Endless Thread - Screamtime: Roof Man

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

Paranormal activity has haunted Darcy throughout her life. But it wasn’t until a nighttime ritual with her daughter turned spooky that she wondered what else might be at play.

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What is the scariest thing that has happened to you? Like the ghostliest, ghouliest thing? This was not a supernatural thing, But I was like a preteen when this happened. I was home alone. And I called the cops on what I could have sworn was an intruder. And I'm hiding in the closet with all I could find was shoe polish as a weapon, like spray shoe polish. Okay.

And the person opens the closet door. Uh-huh. And it's my sister. He sprayed her right in the face. Right in the face. No, I didn't. Fortunately. But what about you?

Uh, so a little known fact about me. My parents were super into hippie stuff from the West Coast, and they got a yurt to put in my backyard. Okay. Like one of those Mongolian tent like things. And that was my bedroom in high school, and it had a wood stove in it. So I stayed in the yurt in the winter. And for several nights one winter, I heard this, like, super scary, creepy scratching at the outside wall of the yurt. And it was the wall that faced this, like, weird, creepy wetland behind.

my house. Okay. And I'll never know if it was like a half frozen squirrel or what, but it scared the heck out of me. Definitely a squirrel. Well, today's episode of scream time starts in Ireland, actually, but it ends with something or someone on the outside of a building. And we've got a name for this one. Yes, we do. Are you ready? Yep. Roofman. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you are listening to endless thread. The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my co-host, Amory Siebertson, and we're coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. All throughout the month of October, we are bringing you scream time. Scary stories from Reddit. This is Darcy. It is. Darcy is a culinary arts teacher,

but she writes murder mysteries in her spare time, hence her Reddit username Irish writer Mommy. Well, I'm Irish. and I'm a mommy. In my spare time, I do write. Darcy knows all about creepy things. She says part of it has to do with growing up in County Clare, Ireland. Growing up in Ireland, you grow up with things like fairies, and you just grow up with them as if they're real. You just believe in them.

Believing in the paranormal for me has always just been something that I do. It's just part of my life. This isn't to say that Darcy doesn't get spooked by the paranormal. She, like me, is not a big fan of mirrors, for instance. And she has her reasons. One time when she was about 13 years old, she was home alone. And there was a tapping noise that was coming from inside my mirror. I had my cat with me.

My cat was hissing at my mirror. I walked around the mirror. I went around to the other side of the wall where it was hanging. But I couldn't find the source of the noise. She got freaked out enough that she decided to leave and head to her, grandmother's house. As I was leaving, the mirror fell off the wall and shattered. I don't have mirrors in my house anymore. I have exactly one because I can't, I don't do mirrors anymore. She's got another story from Ireland that is extra creepy. And I was walking in the woods.

All of a sudden, the woods became very still, which was weird. There was no wind. There were no birds. There were no animals chirping. There was no wrestling. It was just very still and quiet. and it was eerie. And then I started seeing these shadows just out of the corner of my eye. Darcy starts feeling spooked. So she runs home and slams the door behind her. And then...

There was a knock on my door. And I went to go see who was at my door because it was weird to have a knock. I grew up in a very, very small village. And a knock was just odd because people just walked in where we were. We just shout out to hello and then walk in. was no knocking. The knock was odd, but even stranger, was that she had run into the house in the

middle of the daytime. When she looked outside to see who was knocking, it was suddenly dark. So I'm missing about five hours of my life that I have no idea where it went. But the other thing I noticed when I looked at the door was a little girl. She was maybe 13. She had long black hair. She was not looking at me. She was looking down at the floor. And so I asked her if she needed any help. I didn't open the door. I was speaking through the door at this point.

She didn't look up. She just said, no, I need to come inside to make a phone call. I wasn't going to let her inside. She was terrifying me, even though she was young. And so I told her no. But I told her I would call somebody for her. She kept knocking on the door and saying, no, I need to come in. So I, I left and I went to my room and I hid under my covers

because I was the only one home. This knocking goes on for no less than 20 minutes. Then it suddenly stops. Darcy goes to check the door again. And now the girl is sitting on the fence in the front yard, still staring at the ground. And I don't know, she just, she really freaked me out. My grandmother, when I told her this story later,

was convinced that it was a fairy. And fairies, true fairies, are not, you know, the winged tinkerbells of Disney. They are actually supposed to be more on the evil side. And they are supposed to try to steal your soul. Ben, you're a dad. So why are children so creepy? Okay, well, first of all, my children are angels.

But I think they're creepy for the same reason that clowns are creepy. they generally bring so much joy and happiness that if you put a child in a slightly creepy situation, they're like double creepy because they're not supposed to be creepy. Does that make sense? That actually makes perfect sense. Okay, so eventually Darcy moved away

from Ireland's fairies and castles to the U.S. She started a family in Colorado where nothing super creepy happened until this year. So this happened just a couple of months ago. I have a daughter who is almost four, and she was getting ready for bed. We were in the family room, which has the skylight, instead above the couch. I was doing my best to wear her out before bedtime. We were reading books.

We were telling jokes. I was tickling her. I was tossing her in the air, and she was giggling. And all of a sudden, she stopped, and she looked up at the skylight, and she pointed up at the skylight. I thought that she was just noticing her reflection And I said, oh, do you see an Ellie in the glass? And she said, yeah, Mama, I see Ellie and a mama and a man. It takes a second for it to sink in that Darcy's daughter Ellie is making a real statement.

And when it does, Darcy feels that chilling feeling that she hasn't really had since the mysterious girl knocked on her door in Ireland. I was trying simultaneously not to freak out and also get the attention of my husband so that he could see if there was anybody on the roof looking at us through the skylight. I couldn't see anything. And I said, Ellie, there's no man in the skylight. There's just Mama and Ellie. And she said, no, Mama, the man is there too. He's right next to Mama. And she pointed.

And the area she pointed at was the area right over my shoulder. And I said, is the man daddy? And she said no. It's a man. As her daughter is pointing over her shoulder, up at the skylight, Darcy calls over to her husband for backup, trying not to scare her other kids. My husband, by the way, he's not a believer. He does not believe in the paranormal.

He is a skeptic and he thinks him crazy. Paranormal or not, the specter of a man on the roof is not what you want. So Darcy's husband somewhat reluctantly gets out a baseball bat and goes outside. He reported back that there's nobody around always well. I got calmed down enough to get my daughter changed and ready for bed. She was running to her room when she stopped, turned around and waved at the skylight saying, Night night, Ruthman. Everybody woke up the next day, still alive, but the parents were unsettled.

At this point, Darcy just doesn't know what to think about what happened. So she posts the story in hair-raising detail to the paranormal community on Reddit. and she gets a wide range of responses. One person tells her that the roofman is a demon and that she needs to sage her house immediately. Which I did anyway. I did sage the house. But I do that all the time. That's normal for me. Others agreed with her husband and said basically, Ellie's just being a kid, roofman schmoof man. But most of the responses suggest something kind of surprising.

They say that roof man might be the ghost of a relative, like her mother's father, who died in 2003. He was always a jokester. He liked to put pranks. And every once in a while in the house, things like my keys will go missing. I found my keys in the freezer three times. And I always credit him for that. I say, oh, that was a nice grandfather. Oh, yeah, definitely. My grandfather always lurked on the roof at dusk, totally normal behavior. Okay, but the problem was that Darcy's maternal grandfather died a decade before her daughter Ellie was born. So Darcy was a sure how to confirm the identity of Roofman. A couple of people has suggested just getting photo albums and going through and not asking

her specifically is this Roofman, but just showing her the pictures and seeing if she made the connection herself. Now this makes sense to me. Good old-fashioned paranormal detective work. Yeah, and I get the logic of this, but like, is that something you really want to do? Like, if you really want to go look in the dusty photo album and stare into the eyes of family Ghosts. Knock yourself out. Staring into the eyes of family ghosts in a minute.

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Darcy, aka Irish writer Mommy on Reddit, is trying to see if her daughter Ellie will pick Roofman out of a family photo lineup. I was going to wait until it was dark, but that it was suggested that if it were dark outside, that that might be leading her. So we wanted to make it, you know, a time of it. of day where she wouldn't associate with the roofman. So we got the photo opens out in the middle of the day. And I had my husband actually show them to her again so that I wouldn't accidentally lead her.

So I was in the room, but I was on the other side of the room. And he was just going through the photo albums. So they start going through these albums. And Ellie's just looking at photos, pointing out who she knows, skipping over who she doesn't. And they start with her dad's side of the family. She pointed out granddad. You know, she pointed out her cousins. So after that, we went to my family. Again, same thing. She recognized my mother and my father and my brother and my sister.

And she got to my grandfather, my mother's father, and I was expecting her to maybe say something. And I was kind of hoping she was going to say something. She didn't. She skipped right over him. And at that point, I was a little bit disappointed. also a little bit relieved. I wasn't sure what I was expecting. My husband was trying to finish up, but he gave me that look like I told you so. We went to the next part, which was my father's side.

And again, she pointed out to Grandma. And then she got to the photo of my dad's father, my grandfather. Who's this, Daddy? And he told her, he said, well, that's your mama's papa. And she just got this look on her face, and she looked up at the roof. And she looked back down to picture and she said, nope. I did actually have my husband cover the skylight up because I was still a little wary of roof men and having to worry about there being an entity or possibly even a real person looking down on us from the glass. And I have trouble with reflections anyway, as I told you before. She hasn't seen him again, at least not that I know of. My two-year-old son, however, he will crawl into the middle of a room and then put his arms up as if he wants to be held.

But there's nobody there to pick him up. He's just asking to be held too, you know, thin air. Darcy still hasn't seen Roofman herself to know if it is, in fact, her late paternal grandfather stopping by for a visit. But Ellie's the same age that Darcy was when her grandfather passed. She thinks there might be a connection. She and I look very much alike. She is my mini-mey. And she is the same age that I was when my grandfather died.

So I'm hoping that maybe it's because of that. And he's picked up on that energy and her little spirit. And he sees her the way I was at that age. Darcy and her family have decided to choose this theory, that it's her grandfather watching over them. They even talk to him sometimes. Especially when something weird happens. The TV goes off sometimes by itself.

Or if something just strange happens, we'll say, oh, thanks, grandpa. And at this point, it could be either one of my grandpas, so I just say grandpa. And I figure that covers it all. Has your husband's view of the paranormal changed at all? He says no. But more recently, he's been a little bit more open to it. He does, you know, say, oh, thanks, grandpa, when something happens.

But for him, it's more of a joke. But I think that somewhere deep inside of him, he's questioning. Darcy's husband might still be questioning the paranormal, but after the mirror and the fairy in Ireland and roofman, Darcy has no doubt. It's real, it's all around us, and it's up to us to let it in. I believe that people experience the paranormal in different ways, and some people never experience it,

and I think that the people who don't experience it probably have a closed mind, a closed energy, so they're not allowing it to show through. I believe that there are guardians. I believe that there are evil spirits as well. But I think that each person experiences it in a very personal way. So for me, because I believe that this particular one is a guardian, I welcome it.

And we just, we talk to him and let him know that he's welcome and that it's okay for him to be there. Amory Screamerton. Yes. Do you believe that ghosts can be good, like guardian ghosts or Casper, for instance? I'm afraid to even say this out loud. I can't say I believe in ghosts.

I am way more afraid of real things than I am of the paranormal. But of course, now that I've said that, I will start being haunted, like right now. Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of with you. I don't know if I believe in the afterlife, but I definitely believe in older generations of things. families being kind of spiritually present, trying to send good vibes the way of family members they love. Maybe that was your great, great, great grandma scratching on the wall of your yurt.

Great, great, great, great, but you can't come in. Now that's the kind of statement that's going to get you straight up cursed. Come at me, ghosts. Next week on Screamtime, a fungus with one sole purpose. Survival via mind control. We share a lot of DNA, so how likely is it that that's going to happen to me? Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert who thinks Ireland is old school cool. Also special thanks to her daughter, Nikki, for playing the role of Ellie in our story. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she went home after listening to this episode and said,

Today I learned. Mix and sound designed by Paul Vicus and John Parati, and before they go to bed, they always say night night to their forbidden snacks. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, and her house needs to get saged because it's haunted by the ghost of

thrift store halls. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and he calls children real-life doodles. Even though you don't always hear his voice, it's important to point out that our fellow producer Josh Schwartz can also say the endless thread is

something I made. Extra. production assistance from James Lindberg. Our intern is Candice Lim. Our theme music is by Squelcher. Thanks to Redditor Her Cofin for this week's artwork. It is called Your Haunted Head. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread.

If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Severson. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out. And stop it. Roof man. Come on. Roof man.

Roof man. That's way too cheering. Yeah, I know. Roof man. Roof man. Roof man. Roof man. Roof man.

Roof man. Josh gives it that. He's like, that is the best of terrible options.