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The Radford Horror

The Radford Horror is the first arc of PITF: eight episodes in which a newly formed FBI task force is sent to a small Virginia town to find a missing cheerleader and instead finds a spaceman, a plague of vanishing dogs, and something very large living in a ruined church.
Setting Radford, Virginia, with opening scenes in Washington, D.C.
Episodes 8, all recorded
In-fiction dates May 24th to about May 29th, 1992, with an epilogue running to mid-June
Main threat The Radford Moth
Players Andre (Keeper), Rita, Dante, Ezra, Zack
Next arc The Summer Service

Overview

In spring 1992, with the Soviet Union gone and the Bureau downsizing, four people who are in the way are moved onto a presidential task force that most of their colleagues consider make-work. Andrew Howard is a desk agent who sincerely believes in benevolent aliens. Kurt Larson is a CIA man on loan with a trunk full of stilts and wolf urine. Dick "The Biz" Baxter is a cynical counterintelligence agent with money trouble, and Huell Kendrick is a disgraced cop in the middle of a divorce. Their office is a derelict barbershop and their first file is a single sheet: Amanda Lucky, 17, gone from a locked third-story bedroom, and a four-year-old witness who says a spaceman took her. (Radford Horror 01)

The case turns out to be several cases lying on top of each other. One is entirely human. Amanda's psychiatrist, Dr. Lori, and the pharmacist and romance novelist Derek Augustine were both abusing her, and the disputed painkiller prescriptions lead the agents to them. Her boyfriend Dean Lawson was dealing heroin, and had buried about $40,000 behind his family's cabin. (Radford Horror 02, 05, 07, 08)

A second belongs to the Whateley family. One twin was supposed to have robbed a Radio Shack in a homemade spacesuit and run away three years ago; the other has sat unresponsive in a wheelchair since a car crash. The truth is in a hidden cellar under their garage and in Wilbur's journal. (Radford Horror 02, 06, 08)

The third is the thing itself. It is first a blue streak over the forest, then a silent shape that blots out stars, then something that takes a dog from a yard and a girl from a clearing and leaves white powder and a smell of rot. In the seventh episode the agents finally see it clearly, and it nearly kills all four of them. (Radford Horror 03, 04, 06, 07)

Around all of this moves a fourth party that the arc never explains: a watcher on a rooftop, a white van, a man with an NSA badge and a flashlight that sets people on fire, and at the end soldiers without insignia who burn what is left and take the body away. (Radford Horror 01, 03, 07, 08)

The arc also sets the show's habits. Each session opens on a cold open and a cut to credits, the party splits at every opportunity, and Kurt's car trunk and the Biz's digestion are established as permanent features. See The show and running gags.

Episodes

Episode Summary
Episode 01 Four reassigned agents meet in a barbershop, drive to Radford, and work the Lucky house; a child describes a spaceman and someone is watching from a roof.
Episode 02 The Whateley disappearance, the Radio Shack robbery, a file of missing dogs, and a psychiatrist who denies writing a prescription.
Episode 03 A barn stakeout, a commandeered car, an armed group in a clearing, a silent object in the sky, and Agent Murphy's flashlight.
Episode 04 Murphy's papers, a searched motel, DMT from Rutherford, a burgled office, and Phoebe Augustine taken before dawn.
Episode 05 Amanda's autopsy shows crucifixion and sedation; a hair tie and a set of fingerprints tie the cases together.
Episode 06 Huell tackles the spaceman and falls out of the sky; a mummified boy is found in the Whateley cellar; Wilbur walks away.
Episode 07 Dean Lawson's cash and heroin, a flight over the forest, and the fight in the old church.
Episode 08 Escape from the cleanup crew, the official story, Wilbur's journal, and the first scenes of the Marblehead case.

Principal cast

The task force

Radford law and medicine

The missing and their families

Suspects and townspeople

The other side

Monsters and entities

Key locations

Key items

How it ended

The agents found Phoebe Augustine alive, crucified above the pulpit of an abandoned church in the forest, with Wilbur Whateley beside her and the creature in the rafters. They burned it with a bottle of Everclear, tore its wings, cut off a leg and put out its eyes, came close to dying themselves, and locked it inside the burning building, where it died. (Radford Horror 07)

They then hid from soldiers with flamethrowers, robbed one of them, and woke in hospital. The sheriff's account made Wilbur a serial killer with cartel connections: he had killed his brother and hidden the body, staged the runaway, and taken the women. Irene Whateley was found in the church, crucified, burned and disemboweled. The body in the cellar was "probably Abelforth," pending tests. Lori and Augustine confessed to abusing Amanda and went to prison. The agents read Wilbur's journal, concluded that the moth had been in his head since it hatched, and let the police version stand. By the time they returned to the church, the creature's body, the gore and the dog collars had been removed. They left Radford with a heat-ray flashlight, a cloak made of shadow, most of Dean's $40,000 and a quantity of heroin, none of it recorded anywhere. (Radford Horror 08)

What it left unresolved

  • Who the soldiers and the men in heat suits were, how they knew about the moth, and where they took its body. (Radford Horror 08)
  • Who Agent Murphy was. His badge matched no record, and his papers mentioned servitors, "Menelaus," "acceptable leakage" and a name ending "...ig Bill." (Radford Horror 04, 08)
  • What the creature was and who made it. It called Andrew "Changeling" and said he knew its makers. (Radford Horror 07)
  • Why bullets slow before they reach Andrew, and what his church's "mace" is. See The Masters. (Radford Horror 07, 08)
  • What disemboweled Amanda Lucky and Irene Whateley, and whether the moth left eggs. (Radford Horror 08)
  • Whether Wilbur was ever truly catatonic. (Radford Horror 08)
  • How the fingerprints on file from the Radio Shack robbery, taken to be Abelforth's, reached the Lucky roof when he had been dead in the cellar for years. The sheriff's theory that Wilbur wore the suit would explain it, but nobody says so. (Radford Horror 05, 06, 08)
  • Where Dean Lawson went, and who his suppliers were. (Radford Horror 08)
  • Who searched the agents' motel rooms, and who "Red Dutchford" was. (Radford Horror 04)
  • Mr. King's prophecy that "the next master is coming." (Radford Horror 01)

The task force comes back to the town in The Radford Horrors. Further analysis is on the unresolved mysteries page.

Trivia

  • Names drift across the sessions. Mr. Whateley is briefly "Josiah" in Radford Horror 02 before Andre settles on Yobiah. The sheriff is named Frank Roosevelt in the premiere and is simply "the sheriff" afterward. Underhill calls the missing twin "Abelforth Radford" in Radford Horror 05, where Andrew's superior, Big Bill Nelson, is also just "Nelson." The table itself keeps turning Abelforth into "Albert" and Amanda Lucky into "Amanda Palmer."
  • The mountain ski lodge is not named until Radford Horror 06, where it becomes the Alpine Lodge. It is a different place from the Ferry Lodge, the team's second hotel.
  • The arc opens on May 24th, 1992. The date of May 29th for the church fight is Andre's estimate at the table in Radford Horror 08 ("I think it's May 29th now").

See Lost episodes for the campaign's recording gaps and About this wiki for spelling conventions.