Summary
Highlights
Rosie receives an email from her best friend Jennifer, requesting a mandatory $250 donation for her wedding. This revelation strains their friendship, leading to a confrontation where Jennifer admits her financial struggles and fear of judgment, and Rosie reveals her anger at being charged to attend a wedding. Despite the fight, they reconcile a week later.
An anonymous note from her neighbor, Dylan, blackmails Rosie with a video of her fight with Jennifer. He demands five tasks be completed, starting with baking a pie. The tasks escalate, involving daily walks, watering her garden in a specific dress, and baking a pie every day while watching him play video games. Rosie, initially resentful, starts to enjoy the peculiar routine and the attention, but then Dylan abruptly ends the arrangement, having found a new girlfriend and deleted the video.
Feeling betrayed, Rosie records incriminating footage of Dylan and his new girlfriend, Charlotte. She then blackmails Dylan in return, making him complete five tasks for her. These tasks include baking her a pie, taking her to the movies, buying her groceries, having zero contact with Charlotte for a week, and finally, spending seven nights at her place while she feeds him pie and he plays video games. Rosie deletes the video on the seventh night, ending their manipulative exchange, and confides in Jennifer about the ordeal.
Lily and Mike travel to Blackwood Creek, a supposedly immersive ghost town experience. They opt for the 'solo tour' after encountering a mysterious gatekeeper named David. Inside the town, they find unsettlingly vacant 'actors' and are eventually led to a hut with an old TV. The TV screens a horrifying, grainy black and white video depicting a massacre in the very town they are in.
Shaken by the disturbing video, Lily and Mike leave the ghost town. They later receive a refund email from Last Eagles, stating their tour was canceled due to their guide's illness and a policy of no tours without a registered guide. Upon calling, they discover that Blackwood Creek was closed that day and their gatekeeper, David, was actually David Holloway, the leader of the historical massacre, implying they encountered a ghost.
Staying at an AirBnb, the narrator witnesses her neighbors, James and Pamela, arguing, which escalates into Pamela seemingly murdering James with a lamp. The narrator calls 911, but James appears alive, and Pamela claims it was a prank. The police, annoyed, warn the narrator against false reports.
Later, James secretly enters the narrator's bedroom, claiming Pamela's pranks have gone too far, and he fears she'll kill him for real if he leaves. The narrator reluctantly agrees to let him hide. Pamela checks on the narrator, looking for James, but the narrator lies. The next morning, the narrator is woken by police, only to find James dead in her room, a knife in his face. Pamela has framed the narrator for the murder, who is then arrested and faces trial.