With no sign of ghosts in the theater, CP decided it was time to go hunt down a severed human finger for his new ritual. He managed to talk his way into the ETU cadaver lab, only to discover that the one body that was supposed to be stored there was missing. However, Troy spotted a scrap of paper on the floor that listed a number of ritual components, including a severed finger and fresh human lungs. All except the lungs were crossed off, and a note next to that last entry mentioned leaving a cooler at a gravestone. The team traced the gravestone to Pinebox Memorial Cemetary, the site of a recent interment. According to the note, the person seeking the lungs would be there at Wednesday moonrise. While visiting the cemetary, the group was unnerved to see bark flaking off a tree to reveal human skin, which then hardened back into bark.
CP returned to rehearsal, only to have an experience of extreme cold pass over him, while Marco, monitoring the team’s ghost hunting gear in the audience, saw a sudden spike. CP was unable to follow up on the lead at that evening’s rehearsal, not being able to trace the source of the feeling.
Wednesday night saw the investigators back at the cemetary, setting up to surprise the body thief, when a voice cried out for help. CP investigated, discovering a disheveled young woman who claimed to have been drugged and abandoned in the cemetery as a sorority hazing ritual. She also said a man had attacked her, which the group assumed was the body thief. Marco took her back to Mariana’s SUV while the others set up to catch the thief.
After 20 minutes, however, no thief was forthcoming, and the group returned to the car. As soon as they headed back to campus, however, the young woman attacked CP, stabbing at him with a knife and demanding he give her his “stash”. Thanks to some quick work by Marco, the team subdued the young woman, and determined that she had ritual books and was trying to raise the dead. She had left the note for the team as a trap to lure them in. The investigators ransacked her dorm room, finding a cooler of severed fingers and the ritual book, and then called in the police to take the woman for psychiatric help.
At CP’s next rehearsal, ghostly fingers clutched his shoulders, and a voice whispered “For Darla”. The ghost hands choked CP, but released him after moderate injury. Looking up, CP saw a dead man hanging from the ceiling and pointing at the stage.
A bit of Troy’s sleuthing determined that Darla, the ghost (Joe), and the new drama professor had been in a play together in the 1970s. Joe had committed suicide, leading the professor to take on the lead role. Just days later, however, a lighting stack collapsed on the couple, killing Darla and injuring the future professor. The team, aided by Joe’s ghost, confronted the professor, who eventually cracked and confessed to murdering Joe to get the part and Darla.
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