Otherworld - Bonus: The Night Before Christmas

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

During the holidays at the height of the pandemic, Andrea traveled to Yuba County, California to visit her family. Desperate for a proper bed instead of sleeping on her parent's couch, she booked a cheap nearby hotel for the night. From the moment she entered the room, something felt off, but she chalked it up to the hotel's dinky conditions and went on with her night, until she found herself ambushed by an unexpected visitor. Check out our Merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For business inquiries contact: [e-mail] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. The holiday season is officially upon us, myself, and the team will be taking next week off to relax with our friends and family. A well-deserved one-week break, if I do say so myself, especially before kicking off next year with a bang, because we have some truly crazy projects in the works. Some of them have been ongoing for way too long. There's a few episodes I'm really excited about, and I can't wait to get started. But we didn't want to leave you completely hanging during the holidays. So we have an extra episode this week that actually takes place on Christmas Eve. It's about a woman named Andrea who works at a particle accelerator in Berkeley, California.

This was during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made life very, very, hard and isolating for everybody in general, but especially during the holidays. I'm sure everybody remembers what that was like. Andrea's experience takes place during that time, and it happened when she was staying in a hotel near her parents' house in Marysville, California. This is in Yuba County, which was sort of a booming area during California's Gold Rush. It's sort of an old wild west town, or at least used to be. While Andrea was staying in this hotel, she ended up having a surprise visitor on this particular Christmas Eve, and unfortunately it was not from Santa.

I'll let her explain for herself. Happy holidays for myself and the entire other world team. Thank you so much for listening this year. I hope you enjoy this episode, and I hope you have a great holiday. My name is Andrea Taylor. I live in Oakland, California. I am a principal supervisor at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Essentially, it's like a specialized particle accelerator. Really cool science is done there, and I love my job. So I am not a scientist, just to make that clear. But I do work with a lot of scientists.

Myself, I manage the administrative team at the Advanced Light Source, And essentially, the Advanced Light Source is a U.S. Department of Energy User Facility. So we have Synchrotron. We're a Synchrotron light source that provides all kinds of capabilities to our user community, and that community is essentially people who come to the ALS to do science. So we have, we're a specialized particle accelerator. Like I said, we generate really bright beams of x-ray light, and that is used for all kinds of research.

I mean, material sciences for sure, but biology, chemistry, physics, any kind of environmental science. And we just use the photons that are produced in light spanning the electromagnetic spectrum to produce to produce energy ranges that can examine the atomic and electronic structure of matter. So I did grow up in the Christian church. My dad has been a pastor pretty much all of my life. One of the good things about my dad specifically being a pastor is that he really loves science and he would try to incorporate it into his sermons as much as he could.

I remember distinctly when I was like, oh my goodness, 11 or 12, something like that. We were living in Missouri. He had a church there and in his sermon he introduced the concept of string theory and very long ago that this happened, but if memory serves, in that explanation, he was sort of connecting, you know, these sort of nano-precise things that aren't visible to us, but that we know and their resonance and how they interact with each other. And then connecting that to, like, a broader creation story almost. I'm taking a long way and saying that the perspective that I had that was definitely shaped by my dad, my parents, and then later on, you know,

getting an education is that creation is intentional and that, you know, maybe the language I have of God, you know, that's the tradition I was raised and grown with, but I do think that whether you call it God or, you know, Allah, or whatever the name for it is, I don't feel like it's a contradiction with science at all. In fact, I feel like the more science reveals, the more it reveals how expansive the universe is. And it doesn't feel like it's in conflict for me. My faith is not something that is a gatekeeping system.

And I think that that it comes in in the story because it was something that helped me stop feeling powerless and something that I could replace my fear with, if that makes sense. This occurred right when COVID was still fairly new, and all of us were trying to figure out how to respond to this, you know, semi-apocalyptic event impacting everyone everywhere.

So certainly in a state of uncertainty, you know, perpetual anxiety, and trying to hold on to the little things like, you know, the rare, visits to family that we could actually engage in. It occurred actually the event itself on Christmas Eve. My husband had been really sick with COVID, and because we didn't have vaccines yet, he quarantined himself in our bedroom.

We have a small home in Oakland, so I had to sleep out in our couch in our living room for several days on that point, and I mean, thank goodness I have a comfortable place to sleep, but I really wanted to sleep in a real bed. So I had this, you know, this sort of mix of sentiments of feelings that I was feeling, like the stress of just being in a pandemic and the stress of how people were responding to it and seemed to bring out our worst impulses as human beings. I was just really looking forward to visiting my family, just my family, you know, taking all of the precautions, the social distancing, et cetera.

So they were in Yuba City, which is around three and a half hours or so drive from Oakland. And I went by myself. And I was, you know, in parallel to being excited to see my family, even, you know, through the social distance mechanisms. I was so desperate. Like, I was fixated, totally fixated on having a big ass bed to sleep in. Like, I was so stoked. You know, it's just like a random, I can't even remember the hotel. It was either Marriott or something like that.

So just, you know, a really straightforward franchise hotel. But that king-sized bed was really calling my name. It was like almost part of the reason I was doing this visit was just to sleep in a big bed. And, of course, because I didn't want to stay with my family, not only consider, considering COVID precautions, but also because it would just mean sleeping on another couch. And at that point, I was like, no more couches for me. I need a Kingside bed. So I booked that hotel, and I spent Christmas Eve with them.

I booked the hotel, and I had not gone there to drop off my luggage or whatever. I booked the hotel, but I went straight to my family's house. Left around 10 or 11. Very excited to sleep in a bed for the first time in many days. The hotel itself was in Marysville, which is just right outside Yuba City. And like I said, it was pretty generic. Definitely in, I guess, what would qualify as the, quote, seedier, unquote, part of the town. And when I came into the lobby late on Christmas Eve, there was who I think I assumed must be a guest.

or maybe like a friend of the front desk because he was just kind of, this guy was just hanging out at the desk, drinking from a bottle of whiskey, which no judgment there, man, like drink your whiskey, have a great Christmas Eve. He was chatting with the front desk agent, seemed fine. But when I came in and started to do my check-in and everything, he was trying to talk to me while I was checking with the front desk agent. And then, you know, I'm sort of just like, yeah, yeah, oh, cool, right? Not really committing to a conversation, but not trying to be rude either.

But he followed me as I went to go to the elevator. And then he went on the elevator to the same floor I was going to. So I did this thing. He was pretty drunk, so I was like, it should be easy to shake this guy. And fortunately, he was right. But I was like, oh, man, I have the wrong room. You know what? I'm just going to take the stairs.

I could use some exercise. And I kind of like quickly went to the end of the hallway and then went up the stairs, stayed in that elevator, or excuse me, the stairwell for, God, I don't know, five minutes or so. And then I kind of peeked. I opened the door and peeked out at the hallway. And thankfully, he was gone. So after that little like, you know, subversive behavior, I then went to my room and was excited to get a good night's sleep. I mean, it had to be like 11, like closing in on midnight at that point.

And, you know, I'm a baby. I need to go ahead like 10 o'clock. You know, I was feeling exhaustion and irritation when I opened. the hotel door itself, like right outside of the door, open the door. And I mean, I tell you, as soon as I stepped foot into that hotel room, like I said, there was just this feeling that something was really off. I've had this feeling before, you know, this is, this is not a new experience for me. So I was familiar with the sensitivity and I was like, oh shit, you know, And in an effort to calm myself down, I'm like, girl, you're just, you're tired.

You know, you had to deal with this drunk guy that was annoying. Just get into the room. This will go away, you know, take shower and enjoy that big ass bed in the corner. But as I started to go into the room, and I mean, this was all going in my head. I had not yet even fully stepped into the room. I was like kind of frozen there at the threshold for a second with all of these sensations and thoughts going through my mind. And as I was trying to convince myself

and then going into the room and doing, you know, what we all do, find a place for your suitcase, take off your shoes, your jacket, whatever. The sense that that feeling that I was hoping would just fade, it got sharper and more specific. It really felt like I was being watched. And as much as I tried to do not. I knew this was not just like leftover irritation.

It felt like there was something glaring at me. You know, if you've ever been glared at by somebody who just hates your guts, which unfortunately I've experienced a couple of times, felt very much like that. It's, it is a sensation that almost has like a, like a tangible quality to it. You know, trying to ignore this sensation and sort of, sort of even just subconsciously justify it. I set my suitcase down.

I got out the things that I needed to take a shower, the pajamas I was going to change into. When I went into the bathroom and turned on the light, that sense of unease grew. And I remember the bathtub or the shower area had a curtain. And I remember when I pulled. the curtain across the bathtub feeling really uneasy. Kind of like, like the movie Psycho, right?

I was just like, somebody's on the other side of that curtain, which is ridiculous, right? Obviously, there's no one here. The room is not that big. I have used my eyes and determine that. But it just, it was almost that like primal fear that like if I open this curtain, something might be right there looking at me. So again, I ignore it. I like to, I like to sing, so I'm always singing

like a little dumb tune to myself. So I started sort of humming. So I come out of the bathroom. And the room when you, the bathroom was like the first thing. Immediately when you open the door, it is on the immediate left. And then you walk into the room and there is a couch there. There's like a little coffee table, and then on the other side is the dresser, TV, et cetera. And then deeper into the room on the left side is the bed. So that's kind of how everything was situated. There was a really weird stain on the floor when I walked in, too. I noticed that I have no idea if it is at all related, but I remember being put off by that

too, like if you spilled a lot of coffee on the floor, like not just a coffee cup, but like maybe a whole coffee container. So it was kind of brown, dark. And, you know, of course, in that sense of unease, my mind went to is that blood, but I was like, that's ridiculous, settle the fuck down. Like, that's not blood. They would not give you a hotel room with blood in it. But it was a noticeable stain, and I was kind of annoyed at it because, you know, I wanted a nice, room. So it's fine. If the bed, like, I was looking over the bed, I'm like, the bed that looks perfectly clean. That is literally all I care about. I'm just going to let this go. That was, like, my obsessive focus at that point was the bed. So, yeah, so coming out of the bedroom, walking

towards the bed, and it was at that point when I was walking towards the bed, you know, all nice and clean in my pajamas, but very much distracted because it was at that stage where that sensation, that sense of unease and like I was being watched became more directional and even more distinct. It felt like as I approached the bed, you know, now the couch and the coffee table, et cetera, those are behind me to my left. It really felt like it was coming from that direction specifically. All right. We'll be right back after this quick break. So I get into the bed, I turn on the two lamps on either side of it. And it's Christmas Eve. I love watching stupid Christmas movies on that day.

So I watched The Grinch because I hadn't actually seen it before. It was the Jim Carrey version. I had like, I don't know, it's a potato chips or something. And I was just very focused. I turned up the volume, you know, a reasonable level. Very focused on watching this movie, even just watching the commercials,

like that kind of just sustained chatter and this sustained thing that was engaging my attention. It felt like, oh, okay, you know, I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm just kind of, I must just be really keyed up. And I felt a little better, is what I'm trying to say. And by the end of the movie, which was kind of long, if you consider, you know, all the commercial breaks, I had even started to forget that I was feeling uneasy.

Like, I was like, oh, yes, bed, bed. And so turn off the TV. I always like to read before bed, so I can't remember I was reading by read a few chapters. And that's when I, when I started reading, like snuggling down into bed and the TV was off was when I started to, feel that sensation again, that sense of unease. And now I'm laying in the bed. So the couch and those items are now to my right. And it really felt like it was just emanating from there, from there specifically. And at that point, you know, I started to engage my faith a little bit, right? Like, even if none of this is real, praying will help me feel better because it's inviting

something else to be in this situation with me. Like, hopefully there is a God and hopefully that God is listening right now. And with that, uh, turned out the light. I just got more and more in easy and it felt like this, it felt like suffocating, honestly. Um, like, like the room. Um, like the room. was shrinking. Like the bed was the safe place, the oasis, if you will, right? And it was at that point, I had turned the light back on to help deal with that unease. And I had kind of been wrestling with that because I really have like sensitive eyes. I cannot sleep with lights on. Like I'm such a wimp. I have to have like the perfect setting for sleeping. I turn on the light. I'm laying there maybe an hour or so, half hour or so passive.

and then I turn off the light again because I know I cannot fall asleep, no matter how tired I am, with this light on. And it was at that point when I had turned the light off that I really felt like not just a feeling, but presence. Somebody is standing right behind you, you can absolutely sense that they are there. And it was that exact same feeling. Like if somebody had walked up to the bed

and stood right at the edge of it staring down at me, it was absolutely that feeling. And, oh, man, my heart is starting to rakes talking about this. I was so scared. That is when I saw this. It sounds unbelievable, but this is what I experienced, right? I saw this very big, dense and tall, thick, very dark,

like the darkest dark, like darker than any other shadows in the room. And it was a shadow. It kind of had form. It was extremely like solidly black. It was kind of, it was vaguely, very vaguely humanoid shape. Definitely over six feet tall. Vaguely humanoid. but kind of like a blob, like a big blob with what I, one might assume, is a head

as if it was just like there's no neck and the shoulders are the next thing that happens. It was whatever it was. It was definitely a distinct thing, right? It's not like it was a, oh, that was just the shadow of my suitcase or whatever. Like there was something right there. Undeniable at this point, you know, there's no denying that what I am seeing you know, maybe I'm hallucinating. I don't think I am, but this is absolutely the experience I'm having right now, right?

Like, I definitely believe I am seeing this thing. And I cannot describe how scared I felt terror and confusion. And it was almost like I was expecting this, honestly. You know, I had almost like affirmation. Maybe that's the word. This affirmation that what was, you know, boiling up at that stage, there was a reason for it, and this is the reason. Here it is. It's this guy.

Whatever the hell this thing is. Then it just, like, blinked, like a snap. And it just popped. It was like a pop. Like a balloon. When you pop a balloon, that's kind of what was like. It was like a pop. And it popped out of existence.

It's just like it was there and then it was gone. It popped. from the right side of the bed, and then it's at the foot of the bed, and then it's at the left side of the bed, and then it's just kind of like popping. It was just like a blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. And it even, it had this kind of like,

like blurry whirlwind effect. Like if you're spinning around and every, you know, say you're in a, I don't know, you're dancing with friends, and you're in the middle and you're just spinning around. Like the way that all of the people around you just start to blur together, that's kind of what it looked like, just like this one big whirlwind surrounding the bed

where I could kind of see its nebulous features, such as they were. But they were all blending together in this almost like inky black whirlwind. written, if that makes sense, around the bed. At no point did it, was it able to go over the space of the bed? It was almost like there was a barrier right around the bed, and it was coming as close to that barrier as it possibly could. Like, if you're at the zoo and you're watching, I don't know, the gorillas, and the gorillas, like on the other side of that glass, it almost felt like, I don't know, that it just couldn't get further, but, I mean, it was still scaring the fucking shit out of me. Like, it, like, I wasn't thinking at that moment, oh, look, I'm safe. It can't

get me. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Like, I was just terrified. Like, I didn't have coherent thoughts, really. As this continued and could not, I did not have sense of time in this, in this moment. So, it felt like a long time. It felt like minutes, but it was probably like 20 seconds, 30 seconds. But I got really mad. I was so scared, but I got really angry because I was finally in a bed. Like, it's Christmas Eve. It's my favorite holiday. I'm seeing my family.

I am so tired because I have not slept super great on the couch for the last, you know, five days that my husband has been sick. And finally in this bed, I'm paying money for this, right? And like, who is this fucker? Like, what is it doing? Why does it think it could take my evening from me and do this to me? I just was so, so upset. Though at this stage, I had been sort of cuddled into the bed, sort of near the middle of it.

I had moved even more to the middle, you know, with like the pillows sort of forming a little fort around me. But when I got increasingly angry and at the point of being furious, like just fucking mad, like the maddest I have ever been. I didn't even really think about it. I just kind of shot up on the bed. I didn't stand up completely, but I shot up to like a seated position.

And that's when, you know, it sounds so cheesy. It really does. And I swear I'm not like this evangelical Christian who is saying things like these, like this commonly. But I started showing. What I said was, I'm covered by the blood of Christ. You cannot touch me. I'm not afraid of you.

You need to fuck off. Like, I think I even said the scripture, God has given me authority to tramp on snakes and scorpions. Nothing will harm me. As I started really getting into invoking those phrases and that belief and really calling on it, Um, like I, I really started to believe it. It's weird. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I was that confident and strong in the face of what I felt like I was seeing. Um, and then I remember distinctly, I was like, leave me the fuck along.

go back to where you came from, don't bother me again. And that was the culmination of this whole, you know, verbal fight. And the crazy thing is that as soon as I was like, go back to your corner, don't bother me. Like it looked like somebody had grabbed the back of this thing and just yanked them back into this corner. Like it wasn't making that decision. It wasn't like, okay, man, whatever. I'm going to go chill in my corner. Like, it was yanked back there.

I could still see that it was there. I could still see it in, you know, my periphery especially, when I look directly at the corner, and this is the corner, like, where the couch is and everything. When I looked directly at that, it was definitely really dark, darker than the other shadows in the room. But when I turned my head, I could see it peripherally, and it was strange.

I don't know why, but for whatever reason, And in my periphery, it seemed to have more shape. It was there. And I had this sense that it couldn't get out of that space. Like it wasn't going to go away completely, which obviously that would have been preference, but that it just was not able to step out from that zone. And I was sweaty. I was shaking.

Oh, I was shaking so hard. Panting, I mean, hyperventilating. And the crazy thing is that it even occurred to me that I could fall asleep at all. Like when I hear these stories, I'm like, how the fuck did you fall back asleep? That's insane. Like I get out of the hotel and burn it down, right? But for some reason, I was like, yeah, I can go back to sleep. So I was able to.

I was able to turn up or the lights were still off. I was able to keep the lights off and fall back asleep. In the morning, I woke up. I forgot for a minute what had happened. I'm just like, oh, it's Christmas. And in the morning, I did not notice anything. I had opened the curtains. I did not notice like a shadow

or anything being darker than the space around it. You know, I think that I still kind of had the sense that like this room is still inhabited by more than just me, but I didn't at all feel like freaked out about it. I just kind of got up, thought about how I was stoked that it was Christmas and I was starting to see my family and got my stuff together and left. And then immediately went over and I was like, hey family, do you want to hear something crazy? I told them and I was surprised that they were not surprised.

It was just like, they were like, oh my God, I can't believe that happened to you. But they're at no point where they like, are you maybe a little bit crazy? You know, they sort of reaffirmed that it sounded like I, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I wrestled with something. I think it was my mom said something to the effect of, it sounds like that, was like a demon. And I don't really know if I believe in the, I don't know if I believe necessarily in demons or evil spirits. I just, I don't think we're really equipped to identify what these things are. So we reach for the language that we already have, you know. So obviously she was doing that, right?

It sounded like a demon. And clearly the invoking Christ worked on it. They accepted the story. They kind of talked about it. My dad, he said a little prayer. You know, thank you for protecting my princess. And then we just had Christmas, you know, we moved on. It did not become something that we really referred to the rest of the day.

My husband, he, I love him, and he is such a great compliment to me, but he does not believe in this at all. By this, I mean generally, paranormal, supernatural, et cetera, absolutely does not. He's extremely pragmatic man, very analytical. But he has not. He has not. been anything but supportive, and that is to say he's like, well, you know, I don't really know how to reconcile with that. And he does not come from a background where he would have any kind of, like, easily accessible language like I do, right, to describe my experience in the world. And even when I talked to him about it recently, I was like, well, do you believe me or not? And he was like, well, I believe you. But I just, I don't.

I can't explain it. And we got to talking, and I said something to him that I very much believe, which is that many of these phenomena, we just don't have the tools to examine them properly. I mean, going back to my experience of where I work, when you think about the micro level at which we can examine things, material structures, you know, nanoparticles. That would have been insane and sounded like complete, you know, fairy tale made up shit

to scientists not that long ago. So it is truly my belief that science just hasn't revealed how these things connect, but that it will eventually. And then we will collectively, as human beings, be able to develop better vocabulary to explain these things. And I think that in my husband's reaction there, I think that that sort of general perspective is more comfortable for him.

You know, just a general acknowledgement. The universe is more complex than our categories. Until we have better tools, things are just mysterious, you know? Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theo Schaefer, Theo Krantz, Haley Pearson, and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans and Juice Jackal. Our artwork is by Coldassack Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show. If you want to hear bonus episodes

of Otherworld, you could become a patron at patreon.com slash Otherworld. Our social media is at Otherworld. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, Leah Reese Dennis, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gaynor, and Hillary Schuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld Now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, you could send us your stories at stories at otherworldpod.com.