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- [00:02]
A
If there really is a line between us and them, when do we go to their side? And why do they cross to ours? From step Judgment's underground lair Listening to Spooked. Stay tuned. Sometimes when I can't find my own darkness, I chase it. I seek it out at the bottom of a glass of Irish whiskey, neat. And if I still can't find that dark place, well, I just try another glass and another. And then maybe another still it will come, that dark cloud, no question. Bad man meet bad space. Yes, this is gonna hurt in the morning. So why am I still reaching for the bottom, you may wonder. Sure, I know better. But better doesn't know me searching out my personal nightmare. Because in that darkness, things are clearer, more distinct. I see their faces in that shadow, laughing, mocking, waiting. All this. All of this. Because I never want my ghosts to sneak up on me. When instead I can sneak up on them. From WNYC studios and snap Judgment's underground lair. My name is Glenn Washington. Hunt your own demons, not the other way around. Spook starts now. So we begin with Cheryl Langford. Cheryl moves with her three kids into a new apartment. With their bag of clothes, boxes of dishes and a can do attitude, they were ready to face whatever the next chapter of life brought them with a smile. But you have to be careful out there, spook listeners. Sometimes you can be too friendly because what you don't know might hurt you. Spooked.
- [03:25]
B
My father was extremely intelligent and extremely controlling. He was used to being the boss at work and he was the boss at home. He wasn't a mean man, he wasn't a cruel man, but he was the boss. And I think because I got married so early, I was 20, I chose a man that was a great deal like my father and ex husband was very controlling. Finally, after 21 years, I had, I guess, the impetus to go ahead with divorce. You know, at this point I didn't even know who I was or what I was or how strong or weak I was. My life up until that time had been defined as a wife. We had three children before I was 25 and I was 40 something years old. And it was time to find out who I was. To keep everyone anonymous. We'll call my daughter Baby Girl. She was still in high school. For my son that still lived at home, he was about 19, call him Middle child. And then we had a friend and he was around 19 who needed a place to live for a while. He had gotten kicked out of his house. We'll call him borrowed child. Baby Girl. And middle kid and borrowed child that made up our family. So found a job fairly quickly. I'm a registered nurse and started looking for a house to rent, and we settled on one. This house really was what I thought would have been a perfect place for our kind of bruised and battered family, because it was clean, it had nice curtains. It was completely empty of furniture except for this one bedroom upstairs. It just had a chair and a single bed. It was very stark. That room in that bedroom upstairs was the only one that there was a lock on the outside of the bedroom door, the sliding bolt. It seemed extremely odd to me. But we all got moved in, got our rooms settled. Borrowed child got the room with a lock, and my other son took the other bedroom upstairs. And baby girl slept with me. And we kind of settled into our routine fairly quick. I usually went to bed fairly early and much earlier than anyone else. My bedroom was isolated at the end of a hall. The kids would all be in the downstairs area Watching television, doing homework, whatever. But one night, I was lying in bed, and I began hearing somebody whistling. It was very soft. It was no tune I had ever heard. Just somebody kind of playing around, just mindless. I thought, well, it's coming from the television. Okay, I guess I'm gonna have to get up and close the door, do something. As I became more aware of it, it got louder and more distinct. It was very clear. And I suddenly perceived that this was coming from the corner of my bedroom. My brain finally focused in and said, there's somebody in here. I was on my side, away from that corner. I turned my head very slowly that way. And that's the first time I saw what I would call a black. It was a mist. It was the height of a person. That was, I think, more disturbing than the whistling. And it was definitely visible from the rest of the room because the light was shining in through the hall door. But as soon as I turned my head, it went poof, and it was gone. And the whistling stopped. And it didn't come back that night. This would not happen every single night. I think I would have run down the street if it had. But after, you know, a few days, I would have some more whistling. Each night when I would hear the whistling, I would turn my head very slightly Because I really didn't want to see anything. And I would see the mist. And that instant that I turned my head, it would disappear. The whistling would stop. Sometimes I would feel like somebody had walked up against my bed, at the foot of the bed, toward the side, and was Nudging would shake and it would shake enough. It felt like somebody's knees were bumping the bed. I just didn't know. It didn't make any sense to me. It didn't. My mind is logical as a nurse and you gotta have black and white. You have a cause and effect. And there was no cause, just an effect. It was almost like somebody was teasing me. Finally I decided we need to sit down and talk. We need to have a family conference also. By this time, Borrowed Child had started sleeping on the living room couch. And he would cover his whole body up like a mummy wrapped up head and all in a sheet. So I sat them all on the couch. I got in front of him and I said, let's talk. I said, there's something going on. Borrowed Child, you're sleeping on my couch. You have a good room up there. And this six foot like one guy who is just a tough guy, he. He actually started to cry. And I said what? Why are you crying? And he said there's something upstairs, there's something up there. And I think somebody's getting into the house. I said why would you think that? And he said because I'm being poked. He said it's always around 3 o' clock in the morning around there. I'll be on my side asleep and I'll feel something poke my shoulder. For him it was almost every night he would get poked and it would get harder and harder and harder. He had been poked. One night he sat up in bed and as he was sitting up he felt his covers moving and he looked down and the bed spread. The comforter and the sheet were slowly being pulled down his leg. And then it just shot off the bed, flew across the room and just crumpled up in this big pile. He was terrified. One night he looked up and he actually saw a man standing in his bed, bedroom door. He was leaning around the door frame looking at him and he said was an older gentleman. He had on like a fedora and he thought he either had on a suit coat or his pajamas. And he said for all purposes, this, this was a real person. He said it wasn't a mist. You couldn't see through it. It was a human. And he said that just about did him in. It darted back. The man darted back into the hall and our old child got up eventually to go look. You could see a black mist walking down the hall going toward Middle Child's room. It faded from the feet up and slowly faded as it went through Middle Child's door. He just passed through the door. He went over to middle child's door. He could hear him snoring. And he knew that my son was okay. And he wasn't gonna open the door because he said he didn't want to see anymore. But that's when he started sleeping downstairs. He said that was enough. I wasn't gonna sleep up there anymore. So I told him that after that, he could sleep on the couch as much as he wanted to. That's when we all. The other kids all chimed in. And they all started talking about things that had happened to them. And they had been happening really, from the beginning, but nobody said anything. I wasn't the only one that had their bed shake. Middle child had. He had an ancient bed. It's a big oak sleigh bed. And he was sitting on his bed reading. And his whole bed started shaking violently. He jumped off of it and turned around to look at it, and he said it still shook. Nothing else in the room was shaking. Just his bed. And there was nobody there. We talked it over, and we have a funny, sarcastic family. And they started talking about this old cheesy movie we had seen years before. And the spook in it was named Bob. So we nicknamed our guy Bob, and that's how he got his name. In the beginning, this was a very cookie cutter neighborhood. The mailboxes for a group of homes would be on a post in a central location. And There were probably 20 mailboxes at each one. So I would trot down there every now and then and get the mail. That one particular day, I did not look at who the mail was addressed to. I figured, if it's in my box, it's fine. I ripped open this particular envelope, and I noticed that the slip inside was this strange kind of pinky orange. It was very outstanding. And I thought, oh, my, have I forgotten to pay something? Because that look. That looks suspiciously like a bill. I actually read part of it before I realized, this can't be mine. This is from a mortgage company. And I saw it was addressed to our landlady. I had met the lady. She had actually come over to the house one day, and she was an elderly lady. She had had all the joints in her hands and fingers replaced, which sounds awfully painful. A very frail lady. This notice was from her mortgage company that she was a month behind on her mortgage payment. I realized that her house payment was much higher than what she was charging me for rent. She had told me she had had financial problems. I knew she was living in an apartment, but I looked at what she owed every month versus what I paid. And I thought, how strange. Why would you put yourself in that situation? It just seemed so odd. One day we were sitting at home and we were all talking about kind of fussing about Bob bugging us. And my daughter said, you know what? I'm going to call our landlady. And I said, yeah, I don't know about that. She said, no, I'm going to call her. I'm going to do it. And you'd have to know Baby Girl, she's pretty headstrong. So she called her, and we were all sitting there, and Baby Girl said, I just want to ask you if anybody's ever died here. And I thought the lady would either hang up on her or say, well, you know, you're nuts. But she said, yes, somebody has died in the house. My husband died there. Of course, Baby Girl's mouth fell open and she said, what was his name? And that's when Baby Girl's mouth really dropped. And she said, well, thank you very much, and hung up. She was very pale, and she said, mom, the fellow that died here, his name was Robert. We just sat in stunned silence.
- [17:34]
A
Oh, it ain't over. It's never over. The stunning conclusion when Spook continues in just a moment. Stay tuned. When we left the story, Cheryl called her landlady and asked some snooping questions about the history of. Of her apartment. And Cheryl learned that her landlady's husband had actually died there, right there in the apartment.
- [18:33]
B
I later did speak to the lady at length, and she was very talkative one day. I don't know why, but she said that they both had been working. They were getting on up in years, but they were still healthy and working. And he became ill and progressed fairly quickly. She never told me what was wrong with him, but he became more and more confused. So she started getting sitters for him to sit with him while she worked. She said eventually they went through all of their insurance and then all of their savings. So they were very desperate. There was nobody to help. When she couldn't afford sitters any longer, she still had to work. She still had to get groceries, you know. That's when she started locking him in his room. She said she really had no choice. She was afraid he would go out the door, wander off, fall down the stairs, and she thought it would be best to just keep him locked in his room. She said he only had a bed and a chair. He had a tv, but she would keep that sliding bolt locked. When she went to Work. That's why the lock was on the outside of the door. So he would spend hours in that room alone and confused and not knowing probably where she was or why he was alone. You wonder just how was he frightened. He probably wondered why can't I get out of this room? What's going on? It had to been traumatic. I remember that when I first moved there, I had gone around and I had locked all the windows upstairs. The windows slid in the tracks and the track in that room was full of pills. Every track was just like a little choo choo train, just full of capsules. I thought, well, there's somebody been in this room that was sick. Being a nurse for so long, I knew somebody's hiding their medicine. Somebody doesn't want to take it. They're suspicious or they're confused. And I think Bob was just putting his pills up there. I have wondered if he didn't die alone. She did say he did die in the house. I've had patients that died alone. And it's got to be one of the most frightening things in the world, world if he was alone when he died. And maybe that's enough to keep you here on, on this earth if your death is traumatic enough. I think she left because I think after Bob passed away, I think he was bugging her too. I think he was still there in that room. As things progressed, he was still there. He was still turning on lights and all the faucets would be left on. I finally had to fuss at him one day and I just yelled out, bob, stop it. You've got to stop this. I was almost crying. And he did. He stopped. So through time, on occasion, we would all just have to say, stop, Bob, stop it. And it was nice to know that you could reprimand Bob. And we just got used to him. He was part of our life. After a year with the lease, I knew that I really didn't want to stay there again. As time got closer and closer, I got everything ready. I got movers to come and everything. I think when Bob realized, because Bob always knew what we were up to, I think he realized we were leaving and he got angry. I don't know if it's because he thought, I'm losing my other family and I've already lost one. Now these people are going to go away. Things just started to. They just seemed to ramp up. I started packing. Lights started turning, coming back on full force worse than ever before. The water started coming back on. The dishwasher even turned on one night and I never had used a dishwasher, borrowed. Child saw him again down in the den one night, and that frightened him. He didn't want to come in the house. And then the worst was the day that we actually moved. The packers had left. They had emptied out the whole house. My son, he was taking his posters out to his car. He was walking down the steps, and I was in the kitchen. I heard this horrendous crash and screams. And I ran into the den, and he was all crumpled up on the landing. Glass and frames everywhere, torn posters. And he said, mom, something just pushed me. He said, right before you got to that last small landing at the bottom of the stairs, he felt two big hands on the back of his back. He said it was very forceful and pushed him. And, you know, at this point, after a year, I didn't question him. I knew it was Bob. And I said, well, let's get you cleaned up and bandaged. And he wouldn't come back in the house. My daughter was upstairs, and she was vacuuming that room. And she came suddenly. She just was hurtling down the stairs, screaming to get out. Just get out. Get out now. And, well, we did. I picked up the phone, and we ran outside into the driveway. She was shaking. And my daughter's pretty tough. She said, mom, you didn't hear that? And I said, no, I didn't hear anything except the vacuum cleaner, which she had left going upstairs. She said, something growled at me. It came from every corner of that room. And she said it was loud. It was a guttural sound, but it was not an animal. And right after she told me what had happened, the phone rang. I had taken the cordless phone with me. It was my mom in east Texas, about 90 miles away. And she was very frightened. She said, what happened? What's wrong? She said, if you had not answered the phone, I was sending the police out there. She said, I have never had a feeling of dread in my life. And she said, I felt like something horrible had just happened to all of you. That night I went to the new place. My kids had set up my bed for me and made it up. And I slept better than I had slept in a year. It just felt like such a weight was gone. I think I think about Bob at least weekly. You know, I think about my divorce, and then I think about Bob. Bob comes up a lot, I think, in different manners. I think we were both trying to gain some control. I just don't think he knew where to turn. He didn't. Maybe he didn't understand death and didn't understand why people weren't paying attention to him. So he would say, hey, look here, here I am. I think we all want to be noticed one way or another in our life. Sa.
- [27:25]
A
To Sheryl Langford for sharing youg Story of the Spook will have a link to Cheryl's memoir, Hot Dog Wars Family Skeletons and a ghost@spookpodcast.org. Please understand this is but one path. The journey is not over. Amazing storytelling under the full light of day, available right now at our sister podcast Snap Judgment. Spook was brought to you by the team that never sees their reflection in the mirror and never cast a shadow. Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman Eliza Smith Erica Lance the original theme song for Spook was composed and performed by Pat CD Miller. The original score was written, composed and performed by Leon Morimoto. And as this curtain between the living and the dead is drawn to the all hallowed eve and you hear the pleas from the other side, begging, whispering, threatening, all for just a taste, just a memory of what went before. You want to help because you're a good person, but whatever you do, don't be led to your destruction. Please heed my call and listen to me when I say never ever, never, never ever, never never. Turn out the lights.