Introducing the Fountain Road Files, a new horror fiction podcast from unexplained creator Richard McLean Smith.

In March 2020, 27-year-old Cafe worker Ben Williams began recording an audio diary of the coronavirus pandemic.

Two months later, he was found dead in the South London flat where he was spending lockdown alone.

Also, he thought.

Search the Fountain Road Files wherever you get your podcasts and for more information, go to thefountainroadfiles.com.

Welcome to unexplained extra with me, Richard McLean Smith.

Where for the weeks in between episodes we look at stories and ideas that for one reason or other didn't make it into the previous show.

In the last episode, you in there, we got a little eerie in Indiana with the story of Latoya Ammons and her beleaguered young family.

Back in 2012, Latoya became convinced that she and her children were being tormented by demonic entities but their home in Gary Indiana.

After an assessment by the Department of Child Services, it was decided that it wasn't demons at all that were plaguing the family, but Latoya's overactive imagination.

As a result, the young mother of three was separated from her children until she could essentially demonstrate that she no longer considered demons to be real.

Or rather, that demons may be real but they couldn't have any tangible effect on her reality.

Because to accept demons and evil entities weren't real, would effectively mean Latoya having to accept her faith and the God she believed in was not real either.

Because all these things are in many ways contingent on each other's existence.

This of course was not how her case was written up, but in practical terms this is what the assessment amounted to.

Yet this is something that would most likely never be asked or expected of her by the State Department of Virtually Any Nation, no matter how secular its society.

And here is a strange conflict that often pervades this kind of story.

But even in the most secular societies, where medical institutions will have no problem in referring to a belief in demonic entities or the thought that you might be possessed or that you're hearing voices as being reflective of a delusion.

Rarely, if ever, will an individual's belief in a God or higher power in the traditional sense be undermined in the same way.

Which isn't to say that I think people should, therefore, be encouraged to believe in demonic entities, but rather just to draw attention to how thin the line is between those potential fictions we are more willing to indulge and those which we are not.

Stories about things that may or may not be true aren't of course restricted to the supernatural.

So much of our world and how we comprehend it is based on fictions that can become so ingrained we can often take the granted just how mutable and arbitrary they really are.

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