And That's Why We Drink - Listener Stories: Vol. 65

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

Welcome to Pisces season! We're all half a fool here, especially little Leona on her almost half birthday. Join us this month for a rolicking spooky time with stories that include the near alien abduction of some traipsing teens, a life-saving omen from Jennifer Love Hewitt and a couple of Swiss witch journalists who sent us audio proof of their podcast haunting. Also, are we cosmically boring? ...and that's why we drink!

welcome to march everybody the rain has healing energy today is uh leona's five month birthday oh fun she was born on the first so it's very easy to like track you know like for the rest of time and it's like a random july 1st you're gonna be like you were 700 months old well uh her half birthday is april 1st which is kind of fun she's a little fool she's half a fool she's half a fool we're all fools really yeah yeah uh very fun well it's also pisces season so welcome everybody god i like pisces season well you know what pisces season means eva's birthday yeah is that what it means that's what it means to me okay that's all that it means to me it's the only thing yeah uh happy early birthday eva and all other march babies and also happy five month to our little half fool. Her little half fool.

She gets to celebrate partially with everybody. That's nice. Um, also, uh, this is where, you know, that meme that always comes up where it's like,

don't do it on Valentine's day. Yes. Scorpios. All those people are now currently pregnant. Um, I don't know if they've announced it to people. I hope you're happy. Know within yourself what you've done and you know what you did there's a little scorpio half it brewing if you will and i don't like it that's exactly right we don't we don't

feel great about it um it's the only downside to pisces season i think is that the new scorpio generation is coming on up talk Talk about a bunch of fools. Talk about it. Anyway, everybody, welcome to March. We are in the third month of 2022. So far, it's all right. I'm we're white knuckling it through this whole year. How is your how were your first two months of the year, Christine? Oh, thank you for asking um they're okay we went back on tour which is actually really fun i feel like we've well okay maybe not for you not for i've had i'm going through it folks i'm having a great time living my life i went with uh blaze

and leona came with me as little groupies to our east coast leg um yeah but how are your first couple months em uh i'm trying to think what i did all of january i feel like i've really been go go go since christmas i feel like i really haven't sat down and gotten to like have a me day yet i did when we were in when we visited new york i got to spend a couple days to myself which was nice but i think before that i was just like prepping things for the show or i don't know I felt like a really stressed in the last you know what it's so weird like you came to Cincinnati briefly to like I did the show and everything and meet the baby and it just all feels like a big blur somehow it does oh that's why the year started out stressful because my flights kept getting delayed during new year's trapped oh my god i was

trapped i tried i got seven different flights and all of them got canceled you guys are lucky that i was not recording yet because we would have just complained about that well i guess we're doing it now but we would complain about that for days on the show and kept getting trapped and we were like that we had to end up canceling our first leg at the tour because of COVID. Yeah, it was like a disaster. But anyway, I guess we're sort of on the up and up question mark. Yeah, I think I was hoping like, oh, the first week was kind of wild. So let's hope it just stays there. But then it was just a lot of like, either I was traveling or other people were traveling

to see me. So I just, you know, it's been a little chaotic. But I guess I thrive in chaos. So I know. I'm always like, it's so chaotic. And I'm like, know, it's been a little chaotic. But I guess I thrive in chaos. I know. I'm always like, it's so chaotic. And I'm like, but when it's not, I'm like, I'm bored. So, you know, it's like, what are you going to do? It's like that constant chase of dopamine.

All right. So anyway, thank you to everyone for sending in your stories for this episode. If you are new here and this is your first listeners episode, welcome. On the first of every month, we put out a listener story or listeners episode where we read stories you've submitted about your personal true crime and paranormal stories. If you'd like to do that yourself and be in the running for next month, you can send them to our website.

And that's why we drink.com. And when I'm supposed to send them to our website, like don't write that on the envelope, like go on the website. There's, like, a form. It's a whole thing. You'll figure it out. You got it.

Together, we make sense. Well, half sense. I don't know. All right. So here is the first story. This is from Philip, who uses he, him pronouns. Thank you for normalizing pronouns, Philip. And the subject is ghost caught on Zoom.

Oh. Oh, my God. I see one right there it's me uh loving that there's like a technologically savvy ghost it is you know they always complain like ghosts are all victorian era but i like this modern age ghost it makes me wonder if it's gonna be a victorian ghost who like slipped through and like somehow got on zoom or is it like a millennial ghost who's like i know zoom pretty well i can mess around with the millennials like i'm trapped in a meeting for the rest of my eternity no hell that's hell actually personal hell uh all right the story goes hello m christine eva all the pets all the fruit all the spouses and all the guest hosts and of course the new baby oh hello so kind so inclusive wow uh my wife and i absolutely love you and have been listening for years when we were in grad

school in athens ohio hey oh you binging and that's why i think that's exactly what he probably wanted so uh binging and that's why we drink helped the drive across indiana during trips home feel less like torture in slow motion and now that we live in chicago uh you helped me pass the time commuting on the red line in honor of the bengals playing in the super bowl in a few hours i would rather not bring that up why are you bringing that up philip i thought we were friends because philip said they'll be playing in the super bowl in a few hours. So I think Philip had some high hopes. That's what happened. He jinxed it.

Yeah. Okay. Well, Philip, you heard it here first. It's your fault. I wanted to send in one of our ghost stories from our place in Athens. I got my MFA in acting from OU and the last year was spent on Zoom. Not ideal, but at least our cohort could still be together in class oh my god acting i never even thought about that that's tough i never even thought virtual yeah in my mind

it feels like a chunk of it is like still able to happen because like you can just stand in front of your camera and act but i also understand like you don't get to like take up space on a stage or something i don't know i don't know enough about acting but i could see it as an advantage or a disadvantage of like you can keep acting just yeah that's tough just in your pjs um i still think of when rj was teaching swimming oh my god that was right that makes a lot less sense athletics via zoom seems very difficult yeah yeah i don't he i just remember him like basically teaching kids to manifest that they'll swim again it's so sad um on a sunny fall day around 2 p.m i was in one of those zoom rooms watching a classmate work our work could get

pretty personal and so the vegas rule vegas rule was very much in effect I don't know what that means but cool it sounds like Vegas like Las Vegas right what if it's um like um what if it's like the house always the house always wins hey okay okay I love that anything that was shared in class oh i found it oh whatever happened stays okay so stupid how are you so dumb also emmy was right there and you did you let me go on a fucking dumb ass mental journey 100 didn't even choose to read on as embarrassing as you could have been there god okay anything that was shared in class stayed in class we even choose to read on. That's embarrassing. The answer could have been there. God. Okay. Anything that was shared in class stayed in class. We even like to make sure that all of our individual doors were closed in case people had roommates.

Oh, that's nice. Everything was normal until my classmate stopped what she was doing and said, hey, for real, Philip, are you alone? My door was closed and I was the only one home. I said, yeah, what's up? To which she kind of paused and said, I'll tell you later and finished her presentation. So naturally, I immediately grabbed my phone,

shoved it under my desk and without looking, text her to see what was going on. When she texted me back on the screen, it said, I saw a hand reach across your body. Okay. Well, now I'm just nothing but nerves. Now my wife and I have both lived in haunted and haunted places before so my first thought was absolutely ghost yeah me too yeah yeah but i have a habit of swiveling in my chair to stay engaged so i told her i was sure it was just me turning

to the side and scratching my shoulder or something mystery solved until she replied i don't think so it would have been pretty painful for you to get your arm in that position. And besides, the hand I saw was frail and a woman's. She's just a fan of the arts, everybody. Okay. She just, she wanted to be in on the acting. That's why you saw a velvet lined cape come through too. She was like, oh, my moment has arrived.

She was actually like doing like an old fashion like pulling a cane out onto the stage and like yanking you off of them uh my wife and i had a few strange things happen in that apartment hearing voices smelling cigarette smoke and disappeared a disappeared can of beer we never found oh she's a partier i like her i do too enough so that every few months we'd stand in the middle of the living room and tell whoever was there that we were fine sharing space, but we'd prefer if we didn't see, hear, or sense them. But we're not fine sharing beer.

But yeah, give us our beer. Maybe whoever was there with me in that office just didn't know they'd get picked up on camera. So maybe not a technologically sensitive guest. No, probably not. It never felt negative or scary maybe it was just a past tenant hanging out but we do have a friend who is sensitive and she refused to go into that room oh don't love that she said there was someone in there who did not like us being in the apartment oh no she's been to our place in chicago and didn't feel that same negative energy okay that's

good so lisa didn't thank god so who knows i will say the apartment didn't feel that same negative energy. Okay, that's good. So Lisa didn't follow them. Thank God. So who knows? I will say the apartment didn't have any scary vibes whatsoever to us. It was just a duplex that got passed from one grad student to the next, and it was sunny and inviting and full of creativity. It's our favorite home we've had together. I guess it just came with a roommate. Sorry for the long story, but I love Athens so much and wanted to share this on a day that means so much.

Go Bengals. Uh-oh. Best, Philip. Also, I wonder if any other OU student just moved into an apartment and is like, oh my God. They're like sunny, creative. I feel safe here. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Anyway, thank you, Philip, for that story. That is a great story. I really like it. Athens is not far from me. My dad really wanted me to go to Athens to OU for journalism because his hairstylist told him it was a good school. You didn't have to finish the sentence.

We kind of knew it wasn't going to end with a lot of logic. A lot of logic. Every time I tell my dad something, he's like, no. And then the second, and then I'll come over the next week. And he's like, my hairstylist told me the craziest thing. And I'm like, I told you that six days ago, but okay. My God, what? He must be getting amazing haircuts.

He calls it a hair saloon. So I don't think he really knows what's going on. I'm so sorry. I beg your pardon because I will. I beg your pardon for the rest of time because you're gonna need to pardon me because i will be using hair saloon for the rest of my life there are certain phrases that he just can't get rid of one of them's hair saloon um thank god thank god the good ones are the ones he can't get rid of and then laundry he can't really say right but hair saloon is the one

that's gets the biggest eye rolls i would say eye rolls applause for me because okay it makes so much sense i've also to be fair i think i just had this conversation with somebody where i was like what's the difference between a salon and a saloon like i know a salon these days it's like where you kind of go get primped in some way a saloon is where you go drink i know but like i feel like salon came from saloon they're way too similar in my oh maybe maybe in the old west they did both like you would like get a haircut and drink a beer i don't know uh shave and a haircut oh wait no those are that has nothing to do with now we're talking nope those are the same thing um i really i without any knowledge and i'm aware that Google's free and in five seconds I could

learn but I am going to double down and say that salon came from saloon the house always wins so I think you're set I think I wouldn't even worry about it I wouldn't even second guess yourself what happens at the hair saloon stays at the hair saloon that's right except it doesn't because my dad comes home and insists that everything his hairstylist said is correct. Right, right, right. Okay, so this is an email from Livia. She, her. Thank you for normalizing pronouns, Livia. And the subject is how we accidentally invited the ghosts of witches onto our podcast plus audio evidence. See ya.

onto our podcast plus audio evidence. See ya. Also, Eva, when we met up to do this episode at the beginning, Eva was like, oh, there's no theme. And so instantly I thought, I'm going to find a theme because Eva said there is none. So I'm like, I'm already sensing a technological theme here. Me too. And if there's a hair saloon in this one, I've really figured it out.

Then we know. Okay, so this is from Livia. Hello specifically to the ghost child that says daddy me too and if there's a hair saloon in this one i've really figured it out then we know okay so this is from livia hello specifically to the ghost child that says daddy in christine's house okay well all right okay okay honestly whatever i don't like that i said that out loud in my own house i feel like i invited something i don't know oh god, there's a hand running across you right now. It's a little baby's hand. Yuck. Today I would like to share a story that includes witches, ghosts, podcasts, so you are truly the prime audience for this. I am, this is, I love this bio, I am a witch, journalist, and audio person. Hey, kind of, like I get that. i feel like i vibe really a lot with that i like it so far

me too and my journalist witch friend no way noemi noemi and i have decided last fall to make a podcast about the historical witch hunts in switzerland where we are both from oh my gosh that's cool the theory goes that switzerland actually has the most witch hunt victims in all of europe i believe it's estimated that around 6 000 people died after being accused holy shit a severely underreported fact in the coverage of swiss history we set up to do our first episode in noemi's i hope i'm saying that right uh noemi's kitchen in early january of this year we record the intro and as noemi touches on the actual topic of you know state-sanctioned murder of thousands of people the first time.

Our audio, which had been running smoothly for five minutes, starts doing a horrible hissing sound that gets continually louder and eventually drowns out our voices. Oh, God. Yikes. And she says, see attached audio. It is capital T, truly, capital F, freaky. So I'm going to play that after the email, I think. Neither of us had touched any of the equipment. We stopped the recording upon hearing the haunted sounds capital THS doubly

unsettled. As I was hearing the crazy hissing coming through the audio, we both also had started to feel an intensely angry energy in the kitchen. Instead of recording that afternoon, we thoroughly cleansed the apartment of any remaining witches who felt they wanted to become a part of the podcast experience tm one would think this is where the story stops but no this evening noemi was holding her phone as it called her boyfriend by itself yuck her netflix would turn itself on and off there was a poster violently ripped off her bathroom wall and items thrown from the closet in the

hallway oh i don't love this wait and they're okay i know you are in the middle of a sentence but supposedly these are the ghosts of witches wouldn't they be happy that you're like giving no because you're talking about like how they were all murdered i don't know oh that's true i don't know if it was like good that you're like addressing their history or bringing it to light or something i guess they didn't read it it was like good that you're like addressing their history or bringing it to light or something. I guess they didn't read it like that, which is fine. So, OK, got it. Yeah, I could see both ways of like, thanks for telling our story, but also like, wow, I'm still so pissed that they murdered me. They're probably like, you're giving us flashbacks. So, yeah, OK, I get it. Be mad. That's fine.

Be mad, said them. OK. Go for it. Be mad, said them. Okay. Go for it. I, for my part, had horrible nightmares, and when I woke up in the middle of the night, I saw a woman with torn clothes, unkempt hair, and decaying hands and face standing in my bedroom. Ugh. Oh, my God.

This is clearly not what we had in mind when we wanted to make a purely journalistic podcast about witch hunts, but we understood that after very little to no discussion of the intense amount of discrimination, suffering, and systematic murder, we were setting free an intense amount of energy and we were telling the stories of people who had been unable to speak up for themselves in life. The following week, we tried recording again after lighting a candle and inviting anyone who wanted to speak up on the podcast if we said something they didn't like. We have now successfully recorded most of the first season of the podcast, but are definitely not alone in the studio when we tell these important and tragic stories. Thank you to my new witchy journalists from the past,

and of course my best witch journalist friend one could ask for. And thank you for listening and reading. I hope it gave you the creeps. Here's the link to the recording. Livia. So let me pull up the recording here. Okay, here we go. Here we go. here we go.

I studied history and did historical research and found out, to my great surprise, that Switzerland, or the area where Switzerland is today, which was not Switzerland yet, as we know it, was one of the areas in Europe... Sorry, something. It's your microphone. Is it yours? Sorry. Irgendwas. Das ist mega schlecht. Ist dies. Shit. So macht es das. Hallo? Fuck. Das ist voll der Scheiss.

Das ist ja mega scheiss. Es nimmt nämlich auch nicht auf. Oh, weird. It sounds fucking haunted, man. It sounds fucking haunted, man man that's my favorite part also immediately my uh itunes then went straight into strawberry wine that's why i just heard the guitar going through okay so i it sounded like someone was fucking with the gain or something or like yeah i also like how they were clearly not speaking english the whole time until it sounds fucking haunted well i heard shit and then i heard it sounds

fucking haunted i love that i also heard hello i think actually like are you swiss or something because it sounds like you're speaking their language oh my god all right was that was that the whole story yep okay wow oh huh i you know i am really glad that in five years we have yet to get really to catch anything i think on audio that we know of right yeah i'm trying to remember i feel like there were there have been a few instances where people are like, what is that? But it's usually explained around with whale sounds. Me. It's either me or geo. So me. Or that one time when we did an April Fool's episode and I was like, M loves lemon. And people were like, there's all these voices in the background. were like there's all these voices in the background i uh i do remember the one time i think it was when we were covering harold the doll or something and all the machines started going off when it got really creepy yeah yeah that's true was it like an emf it was we had an emf and something else in there but i remember both of them going off when it got really spooky but i i do appreciate that we haven't gotten anything too creepy on our audio because i think

i would be terrified that it would happen in my room you on our audio because i think i would be terrified that it would happen in my room you know until now now i feel like we're just waiting this episode's probably gonna be all sorts of fucked up we'll see all right well thank you so much for that story our next one has probably one of the most interesting um titles oh this is from beck who uses she her pronouns thank you for normalizing pronouns and the subject line is spaceships and serial killers on saturday night strolls okay now we are talking oh yeah hi i'm christine pets petrified fruit and a special hello to little leona oh hello i've wanted to write in for a long time and figured

since your next listener's episode is on my birthday march 1st happy birthday i try my luck and today i'm going to tell you why i drink because i think i'm thinking about all the times my loved ones and i could have died whether by mundane or supernatural forces consider this a cautionary tale for traipsing teens oh i miss being a traipsing two traipsing teens this is something i wish we had heard 20 years ago i would have been i would have liked to be in the know be wary of wandering walks in the witching hours of the night let's crack into it walks were a favorite pastime for my childhood best friend and i we lived in a rural area with more farmland than houses,

not much for a couple bored teens to get into. And I had a little dog, Sky, who needed walks. So our idea of a fun Saturday night was taking the dog walking down every back road and through every field we could reach on foot. We weren't in – it sounds like the beginning of like a childhood book series. It does. Just adventuring with my best friend and our dog up and down the cornfield. I love it.

We weren't interesting, but our cardio was fantastic. Oh, I bet. Good for your heart. During one of these late night walks, we were pacing the length of a dead end street talking about who knows what when one of us noticed something in the sky. It was a tiny light and it seemed to be moving towards us and at first we thought it was farther up in the sky maybe a satellite but that was our only that was only our first clue to how much this object distorted our perception

one of the people on the street had recently built a brand new garage and as the light approached we realized it just barely cleared the roof of it and it was heading right towards us this really is like right out of an adventure it is yeah what i remember next was how eerily still the night became there was no movement no sound sky who hated staying still and would have been pulling at his leash by now stood quietly by my side. I hate when animals are acting different. Me too. We watched almost trance-like as the light passed over us. It was a bright white light, almost like a singular headlight in the sky.

From far away, it seemed small like a drone. If this had happened in 2022, that's what I might have assumed it was. But this was before drones became a common thing. In any case, as it passed right over our heads, it became clear that this was no little drone. I'm not sure how to describe what I saw that night, but I hope my words do it justice.

It was like, you know, in the sci-fi movies when the spaceship has its cloaking mode on, the spaceship looks like the sky around you, but you can see sort of an outline. Oh, yuck. Oh, yuck.uck i don't like that once it was directly over us even though it still looked like the night sky we could see the outline of something much bigger the sky seemed distorted and wrong within that outline as if it was something pretending to be the sky oh god that gave me goosebumps also very interesting to me if this were a book series and we were looking into

like the literary flair of it symbolism is that your dog's name is sky i was thinking that too yeah i was thinking that too just a fun fact it moved slowly following its tiny white headlight giving us plenty of time to stand there dumbstruck taking in this near invisible behemoth above us i don't know how long we stood there i just know suddenly the sky was normal again and the little white light was barely visible heading over the nearby swamp my friend and i did not say a word i picked up my dog and the two of us ran back to my house we didn't stop until we were inside locked in a rec room in my basement only then did we talk about it confirming with each other what we saw we've tried telling others about it but no one

seems interested in believing us even my mom who was a huge believer in extraterrestrials was skeptical but i find it hard to believe that my friend and i had the same hallucination and that light did not behave like any drone i've ever seen was it a spaceship i don't know i know. I'll probably never know. But I know my friend and I saw something that night, something we've never been able to explain. Speaking of my mom, she was not a fan of mine and my friend's midnight strolls. She was, she was always just bought a drone on Amazon. So we were a little confused. The size of the sky, which is weird. so we were a little confused the size of the sky which is weird uh she was always trying to discourage us from staying out too late and she had good reason we found out one night we came in late and my mom was still up and in storytelling mode and if you think my story is long and

painfully detailed i wish you could have heard my mom's she made us both sit down on the couch scolded us for staying out so late she She considered my friend her second child, therefore retained scolding rights. Right. The worst. And then launched into a tale that still frightens me today. When my mother was younger, she and my dad owned a house closer to the center of town. And for a few years during their time there, my mom started receiving strange calls on their landline. The caller seemed to always know when my mom was home calling right

when she got in the door okay well most importantly he seemed to know when she was home alone he spoke with a strange accent one my mom could not identify and he would ask her strange questions about things he should know nothing about oh questions about how work was that day or if she enjoyed her shopping trip oh shit he seemed to always know her schedule in frightening detail my parents of course called the police but the police claimed that there wasn't anything they could do it was the 1980s and my mom assumed they didn't have the technology to trace phone calls as they do today i think it was more to do with them having enough on their plate because as my

mom then shared this was the same time that the connecticut river valley killer was active he was a serial killer speculated to be active between 78 and 87 and he was confirmed to have at least seven victims fuck including one of my mom's close neighbors. Oh. Oh, no. So he's been in her neighborhood. Oh, no. While there were a few suspects, the killer was never caught, and my mom never found out who made the strange calls, but she always wondered if it had all been connected and how much danger she truly was in.

I believe this incident is what inspired my parents to move into a more rural part of my hometown before having kids. This story didn't completely stop our wanderings but we were certainly more careful i've looked i've since looked into the connecticut valley killer but not too much i still live in that area and sometimes the stories hit a little too close to home and i have a book that had belonged to my mom about the killings the shadow of death by philip e ginsburg but i haven't been able to bring myself to finish it. I love true crime stories, but it does get a little too real when the crime scene photos are places you've been to or when one of the victim's family members makes a comment about

it in your local Facebook group. Oh, geez. Anyway, thank you so much for reading my ramblings. I'm glad that I got to tell both one of my stories and one of my mom's. She passed away when I was 18, but not before telling me so many of her own supernatural stories. Maybe I'll write again and tell you about the little boy ghost who haunted her laundry room and her weirdly precognitive dreams. Yes. Stay spooky, Beck.

P.S. Thank you for normalizing pronouns. Aw, cutie. Aw. Wow. Wow. Well, I'm so sorry for your loss it sounds like your mother was um a force to be reckoned with yeah um whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa just um that is wild that i mean i can't imagine getting phone calls like that and not even just in the 80s but even today

to get phone calls of like oh just saw you walked in the door or like knowing you walked in you'd never feel alone or safe i can't imagine i feel like even if you moved i nowhere would feel safe no and i mean the fact that this started with a ufo and now we're like in true crime i mean that was whiplash oh my god a little bit of this and a little bit of that is what that is god that cloaking thing too i don't like it firm pass i don't like it that's really all i have to say um also i love that the ufo they were like they don't see us right they can't see us right they can't see us the description was pretty perfect though of like it it looked warped within the outline like it was pretending like it was trying to be

the sky it was very like uncanny valley yeah and also there had to be something so creepy about knowing that if you're at a dead end in a rural area with no one around like you are unprotected from all sides yeah and you're not even looking at any of the sides because you're looking up oh and it's like oh if it were modern day maybe it was a drone but it's like but who's there using a drone in the middle of the night i don't know even if that were the case like still so fucking creepy um i don't like it um all right well thank you beck i have a story here from dylan she her thank you dylan the subject is jennifer love hewitt saved me from drowning you know i bet she's very proud of that she i, I don't know. She better be.

I don't know if she is, but she better be. So I don't know what she did or what she knows she's done. But for all she knows, she's aware she is saving lives out here. Well, we better tell her if she doesn't. So this says, hi, Eva M. Christine Lemon, furry friends, tiny BB lion, and Xenon. Xenon doesn't get enough credit in these you know she certainly doesn't i'm glad she's somewhere up in the sky going what her cloaking mechanism just turned off and she's like she says my sister and i have been avid listeners and that's why we drink since 2018

oh and that's a long time and for some reason I am just now mustering up the courage to submit a listener story. Aw. My family grew up really believing in signs from the universe and omens, so when this happened to me at a young age, it really stuck with me. I thought you might enjoy this crazy synchronicity. I love synchronicities. When I was in third grade, I had a dream that I can still vividly see in my head at the age of 23.

I can remember every detail, and it still spooks me to this day. The dream goes like this. I was sitting in school and the topic of the day was omens. My whole class had our books open on the desks and the teacher said to flip to the next page. The page showed a terrifying image of what looked to be a face and two hands emerging out of a surface. The image almost looked as if someone was screaming and trapped under a sheet of plastic trying to get out oh oh oh no that's very disturbing it is sound like dexter the teacher said to us that this was an omen of death and that if we saw this it was a

sign that we were going to die oh god in my dream i'm suddenly at a friend's house her backyard was met with pitch black lake it was autumn and there were leaves littered all around the stone patio as i'm walking with my friend out to the dock i see the omen face at my feet i screamed and told my friend that i was going to die she ignored me and we walked out to the dock in my dream i fell in and drowned in the lake dark right especially for a third grader i woke up freaked out but i told myself it was just a dream and to move on it was winter time where i grew up in indianapolis slight sidebar i went to american university as well christine oh my god i love that there's something to be said about

the midwest to au pipeline yes there certainly is what's wrong with us there's probably a lot anyways i grew up in india in this particular winter we got a lot of snow the next day of school was already called off to be a snow day and the white river had frozen over my entire third grade class had plans to go uh-oh ice skating on the river in the backyard of my friend's house during the snow day oh my god the night before the snow day i was watching ghost whisperer with my dad on the couch hugh jen you know of love hewitt fame sorry i don't know why i said that you mean jen hewitt of love fame that's exactly what i meant i'm sorry i guess since a young age i've always liked the spooky and supernatural so this wasn't a particularly strange routine however what was spooky was that in the episode that we were

watching on cable television the omen of death that i had dreamt of the night before showed Oh, God. Oh, shit. Point blank, period. He agreed that it wasn't a good idea because of my dream, but we decided that I should go and just not go out on the river. Okay. Oh. I thought he was going to take that as an opportunity of like, honestly, I don't want to go hauling you around in snow. And that's a genius call. Exactly. Nope.

Okay. The next day I was anxious as fuck. Not how you want to feel on a snow day. As I sat on the riverbank and watched my friend skate, I kid you not, the ice started to crack. Everyone on the ice ran to shore and the entire mass of ice that they were skating on fell into the river. Holy shit. Thankfully, everyone ended up being okay. To this day, I think that had I gone out there, I would have fallen into the current and drowned when the ice cracked so I send my thanks to Jennifer Love Hewitt for sending me that sign on Ghost Whisperer I hope you dm'd her personally or something I don't know I hope so too thanks

for reading and I'm sorry if it was long seriously can't thank y'all enough for what you do you have gotten me through a lot of long walks in DC grocery runs chores and car rides I'm excited to finally see you in person at the boulder show hey april 2nd i think there's still tickets i recently moved to denver and i don't know anyone here who listens so i'm flying solo to the show usually that would give me mad anxiety but i know the and that's why we drink crowd will be kind and loving and welcoming they will be i feel like people make friends at these things yeah yeah live laugh lemons xoxo dylan wow wow wow what a tale Live, laugh, lemons, XOXO, Dylan. Wow. Wow. Wow. Oh, my gosh. What a tale. I don't like that your poor third grade brain had to deal with that, but I'm glad.

Yeah, I feel like now you're primed to always be worried about that symbol showing up somewhere. Because if it technically saved you one time, I would never not listen to it again. Exactly. I agree. If we knew Jennifer Love Hewwitt we would pass on the message um we would but but we don't but we don't uh i know a different jennifer i could tell her all about it if you tell jen of a different fame this next one is from kyle who uses he him pronouns thank you for normalizing pronouns kyle and the ah okay

this one has to do with me maybe because the last one had to do with au for you see eva's full of it there's all sorts of themes in this one ghosts and the cnu sun trust buildings okay so uh before i even get into this the sun trust building is literally the bank yeah and CNU uh I don't know I don't know if it's still like that I guess we'll find out in the story but um I think you told this on a recent episode or like not recent but we didn't have a lot of classroom space when I was there because we were still like developing really quickly I think they're still really growing quickly but a lot of math classes used to be in the literal bank we just like rented out the top floor so i only have bad memories of the sun because that was where like my like stats classes

were yuck okay um ghosts in the cnu sun trust building hey m's christine eva and other other fruits and animals i like how that means we're technically fruits or animals we're an animal i guess i guess i'm technically a fruit yeah that's exactly right i wasn't gonna say it but in the last episode em talked about cnu and how they used to take classes in the infamous sun trust building on the edge of campus okay i was like i feel like we did talk about this okay yep as a recent theater grad 2019 of cnu who was in uh res life i wanted to reach out with the current status of the building oh thank you i love that you say all this in the beginning and then it's like it's all addressed already in the first two lines but the building as m knows is this giant ominous black monolith that stands on the edge of campus

it's true a real eyesore that cnu has been trying to get rid of for years it's true that we've been like trying to like make deals with sun trust to like move to a different building uh recently they emptied out the building and gutted it entirely hoping to make it a new a brand new residence hall complete with marble gold and columns cnu well cnu is very famous for columns every goddamn building has at least 10 000 columns on it great um and so okay with marble gold and then the columns that cnu is so famous for wow so they actually successfully did it i'm so i never thought that day was gonna come okay when they emptied it out it was in a holding period while whatever bureaucratic nonsense

had to get sorted out in the meantime cnu decided to use this place to store residence hall furniture classroom supplies and many many props and scenic elements for the theater department now because we're a smaller school with a smaller budget much of the theatrical furniture was donated to us or bought from estate sales in the newport news area needless to say a large amount of this furniture in one place tends to send a chill down your spine while i've never experienced anything personally because i do my absolute best to keep my third eye sewn shut i love it uh many of my peers in the theater department claim they experience chills hear footsteps and feel different uh presences when in the storage room alone our technical director will always mention how

furniture never seems to be in the same place she left it during the strike for the last show she attributes small things like this to the students messing around but i wouldn't be surprised if the furniture felt the need to move around on its own the theater itself is definitely haunted by a young girl who died there very suddenly but she seems most friendly uh so most friendly okay mostly friendly as long as you always say hi and bye to her at the end of the day but that's a whole other story thanks so much for the work you do and i hope you have a spooky week i hope i wonder if the little girl um that he's referring to is the same little girl that haunted it has to be okay so there was um at cnu i've probably talked about this before but one of the older buildings that we have classes in but it's

only theater for the most part it's basically like if you're a theater major at cnu you really never leave this one building and it's very like isolating like nobody else goes over there and you don't go anywhere else so the theater department is like its own world right but it's called ferguson and it used to be a high school and people including me uh would like to sneak in after it was supposed to be closed for the night and if you go through the right way there's still like a whole section that still looks like a high school oh um it's like the gymnasium and so it's like all the old wood from the basketball court gym but it's all warped and fucked up because no one's been there for so long and everyone has always said that especially in that area but in the ferguson building altogether there's always been a little girl that haunts

the theater department and so it would make sense that now in the SunTrust building where they're keeping all of this theater crap that a little girl is there it's probably the same one right I would imagine if it were yeah exactly especially if it was the theater group again right she just came along with all the set pieces yeah maybe she just likes all the arty the artsy stuff I love that she's like I'm very friendly but you have to say hello that was what they used to say in Ferguson, where if something happened, you always had to say hi and bye before you left a room.

Oh my gosh, I would be the one to forget. Oh my bad. Well, I guess she's really latched on to a piece of furniture or something over there. Also, thank you, by the way, for the update on the SunTrust building. I really, I thought where this... Listen, ask and you shall receive, I guess. I thought where this was going was that it had been gutted and in the middle of figuring out what to do with it people

were like sneaking in in the middle of the night and like the bank itself it was me because when i was a freshman there there used to be a hollywood video on campus of course they're on campus wow there used to be a bowling alley on campus but but they knocked the- We're old, by the way, everybody. We're old. The Hollywood video still technically, last I checked, exists, but it's been turned into like the campus police station. But the bowling alley got knocked down for one of the residence halls that showed up by the time it was like senior year for me. Yeah.

But I remember like freshman year, the coolest thing to do was to like go like sneak into the bowling alley in the middle of the night. And we would just like lie down on like the bowling alleys and just talk. It was like very fun. That's actually kind of fun. Yeah. I thought that was where we were heading. But anyway, any opportunity to talk about seeing you, I'll always do so. Thank you for the love that you I mean, I remember you literally saying if anyone knows what is going on with the SunTrust building, let me know. And then. And Kyle said, here I am. I love that you forgot that you had asked that, though. You were like, oh, cool. Let me tell you about the SunTrust building. I was like, I think you did. I think that's why we got this email.

I'm just always eager to talk about seeing you. So. I love it. Anyway, thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Kyle. So I have one here. This is the last story. And this is from Sam. She, her. Thank you, Sam, for normalizing pronouns. The subject is my tarot cards predicted finding my biological family. Oh. Now that is fun. Now we're cooking.

OK. Hello, ATWWD fam. I am a longtime fan. And while this isn't the first story I've submitted, this is probably one of the sweetest slash spookiest slash mystical stories that is currently unfolding. Ooh. Ooh. You got our attention.

Hot off the press. So I recently figured out that I am a medium, which is wild, and I just, I wish I could figure that out about myself. That's fun. I like how they also had to state, like, which is wild. It's like, we know, parentheses. That is wild for sure. So I recently figured out that I am a medium, which is wild. It's like, we know. Parentheses. That is wild for sure. So I recently figured out that I'm a medium,

which is wild, and I decided to start learning about witchcraft and tarot. I got my first tarot deck and brought it over to one of my friend's houses. She is also a witch and oozes witch vibes, so she could teach me how to use it. We start... Somebody, Eva, teach me.

Okay. We started by interviewing my deck and getting to know its purpose. Oh my God. And it revealed it is meant to help me find closure and acceptance of my past. Now I am no stranger to trauma. So I assumed it meant that, but it kept alluding to something deeper that has been a source of pain and confusion my whole life. It is important to note that I am adopted and I know very, very limited information about my parentage, but I did know much more about my maternal side and knew absolutely nothing about my paternal side. My deck was adamant that I would find closure and acceptance

and whatever that closure and acceptance was would bring me joy. It also told me to not be afraid of taking a big chance so that I could get closer to that closure. About a month after interviewing my deck, there was a giant sale on 23andMe, so I impulsively purchased the Ancestry and Health History one, hoping I could at least find out what nationality I am and if I need to be anxious about any incoming potential sicknesses. Once my result came back, I got more than I hoped for. I got a DNA match for my paternal grandparents. Fun! I didn't do anything about it at first because I didn't know if they even knew I was alive. Yesterday while at work rocking out to the Encanto soundtrack, I received a message from someone who said they shared the same grandfather.

I usually delete things like that because I listen to true crime podcasts and know better, but something in my gut said talk to her. A little bit of talking later she did some fbi style digging and came back to me saying i know who your parents are call me if you are comfortable oh my god that's where i would end because i'd go sorry i don't phone phone calls give me anxiety sorry i would immediately be like speed dial i'd be like you would have been like i'm already on the phone with you be like there i am this close to gossip i must there's nothing myself there's nothing that could stop me a phone call later a lifetime's worth of questions were answered and i was connected to my

entire biological paternal side who had no idea i existed oh my gosh it felt like coming home okay i'm gonna cry now it felt like coming home and i experienced this overwhelming sense of peace like i finished a really hard puzzle if my deck hadn't encouraged me to make bold strokes i would have never bought that test and i would have never made these connections talk about a powerful deck of cards i know this is long and now i'm getting emotional i know this is long but honestly it's so synchronous that i can't explain away the power of my deck and how it made me make choices to find my family thank you for taking time to read this and thank you for all the laughs and spooks one day i'll return with my story of kelsey the blind bichon freeze that saved me from a man breaking into my window okay

kelsey okay and all the other spooky things that have happened to me when i didn't know i was a medium happy hauntings friends can't wait to see you in chicago in april sam oh that was a doozy that one was a good one wow that was a doozy i that is my sign i'm finally gonna actually take my tarot seriously i have like all these books that I keep just kind of ignoring. I feel like I need to actually get on it. I'm shocked that of all my hyper fixations, tarot has not become one of them yet. You know, it's funny because I think about that a lot. I'm like, I've had like hyper fixations on like angels and like just for weeks, I just spent researching that. And I'm like, I have all my tarot at my disposal, the books and everything.

I just spent researching that and I'm like I have all my tarot at my disposal the books and everything and I just haven't yeah like jumped in I even like my so I've never gotten I have some tarot decks I just I kind of leave them in different places because I like to surprise myself and be like oh man and then that really like gets me like motivated to use them I feel like if I see it always sitting around it just kind of becomes like blended into my environment. So like Eva just got me a really good, like a custom set of tarot, which was Pokemon. That's the cutest thing I ever heard, by the way. It was precious. And I hit it on purpose. And I did a really good job.

I don't know where it is. Eva's like, wait, what? I just got you that. You hit it. I used it one time. And it's so weird. Every time I've used tarot so far i feel like i keep getting like the same information what is it it's like not that interesting i'm like kind of like i guess

cosmically boring and so i am not oh come on we all know that's not true well so my thought is like okay i'll hide it and then like enough time will pass where i'll surprise myself and then have to do it and i want to see if the message is different in that chunk of time or it's my own crazy way of thinking. But I have, I think three tarot decks. I know one's hiding in my car, one's hiding in my bedroom. It's somewhere hiding. I like how you say it. Like it's, it's not, it's not passive. Like it is doing the hiding from you. It's choosing to hide from me. And then the other one that I have is my mom's tarot deck from when she was in college but i never love that i never touch it because it's so fragile so i'm always afraid i just own it but i never use it but so i've got the pokemon one and i've got i think uh

like a dinosaur one i have one here that eva gave me um it's a little lisa frank yeah oh yes yes yes oh that's a fun one i think eva gave me that i never uh i just anytime i do use one i think i get overwhelmed and mad at myself that i don't know more and then i get frustrated answer would be to teach myself and my brain's like you think so right but i think i get overwhelmed like there are so many different things to learn and like spreads and meanings and then I get overwhelmed and I'm like oh I'll do this another day I just want to be an expert and I get mad when it doesn't happen for like without effort me too which is like duh like that's the dumbest thing but I have the same

problem I'm like it takes a lot of energy same with um I've done the same thing with crystals and like the meaning of each crystal and all that but like if you have certain crystals next to each other they're supposed to do different things and i'm like i'm supposed to be cleansing them and then the moons i do that with lunar cycles i'm like i will finally learn the lunar cycles and then i'm like i get overwhelmed and i get distracted and then everything involving like a basic entry into witchcraft not saying that those things are basic but i feel like those are like usually the first like door openers into this world even those overwhelm me and then i'm like oh man i need to relax i need to relax yeah i know same um well eva i'll let you know when i find my pokemon tarot

i think it's probably in my i don't know where and there's only so many places in this room it's probably gave it to you when we were traveling. So maybe it's in the suitcase. I don't know. No, I already took it out and used it. And hid it. And hid it. Oh, I know where it is. Oh, okay.

I have to forget that. Well, that wasn't very... I didn't do a good job. You didn't hide it that well. Okay. I just took one scan of my room. Seriously. Anyway.

Anyway, thank you everyone for listening to us go on and on and on about tarot. After reading your lovely stories. On and on about tarot, but not really. It go on and on and on about tarot after reading your lovely stories on and on about tarot but not really it was just like on and on about our toxic traits our toxic traits with exactly our toxic traits that we keep buying tarot decks thinking one day we will actually learn it that's my toxic trait if you would like to um come back next month and hear us talk about other toxic traits of ours um we will see you april 1st with another listener's story again if you'd like to submit your own personal true crime or paranormal stories you can do that at our website um and other than that we got episodes every sunday we're still on tour so if you are coming

to our tour this is where i will uh remind you again please be loud and supportive because we both have a lot of anxiety and so far the shows have been going very well people have been wonderful yeah really but just you know any opportunity to remind you to please be extra nice and to laugh and to laugh really hard also uh i think our april 1st show oh that's right I'm going to announce it now um just so people that are going to the April 1st show have time to prepare but a couple years ago um we did a show I think it was in Chicago on my mom's birthday and I had everyone scream happy birthday Linda oh yeah that's probably the video my mom still to this day shows my mother still plays that for people it's your mom's video and my mother still plays it like i think that's her subliminally

saying i better get one of those honestly that might be yeah wow wait when is your birthday april so it's april 2nd so um boulder we'll be in boulder on the 2nd so if you're in boulder i will be asking i will be taking my phone out on stage and asking us to sing happy birthday to my mom or shout happy birthday or something. Happy birthday, Linda. Please be as loud as possible so we can try to outdo the last video that she's been showing all these years. So that's so cute. It was Chicago, I think, or Detroit, one of the other, one of the one of them.

But and also it's going to be your little baby's half birthday next time we do an episode i'm sad i won't be home for it but that's okay um blaze will send me a picture of her you know walking or doing something that you know i will be missing like like figuring out the nuclear codes being like i've solved the war with russia and the ukraine don't worry about it it's all fine okay well leave that to leona we'll just get on stage and tell funny jokes. So hopefully funny. Yeah, no promises. And that's why we drink.