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- [00:05]
Connie
To ask for aid. It's hard to do hat in hand to go to you and beg for change or crust of bread. I said I'd rather die instead of let me fall into your debt but somehow still I'm not dead yet My beaten shriveled silhouette, you wince as if I pose a threat then turn just like we've never met. You're listening to spooked Stay step Judgment is brought to you by Progressive, where customers who save by switching their home and car save nearly $800 on average quote@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $793 by new customers surveyed who saved Progressive between June 2021 and May 2022. Potential savings will vary get the apps.
- [01:19]
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- [01:47]
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- [02:29]
Connie
I am not old yet. I'm older. It turns out there's a big difference. I've grown old enough to recall, finally, that magical time when bad things couldn't happen to me. That time when I had no care for a sudden pain in my chest. The time I joyfully answered the unexpected midnight phone call without the slightest hint of terror in my V. Hello. Since then, I've learned my lesson. Every smile does not come from a friend. Some knives you only see after they have drawn blood. And if I could whisper a few words to the younger me, I wouldn't warn him of what I've learned. No, no, because it is so very important. But I never see it coming. Spook starts now. Lessons Learned we're about to hear from Connie, and I want to let sensitive listeners know this story contains talk of drug use, graphic imagery, and maternal mortality. Now, Connie, she's just 22 years old, working odd jobs to stay afloat. And we begin with Connie in the middle of a catering gig with her best friend, Susan at this fancy retreat center out in the woods and up until now, it's felt like just another job with Connie. Connie's about to meet someone who will change her life.
- [05:25]
Geneva
One of the things that happens with people in this service industry is that when the day is done, it's basically understood that everyone is just going to sit around and kind of get to know each other. So we all pour a glass of wine, and we go sit outside, which is on the side of this beautiful lake, and there's a little fire pit. So we spend the next probably two or three hours sitting around and telling stories and talking about the day this woman, let's call her Geneva, begins to tell us stories about her life. She spent a decade or so as a midwife, then became a counselor. For the last a few years, she had been working with hospice patients. I begin to warm up to Geneva pretty quickly, and she starts warming up to me as well. We actually look alike. She's about 20 years older than I am, but we have the same kind of coloring. And, you know, we're sort of built the same. Susan and I have a day or two more of this catering job. Geneva and I, throughout those next couple of days, just continued to get closer, you know, would get lost in conversation with each other. It just felt like we already knew each other. We just had kind of this connection. When we had to leave, it was actually really sad because she lived in a town in Northern California that is about nine hours away. It was a big, almost tearful hug at the very end, and she says to me, I will see you again soon, one way or the other. It was about two months later Susan got an offer to cater a retreat up in Northern California. And she says, connie, you've got to go with me. We quickly realized by looking at the map that this retreat center is very near to where Geneva lives. So we get in touch with her, and she says, come a day early. You can stay with us at our house. The next day, I can help you guys get situated and show you around. I'm really familiar with this retreat center. We finally arrive at Geneva's house around sunset. She welcomes us in and shows us around, shows us where we're going to be sleeping for the night. We sit down around this gigantic table and start eating. And she starts telling us a little bit about this retreat center that we'll be going to in the morning. It originally began as basically a hippie commune back in the 60s and 70s. Eventually, it kind of degenerated into more of a drug commune. There was a culture of just hard drug use. And that's what it became for quite a while. In the morning we drive to the center and it's about a 30 minute drive and it just kind of gets a little more and more remote. As we get closer, the trees start even looking a little larger and the forest gets a bit thicker. And then we arrive at the entrance. It's beautiful. It's lovely. There's a huge, beautiful main lodge. It looks like a log cabin and there's a little garden and a gazebo with a couple of picnic tables. But there was nothing warm or welcoming about it. Just the general vibe is not very warm and fuzzy. But I just try to ignore it because we are here to work. There's no way out of it. So I just kind of put it in the back of my mind. We park the cars and Geneva takes us on a little tour. She shows us this big beautiful main lodge. Just down from there are several cabins. She tells us about the cabins that, you know, back in the day they were all basically tiny houses. We make a final stop at the main office. We introduce ourselves to a woman running that office and she says, okay, great, Susan and Connie, I have you assigned to cabin four. Geneva freezes momentarily. Her face fell a little bit and I noticed it. She didn't say anything about it though. She basically said, okay, all right, let's go. Bring your stuff into cabin 4.
- [11:48]
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- [12:17]
Dubai Ad
Dubai is the world's fastest growing venture capital ecosystem with a stable economic proposition. It has cultivated an environment for early stage businesses to not only grow, but to redefine industry standards. Pioneering government accelerators, an agile regulatory framework will continue to draw venture capital from across the globe. Dubai, where innovation meets investment.
- [12:54]
Geneva
After loading our stuff in, Geneva says, I can't stay. I've got to go. I've got to go. She basically rushes off a little more quickly than I was expecting. It seemed like she just wanted nothing more than to get out of there and it was odd. I did wonder what it was about, but there wasn't really much time to dwell on that at all. We just had to unload everything into the kitchen and get right to work. Anyone who's done this kind of catering work knows that the days are absolutely brutal. You have to be up by about 5:30 in the morning, and usually you're done around 10pm Maybe you get around five hours of sleep or so, and then you get up the next day and do everything all over again. So on the second to last day, I am completely exhausted. We had cleaned up from lunch and we were doing some light prep for dinner. There's a sheet pan of roasted vegetables in the oven. And I open the oven door. I reach in, I feel just the searing pain. Somehow I managed to burn my forearm on one of the rocks. It was absolutely the straw that broke the camel's back. I melted down into a puddle of tears. And poor Susan looks at me and she says, connie, it's okay. Go take a nap. It's okay. I got this. You've got about an hour and a half. Please go get some rest. So I take off my apron, I go outside. I walk across the little garden. I'm gonna go have a cigarette by myself and get some air. And then I'll go back to the cabin to sleep. I'm sitting in this gazebo and I'm trying to calm myself down. I'm breathing and closing my eyes. I open up my eyes and I am pretty startled by what I see. I see a bunch of lights in a grid. It was as if someone had thrown a blanket over the ground. And this blanket was made up of a grid of light. And it was just glowing, a greenish, bluish glow. And it was pulsating. I could not understand what the heck I was seeing. I'm rubbing my eyes, I'm blinking as hard as I can. I'm shaking my head around, you know, thinking maybe there's something in my eyes that's. That's messing with my vision. And no matter what I do, every time I open my eyes back up, these lights are still there. And they traverse the entire property. Any direction that I look, they're everywhere. I say to myself, connie, you're losing your marbles. You are so tired that now you are seeing things. Get yourself together. Go to bed. This is ridiculous. So I'm walking to the cabin, looking down at these lights, and it's like my legs are cutting through them. They're still there. I open the door and I walk straight into my bedroom. Walk those two feet over to my tiny little bed. But I'm blocked by something. I cannot physically get onto my bed. It was like coming up against an invisible wall. I try A few times to push against it and it still wouldn't happen. There's nothing in front of me but bed, so I cannot comprehend what is going on. All of a sudden I just get the distinct sense that someone is in the room with. I start to see something on the bed. A faint outline of a woman. It was made of light. And slowly it begins to take more solid shape. She's not clear enough for me to make out any distinct physical features, but I could see that she was crying. She was just sobbing. This feeling is emanating from her of just the deepest grief I've ever felt in my life. There aren't even words for how sad it was. And it filled every corner of this room. And it was coming directly from this woman in front of me. As I'm standing there looking at her, all of a sudden I get the name Bridget in my head out of nowhere. And I say to myself, okay, her name is Bridget. And I feel like I need to help her. I don't actually touch her. I raise my hands probably about a foot, foot and a half above where her head would be. And very, very slowly I run my hands down the length of her body down to where her feet would be. It just instinctively, automatically felt like the right thing to do. And I can feel sort of a vibration coming from her body. I'm sweeping my hands over her, but when I reach her abdomen, I'm not able to move with such ease. It's like tangled hair that you just can't move your hands through. There was something very obviously there. I'm looking at her abdomen and at first I don't see anything there. But something slowly begins to take shape. It looks like all of these threads, just thousands of threads are wrapped around each other. It was just this wrapped up mess. These threads are glowing the same blue green color as the lines that I could see outside. It's just my impulse to want to start to untangle what's happening here. I just know that I have to unravel these threads.
- [23:07]
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- [23:45]
Geneva
I start using my fingers to kind of tease them away from. From each other, tease them free. It's not like I'm touching a solid thread, but I can still feel it. I can still feel them on my Fingers. There is definitely warmth to it and there is texture. She seemed completely unaware of me. She's still crying. Her body is just kind of heaving with these just deep sobs. But I just felt like I had to keep going. It all kind of started to unfold and make sense. You know, she's here. And whatever this tangled mass of grief was, is why she was here. As I make progress with untangling these threads, the grief in the room begins to dissipate a bit. Once I had untangled this whole thick ball, they were all standing up like grass in a river or something like that. They were kind of swaying. They were still attached to her form, but they were all finally just standing straight up and untangled. And so I began to cut them with my fingers just by moving my fingers through them. As I'm severing these threads of light, the feeling in the room is getting lighter and less sad. And when it's actually complete, it was filled instead of with sorrow and grief, it was filled with the most beautiful feeling of peace. Just utter peace. I just stood there taking it all in. And this woman, she began to disappear. Her form just disintegrates. There's no more blockage on the bed. I look outside side, and I see that this rain had begun to fall. And I couldn't see the lights outside anymore. I look at the clock and realize I still got about a half hour before I have to be back in the kitchen. I still was absolutely bone tired and completely spent. I got into bed. I'm laying there about to take my nap, and there is a part of me that questions if that just actually happened. So my alarm goes off and I head back into the kitchen. I immediately tell Susan, you're never going to believe what just happened. She definitely responds with a little bit of disbelief, just kind of in awe that I'm relaying this kind of story. She just keeps stopping what she's doing, going, what? That's crazy. So we finish out the evening. In the morning, we do breakfast service and pack everything back up into the car and we head back to Geneva's house. We all sat around and ate a delicious meal. It's getting later into the night. Susan says to me, hey, Connie, tell Jenny what happened. You got to tell her that story. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay. So I go into this whole story, tell her all of the details. She's just staring at me with alternating kind of disbelief. And sometimes I would look over at her and she's got tears streaming down her face. I kept stopping Myself and going, ginny, what's up? What's happening right now? And she says, no, no, no, finish your story. And so I do. I tell her exactly what happens when I'm finally done. She says, connie, I have something to tell you. And she begins her own story. 22 years prior, and it was exactly at the same time, in mid summer, Geneva was about seven and a half months pregnant with her first son. At this time, she is still a practicing midwife. And in California at that time, it was illegal to be a midwife. You could be thrown in jail. She got a phone call from someone that she knew at this retreat center when it was still the hippie commune. And they said to her, geneva, you have to come quick. There's a woman here, and she's in heavy labor and she is not doing well. And Ginny says to them, well, just take her to the hospital. And they said, we can't. She's high. This young woman was on heroin. She was terrified of going to the hospital because her baby would be taken away and she would be thrown in jail. So they said, we can't take her in. You have to come. She showed up, and they immediately pointed her toward cabin four. She walks in and the woman is hemorrhaging. They pick up this woman and they bring her into the kitchen, which is what became the bedroom that I stayed in. And they put her on the kitchen table, and she ends up delivering the child. But the woman passes away during the birth. Geneva couldn't stay. She had to get out of there because not only was she an illegal midwife, now this woman has died. She thought to herself, I can't have my baby in jail. I can't do that. She hands this brand new newborn over to someone and says, take it to the hospital. I have to leave. And so she left. As Geneva is telling me this story, she's just sobbing. She says, connie, I've carried that with me for 22 years. I feel it all the time that I was able to be there for this woman. I wasn't able to close it for her. And I always have felt so guilty and horrible that I had to leave her there. She says, you finally closed it. You completed what I could not. Then she looks me dead in the eye and she says, do you know what her name was? And I said, no. And she said, bridget. It was sort of like a gut punch, that feeling when your stomach drops out. I was in disbelief. There was a slight sense of relief as well. I felt validated that, you know, I wasn't making this up. We just sat there staring at each other, both of us in disbelief and trying to digest what all of that meant. We both kind of wonder, you know, if this is the reason that she and I were brought together. I have many, many, many times in my life, you know, questioned if I've ever had an impact or if I've ever done anything truly important. Sometimes I remember what happened and it brings me a lot of comfort because I know that I touch somebody's life, not just in this physical world, but on a whole other level that goes beyond time and space.
- [36:10]
Connie
Thank you, Connie, for sharing your story with the Spook and people. Please understand, Connie is our favorite kind of storyteller, a spooked listener. If you have a story of your own to share, send it to us spooked@snapjudgment.org the original score for that story was by Leon Morimoto. It was produced by Zoe Frigno. So you've heard people say this feels like deja vu or I'm sure I been here before, but I know I've never been here before. That feeling of the familiar is something that we all experience from time to time, like we're walking through an echo of something that has already occurred. But are there those that really do know what's going to happen next, who can tell you clearly the next person to walk through the door who do in fact shout warning of the car crash, tornado, the lightning strike before it ever happens? Do you know someone who straddles this world and a slightly different one where all these things have already occurred? Are you yourself that person? If so, I desperately want to know all about it. I promise I only Share your story with the most amazing community the world has ever known. Tell us your story spooked@snapjudgment.org because there's nothing better than a spooked story from a spooked listener. Spooked@snapjudgment.org warn the other side not to make any sudden moves with spooked gear that lets them know you mean business. Spooked T shirt stuff available right now@snapjudgment.org and remember, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day, get the amazing Stupendous sister podcast Snap Judgment. It is storytelling with a beat. Spook was created by the team cursed never to grow a single day older. But Father Time will not be mocked as Mark Risich takes one on the for the entire crew, there's Davey Kim, Chris Hambrick, Leon Morimoto Teo de Cod, Marissa Dodd, Zoe Frigno, Ann Ford, Eric Yanez, Lola Abrera, Cody Harjo, Doug Stewart, Miles Lassie and Jari Bundy. The Spook theme song is by Pat Mesiti Miller My name was in Washington and it's not that sage doesn't work to ward off dark spirits. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that sage is just one small part of a much longer spell that has largely been forgotten. So much knowledge lost, so many answers buried, secrets burned. But some things. Some things we still remember even now. And the most important remnant of the vast library of mislaid protections is this. Never ever, never ever. Never ever, never ever turn out the lies.
- [39:53]
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- [40:31]
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