THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES #7 - The Piper 

I think the cynical tired attitude of the narrator is so funny when paired with the sincerity of the stories. You get told a very earnest and soulful sounding tale and then /*CLICK*/ Narrator: now wasn’t that some shit!!! No fuckin organization!! Ugh, I gotta do EVERYTHING around here!! It’s very funny and gives me a little whiplash every time 😂

Wilfred: No bro- I met *The War* 👀

This episode really deserves an award for the writing and performance, it could be a short story on its own even without the context of the Magnus Archives.

Considering that Wilfred Owen was a real war poet who was renowned for finding ways to personify aspects of war in his writing, I find this strange, haunting story to be such an immensely intriguing one

For some reason this episode makes me think that the disorganization is intentional. Like she was ensuring he’d read these by placing them in the wrong area. Can’t be sure of course.

Joseph Rayner is a real person who served in WWI, you can read about him and see documents on his service and enlistment. Where he lived, that he wasn't married, that he at some point went missing.

I did some research on Wilfred Owen after listening to this. One of his poems, "Strange Meeting", includes the line "Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were". If that inspired Owen's death, then dang did Jonny do some research.

This has got to be one of my favourite episodes... something about old unknowable war harbingers just galloping across the battlefield blasting a trumpet with one arm while another arm is holding a movie popcorn bucket and another is flipping off Nazis and two more are dedicated to dabbing is so good, so classic, so timeless

Why do I get the sneaking feeling that there was a definite method to the previous archivist's madness?

I heard the silent melody, As a young, jolly, working maid. And only when I told the soldiers what I heard they understood The Piper must be payed. Wilfred Owen went insane, His 3rd eye opened in the field. To the slaughtered soldier's thoughts true, but mundane, From the Piper, there is no shield. He still is there, in the battle field, alone. Playing in that sad, sad tone. A reminder from the past, That a lot of soldiers never came home.

The description of War,although I know its a paranormal being here, makes for such a beautiful and macabre explenation of every war

I think all the English Literature students that had Exposure in their GCSE poem roster were quaking by the end of this.

Ok now I REALLY want to see someone draw an ilustration of War based on this!

The description of The Piper combined with the time period in which the story takes place makes me imagine him in the style of old political cartoons with stark shading and crosshatching and faded colors, alongside features that just evoke this uncanny valley effect. Haunting.

ARCHIVIST Statement of Staff Sergeant Clarence Berry, regarding his time serving with Wilfred Owen in the Great War. Original statement given November 6th, 1922. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins. ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT) A lot of people call me lucky, you know. Not many came through the entirety of the war in one piece. And if you discount the burns, then I did indeed do just that. Even fewer spent all four years at the front, like I did. I was never sent for treatment for shell shock or injury, and even my encounter with a German flamethrower only ended up with me in a front line hospital at Wipers. I was still in that field hospital when the fighting started at the Somme, so I suppose that was lucky too. Four years… I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who saw the whole damn show from start to finish, as though I alone know the Great War in all its awful glory. But deep down I know that honour, such as it is, has to go to Wilfred. You wouldn’t have thought it from his poems, but all told, his time at the front totalled not much over a year. Yet he got to know the war in a way I never did. He’s certainly the only person I know that ever saw The Piper. I grew up poor on the streets of Salford, so I joined the army as soon as I was old enough. I know you’ve heard the stories of brave lads signing up at 14, but this was before the war started, so there wasn’t such a demand for manpower and the recruiters were much more scrupulous about making sure those enlisting were of age. Even so, I was almost too skinny for them to take me and barely made the required weight. But in the end I made it through and, after my training, was assigned to the Manchester Regiment, 2nd Battalion, and it wasn’t long before we were shipped off to France with the British Expeditionary Force. You seem like educated sorts, so I’m sure you read in the papers how that went. Soon enough, though, the trenches were dug and the boredom started to set in. Now, boredom is fine, understand, when the alternatives are bombs, snipers and gas attacks, but months at a time sitting in a waterlogged hole in the ground, hoping your foot doesn’t start swelling, well… it has a quiet terror all its own. Wilfred came to us in July of 1916. I’m not intimately familiar with his history but he clearly came from stock good enough to be assigned as a probationary Second Lieutenant. I was a Sergeant at the time, so had the job of giving him the sort of advice and support that a new officer needs from a NCO with two years of mud under his nails. That notwithstanding, I will admit taking a dislike to the man when I first met him - he outranked me, and most of the others in the trench, in both military and social terms, and he seemed to treat the whole affair with an airy contempt. There’s a sort of numbness that you adopt after months or years of bombing, a deliberate blankness which I think offended him. He was unfailingly polite, far more so than I was accustomed to in the Flanders mud, where the conversations, such as they were, were coarse and bleak. Yet under this politeness I could feel him dismiss out of hand any suggestion that I gave him or report that I made. It came as no surprise to me when he mentioned he wrote poetry. To be perfectly honest I expected him to be dead within a week. To Wilfred’s credit, he made it almost a year before anything horrendous happened to him, and by the following spring I’d venture to say that we might almost have been able to call each other friends. He had been composing poetry during this time, of course, and occasionally would read it out to some of the men. They generally enjoyed it, but personally I thought it was dreadful - there was an emptiness to it and every time he tried to put the war into words it just sounded trite, like there was no soul to what he had to say. He would often talk about his literary aspirations, and how he longed to be remembered, to take what this war truly was and immortalise it. Were I prone to flights of fancy, I daresay I would call his words portentous. When he talked like that, he had an odd habit of trailing off in the middle of the conversation with a tilt of his head, as though his attention had been taken by a far-off sound. The spring thaw had just recently passed when it happened, and we were on the offensive. Our battalion was near Savy Wood when the orders came down - we were to attack the Hindenburg Line. Our target was a trench on the west side of St. Quentin. It was a quiet march. Even at this stage there was often still some excitement when the orders came down for action, even if it was usually stifled by that choking fear that you got when waiting for the whistle. Yet that morning there was something different in the air, an oppressive dread. We’d made this attack before, and knew that the change from the valley exposed us to artillery fire. And artillery was always the scariest part of it for me. Bayonets you could dodge, bullets you could duck, even gas you could block out if you were lucky, but artillery? All you could do against artillery was pray. Even Wilfred felt it, I could tell. He was usually quite talkative before combat. Morbid, but always talkative. That morning he didn’t say a word. I tried to talk with him and raise his spirits, as is a sergeant’s duty, but he just held up his hand to quiet me, and turned his head to listen. At the time I didn’t know what it was he was hearing but it kept him silent. Even when we crested the ridge, and the rest of us tried to drown out the deafening thrum of artillery with our own charging cry, even then he made no sound. The ground shook with the impact of the mortar shells, and I ran from foxhole to crater to foxhole, keeping my head low to avoid the bullets. As I ran, I felt a shooting pain in my ankle and pitched forward into the mud. Looking down, I saw I’d been caught by a length of barbed wire, half-hidden by the damp upturned soil. I felt a surge of panic begin to overtake me, and frantically tried to remove the wire from my leg, but only succeeded in getting my hand scratched up quite badly. I looked around desperately to see if there was anyone else nearby who could help. And there, not twenty yards in front of me, I saw Wilfred standing, his face blank and his head swaying to some unheard rhythm. And then I did hear it - gently riding over the pulse of mortars and the rattle of guns and the moans of dying men, a faint, piping melody. I could not have told you whether it was bagpipes or panpipes or some instrument I had never heard before, but its whistling tune was unmistakable, and struck me with a deepest sadness and a gentle creeping fear. And in that moment I knew what was about to happen. I looked at Wilfred, and as our eyes met I saw that he knew as well. I heard a single gunshot, much louder than any of the others somehow, and I saw him go stiff, his eyes wide. And then the mortar blast hit him, and he was lost in an eruption of mud and earth. I had plenty of time to mourn him, lying in that dreadful hole until nightfall, when I could free my leg as quietly and gently as possible before crawling back to our trench. It was slow going; every time a flare went up I could only lay motionless and pray, but the good Lord saw fit to let me reach our line relatively unscathed. I was quickly bundled off to the field hospital, which was overburdened as always. They didn’t have much in the way of medicine or staff to spare, and certainly no beds free, so they washed my wounds with iodine, bandaged them, sent me on my way. Told me to come back if I got gangrene.

honestly any of these magnus archives story could make a better horror film than those produced in hollywood...

The voice acting in this one is incredible.

"Did you know that Hamelin is a real place in Germany?" - yep. Been there, it's a cute little town with lovely old buildings. :D

I want to believe that wilfred was used by the piper, or War and was happy to see the end of the fighting approach, even though he knew it would be his doom, because his dead and eventual defect of the vessel that creature used, would mean end of suffering. The imageries where beautiful by the way

I just want to say I've started relistening more carefully to each episode after having devoured all three seasons/beginning of season 4, and this episode is .... Really good. I got very invested in the descriptions, in the relationships between the characters, in the conversations... The description of the piper is awe-inspiring

First read Wilfred when I was about 14 years old. Was immediately taken by him. Reread him many times over the next 60 years. Now this tale will stick with me the few days I have left. Thank you.

oh god when the narrator said wilfred heard a distant flute near the end of the ep i started crying bc i knew what was coming to him

I think we should take notes of the off-hand mentions of people and events outside the stories. I'm sure there's a wiki full of information but it will also be full of spoilers.

Why does this one make me sad? Like... Wilfred... bro...

I’m listening to this series for the first time, and holy shit this story is so good. I’m sure it will fill some role in the worldbuilding, but it could absolutely stand on its own as a haunting metaphor for the effects of war. War is like the Pied Piper: it steals away and murders the youth, all because of the greed of the old. And the Piper handing Wilfred a pen is so poignant: he got his wish of becoming a great poet, but I’m doing so he had to literally give his mind and body to the War.

The Piper's description made me think in a sort of angelical creature, like the sorts of cherubims or seraphims, with all those armas and heads ...

Owens is an actual poet and his poetry is really interesting

"Take no prisoners, give no quarter, Show them all the colour of their entrails on the floor The Kaiser’s men are cattle to the slaughter And their blood will run like wine!"

I teach "Dulce et Decorum Est" to my students. I think I shall connect it with this podcast. Bravo!

I've been learning about the poem "Exposure" by Wilfred Owen for my English exam, and this has made me think about it completely differently. I'll have to mention this to my teacher, she might find it interesting

Ah yes. The sound of battle cries and war cries, and that random haunting tune that keeps coming out of nowhere. Music to my ears.

well this was a weirdly beautiful episode. if you're writing about the horrors of war, ww1 is a deep and familiar well to draw from. as a canadian, i've had 'in flanders fields' drilled into my head from a young age, but like, the message of that poem is to continue the noble fight against our foes. 'dulce et decorum est' communicates the war's ugliness clearly, and identifies blind nationalism as a terrible reason for young men to be sent to kill each other horrifically. the personification of war captured that ugliness really well. i can't say i was expecting historical fiction in this podcast, but this story was an interesting change from the modern statements i've heard so far. the narrator is characteristically grumpy about the organization of the archive, and i'm becoming really fond of that grumpiness.

"Wilfred, you look like hammered shit." "Looks don't count for shit in no-man's land. This is the War, baby."

I don't know what it is about this episode but I just keep coming back for this weirdly poetic story and descriptions

I love the horror genre so much and this podcast does a really great job at being terrifying!

The three head aspect is very deep, the piper face is the political aspect rulers playing the song soldiers are the screaming face represents a war cry of soldiers as with the weapons and the face with dirt and blood is the fallen dead any casualties both civilian and military

I'm starting to notice a pattern Rusty Quills. Not in the story, but your choice in source material. Uniquely expressive poets, regions dull yet with an easily hidden darkness, the uncanny goings on of public servants. You've crafted a world based on trivia, written as a universe in your mind, connected with blood vessels of an eldrich truth. I wonder if you'll ever share with us the origin. Because I know you have it written in your mind. I'm the same way.

This one doesn't feel necessarily evil. Just a truth. Among the darkness of war, War means nothing.

I am absolutely in love with this series. I am also now sitting in a room with all windows barred with various items and my pullup bar as a makeshift staff/club near me as I listen to them. Getting a bit paranoid from binge listening them late at night? Yes, but its worth it^^

The Slaughter statements are always so brutal.

Glad I didn’t discover this whilst doing gcse English, trying to analyse exposure after this would be difficult

This story gets to me because my father, brother, uncles and husband have been in actual wars, not just serving without being in a war. You have no idea the horrors of war I’ve hear and I can tell you, in some of the stories I’ve heard…I’ve seen war!

"Did you know Hameln is a real place in Germany" Me: *literally lives there*

13:09 Oh, there's background white noise. Jon, you're feeding them...

original statement in 1922, I didn't realize the institute was so old. I don't remember the dates of the other original statements but that one got my attention. Thats really interesting

this one hits different now, than it did when it was made, due to current events. This is aging like wine and that fact is genuinely horrifying.

Man, it's real fun to catch things like what Wilfred Owen is on the second listen.

I think The War chose Wilfred as a final sacrifice of the great war. I don't think The War itself is inherently bad or evil, but simply a being that embodies war and decides the fate of it, as well as those who fight in it.

I don't know why but this one made me feel sad and depressed. But not the usual kind of depression I feel, more like the feeling I get from a never ending dream. One that's not necessarily a nightmare but isn't very pleasant either. I couldn't really say if I liked it or not.

i finished 7 episodes today. yeesshhh i think it's time for bed

i cried twice here bro, i dont usually cry either but, i dont know why but the tears just flow when i think of the piper and wilfred even now

This doesn't seem horror as much as it feels philosophical. I think I'm gonna be coming back to this episode again and again

why do i feel like i should be taking notes?

"I met The War." *instantaneous chills*

This one hits hard

Joseph Reyna does sound really familiar but I can't place it. Help!

Ok so no major spoilers please since I’m only up to this episode but did the previous archivist put these stories in this order on purpose because it feels purposeful

I've always felt a pull to Owen's poems which was kinda weird for a 14 yro high school girl but I always keep his poems nearby all these years later. This has been my fav episode so far!

reminds me of that SCP, i think his name was “the old man” or smth like that?? totally unrelated

I still find myself returning to this one. Perhaps it's the context of the great war, the disconnect of time between now and then, and the nature of the statement, all draw me in, not to mention the authorial voice!

Wilfred Owen was an actual dude so this was funky

Does anyone know an artist that draws the creatures from the magnus archives?

I’m not so much creeped out as much as I am in awe of the amazing writing of this episode!! Both the detailed description of “the war” and the poetic comparison of the pied piper myth and war are outstanding to me and I hope the writer/writers of this episode gave themselves a good pat on the back for this one. Very well done

I'm on my first listen of this series, and I have to say I've found episode 4 to be the scariest so far. But this one is just... Sad. I almost cried. It's just so bleak and haunting and visceral and existential all at once.

I found a poem from Wilfred Owens. It is called: Smile, Smile, Smile. It kinda gives me a creepy vibe.

I’m caught up with the whole series but I’m coming back due to hyperfixation and the people in the comments have surprisingly good theories

I really want to see a Bekinski inspired painting of the Piper now...

This is my favorite episode so far! Written very well and the description of War and how it died was bittersweet.

This is the story I keep coming back to. I don't know why, but something strikes out to me on how this man *saw* The War. And began describing them. It sent shivers down my spine the first time I listened

YASSSS I LOVE WILFRED OWEN

This is .... Sadly very fitting~ Heart goes out to Ukraine

that was awesome, very lovecraftian and vivid

This episode hits different man! The description of War... "those men never came back"... CHILLS

Relistening after the finale, and this episode still gets me. I don't know what it is, but this is by far one of my favorite statements.

So looks like war spared him as long as war was going so when it ended Piper took wat was his.

The light music in the background during the statement is such a good detail

What a magnificent work. I liked all the ones before this but this one... there's just something absolutely captivating about it, the kind of story that sticks with you for a long time, it really feels like it has happened, as if War does exist in such form and is able to appear before and rule the fate of people.

this is one of my fav episodes so far... and the description of the concept of war was so interesting i wanna draw it now

One of the stories that will always stay with me, and as fair warning to you, curious reader, it might be the same with you

This is pure literally at its finest I legit can’t wait to see more of the Magnus archives Istg almost gonna believing this might be real at the end of it because of the amount of detail

I really really don’t like the intro music By which I mean I love it but it makes me feel constantly in danger and if there’s any darkness around me I turn on all lights available

This is incredible writing.

Love how I’m learning about the war in history class and listening to this too 😭😭

Johnathan sims!! You are amazing!!

This is the best episode so far.

As a historian, I loved this one.

Ok if this is about the entity of war or destruction (i dont know much i just saw somewhere that this podcast revolves around entities) it reminds me of God of destruction Shiva (from Hindu mythology) also the father of God of War, plus Lord Shiva has the third eye! The third eye when opened destroys everything it sees. Idk if its relevant but i just felt like sharing regardless.

Since this one has actual people in it I’m currently that simpsons *chuckles* I’m in danger meme

I just imagine the classic spongebob meme music every time they mention the Piper

Am I the only one who misses the music from the early seasons? (ex: the music in the background at 5:20)

Ok This is my first time going throught these I think one of the reasons I'm liking them so much, is because, most of the time, the stories are told by a secondary "character" or bystander on the story As the main victim is either dead or missing The only exception is the first one, unless the hanging flying pale person of the halleyway is a human used as a puppet And the story with the coffin, unless the dude that obviously died to it in the end were the main one, but the coffin staid too long with the op OP of that one, so, i dont think so

The bit about the pied piper... That isn't a fairy tale, that shit happened. The story evolved a little, as in the original telling there weren't any rats or an agreement to get rid of them but there's *_hisorical records_* and *_accounts_* from Hammelin in the 1200s that 130 children were lured out of town by a mysterious piper and were never heard from again. It's utterly fascinating, the exact sort of thing statements are made of.

This statement would be an incredible movie

Oh my gosh I so love this!! So creepy and yet almost believable!! And the entrance music! I jump out of my skin!!

I’m new to this series but this is my favorite as a historian very interested in WW1

I know I'm a bit late, but man. I love this podcast, and my hand just slipped..: Child of youth be aware, be warned, For a monster out there, Who hunts the young It's called the War, my dear, my child, Sweeps away life As the wind blows the sand I met the War, my life, my love, I still remember Its sound, its wrath People followed the pipe, the tune, They died young death, Buried in mud The terrifying sound, the cry, the song, Like rats to the river, Young soilders flowed And there it stood, in blood, in sweat, The Piper itself, The Angel of Death Three of heads with no eye, no face, Arms, hands clenched In fists of rage It stood there among the dead, the dust, One face cried, One played the song As I watched in terror, fear and shock, The third face opened, And cried soil with blood A bomb just crashed through flesh and dust, I lost my mind, I cried for mom And as the fire necrose, I died, I swear, My eyes went black, Then cold, I felt And there was it again, The Piper, the War, With its strange melody playing, For which many have died

rayner, huh.

ah one of my faves~ Love that 30's haunting radio music in the background subtly ramping up as the story reaches one of many pitches

this might be my favorite one so far

Be still. For there is strange Bagpipes