Transcript
Glenn Washington (0:06)
Ours is not to question why. Ours is but to do or to die. You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.
Catherine (0:23)
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Glenn Washington (0:56)
You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and your friends find a place on the beach with a pool and the marina.
Catherine (1:04)
And the waterfall and the soaking tub. Expedia made to travel.
Glenn Washington (1:21)
In this space, this shadowland. People, they often want to make the simple things hard. They want to assume deep mysteries and seek hidden signs and esoteric understandings. But when you walk down the street and see screaming people fleeing back the other direction, it is not necessary to first query the shrieking folk, asking as to the specific nature of their common distress.
Emily (1:53)
No.
Glenn Washington (1:58)
No, no, no, no, no, no. If they are fleeing, follow them. Your little questions or whatnot can wait. It's the same thing here in this place. If you detect a voice, a feeling, a premonition, an intuition, a suspicion, a foreboding, a vision, a hunch telling you plainly that this is not the place you need to be right now. Run. Spook starts now. Now, our storyteller, Catherine, she studied archaeology in college, and when she was a senior, she got to head into the field like a real archaeological dig. She went with all the other seniors, a few professors, to a site that her university owned. But I have to tell you, Kathryn asked us to keep this location a secret for a very good reason, Spoot.
Emily (3:57)
I'm really excited, too, to see a large, like, scientific investigation and to get to bond with these people in my program and to kind of really, you know, put my money where my mouth is as far as becoming an archaeologist. So we meet on a Monday morning in the archaeology lab. We all pack into the bus, and the professor drives down behind us in his pickup truck. We're in the south, but we're not in the Deep South. It's farming, tobacco fields, and we're in a largely agricultural area in a river valley. I'm driving down this little unmarked road. It's not dirt road, but it's close. And this was really in the middle of nowhere. Even compared to our small town. This is absolutely the middle of nowhere. And then you turn into kind of a dirt driveway, and there's this tiny little house. My first impression of the house is that it's kind of cute. It's, you know, probably built in the 1920s or 30s. It's this little white wood siding house with a little front porch. And other than the kitchen, students aren't really supposed to be in most parts of the house, which suits me well because it's full of, like, spiders and cockroaches, and I don't really want to be in there anyways. It's got these creaky wooden floors and these old wooden stairs. And the upstairs, it's got these kind of, like, slanted roofs, and you've got some, like, eaves and some little nooks and crannies around there. It's a cute little house. It's just very small and old. And then over behind the little white house, there's a fire pit and a big ring around it. And then off to one side, there's two pretty rough bunk houses, One for boys, one for girls. No ac, no running water in them. The birds are singing, the insects are chirping. Because we are, again, in the middle of the woods. There's bugs everywhere, and it just feels very cheery, I think is the best word for it. We do the fieldwork like, a solid 30 minutes away. It's not too far as the crow flies, but the way we have to get there, it's. It's a long drive across a river in the middle of this old battlefield, essentially. I can't really say more about the location of the field school or the site that we dig at. We do tend to have a big problem with looters. If they know that there is a native American site there, they could potentially dig up graves or other disrespectful things that we don't want them doing. So it's, you know, we get in and we're, like, looking around. It's like, okay, unload. Like, let's go. We've got jobs to do. So excited but busy is how I was feeling. A couple days later, we come back from site. Our routine is to, you know, you split up, and whoever is on dinner crew goes to cook dinner. And then everyone kind of naturally congregates around the fire pit until dinner is ready. Our professor grabs everyone's attention in a way that we can Tell he's going to kind of make an announcement. The professor goes on to tell us that, you know, the school had bought the property. You know, he told us that they did have to bring on some volunteers and go clean out the house, take all the personal effects out of the house and make it right for our field station purposes. While they were doing this in a crawl space up in the upper floor, they found this diary that had belonged to one of the daughters. He tells us that the property was previously owned by a family. The father worked at the mill and he was an alcoholic and abusive. He got laid off one day and came home and shot his two daughters and his wife and then himself. We're sitting in a circle. It's really easy to see everyone's faces. And most people are somber and shocked. I was just thinking how terrible. And he pretty much says that since there was no other family that they knew of, they decided to just respectfully dispose of the diary by burning it that night and hope that it would kind of set things to peace for that family. And he was just saying, you know, just so we're aware, there's, you know, people have said they've heard things or seen things, but no one had really had any experiences themselves. I am, you know, very much inclined to believe him because he's my professor and I know him pretty well and I trust him. But at the same time, I think that it sounds a little far fetched. Eventually people start saying that things are going missing and coming back up places where they shouldn't be, or that they are seeing shadows at night and stuff like that. I do have a friend who one night he is laying awake in his bunk. He's got a window next to his bunk and the light from the bath house was kind of illuminating the area. And he sees this big tall shadow just slowly walk past his window. And in his words, I think his response was nope and just turned over and decided to ignore it. What freaks him out is that the whole camp is covered in mulch or gravel and you can hear people walking pretty easy. And he doesn't hear any foot footsteps go by with this big shadow. But other than that there were just. Just little things. The stories are prevalent throughout all aspects of camp life. I think they're really fun and I like to hear about them, but again, I don't really think that there's much truth to them. We leave the site around three or four, pack up all our gear, drive back to the camp, and then everyone just ends up hanging out around the campfire until dinner's ready. It's not uncommon for alumni to kind of drop in and out throughout the field season as they're able. And one of our more involved alumni had just arrived at camp, you know, just to kind of help out in general for a week or so. He's hanging out with the professors and the assistants during dinner and all that. And then eventually people start to go, oh, like hey, like you know anything about this weird stuff that happens here. He's like, well, yeah, actually I, I have an experience with that.