Jenny Finney Boylan (8:14)

We moved in in early August of 1972. My parents, my sister and I walk into this house with our three dalmatians, and instantly it is clear that the previous owner of the house fancied himself an amateur interior decorator. This elegant living room was black rooms painted crazy colors. The family room had these, like, Wagon wheel chandelier things hanging from the ceiling and zebra striped paneling on the walls. The reason my parents could afford it, though, was that it was in such crazy bad condition. My father said, let's go upstairs so you can choose your rooms. The second floor was even darker than the first floor. My sister immediately chose her room. My father, mother picked the room next to it, which was, I guess it was the master bedroom. I went into the last room on the second floor and I see this room that looks like a girl's bedroom with these kind of frilly curtains on the wall. I loved that room. And I said, is this going to be mine? My mother said, no, we thought you'd like to be up on the third floor. That's where the boys of the previous family, the Hunts, had lived. I kind of went up there and looked around and thought, yikes. It had this just kind of creepy vibe. There was an absolutely creepy vibe in there. It was dark, and it also had this kind of creepy yellow wallpaper that featured what looked like sheet music. And then there was this bathroom with marks on the ceiling where the rain leaked through the roof. And I said, oh, I have to be up there, but you're all gonna be down here. And one of my parents said, well, you can have your own empire. So I was like, okay, I. I guess I'm gonna have my own empire. One night my parents went out and I was determined to scrape off the wallpaper in my bedroom. I had this can of paint. It was this kind of, you know, electric hippie blue. And I started tearing up the wallpaper, just ripping it down left and right. While I was scraping off this wallpaper, I felt something was watching me. Something. I felt it so, so strongly. One part of me is just aware of what I'm feeling, and the other part of me is saying the way you would. There are no such things as ghosts. Don't be an idiot. I kept slicing the paper, and that's when I noticed something. Underneath the wallpaper were all of these scribbles and drawings. Right there at shoulder level, there was a line that said, in this room, in the year 1898, lived Dorothy Cummins, who was not of sound mind and drowned. Pulled off this big chunk of wallpaper. And I noticed below knee level, there were a bunch of children's drawings, as if some, you know, a kid had been drawing on the wall and scribble. There were some wavy lines that might have been the ocean, a sun, a moon. And there was a face. There was a face of a woman with this long hair. It wasn't a great drawing, and it had been underneath wallpaper for a long time. I put two and two together. So there was someone in this room who was not of sound mind. And now here are these drawings. So I just assumed that it had been that woman in the drawing, the one who had drowned. That's the story I assembled in my mind. It was creepy and, you know, I'd paint it over and all those drawings disappeared. Living in that house was all a big. A very big change for us. But also, I was about to enter ninth grade, and that was really scary. I went to this all boys school. It was a place where, you know, we had to wear coats, we had to wear ties. Everything was about football. I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to be a musician. When I was home, I'd spend most of my time in my room by myself. It was a place of quiet. It was a place of peace. And on the third floor, there was this storeroom. In that room, of course, went all the garment bags and the, you know, clothes of my mother and my sister. As a kid, I'd play this game called Girl Planet, in which I believed I was an astronaut who had crashed on a, you know, an alien planet. But here's the deal. In that place that girl planet, the atmosphere changed you into a girl. It just happened. And your clothes changed to a girl's clothes too. Bang. So, you know, on the third floor, there's nobody up there. Every day I come home from school, I go in there, I grab one of the dresses and I slip it on and go into my room and pull the deadbolt and sit down and do my homework. And then when I was done, when it's time to go to sleep, I put them back. There was one night I woke up at, like, 2 in the morning and I noticed that my dog was growling. My dog was called Sausage. She was this kind of fat, Dalmatian dog. And I love that dog like crazy. Suddenly, I hear a creak out in the hallway. Another creak. So I got up to check things out. And then I noticed the door to the bathroom was open. And I went into the bathroom, and there, over my shoulder, I saw for a second in the mirror this old woman. She was not terribly old, but she was old enough. And she had long blond hair. She had green eyes. She had, like, a long white nightgown. And I noticed that her hair seemed wet. I turned around and there was no one there. So I'm freaking out, and I run back to my room, lock the door, and I get into bed and I'm just like, nope, that didn't happen. I just lay down there waiting to fall asleep. On that third floor. That feeling I had that I was being watched, I always had that feeling. Sometimes I'd find the bathroom door open and I don't remember it being open. Had my mother been up there? Had my sister been up there? Had I just not closed it? I don't think my sister or my parents ever felt any of this. One time I remember asking my mother, mom, do you ever feel scared in this house? Do you ever feel. Do you ever get the creeps? And she said, oh, of course not. It made me sad because it meant that I couldn't explain to her the thing I was feeling. But, you know, I couldn't talk about a lot of things. It had been another typical night for me. I'd come home from school and managed to sneak into my sister's bedroom. My desire was to grab some stuff from her hamper. You know, that's where she'd throw out her blouse and her skirt at the end of the school day. So I go in there. There was a green paisley skirt and a blue blouse and the little blue blouse. It had these little mirrors in it. I ran back into my room of course, and pulled the deadbolt. I did the switcheroo. And at that moment, I got that weird feeling again. I felt the eyes watching me. I did my homework, I did the switcheroo back and was time to go to bed. But I needed to put everything back where it was. I went down the creaking stairs and I stuffed them back in the hamper. And while I was in there, I thought, oh, no, what if they hear me doing this? So I went into the bathroom and I flushed the toilet to make it seem less suspicious. I went back up the stairs to the third floor, got in bed. I went to sleep. Somewhere around 3 o', clock, 4 o' clock in the morning, I heard my mother screaming. I turned on the light by my bed. The light didn't go on. There's this kind of roaring sound, like we're in the middle of a storm or something. And my mother is screaming from downstairs. And I opened the door and walked down the stairs to find this waterfall ankle deep on the second floor, pouring down the stairs and pouring through the rungs on the banister. My sister is in the hallway and she's pointing to the bathroom, the one that I'd used before when I grabbed the clothes out of that hamper. And now I see that the toilet in that bathroom is overflowing. Water just pouring like a fountain. So my mother and my sister and I are walking around and there's just water pouring everywhere. Now we hear this giant crash from downstairs. We all go down the main staircase and into the living room. And that's when we saw it. The kitchen ceiling just collapses, Crashes onto the floor. The plaster is everywhere. Here comes Sausage coming down the stairs. And we go out into the front hallway, and at that moment, the living room ceiling will burst. Plaster wood just rains down on us. My sister went to the front door, swings it open, and this water just gushes out onto the porch. So now our house was wrecked. I mean, like, really, really wrecked. They spent like the next week pumping water out. My first thought was, this is all my fault. This is because I flushed that toilet. But I remember thinking, what was that girl, Dorothy Cummin? She was of unsound mind and drowned. And the last time I'd seen her, her hair was wet. And now here's my house. What does that mean? It began in earnest, the process of changing that house from what it had been into what it was gonna become. New wood flooring went down. The living room, which had been black, was finally painted a tasteful off white. Down came all the old Scary wallpaper. And in a year or two, that house was almost unrecognizable from the place that we moved into. It was the beginning of kind of the next part of my family's life. But when I got out of college, I moved to New York City. And I forgot everything about Dorothy Cummings. I would visit my mother pretty regularly. My mother loved that house, and she'd lived in that house all that time. Just around When I turned 40, I think it was 2001, we were in what had once been the room with the wagon wheel chandeliers and the zebra striped wallpaper. Now, of course, it was an elegant family room. My father was long dead. But by then I poured her a gin and tonic, her favorite on a Sunday night. And I said, mom, there's something I have to tell you. And so I told her I was Trance. I'm sorry I never told you when I was a child because I was afraid you wouldn't love me anymore. And that's when I began to cry and shake and just sob. But my mother reached out to me. She said I would never turn my back on my child. In my mother's last week or two of life, we had home health care nurses looking out for her. But one night, one of the home health care nurses quit. She'd gone into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. And in the mirror behind her, she saw the face of an old woman. She turned around, and there was no one there. So there was still something up there, something still living in that house. In 2011, my mother died at the age of 94. You know, we did the thing people do. My sister and I selected the things of our parents we wanted to keep. The rest went off to auction. There was one day when, you know, moving vans came, and I was just kind of overseeing the whole business. I was there by myself in the house. And I climbed the stairs and I sat down in what had been that room with the yellow wallpaper. And I started weeping and crying. I felt the passage of the years and the loss of my parents, whom I really loved. And also I remembered how much I had carried something that I just didn't have the language to talk about. Eventually, I got up and I went to the bathroom and I looked in the mirror, and there was that old woman looking at me again. But I realized it wasn't a ghost. It was me, age 55. It was the woman that I'd grown up to be.

Host (27:56)

Thank you so much, Jenny, for sharing your story with the spooked Jennifer Finney. Boylan. She's the author of 19 books, including I'm Looking through you, Growing Up Haunted, where you can read more about her experiences living in the that house. Also, her new memoir, Cleavage, Men, Women and the Space Between Us is out now. We'll have links to Jenny's books in the episode. Description the story was scouted by Elliot Lightfoot. The original scores by Nicholas Marks. It was produced by Eric Yanez. Been here before, done this before. You ever watch a child sleep? Innocent, peaceful. Bruce Liner used to watch his son sleep. Little James, just two years old. Perfect, perfect little boy. Till one night the screaming stops. Airplane crash on fire. Little man can't get out. Bruce rush in to soothe his little boy, tell him everything's gonna be all right. But night after night, 2:00am, 3:00am this baby boy, he wakes, thrash and kicking like he's trapped inside something. Little man can't get out. Well, now this mama holds him close and asks, who's this little man? James looks up at her, terrified, and says, me. Little James had never seen a war movie. Just two years old. He watches Barney plays with blocks. And he starts saying things. Specific things. So this plane got shot down. The Japanese did it. So he flew off a boat called the Natoma. Natoma, Bruce's pops and thinks this is crazy nonsense. But. But for some reason, Bruce searches anyway. Goes through old records, old books. Then he finds it. The USS Natoma Bay is real, an escort carrier in the Pacific. And Benny learns it. One of his pilots was killed at Iwo Jima. His name was James Huston Jr. And here Bruce has to shut down his own little research project for a little bit. Understand? Bruce was raised Baptist and his reincarnation is not part of his worldview. But his little boy keeps talking. Little James says he has a friend named Jack Larson. It turns out there was a Jack Larson who flew with Hudson on the Natoma Bay. Little James says his plane got hit in the engine. Eyewitnesses saw Hudson's plane take a direct hit to the engine before it exploded and plunged into the sea. Will James draws pictures of aerial combat, explosions, signs of James three. Why three? Cause I'm the third. James James Hudson Jr. Was James Hutchinson II. After many more hours of research, many more deep family conversations, Andrea James mother learns that Hudson's sister Ann, she's still alive. James Hudson's baby sister, 84 years old and still grieving. And Andrea sets up a phone call. This little boy began speaking to a woman he'd never met. Calls her Annie. Only James Hudson Jr. Ever called her that. He knew their father drank. He knew he had to go away. He knew their mother painted Ann's portrait when she was a little girl. Private things, family things, things not in any book. After they put down the phones, Ann sends a package to young James, along with a letter. She includes her brother's belongings, family heirlooms, gifted, returned as if they are his own birthright, a model plane, a bus to George Washington. She starts calling him James 3. He calls her sister. When James 3 turns 11, his parents take him to Japan. There they travel to Chichijima, the small island nearest to where Hudson's plane went down. They motored out in a rented fishing boat to the exact spot, and there, weeping James drops flowers into the water, a memorial to himself, for himself, from himself. This story is from the most extensively documented cases of past life recollection ever. I want to thank the family for the rash of interviews, writings, even publishing the book Sole the Reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot by Bruce and Andrea Ledinger with Ken Gross. I also want to thank Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia, who documented this case extensively in his research on children's past life memories. And if you have a story for Spooked, please let me know spookednapjudgment.org because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Be careful because Spook Studios is sneaking up behind you right this moment. Don't look back. Don't look back. Even if you can't see it, you can feel it. Don't seek to find it. Let it seek to find you. KQD in San Francisco is where we hide the secrets. We've got the special incantations from Spook Legal Reading that know SNAP Studios content. They be used for training, testing or developing, machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. On Team Spooked, the union represented producers, artists, editors and engineers are members of the national association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL CIL Local 51 and Spooks is brought to you by the team that does not trust mirrors, especially Mark Ristich. He refuses to believe that's what he looks like. There's David Kim, Zoe Ferrigno, Eric Ganez, Elliot Lightfoot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Teo Dicott, Regina Bediaco, Polina, Creaky, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Lithia Matu, Lulu Jemima, Doug Stewart, Nicholas Moss. The Spook theme song is by Pat Mesiti Miller. My name is from Washington and I'm pretty sure that this is my first time through this world My first pass. I could be wrong but I can't remember anything else and I hope that when my time here is done that I don't feel the need to return But I know right now I'm not done. I'm unfinished. See apologies must first be made. Wrongs must be righted. Wines tasted, art seen, hugs given stories shared. So, so much to do. But instead, instead of rushing to do it I find myself doom scrolling their latest outrage on my phone. What a gift. What an amazing gift it would be to take that final rest and feel complete. Like. Like okay, I did that. Let us laugh together one last time. But to me make that happen. I must first get very, very, very lucky and then I must get very, very busy and murder this electronic thief of dreams. Because I know. I know with absolute certainty My real horror is regret. Never ever, ever, ever turn out light.