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- [00:04]
A
Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aden it shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name. Lenore. It's time. At long last you've crossed over to Spoot. Stay too.
- [00:31]
B
One crunchy bite of a Hershey's cookies and cream bar and I'm taken right back to college. Move in. Day I was a little overwhelmed by the newness of it all. Boxes were everywhere. I needed a break from unpacking. But just as I was able to take a breath and open my Hershey's cookies and cream bar, my new roommate, Rachel walked in. I offered her a piece, but she said no. Then after a beat, she said, actually, those are my favorite ones. So we left. The ice was broken and we've been friends ever since. Hershey's. It's your happy place.
- [01:13]
A
Two years ago, maybe nine, 30, 10 o' clock at night, just finishing things up. Exhausted, I'm driving my car, bumping tunes and keeping my eyes open. I know I'm gonna get home and sleep for days. Where I live. It's kind of weird. You pull off the road and it's a long wooded driveway. Hidden, secluded. That's our place on the left. And I'm almost there. Driving on autopilot, I pulled off this highway onto my road a million times. So I pull off the highway, can't wait to hit these sheets. Speed down the road past the Mormon temple. Dark night, dark night. Sharp turn onto our wooded driveway. Blackness. Almost there. Two points reflect back from my headlights. I slam on the brakes and stop a few inches in front of a baby. A tiny baby crawling on the rocky dirt of my driveway. In the gloom, a little baby. Seven, eight months old. A baby. Then people, mother and father maybe, they come out, they grab the child. Now they're apologizing. So sorry. Just taking a late night walk through the neighborhood or something. So sorry. I actually don't know what they're saying. I'm just staring down at the driveway. The after image of that child's eyes burned into my own. What if? What if. They walk away? I park like wracked with fever. My body starts shivering then shaking. I can barely walk from the car to my own porch to my front door, to the shower. Even bent under scalding hot water, my lips feel cold to my tongue. A baby. I start to laugh. I start to cry. Laugh. Big racking sobs. All of it made plain. The line between this side and that. Just a few inches. A blink of the eye. What if? What if what? Lies on the other shore? No, no, no, no. This year we can't wait until Halloween. Now stories remain unturned. Answers lie hidden in shadow. You've waited patiently long enough. From the creators of Snap Judgment, in partnership with Luminary Media, we proudly present Spooked Season four, our biggest season ever. What if real people, real stories, directly from the mouths of those that can scarcely believe it happened themselves. My name is Glenn Washington. Please, please, please don't leave your baby alone on a dark driveway. Spook starts.
- [05:45]
B
Now.
- [05:45]
A
Then what people say is that the other is the scariest thing. The other. The boogeyman, the vampire, the bigfoot jumping out from behind the bushes or whatever. The alien. Thank you from the foreigner. Now first guess she has some thoughts on the matter. Because what if the thing you see in the middle of the night doesn't look so strange after all? Spook.
- [06:17]
B
I'm Betsy and this story takes place when I'm seven years old. So when I get to go to my grandparents house, it is a big huge deal. Mom not having like a whole lot of money. Plane tickets are expensive. Before I go, my mom always preps me. Now I know they spoil you and I know that they give you pretty much whatever you want. But don't abuse it. Be a good girl. Don't run around asking them to put themselves out or for a bunch of special stuff because you want to be welcome again. So my grandmother's house has these particular guest rooms. One is the dusty rose and everything in it is like these beautiful muted shades of country English rose. Everything's so pretty. And then the other one is the blue room. I chose the Rose room. Before I go to bed, my grandmother wishes me good night. Sleep tight. My grandpa, always with a bear hug and a kiss on a cheek. Good night and we'll see you in the morning. It's so beautiful and comfortable and super cozy. And I fall asleep. And in. In the early morning hours I. I'm dreaming. And in my dream a girl walks up to me. Kind of reddish light auburn hair, brown eyes like me. She's wearing a plain blue turtleneck. And her face gets really tight and her eyes get tense and it's like her jaw kind of clenches. I get the feeling that she. She wants to tell me something but she doesn't. And then her lips start to curl into like this sideways kind of snarl. And the jaw kind of slings off to the side. And the fact that. That she's still staring at me is absolutely horrific. It terrifies me to the point where I wake up out of a dead Sleep. I sit straight up. It is about 5 o' clock in the morning. The room is completely light. I just flopped back down in bed on my back and thought this is an awful scary dream. And then I turned my head to the right and she is kneeling on the floor five feet away from the bed and she's at eye level. She looks exactly like she did in the dream. But then I realized there's a girl in the bedroom. Staring at me. Just staring at me. The way she's looking at me is angry, it's troubled, it's menaced. Her eyes are narrowing, her face is getting tight, her body is not moving, it is not shifting and she is just like a flippin statue which made it scarier somehow. I grabbed the comforter, I put it over my head, I closed my eyes tight and I counted to 10. And in my mind if I do that it'll be okay. And I waited a moment after I counted to 10 and I put the sheets and the comforter back down and she was gone. That. I know that breakfast is going to be ready soon. Mom said not to be a pain. I don't want my grandparents to think that I am going to be difficult or homesickness or whatever. I don't want them to think that because I don't want them to send me back home and I don't want to not be welcome. I don't want them to think I'm going to be in trouble when I come to visit. I'm going to go to the bathroom, wash my face, pull myself together and go out and have breakfast. I left my grandparents house about six days later. When I got home the next day, the first thing I did was I told my mom. She's like, I know sometimes other girls are mean to you and won't let you eat lunch with them and they pick on you in the playground. Do you think that you might have a bully and maybe you can't or you're too afraid to talk to her. So I think maybe it's coming out this way. And what I want you to do is when you go to school I want you to look around and not even in your own class, but maybe somebody you see at recess, maybe somebody you see at lunch on the playground, is this someone that you know? I did not waste any time. The next time I went to school after I left my grandparents, the next time time was when I looked for her on the playground. I looked and looked and I saw a girl who kind of looked like her. It wasn't her, but similar features, hair color, you know, hair length. And this girl had never picked on me at all. But I thought, well, maybe if I walk up to her and talk to her, I'll feel better. So I walked up to her and said, hi, my name's Betsy. What's your name? Do you want to be friends? And she was an absolute doll. Sweet and just super and not at all, at all scary. I liked the idea that, okay, I might have some mastery over this. I might have some control. About six months later, I had the dream again. This girl walks up to me, and she stares at me, and it's a blank stare at first, and then it becomes more angry and more twisted and more contorted. And I wake up, turn my head and open up my eyes, and she's there. Her position is the same as it was before. This is out of control. I saw her face and the anger and the expression, the kind of anger that it's hard to even imagine you can give that dirty or that bad of a look. I don't want to look, but I can't look away. But then I notice that she's not wearing the same clothes. Her hair was a little bit longer, and her face was a little bit fuller. Her body looked like it might be taller, too. And it was then that even in my absolute panic, I realized we're the same age. I have grown and changed in the school year, and she has, too. Fear was still the biggest driving factor and biggest emotion I had around this. And I didn't know if this time would be different, if she would hurt me, if something awful would happen. And I wasn't going to take any chances. So I went back to what worked the first time and threw that comforter up over my face, jammed my eyes shut, counted to 10, waited till I could breathe normal, and then put the comforter back down and looked again. And she's gone. So being a latchkey kid, I have it drilled into my head that you do not answer the door for anybody. There is no reason you should ever let anybody in the house, because if you do, they could hurt you. And once you open up that door, it's out of your hands, and that's what it feels like. I sleep with my door shut. I didn't hear it open, but here she is. What did I do? What did I do wrong? This happens every three to six months for the next seven years. I don't know what to do. I am afraid that if I go to school, if I go to my Girl Scout troop, If I do anything like that and say something, I don't want to give anybody any reason at all to pick on me more than what I was already dealing with. I figured out pretty quick if I am with other people, it doesn't happen. So I go on a personal campaign to get invited to as many sleepovers as possible. And it doesn't happen if I'm on a sleepover. It only happens in my bedroom. And so if I can be out in the living room and watch TV and pretend to fall asleep watching tv, and oopsie. I just didn't make it to my bedroom. It was okay. We got a puppy, not housebroken. And mom doesn't want the puppy on the carpet. The carpet's really super nice. It's very clean. And mom says, put him in the laundry room and put some papers down and some water, and he'll be fine. He starts whining a lot the moment I put him in there, And the light bulb goes off. And I say, hey. He seems like he's scared, and he's just a little baby. How about I sleep in the laundry room with him to keep him company? And she's like, oh, God, you're gonna be uncomfortable. The floor's tile. It's cold. You're not gonna be in there. And I'm like, no, no, no. I really wanna be with him, and I don't want him to be scared. So she's like, okay. Oh, my God. I about let skidmarks running back down the hallway to get my bedding and my pillows and everything and drag it in the laundry room so I could sleep on a cold tile floor with the puppy, because I knew it wouldn't happen if I did that. When I was 10 years old, my mom put a chair in my room next to my closet. I was not organized, and she wanted me to be better organized. She told me that I was to sit in that chair, and that was supposed to be my base of operations for getting dressed and undressed and keeping track of my closet and everything else. That night was like any other night. And I had the same nightmare. And when I turned and opened up my eyes and looked, she was sitting in the chair. That had never happened before, for I didn't know that was even an option. I didn't know she could even do that. I'm looking at her, and her face is angry, her jaw is stiff. The longer I stare at her, the more her eyes narrow and her lips tighten. But, yeah, she again had grown up like me. And all my Friends. I rolled over onto my right side, put the covers over my head, clenched my eyes shut really tight, count to 10, try to take deep breaths, bring the covers back down and she's gone. So I always made sure that the chair in the room was loaded up. And when my mom, you know, when she'd come in, in the morning or whatever on the times that she did and she'd see the chair loaded up, I would just come up with an excuse. Every. As terrified as I was, I was fascinated. Because when I was 11, she was 11. And when I was 12, she was 12. And it was never a different person, it was always the same person. But she got a little taller. Her face filled out a little bit more, her hair grew, but none of it is out of place for that time, for that year, that kind of thing. So it's late summer. This is like the precipice of 13, 14. We have a family reunion at my grandparents house. I get the dusty rose colored room again, which was my favorite. It happens again, only this time the dream is different. In the dream, I wake up and I walk into the parlor area of my grandparents house. And it's cold, frosty, like when you open up a freezer and the cold steam kind of hits you in the face. And I'm looking around wondering where everybody is. And all of a sudden a little girl in a prairie dress with long hair runs past me in the parlor room. And she runs straight to my grandpa's gun cabinet. And you are not allowed to touch the gun cabinet by the door ever. And she runs the gun cabinet and she's staring at it and I start yelling at her, get away from that. Move. Don't grab it. No, he says, no, Grandpa Ike says, you cannot touch the gun cabinet. I'm screaming at her and she turns and looks at me and there's a staircase that goes down to the basement right next to the gun cabinet. And all of a sudden this huge like sucking wind comes up from the basement, grabs her and pulls her down. And I see her body start to twist and turn and I hear her hitting the stairs as she's falling down the basement. This really distorted, distorted, awful like this organ music starts playing and there's heavy thud, thud, thud. Footsteps coming up the wooden staircase. And into the light. There's a man, he's dead and decaying and his flesh is kind of grayish and it's kind of hanging off of him. And he has his arms curled up towards him. And the girl is in his arms and she's dead. Her body is limp. And he turns to face me and walks closer and closer to me and goes to hand her to me. And in that moment it popped into my head. This is your sister and she's dad. I open my eyes and she's there in the room. And she's staring at me. And this time she's just staring. She's not really even angry. She doesn't look happy, but she's just staring. And I did the usual. I put my comforter back up over my head. I closed my eyes tight and I counted and I waited. And when I took the covers down, she was gone. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew I needed to talk to my mom. My mom and I used to go for walks for exercise and just kind of talk and hang out. It's very scenic, it's very pretty. Rolling hills. It's a great place to go walking. So she's like, hey, you want to go on a walk? I'm like, yeah, sure. I'm almost down for a walk. So we're walking and we get to this one point on this one hill and it just escaped my mouth. I mean, it just came out of my face. I blurted out to her, mom, did you ever have any kids before me? And she stopped walking and turned and looked at me and it was like this mixture of confusion and concern and a little bit of panic. And she said, why would you ask me that? I told her about the dream when we had been at my grandparents house. I said to her what it meant for me was that there had been a child before me who had died and I wanted to know what happened. She said, do you remember when you came home from seventh grade and you were so excited because you were in Spanish class and the teacher gave you your Spanish name and wanted me to call you by your Spanish name when we were doing homework. And he wanted you to be in character and your Spanish name was Isabel. And I'm like, yeah, I remember that. She's like, you remember that? I was upset and I refused to call you that. I'm like, yeah, I remember. That was kind of weird. And she said, well, I never told you this because I didn't want you to be afraid that there would be something wrong with you or something bad would happen. But she said I did have a daughter before you and her name was Isabel. And she said she was born with a heart defect and at the time they couldn't really do anything about it. And she was basically told Take your daughter home and enjoy her for as long as you can. And she will either grow up to be very weakened or she will not live very long. And she did not live very long. My mom decided when she got pregnant with me that I would never know. I would never know, and she was never going to tell me. And there were never any pictures and no one ever said anything. At some point in the conversation, she told me that I could ask her whatever I wanted, but only for that time, and that it wasn't going to be a topic of conversation. Even though she told me that I could ask her anything that I wanted, I didn't. I was so relieved to know the truth and to have an answer that I was just stunned by that. After that conversation with my mom, I never saw her. If she came back, oh, my God, the stuff I'd want to know and the stuff I'd say to her, and I'd love it. It wouldn't scare me. And I would apologize. I would tell her that I'm sorry, even though I couldn't do anything about it at the time. I would say I'm sorry that. That I was never able to talk to you. I don't think that's gonna happen. And only for the reason, Matt. From what I can piece together, after I knew the truth, she went away. So I don't know how this works. I don't know how any of this works. I don't have a religion. I don't have a spirituality. I don't. But, like, I've got to feel like, because she never did come back, that wherever she is, since it never happened again, she probably is gone.
- [32:42]
A
Thank you, Betsy, for sharing your story with the Spoot. I need to let you know that Betsy. Betsy's a Spook listener and she reached out to us to share her story. And I want to let you know that we here at Spook, we love listeners stories. Want to hear more of what you've got, Send them to us. Spooked. That's snap judgment.org the original score for that story was by Leon Morimoto. It was produced by Annie Nguyen. Oh, now it's that time. This is just the beginning. The beginning of the beginning. Be afraid, be terrified, be quick, but be here to see it go down. And remember, if you like your storytelling under the warmth of the noonday sun, sunshine, get the amazing, stupendous, incredible Snap Judgment podcast. Storytelling with the beat. Spooked was created by the team whose ghosts look exactly like they do. If you hear him coming running high from Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman. Our chief Spookster is Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Renzo Goriot, Teo Dakota, Marissa Dodge, Greta Weber, Seneca, Tiffany Deliza, Ann Ford and Fernando Hernandez. The Spook theme song is by Pat Mesiti Miller. My name is from Washington Even though the Magic 8 Ball might advise otherwise known this. Your Magic 8 Ball has ulterior motives. Listen to me when I say never ever Never ever, Never, never, ever turn out the light.