Spooked - 30-Day Notice

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

You know that house, the one at the end of the block? The one the kids all dare each other to break into? Well, Mary El is about to move into it. And she’s pretty sure the landlord isn’t telling her family something important about the house’s past.  Thank you, Mary El Grammer, for sharing your story with us!  Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, original score by Nicholas Marks, artwork by Teo Ducot Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jack found the house lay empty. The house was Jack's delight. Jack went to sleep inside it. Jack should have checked at night. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Listen to spooked. Stay tuned. In front of a campfire trying to figure out why these vegan marshmallows won't melt between the grand crackers like marshmallow marshmallows.

And I feel someone tugging on my shirt. I look down and see a beautiful little girl with my buddy Sam's daughters who asked me Uncle Glenn What's a ghost I glance over a Sam Because I get what's going on here

She'd asked him first But he over there trying to dodge He smiles, shrugs Waves his beard at me like Hey hey This is supposed to be your arena You answer Huh

What's a ghost? and she's looking up at me, big brown eyes expecting. So I tell her, I don't know what a ghost is, but I might know a little something about what ghosts are made of. What? I think a ghost is made of secrets that are buried deep. Stories that someone didn't get to tell, they're made of hurts that don't go away,

and big things that are left undone. And I'm really proud of this answer. Uncle Glenn breaking it down. You're welcome, little girl. Friends, one in all, you are welcome. But I look back down at her face. She's not as pleased with my talkie talk as I am. Shakes her head at me like I'm slow.

No. She says, ghost is people. Well, if you understand so much, what you're asking me for? Because they told me to? Spook stars. Now, areas are forever imprinted upon us. We're built to have attachment to places, to childhood homes, that lake you used to go to. We've even drawn to spots where bad things happened.

No, as a kid, Mariel, she moved to run a lot. And when her family ended up in James Island, South Carolina, Mariel thought they'd hit the jackpot. A nice neighborhood, a beautiful home. Everything seemed awesome. Of course, this is spooked. And here's Mariel. Selling Sally Foster gift rep with my neighborhood friends.

We take turns on who's going to knock on which door, and there's one house that we always play rock paper scissors for to see who we'll have to go. It's a one-style ranch with a little square of a front yard. The lawn is overgrown. The cars in the driveway never move, and we can see through the window and see furniture and things inside, but we never see people. There's so much just neighborhood lore about this house. My friend Jan had to go up to the door to knock on it one time, and she swears that she saw a headless woman in a white lace gown rocking a

Maybe. Other kids in the neighborhood would have said that we were crazy for walking up to this house. But we were overachievers, so of course we had to go up. Rock paper scissors. Rock paper scissors. I lose rock paper scissors, and I have to walk up to the house to knock on the door. The driveway feels like a very long walk. I feel like I have weights on. on my ankles, and yet I am pushing forward until I reach the front door and am ringing the doorbell. But nothing happens.

I don't hear anything inside, and I even peer through the front window, and I see the rocking chair, but I don't see a headless woman. And yet, I can't wait to get off that front porch stoop. I sprint back to my friends who are waiting on the street, not even in the driveway on the street. One day my mom picks me up from school and tells me that we're going to move. But in the same breaths, she tells me not to worry. We found another house in the same neighborhood, so I won't have to move away from my friends or change schools. And we're going to go there now so that you can see it.

She doesn't tell me anything after that. we just start driving through our neighborhood. I'm curious which house we were able to rent because I hadn't seen any for rent signs. And I ride my bike or rollerblades on those roads every day. So we drive past the house we're currently living in. And we keep driving down a couple of streets until we turn onto the street with the spooky house. And to my shock and horror, we pulled into that cracked, weedy driveway. And she said, we're here.

I tell her, no, no, no, no, no. We can't go in there. You don't understand. And my mother gives me a stern look that lets me know I need to get out right now. So I begrudgingly get out of the car and she takes my hand and we walk up. to the front door together. My mind is racing because everything I know about this house is scary. And all of my fears of what is lurking behind that front door are crashing around me at once.

I don't expect anyone to answer because no one ever has. So when the door opens and a man is standing there, I am utterly shocked. And my mother introduces me to Mr. Walters, who owns the house. Mr. Walters is tall. He's pretty lanky, and he has a mustache. And he's in kind of dirty jeans in a plaid flannel. He invites us into the house.

I do not want to go inside this house, but I do because I'm a kid and you do what your parents say. So as we walk through the house, I realize that it's not scary in the way that we all thought it was. I'm astounded at how normal everything looks. In the bedroom, there's change on the dresser. There's food in the pantry. there are no monsters that I can see. There are no ghosts lurking about. It looks like somebody lives there, but nobody does.

At first, Mr. Walters seems hospitable, willing to give us a tour. But as we look around, he seems very anxious. He doesn't seem interested in answering any of my mother's questions. But what I learned is that two years before, in 1989, a really horrible hurricane came through Charleston called Hurricane Hugo. And what Mr. Walters is telling my mom is that he and his wife were so afraid of what the hurricane would do to their house that they left and never returned until now. And I was perplexed by that because the house didn't look damaged.

Everything seemed fine, and I couldn't understand why you just wouldn't return to a house for two years with all your stuff in it. I peek into a coat closet, and that's where I see several boxes full of children's toys, and this small stuffed gorilla is peeking out of the top of one of the boxes. Mr. Walter saw me looking at it, and he picked it up and handed it to me and offered it to me as a gift, as a housewarming gift. As he hands me the gorilla, he suddenly flips from anxious to warm and friendly. But that only lasts for a few seconds. And I get the feeling that he wants us to get out. That night when my dad got home, we all talked about it over dinner. and I learned about the deal that my mother had made with Mr. Walters.

My mom felt like that house was abandoned, so she started asking around in the neighborhood to see if anybody knew who owned it. And that's when she got in touch with Mr. Walters and basically begged him to rent the house to us. He didn't want to at first. My mother didn't say why Mr. Walters and his wife didn't want to rent out the house. and I didn't get the feeling that she or my dad cared

because they were just desperate to move somewhere and this seemed like the perfect place for us to move. On the morning of moving day, I'm feeling really scared. We belong to a small fundamental Christian church and we got another family involved with their kids and we all ran around the house, opened every door and into every corner did what we call calling on the name of Jesus to bless the house. It felt fun.

It was like a game and it was something new. We'd never done that before. By the end of the day, when it's time for bed, I'm feeling pretty peaceful about being in the house. I have new bedding. I like the setup of my new room. I'm snuggled in my bed, lying on my back, holding on to the gorilla that Mr. Walters gave me. My door is cracked a bit, and the hall light is on. My eyes are just kind of lazily gazing around my room, and they land on a little bit of movement around my door.

And that's when I notice a little boy, maybe seven or eight years. years old, peering into my room. He has reddish brown hair, parted on the side, clean cut. He's wearing a long sleeve shirt, something that looks similar to Long John's. I feel a strange sense of calm. I don't freeze. I'm not scared. We just kind of stared at each other. He didn't say anything. He didn't come any closer. He isn't smiling, but he doesn't look angry or even afraid of me. He looks really curious. After a few seconds of our eyes being locked, I realize that boy can't be there. And not because I thought I was hallucinating, but because he physically couldn't be there. There just wasn't space for his body.

because where my door frame ended was a mirror. And the way that he was peering into my door, he would have to be coming out of the mirror. And then I realized this is probably the ghost we've all been so afraid of. And there's nothing to be afraid of at all. Once I decide he's a friendly ghost, I'm so tired, I go ahead and fall asleep. I fall asleep with him standing. they're looking at me. I wake up to the sound of footsteps overhead, pounding, running.

I don't understand what's happening. And then as my eyes focus, I realize something is hovering over my face just a few inches from me parallel to my body. This kind of wispy, see-through being with these dark, hollow eyes staring me down. My heart is raising. My chest feels tight. I can't find my voice. I'm also thinking I was wrong about the little boy being the only ghost in this house. All I can do is squeeze my eyes as tight as I possibly can and hope it'll go away. And that's what I do until I fall asleep again. waking up in the room the next morning, I knew without a doubt that I had not made any of that up. None of it was a dream. I feel like I can't say anything to my parents because I don't feel like they would believe me.

I thought that they would tell me I was being silly and I'm always worried something's going to happen. Each night for a little while, I'm on the lookout for them, especially the boy. but over time neither of them returned. So I don't forget about them, but I kind of put them in a little box in my mind and try not to think about it. I start to let my guard down. Months go by without anything else happening,

but Mr. Walters from time to time will show up unannounced so that he can check out things. He does sweeps of the house and he's in and out within minutes. But it's random. He doesn't give warning. And he never gives him an explanation.

There's something that just doesn't sit right with me, something strange about him. I don't trust him. It's near the end of summer because school starts up again soon. And we're just enjoying the last lazy days of summer. My mom is grilling. outside on our patio. I'm setting the table for dinner

when I hear my mom scream in a crash and I run out to the patio. I see my mom on the ground her body's kind of curled around the grill and I see that her hand is burned. She's holding

her burned hand with her other hand, kind of squeezing her wrist, and her hand just looks white. It's completely charred. It's grilled human flesh. I start screaming for my dad. My dad got aloeira gel and smothered her hand in it and then filled up a Ziplot bag with ice cubes and water. I overhear my mother telling my father what happened. As she was taking the food down to the grill, it felt like someone had pushed her down the stairs. And she grabbed the hot grill and held onto it to hold her body up so that she didn't land on her head on the patio. She'd walked those stairs a hundred times before and never fallen. But as she and my dad talked more about it, they really,

reason she must have just lost her footing or tripped somehow. I feel like they are downplaying what really happened. And I immediately feel that the thing is back and things are getting worse. Mr. Walters continues to randomly show up and demand that he come into the house and look around. I'm beginning to feel like Mr. Walters knows that the house is haunted. I am convinced, as I have been from the beginning, that we shouldn't be there. A few months later, my dad and I are watching TV in the family room. I decide to get off the couch and play with my dog a little bit. The news is on, and I'm getting bored.

So I'm playing with my dog off to the side. and suddenly my dog, who is a toy doxen named Ziggy, starts barking furiously at my dad. My dog seems very agitated, almost like he is trying to frighten something away. And my dad, at first, shush as him, and then because my dog won't relent, he angrily jumps off the cat.

couch with his finger pointed and gets up in his face to say bad dog. But just as he does, this wooden beam chandelier comes crashing down onto the couch right where my dad had been sitting. The chandelier was solid and did not break into pieces. My dad calls on the name of the Lord and thanks the Lord for protecting him and then mumbles something about needing to call Mr. to have it fixed. I am not convinced God is protecting us. I keep imagining how it would have destroyed my dad if he had been sitting there. So my father calls Mr. Walters to tell him that the chandelier fell and that he needed to come fix it. And Mr. Walters responds with an eviction notice and tells my father that we had to get out of the house immediately because he had sold it.

So we moved out of Mr. Walter's house. The house we moved into was ugly. It had multiple shades of brown carpeting everywhere. It was probably the ugliest house we ever lived in. But I felt so much safer there. I was so happy. Except for when Mr. Walters would drive by our house slowly, studying us just as randomly as he showed up when we were living in his house.

I feel like Mr. Walters was definitely hiding something. He just wanted to make sure that we were keeping his secrets if we knew anything. A few years ago, now a full-grown adult, I was thinking about this experience and I finally decided to ask my parents about the house and what they remembered happened inside of it. I finally told them my account of the story. They didn't admit that the ghost I saw might have been real. They also didn't deny it. In hindsight, I think that's why they made up the blessing or cleansing, whatever it was,

to reassure themselves that God would protect us. We had never done that before. we never did it again. The one thing I've never been able to stop thinking about is Mr. Walters. Curiosity got the better of me, so I looked the house up on Zillow to see what it would look like now. And it looked about the same. The lawn is all overgrown again, the paint's chipping on the shutters. It just looks like it's in a state of disrepair like it always did.

But I noticed on the Zillow Price and History section that it was not sold in 1993. I think that Mr. Walters knew he'd made a mistake letting us. And he evicted us to get us away from the danger that was in that house. And then made sure nobody else would ever live there. Thank you so much, Mariel, for sharing your story with the Spooked. The original score for that piece was by Nicholas Marks was produced by Zoe Frigno. Now, Spooasters, we walk this path together.

My question is, do you inhabit a world that others do not have access to? Do you know things that you should not know or see things that remain hidden to those dearest to you? If there is no one you can tell, tell me, I want to know. Spook at snapjudgment.org.

because there's nothing better than a spooked story from a spooked listener. Let us know spooked at snapjudgment.org. And you can tell the dark side you spook with some spook gear. Get the t-shirt of your dreams. It's available right now at snapjudgment.org. And remember, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of the noonday sun, get the amazing, stupendous Snap Judgment podcast. It's storytelling with a beat.

Fook was created by the team that knows exactly the right questions to ask any real estate agent about that supposedly perfect three bedroom two bath bungalow except of course Mark Ristich He'd prefer not to know There's Anna Sussman our chief spooksters Eliza Smith Chris Hamburg Annie Nguyen Nguyen Nguyen Mouin Lauren Newsom Leon Morimoto Davy Kim Renzo Goryo Tayao de Kott Marissa Dodge Zohi Farigno Tiffany Delisa Ann Ford Doug Stewart and Isaiah Sims

The spook theme song is by Pat McSeedie Miller. My name is Gunn Washington. And the thing about a path or a pattern is that it makes it easier to set an expectation of what it is you do of how your world is ordered. Patterns are guideposts,

handrails. It can lead us away from the dark heart of the force. A pattern can even save your life and one habit. One habit I advise above all others. is that wherever you go, and whatever you do, never, ever, never, never, never, never, ever.