Podcast / The Storage Papers

"Nothing is what it seems."

The Storage Papers is a horror podcast written and performed by Jeremy Enfinger. The series is currently hosted by Rusty Quill and can be found on their website.

After moving to southeastern California, paranormal investigator Jeremy Enfinger impulsively decides to make a bid on an abandoned storage unit. Being as he was the only one bidding on it, he was given the storage unit's contents: a series of papers belonging to a private detective identified only as 'Ron', documenting all manner of strange, disturbing, and supernatural phenomena over the course of decades. Curious, Jeremy decided to begin documenting the papers in the form of a podcast as he tries to get to the bottom of the mystery behind the papers, and finds himself in for more than he bargained for when he stumbles into a massive conspiracy.

The Storage Papers contains examples of:

• An Aesop: Several episodes end with a message for the audience.
  • "The Duct-Tape Man": It's better to seek help dealing with your traumas and mental health issues rather than pretend they don't exist, because doing so will cause far more trouble in the long run,
  • "The Licker": Listen to people's problems rather than dismiss them as non-existent, particularly those of teens, or it will lead to horrible consequences.
• Agent Mulder: Downplayed. Jeremy freely admits to believing in the paranormal, but generally doesn't let his personal views interfere with the podcast and frequently entertains mundane explanations for any recorded supernatural phenomena.
• Ambiguously Evil: There's a few hints that there's something off with Ron and Jeremy notes that he definitely has an ulterior motive, though he does seem to still be a good guy. The Season 2 finale reveals he's actually a member of Project Hydra.
• Amnesiac Hero: Downplayed. The journal entries reveal Jeremy has lost all memories from before he was fourteen due to a traumatic head injury.
• And I Must Scream: Anyone possessed by the Grinner is fully aware of what the demon is making them do, but unable to stop it or do anything but watch.
• Apocalyptic Log: Surprisingly averted a lot of the time. A good chunk of the papers end with the protagonist sill being alive, if not necessarily well, and Ron's eventually revealed to be alive, albeit probably in hiding. The reason the papers are all so disorganized is because he never had the time to organize them, and the unit was abandoned because Ron forgot to pay the bills. That isn't to say that the series never plays it straight, and generally to nightmarish effect.
• Arc Villain: The Grinner/Malcolm Foy is the primary antagonist of seasons 1-2.
  • The Dream Killer/The Man In The Khaki Suit takes center stage of season 3's conflict, after the Grinner is Put on a Bus.
• Arc Words: "Nothing is what it seems."
• Asshole Victim:
  • Downplayed. Shane from "Shealynn" is kind of an asshole, but none of his friends are happy about what ends up happening to him.
  • Peyton from "Mask" is a corrupt railroad baron who murdered Malachai for refusing to sell his land, and used that to threaten his family and his neighbors into fleeing. Unfortunately for Peyton, death isn't exactly the end for Malachai…
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Malcolm Foy's journals show that he's definitely not mentally well.
  • The Grinner really shows off this side of himself during his Villainous Breakdown in "Bait".
  The Grinner: Come on out so I can decide whether to eat you or wear your skin!
• Bad Boss: According to 4th Trumpet, Project Hydra has a nasty tendency to kill anyone who asks any questions about other departments.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The Grinner, Project Hydra, and the… things that live in the realms of dreams.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The giant, cave-dwelling mantises from "Cocoons".
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • "Baby Cries": Jim Thorpe escapes from the Voice Changeling monster with his life, but it still killed a woman and it's still around, waiting to claim more victims.
  • "Shealynn": Most of the teens survive their encounter with the titular malevolent ghost, but she whisked Shane away to an unknown but almost certainly unpleasant fate, and the search for him didn't turn up anything.
  • "Ice Cream Man": The Ice Cream Man slaughters several children and nearly does the same to Chelsea before the young girl is rescued by a police officer, though he gets away unscathed. Chelsea is left traumatized and her mother Marianne is accused of abuse, but ultimately things go back to normal for them, and Chelsea's memory of the whole thing has faded.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The mantises from "Coccoons" are able to make people want to lure others to them as prey, which one of them does to Mikaela.
• Christmas Episode: "Untold Christmas Tales".
• Cluster F-Bomb: Detective Anderson drops the F-bomb no less than five times in his letter to Jeremy.
• Cult: The Order of the Divine Acolytes, a fundamentalist Christian sect led by the Grinner, who brainwashes anyone who joins.
• Darker and Edgier: Season 2's episodes are a lot bleaker than Season 1, with more emphasis on the horror and less on the investigative side of things. Season 3 takes it even further, with each episode having a bitter, almost melancholic tone.
• Despair Event Horizon: Jeremy crosses it at the end of Season 2.
• Devoured by the Horde: Joseph and Marvin are both torn apart by a horde of ghouls in "Halloween 2020".
• Downer Ending:
  • "The Cat Lady": Marjorie is left in a worse mental state thanks to her encounters with the titular Humanoid Abomination and moves out of her house out of fear, forcing her to donate the stray cats she was fostering to an animal shelter. The Cat Lady gorges herself on several more cats before they're all finally moved.
  • "Original Beast": Maxwell Tannard is transformed into an immortal werewolf, much to his own horror, and has become well aware he won't be able to Resist the Beast much longer. What he ultimately does is left ambiguous, but the least depressing possibility is that he's stranded himself on an island where he can't hurt anyone. A later episode reveals that he gave in and transferred the curse to a priest so that he could finally die.
  • "The Duct-Tape Man": Officer Diego Castrado's continued refusal to confront his trauma after killing spree shooter Peter "The Duct-Tape Man" Garrett results in him either slipping into homicidal madness or being subject to the same possession as Garrett was. Either way, Diego winds up becoming the new Duct-Tape Man and is shot dead when he attempts to shoot up a crowded mall.
  • Season 2 as a whole ends on one. Jeremy is left emotionally shattered by the climactic confrontation with the Grinner, Malcolm Foy is able to escape (albeit with a binding symbol carved into his chest), the Grinner isn't banished to Hell and is just lying in wait for some other poor schmuck to summon it, Benjamin Scanlon and Preston Nicholson are dead, and Ron is revealed to be an agent of Project Hydra.
• Evil Old Folks: Well, the Cat Lady might not actually be an old woman, but she's definitely vicious and repeatedly breaks into Marjorie DeLonge's house to devour several of the cats she's been sheltering.
• Evil All Along : Ron is an agent of Project Hydra.
• Evil vs. Evil: "The Dog in the Corner" has an Animalistic Abomination and the Order of the Divine Acolytes fight each other over who gets to claim a victim.
• Eye Scream: The creature tears out the paranormal investigator's eyes and devours them in "Depraved".
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: There's psychics, aliens, demons, government conspiracies, and all sorts of supernatural things going on. Lampshaded by Jeremy.
  Jeremy: The fact that psychics, aliens, and demons all coexist is kind of blowing my mind.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • Heavily implied to be what happened to Shane in "Shealynn" after the titular ghost whisked him off to parts unknown.
  • The narrator of "Unmarked" is used as a test subject for Project Hydra's time travel experiments, which leaves him both horrifically disfigured and repeatedly sent hurtling to different time periods. It's implied that he'll be experimented on until he dies.
• Friend on the Force: Detective Mark Anderson serves as this to Ron.
• Genre Shift: Season 2 incorporates Religious Horror and Conspiracy Thriller elements, and Season 3 jettisons the Religious Horror in favor of Mind Screw and Surreal Horror.
• Ghostapo: Project Hydra originated in Nazi Germany as part of Hitler's research into the occult, before its recourses and some of the scientists working on it were repurposed by the US government, though it's implied that the source for this information is a right-wing conspiracy nut.
• Halloween Episode: "Halloween 2020".
• Hero of Another Story: Ron Hammond, the Occult Detective who created the Storage Papers.
• Heroic Sacrifice: "John Doe" in "The House on the Corner" allows himself to be whisked off by an Eldritch Abomination to save Brianne's life.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • The Grinner is not human, and Benjamin Scanlon is able to tell he's bad news the second they meet because of how off he is. It's hinted he might be some kind of vampire or one of The Men in Black. "The Divine Acolytes" reveals he Was Once a Man named Malcolm Foy, until something (implied to be Demonic Possession) happened to him.
  • The titular monster from "The Cat Lady" physically resembles an old lady, but she can unhinge her jaw like a snake and move at superhuman speed.
  • The Voice Changeling from "Baby Cries" looks like a young woman, albeit a bald and pale one, and is most certainly not human.
• Knight Templar Big Brother: Ben Scanlon is apparently a very protective big brother to Brianne, according to her.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Ron reveals in season 4 that he is the long-lost biological father of Ben and Brianne Scanlon, having been forced to give them up to Project Hydra in their infancy after he was manipulated into a felony conviction and into working for Hydra. Ron states that Ben died never knowing, and Brianne only found out from Ron at Ben's funeral.
• Luring in Prey: "Baby Cries" features a creature that resembles a bald pale young woman that the narrator remarks is only "clearly not human". It can mimic a baby's crying and uses this to lure its unsuspecting prey into the woods near its lair, each time the cries seeming ever so close until it's close enough for them to attack.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: "The Duct-Tape Man". Were Peter Garrett and Diego Castrado subject to some kind of transmitted possession, or were both men driven mad by traumas they were unable to handle?
• The Men in Black: Project Hydra, a shadowy government branch studying occultism and the paranormal who have way too much autonomy and control over the government.
• Mysterious Informant:
  • 4th Trumpet, a mysterious Twitter user who offers to provide Jeremy with information and claims to be a former high-ranking member of Project Hydra.
  • The anonymous high-ranking military official from "Conspiracies Anonymous", if he isn't just some random conspiracy nut.

• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Father Lucas Stone the priest/exorcist/immortal werewolf.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: "Baby Cries" revolves around a monster that mimics the sounds of a baby crying to lure in good samaritans and then eat them alive.
• Occult Detective:
  • Ron Hammond, the creator of the Storage Papers, is a private detective who primarily investigates cases involving the paranormal phenomena.
  • Jeremy is himself one, being a paranormal investigator who has had numerous encounters with the supernatural before the show.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The demon known as the Grinner does have a true name, but characters take care to never say it out loud, as speaking a demon's name gives it power. That said, context clues about him (namely that he is a President in Hell that commands 30 demonic legions) and some knowledge of the Ars Goetia implies that he is likely either Valac or Camio.
  • Similarly, the Man in the Khaki Suit's name is never properly revealed. He is alternately referred to as the Dream Killer or Project Hydra's third test subject, but no one knows his name, despite Brienne having been friends with him as a child.
• Origins Episode: "The Divine Acolytes" centers around both the Grinner's origin and how Ron became an Occult Detective.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: "Original Beast" features the very first werewolf, Ivanov Vasiliev. Ivanov notes that most werewolves have the traditional weaknesses and can only die from silver or being beheaded, while iron also weakens them up doesn't kill them, and they can heal from any other kind of damage. He himself is a wholly different kind of werewolf, since as the first he's not only far more powerful and bloodthirsty when he transforms, but immortal and invincible. The only way for him to die and be rid of the curse is to get someone to willingly accept it, which he tricks Tannard into doing.
• Punch-Clock Villain: The Man in the Khaki Suit from "The Delores Tape" murders the residents of a senior living home and then Unpersons them for unknown reasons, but he's apologetic about it and states that it's just business.
• Put on a Bus: The Grinner, after the attempted banishment ritual at the end of Season 2. His host Malcolm Foye returns as of Season 4, having been arrested and imprisoned sometime during Season 3, smugly implying that the Grinner will likely returning as well.
• Religious Horror: Season 2 starts to move into this as more demons and Christian symbolism start to show up.
• Revenant Zombie: Malachai from "Mask" comes back from the dead as a zombie to take revenge in the corrupt railroad baron who killed him.
• Revenge by Proxy: In "Mask", Malachai slaughters Peyton's entire family alongside him as part of his revenge.
• Sanity Slippage: Jeremy is much more paranoid in Season 3, at one point even speculating that the Storage Papers are alive.
• Spiritual Successor: To The Black Tapes, The X-Files, and The Magnus Archives.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Ron's refusal to be anything but secretive on the details of his plan to catch the Grinner results in the plan failing and a good chunk of the team dying.
• Taken from a Dream: In season 3, Jeremy starts experimenting with lucid dreaming based on notes he's found in the titular documents and finds that he's capable of bringing objects back from his lucid dreams.
• Tomato in the Mirror:
  • The last few lines of the first segment of "Untold Christmas Tales" imply that the narrator is actually a Diduch.
  • The journal entries reveal that Jeremy is some kind of Reality Warper, which he forgot about due to a traumatic head injury.
• Tragic Monster: Ivanov "Ivan" Vasiliev, the world's first werewolf, from "Original Beast". He was a Russian captured by the Ottoman Empire during the 13th century, and he was tortured on end for two years straight until something offered him the ability to make the torture stop and get revenge. He eagerly took it, and was transformed when the full moon went up, slaughtering his captors. However, the werewolf began targeting random people every time he turned afterwards and killing or transforming innocents while Ivan could only watch. He couldn't even end his suffering since he was now immortal, with the only way out being to get someone to accept his curse.
• Voice Changeling: The monster from "Baby Cries" mimics the sounds of a baby crying to lure in unsuspecting good samaritans and devour them.
• Vocal Evolution: Jeremy's voice has become increasingly gravelly and hoarse, coinciding with his increasingly jaded and paranoid personality.
• Was Once a Man: The Grinner used to be a man named Malcolm Foy, before a demon bodyjacked him.
• Weird West: "Mask".
• Wham Episode: "The Divine Acolytes": Jeremy makes contact with Ron, who expresses his intention to collaborate with him on the podcast and hints that Vagueness Is Coming, and the Grinner's origin is revealed.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Both Jacob Stone the werewolf and Preston Nicholson the psychic pointedly vanish during the season 2 finale, and receive little to no mention in season 3. Jacob has a Healing Factor, so he likely survived his encounter with the Grinner. Preston, however, was last seen having been telefragged into the church's floor and being possessed by the Grinner, so anything could have happened to him after disappearing.
• Willing Channeler: Malcolm Foy is a deeply disturbing example. The Grinner has been psychologically torturing him since childhood so that he’s eventually allow the demon to possess him.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The titular entity of "Ice Cream Man" is some kind of shadowy, Pied Piper-like creature that lures kids to an abandoned junkyard in the middle of the night and then murders them. It's racked up quite a body count by the time of the episode.
  • Project Hydra is very happy to use kids for human experimentation for their experiments with demons.