful recruiters, dangling benefits and perks… and warnings. Resistance isn’t futile, exactly; it’s fatal.

Unknown Speaker

I spoke with some of these so-called “integrated” families. More than a welcome, it was… indoctrination. And families who stood apart? Their children would develop “illnesses” only the hospital could treat. Compliance became not just sensible, but necessary for survival.

Unknown Speaker

Over time, people, myself included at times, grow dependent. Not emotionally, but physically, biologically. Residents who received the hospital’s “miracles” found they could no longer endure illness in the old way. No natural immunity, no resistance unless they returned for further treatment. Leave, and you’re overcome by symptoms medical science can’t explain.

Florence Frightengale

And that dependency isn’t accidental. The hospital cultivates it. It’s a kind of addiction, to wellness, to hope, to cheating death. The price? Loyalty. Or, failing that, a swift and violent recall.

Florence Frightengale

Let’s talk about the children. The school curriculum includes “health education”, in reality, subtle programming. Children are taught, from the very beginning, to revere the hospital and its staff, to believe its intentions are always pure, its methods beyond question.

Unknown Speaker

Children born in Hollow Hill display almost pathological loyalty, and strangely show no fear within hospital walls. And when the rare teenager attempts to flee for a different life, they’re met with maladies that inevitably drag them home. It’s a cycle, impossible to break.

Unknown Speaker

The punishments of the present are as inventive as the old curses. Dr. Sarah Martinez, CDC investigator in 2019, she came for answers, left as a… what would you call it, Florence? A living stethoscope? Her essence wired into hospital equipment, performing diagnostics for eternity, never to rest.

Florence Frightengale

Or the Film crew, 2021, came to shoot a documentary. Their gear began broadcasting film of their own grisly deaths before it happened. Then, grisly became reality, frame for frame. The hospital adapts, adopts new technology for ever newer horrors.

Florence Frightengale

Then there was Rebecca Chen, attorney, brave and, perhaps, a touch naïve. She tried to file a suit, and what does she become? A living legal document, her skin scrolling text in legalese. Still conscious, still practicing, if you can call it that. Her warnings are camouflaged in legal terminology only the desperate or the doomed might decipher.

Unknown Speaker

It’s a fate worse than silence. Rebecca serves as both cautionary tale and unwilling participant, never allowed to abandon her vocation or her warning.

Unknown Speaker

Soon we realized the town itself is… networked, in a way. Not just surveillance, but psychic connection. Speak ill of the hospital, and everyone “feels” it, as if tapped on the shoulder by some invisible force, compelled to respond, to protect their secret at all costs.

Florence Frightengale

This psychic reflex isn’t limited to town limits. Former patients, no matter how far they’ve roamed, act as sentinels, their loyalty hardcoded, a first line of defense against exposure. It’s a web spun not just with fear, but with a supernatural thread.

Florence Frightengale

And Hollow Hill doesn’t hide. It draws patients from the world over. Those who come for miracles often get them, if their stories will benefit the hospital’s legend. International patient lists read like a who's who of influence: politicians, celebrities, and scientists, all bound by gratitude and secrecy.

Unknown Speaker

And each patient is profiled, their weaknesses and loyalties catalogued. Their silence is purchased not just with healing, but with a careful, personal touch, ensuring loyalty is never a question. It’s recruitment for life.

Unknown Speaker

Even the digital realm is no haven for whistleblowers. Hollow Hill runs a cyber warfare operation, monitoring all online chatter. Mention the hospital in the wrong tone on social media, poof, it’s gone. Private messages, reviews, complaints—intercepted, erased, or rewritten as glowing praise.

Florence Frightengale

We learned the hard way. Our own correspondence was intercepted, our devices…not just tapped, but used as informants against us. Every keystroke, every whisper, a potential confession.

Florence Frightengale

Outside investigators? They see a performance of normalcy so convincing it would make any actor envious. Townspeople rehearse testimonies, fabricate records, and even children… they are the most convincing protectors of the lie.

Unknown Speaker

I watched it myself during a state health inspection. The sheer coordination, the subtlety of the deceptions by the end, even I began second-guessing what I’d seen. The whole town, complicit and rehearsed. Terrifying in its unity.

Unknown Speaker

This conspiracy isn’t written; it’s inherited. Families tell their children cautionary tales, not to scare, but to instruct. Some elderly residents described, through tears, witnessing their loved ones’ transformations for questioning the hospital, a memory passed down like a family heirloom.

Florence Frightengale

And after so many generations, some families can’t leave even if they wished, they’ve developed mutations, a sort of… supernatural dependency that makes the outside world lethal. The price of safety multiplied over time, paid in blood and genes.

Florence Frightengale

The hospital’s reach isn’t merely human. Roads that loop back on themselves. Shadows that herd you home. I tried to document all this, phones disconnecting, letters never arriving, alarms tripping in empty rooms. The infrastructure itself polices the boundaries, enforcing silence and secrecy with supernatural precision.

Unknown Speaker

And when I attempted to leave for a medical conference, I drove in circles for hours—never out, never closer to escape. I felt watched, judged, found wanting and, ultimately, returned safely to where the hospital needed me. There’s no running from a place that bends the rules of space and fate.

Unknown Speaker

Throughout the town, you find… remnants. Not quiet graves, but preserved warnings: bodies on display, eternally aware, frozen at the moment of their betrayal. They aren’t just monuments, they’re subjects for ongoing research, reminders for all who pass by.

Florence Frightengale

A dual purpose, punishment, yes, but also a lesson. To rebel is to become a footnote, an exhibit. Alive, in a sense. Never released from your post.

Florence Frightengale

Hollow Hill isn’t alone. Similar hospitals—nodes in an international network—exchange patients, research, and… protection. One threatened, all respond. It’s a Hydra, Elijah—cut one head off, two more take its place.

Unknown Speaker

We found evidence of interfacility shipments, sometimes more than patients, they shared secrets, too, coordinated warning systems and retribution. Resistance, anywhere, becomes near impossible when you’re fighting not just one institution, but a global entity bound by common cause.

Unknown Speaker

If you’re still convinced voting can save the day, let me disillusion you. Many politicians, judges, even at the highest levels, owe their recovery, perhaps their very lives, to Hollow Hill. They quash investigations, intervene in court, ensure no law ever quite applies to the hospital or its kin.

Florence Frightengale

We traced election outcomes nudged by quiet threats,or, more chilling, by mysterious illnesses that conveniently remove dissenting candidates. The hospital’s influence bleeds through democracy’s every vein.

Florence Frightengale

Control the narrative, and you control memory. Major media channels, publishing companies, even podcasts like ours, aren’t immune. Journalists who try to dig too deep? Watch their equipment fail. Their sources vanish, or they find themselves blacklisted before they even print a word.

Unknown Speaker

Florence, you remember when we lost three entire recorded panels to static and distortion? It’s not just technical glitches, there’s a hand, somewhere, pressing delete whenever truth draws too near.

Unknown Speaker

Academia isn’t spared either. Universities and medical schools are scared off, professors vanish, research grants dry up, and textbooks subtly scrub every trace of supernatural medicine. History, revised as needed, until nothing remains but the “official” version.

Florence Frightengale

Young researchers eager to peer behind the curtain are quickly recruited, or their families find themselves haunted by mishaps that “encourage” discretion. Curiosity rarely survives its first semester.

Florence Frightengale

Some say faith is a bulwark. Not so here. Churches and clergy encourage acceptance, reminding the devout that interfering would be challenging the will of the divine itself. Questioning the hospital is framed as pride sin, not skepticism.

Unknown Speaker

And clergy who try to defy this narrative? Punishment is swift, brutal. We saw what happened to Father O’Brien. His transformation was not merely retribution, it was a sermon to all who might follow.

Unknown Speaker

By now, Hollow Hill’s prosperity underpins the economy of entire regions. To shut it down would be to plunge thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, into poverty. Breadwinners, providers, all forced to defend a system they despise.

Florence Frightengale

This wasn’t accidental. Over decades, dependency was manufactured, each link in the chain forged with intention. No one can afford to try to stop it, even if their conscience screams otherwise.

Florence Frightengale

For us, the fight became personal. Our own families developed strange illnesses, conditions that only Hollow Hill could treat. A coincidence? Not for a moment.

Unknown Speaker

The hospital began to court us, promising positions, power, privileges if we’d just let sleeping secrets lie. We declined, though, perhaps, with less bravado than some might imagine. And the dreams…prophetic glimpses of what would befall us should we continue. Each vision, more disturbing than the last.

Unknown Speaker

Eventually, all resistance comes to a crossroads. Hollow Hill presented us an offer: knowledge, full and unfettered. In exchange, our silence, and our complicity in expanding the covenant’s reach. Refusal, we learned, meant transformation, eternal warnings, like so many before us.

Florence Frightengale

What’s worse, Elijah? Knowing our quest was allowed, even encouraged, as a recruitment test. Meaning, every step, every discovery, each horror we exposed…was orchestrated.

Unknown Speaker

Everything, we uncovered, points back to that original sacrifice, thirteen families, trading their descendants’ freedom for perpetual protection from death. The covenant cannot be broken, not by force, not by knowledge, not even by martyrdom. To break it, every living descendant must agree… all of them, now hopelessly bound into the psychic network.

Florence Frightengale

And here’s the twist, our resistance, even our podcast, strengthens those bonds. The covenant feeds on failed rebellion. Every warning, every failed escape, reaffirms its hold… making the next uprising harder still.

Florence Frightengale

And so, here is our choice. We remain, as “controlled opposition.” We reveal just enough to satisfy suspicion, to pacify restless consciences…all while steering listeners away from genuine threat. Our fate? That remains to be seen, doesn’t it, Elijah?

Unknown Speaker

Indeed. Every word, monitored. Every revelation, permitted. Listeners…you are now, willingly or not, part of the covenant, bearing witness, and so helping guard its secret. There’s a comfort in complicity, perhaps? Or maybe, just a lingering chill.

Unknown Speaker

So there you have it, listeners. The complete truth about Hollow Hill and its hospital. Every detail we’ve shared, every revelation we’ve uncovered, every moment of horror we’ve documented…has been observed, and, in some sense, approved. If you’re listening, you’ve joined us inside the web. Florence, any parting words for our loyal and now complicit audience?

Florence Frightengale

Keep your lamps burning, watch the shadows, and never trust a hospital that promises more than medicine. We’ll be back, unless the covenant decides otherwise. Farewell, Elijah.

Unknown Speaker

Until next time, Florence. Sleep lightly, listeners, and remember, the walls have ears.