Spooked - A Friend In The Forest - Classic

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

On the edge of Ireland in the deep forest, a young boy makes a new friend that no one in town has seen for years."A Boy Named Thomas" ...Shane Dunphy spent years working with kids as a social worker. He’d seen it all until he met a little boy named Gregory.For more, get Shane Dunphy’s book The Boy They Tried to Hide.Producer: Nancy Lopez  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The best kind of friend does exactly what you want, laughs at all your jokes, and never asked for the last piece of pizza. But you might have to settle for someone a little less easy to get along with. You're listening to Spook. Stay. Our farm was in rural Michigan, surrounded by woods and swampland.

And when my parents screaming inside our trailer grew too loud, Those woods were great to get lost in. I'd follow animal trails through the brush, beat back swarms of biting flies, knowing that no one else in the history of time had ever cut through its far or dug in as hard ever. Till one day, if you'd belong on almost trail,

I came across a well, and this well made of crumbling brick, set into a circle, had the heavy metal lid sealing it from the top, and I thought I could lift it, maybe have a drink of water. When I heard a knock, clear as that bright summer day, a knock from inside the well, as if someone inside wanted to get out. And I sat and heard the knock again and again.

But no, of course. I didn't lift that lid. Instead, I backed away. I turned and I ran home, didn't tell anyone. Still, I trekked back out there the next day. I heard the knocking again. More frantic, maybe. Maybe, maybe not.

Hello? Hello? Again, I did nothing. But then the next, day. I made the trek all alone, sweating under the sweltering Michigan sun. And once again, I sat to wait on the sound. But this time, I heard nothing. A strain, pushed up close against the well. And then it was so hot. And I was so thirsty. But I knew inside, they swell. was water that I would never drink.

You're listening to Spooked. My name is Glen Washington. Question everything. And of course, this goes without saying. They would begin spooked in the land next to the veil. Ireland. Shane Dumfey spent years working with kids as a social worker. Shane thought he'd seen it all until he met a little boy named Gregory.

Due to the sensitive nature of this story, some names have been changed. There's a small coastal town in Ireland that locals call the most westerly point in Europe. But it can feel like the last place on earth. To the east, it's cut off by miles and miles of dense woods. The Finnegan's, they lived just on the edge of these woods. So I found it extremely difficult to get there. It was 2007, and Shane Dunphy was fairly new to town. As he made his way to the Finnegan's for a house visit,

he couldn't see any clear street signs to follow. You go off one little country lane, down another by-road, off another little laneway. The trees seem to close in overhead. As you come up to the house, this tiny little sort of two-up-two-down workers' cottage, which looks like something out of Grimm's fairy tales. It was quite irons.

So I arrive out and I meet Gregory. Shane had learned that Gregory was continuously sneaking off at night into the woods. He had reddish blonde hair, grayish blue eyes. He was maybe a little bit on the small side. And he doesn't really want to talk to me. Everyone imagines when you work with kids that conversation flows immediately. And it didn't at all. He pretty much froze when he saw me.

And what I did was I played this game with him. Okay, I'm going to ask you questions. you can shake your head for no, nod for yes. Okay, so you go to school in the village and he nods for yes. And I say, okay, and your teacher is a six-foot-tall blue bunny rabbit, and of course he laughs and says no. And we go on like this. And eventually he admits that he does go out at night into the woods to play

and that he snuck out at night to meet this other friend. and he told me that this other little boy was called Thomas. Now this is the first I'd heard of this. Certainly Orla the mum hadn't mentioned it. So I thought, right, this is interesting. And so I asked him, where did you meet Thomas? Did you meet him in school? Did you meet him in church?

You know, did you meet him on the internet? But he shakes his head no to all of these questions. Look, Gregory, you're going to have to tell me. Where did you meet this guy? And he tells me that he heard him. And I said, what? You heard him? And so he brings me up to his room.

His bedroom is a tiny little space. There's some posters up on the wall of like football players and Formula One cars. There's a little dresser. And then there's a window looking out onto their little backyard, which exits out through a little gateway into the woods. And he says, I hear it. him calling me from down there. And he said, I got up and I went to the window and I looked out and there was this little boy standing just under that tree over there. The little boy saw him and

beckoned to him. And he told me that Thomas was living alone in the woods. I told him, maybe I should meet him. Maybe he's hungry. Maybe he's frightened. Gregory was absolutely adamant that Thomas did not like adults, was afraid of adults. Their world was just between the two of them. I'd worked an awful lot with kids who were habitual runaways and they're either running to something or they're running away from something. I felt that this was a very lonely, very isolated little family. You know, the dad, he had left them. The mom was working three jobs. He was lonely. So I thought it was absolutely normal. and reasonable for Gregory to create a little playmate for himself, Gregory has an imaginary friend. Before leaving the Finnegan's at evening,

Shane told the mom to start inviting Gregory's friends over or have him join a soccer club or youth group. Anything to get him an outlet so that he doesn't feel the need for this. And I reckon that they're running away and the imaginary friend will disappear. About two weeks later, just, I think it's over the lunch break actually that I got the phone Cole and it was from a police officer who immediately said, you've been doing some work with the Finnegan's or that the mum said you might have some input into what's happened. Gregory had disappeared the night before. The cops didn't find him until the next morning,

miles away from home in the thick of the woods. Gregory said he'd been playing hide and seek with Thomas and that Thomas was still nearby. But the cops found no trace of the boy. Well, except for one thing. When they got back to Gregory's house, they searched the area outside his window. And they discover two sets of footprints. The guard, Harry, showed me a photograph of one of the sets of footprints with some measuring tape beside it for scale. One set of footprints was larger than the other, but they both clearly belonged to children.

My heart dropped because I thought, oh my mind. gosh, Thomas is real. And that really frightened me. Is Thomas being used to lure Gregory into something really, really sinister? I've been involved in cases before in the past where children were used to literally draw kids into pedophile rings, child abuse situations. Now, that doesn't happen every day, but these are realities. So the big question on everybody's was, who is this child? Shane talked to Gregory's mom again and told her to put a bolt or a padlock on all the doors and to hide the keys so that Gregory cannot escape anymore.

I was starting to feel a certain sense of responsibility towards the family at this point. And also I was starting to, I liked Gregory. I thought he was a nice kid. I thought he was interesting and funny and, you know, I kind of started to quite enjoy hanging out with him. So one afternoon, we went out for ice cream. Shane wanted to see if he could get Gregory to open up a bit more about Thomas. And he did.

Gregory, he was really at that particular time, enjoying games on his PlayStation. And then he said, actually, Thomas doesn't have a PlayStation and he doesn't have an Xbox. And I said, well, what does he like then? What games does he play? And Gregory told me that he had a specky. I immediately said to him, do you mean a ZDX Spectrum? And he said, yeah, that's it. That's what he has. The ZDX Spectrum was a game console popular in the 80s.

And this is what really jarred with me. He said the two games that he says are his favorites are Manic Minor and School Days. Now, these were the two big games. when I would have been about 13 or 14 years old. So we're talking 1984, 1984, 1985. You know, I was really fascinated by this. What else? And he said, well, what's the A team?

Thomas tells me it's his favorite show. Again, I'm bowled over. The A team. I said, well, that's like an action show that was on, again, when I was a kid. Gregory mimicked one of the catchphrases from Mr. T. I said, I pity the fool who doesn't like the A-Team. What the hell is all of this about? This child Thomas, who was a huge dilemma and mystery and a cryptic something that I couldn't even understand,

who was engaging in all the things that I engaged with, there was a part of me that was drawn to it. But hang on a minute, we've stopped you getting out. I said, so how are you seeing Thomas then? And he said to me that Thomas is getting in. How do you mean he's getting in? Explain that to me. He said to me, I wake up at night and he's in my room. Now that sent a chill right down my spine.

I felt a very powerful sense of urgency that we needed to get to the bottom of this before something really terrible happened. And I did, I pushed him again. You know, look, I really need to meet him. And he's just like, no, absolutely not. I had come home quite late one evening. I'd had a really rough day at work and I'd kind of fallen asleep. And I remember being woken up by my cell phone ringing.

It was Orla on the other end and she was really upset, very agitated. And she asked me, could I come out to the house really quickly because something had happened. I said, Trina, look, should I call the police on my way out, if somebody tried to break in? She said, no, the police can't help us with this. Now that kind of freaked me out a little bit. I thought, oh my God, what has gone on? I got in my car, got out there as quickly as I could. She brought me into the kitchen,

and she had an old cassette recorder sitting on the kitchen table. She said, play that. So I played it. Had to actually pick it up and almost put it to my ear to hear what was being said. Gradually, I realized what I was hearing was two distinct voices, one of which was clearly Gregories, Gregory's saying no

Mommy gets afraid when I go outside to play with you but the other was slightly lower and sounded almost as if it were coming from an older child I could hear the other child's voice becoming quite annoyed, quite agitated

you know look you have to play fair it's your turn you need to come out with me now you got the sense that he had stood up and at that point on the recording I heard Orla Gregory's mother burnt I heard her saying, you know, Gregory, are you all right?

She told me that when she went into the room, Gregory was on his own, but she said the window was open and on the rug on the bedroom floor there was soil and pine needles and little twigs as if somebody who had been walking around in the woods had been standing there. Shane went out back and he did see a drain pipe running up the side of the house right beside Gregory's window. He figured that was how Thomas was getting in. For the sake of the mom,

Shane threw out another possible explanation. Could it be Gregory pushing the fantasy to a new level where he's creating these two voices himself? But usually when children do that, they're very, very deeply, psychiatrically disturbed. And that just wasn't Gregory. I was just telling myself that these were just two frightened little boys who had found each other and somebody needed to help them.

Shane sat down with Gregory again. He had to ask him who he thought Thomas really was. The words he used was Thomas was from the woods, almost as if he was a part of the woods. To be honest with you, it kind of slightly gave me the creeps to hear him say it. Because I felt that maybe he did understand an awful lot more than we assumed. he did. Shane hadn't really talked about this situation with anybody outside the family. So he confided in the school principal, who was also a friend and could perhaps shed some light on this mysterious boy

who lived in the woods. He kind of suggested that I had somehow stepped into kind of like a rural legend about a girl who had become pregnant by her father. The father had brought her out into the woods to a cabin and he had kept her there and made her. her have her child in this shack. And the story went that she gradually became crazier and lonelier and more estranged. And she took to wandering the paths of the forest. If she were alive today, would have been the closest neighbor to the Finnegan family. Shane dug up some newspaper clippings about this local legend that dated back to the mid-1980s. One mentioned that the woman's child had been 10 years old.

We were never given the name of the little boy. However, the name of the man who had allegedly fathered this child was Thomas. The third article told of her suicide. This woman had taken herself out into the woods and had hanged herself. And there was a photograph of the living room of the house that this woman had lived in. And it showed the TV and the couch and a coffee table. and sitting on the coffee table this little square black box

with the grey keys and a little literally a spectrum rainbow pattern in the corner was a ZX spectrum home computer what the hell is going on this is just too weird I wondered had Gregory

somehow overheard a conversation about the case maybe were the Finnegan's in some way related to this family. But again, I realized I was grasping at straws and I was now starting to think, I really don't know what's going on anymore. But Shane kept poking at it.

According to one newspaper clipping, there was a local priest who had befriended the woman, and he was still alive. But when Shane went to see him, the man didn't want to talk. Shane was running out of leads to chase. I got a call from Orla. She was borderline hysterical.

Gregory was gone, but this time it was different. Orla had been preparing breakfast in the kitchen when suddenly Gregory shot past her and out the back door. She called after him only to see him run into the woods. And he wasn't alone. There was another boy pulling Gregory by the hand. We did call the police, but there was their reaction. was looking at, literally he's only gone. He's gone an hour. He's run away before. If he's not

back by this evening, give us a call again kind of thing. They were growing weary of the case at that stage. I called George Taylor, the principal of the school, who was my friend, and who knew the woods intimately. And he had the principal guide them through the woods to try and find the two boys. We could see two distinct sets of tracks, and they were heading north. Eventually, After a couple of hours, we came across a kind of a hollow in the woods. In that hollow, there was an old shack, an old stone ruin. Gregory was lying up against the wall of this shack asleep, which I thought was very strange, why he would have gone to sleep, but he was.

I went down into the hollow to Gregory. I remember I kneeled down beside him and woke him up. as I did that suddenly we heard the sound of a child crying this seemed to be coming from all around us and kind of in my head as well I said to Gregory

where's Thomas where is he he said he's over there I looked over and there was a child standing a distance away in the trees could see that he was wearing a kind of a like an an anorak with buttons

and he had a up. I remember I took my eye off him to say something again to Gregory and when I looked up he was closer, impossibly closer. He couldn't have bridged that distance in the time that it took. And I looked again and he was closer again and at this stage I could actually see him quite well. You know, I could actually see kind of grass stains or moss stains on the knees of his jeans and the sound of the crying was even louder. It was, So loud it was hurting at times. I remember I picked up Gregory and gave him to George,

and George said that we have to get out of here. You know, we need to go. But there was still part of me that wanted to help this kid. Here he was. He was standing right in front of me. And he looked like a boy. I held out my hand. I said, come on.

Come with us. You know, we can talk about whatever's going on. As I said that, something crossed his face. I don't know whether it was a look of fear or a look of anger or a look of uncertainty. But it was like a rope had been tied around his waist and suddenly it had been pulled back through the trees. He was gone. Just whoosh.

The sound stopped. The crying wasn't there anymore. We took Gregory and we started walking back home. And I remember him saying to me, is he gone? now, is Thomas gone? I didn't have an answer. I didn't know what to say. One afternoon, I'm in the office,

and suddenly I look up and Father Malone is standing in the doorway. Father Malone is a local priest Shane had tried talking to days before. And he's clearly very distressed. And he tells me that he had to come clean. He did know more about the woman in the woods. Father Malone had visited her often. She told him that she had been having violent thoughts towards her son.

She had been thinking about killing him. He said that he hadn't really known what to do. So he just offered a listening ear. Then this one afternoon he arrived out to the house. He knocked on the door and there was no answer. And he was about to leave when he saw the woman walking out of the trees. There was blood on her clothes. smears of blood on her face, she told him that she had murdered her son.

When Father Malone went to the police, they didn't bother to investigate. Everybody believed that the boy didn't exist, that this was a figment of the woman's imagination. A month later, the woman hung herself. Father Malone told me sort of that what we were seeing was the unquiet ghost or the spirit of this little boy who had been murdered. Well, I kind of didn't really know what to say other than it added up. It, I suppose, kind of almost completed a circle in terms of everything that had been going on. A couple of days later, Father Malone and Orla and Gregory and myself went into the woods and we had a

candlelight ceremony. They didn't go too far into the woods, just about 20 yards from the Finnegan's house, and they stood in a loose circle. Gregory held candles, which during the ceremony, Father Malone lit them from a sacred candle that he had brought with him. Now, to be clear, this was not an exorcism or anything like that. Father Malone wanted to acknowledge what had happened to Thomas. And I know that closure is quite important, but as to what the outcome was going to be, I really had no idea. He said a few words, just blessing Thomas and that we all wished for him to be accepted into heaven.

Shane had explained to Gregory that they were saying goodbye to his friend. I think he felt glad that Thomas had gone somewhere where he was happy and safe. At one point out of the corner of my eye, I fancied I might have seen a little figure among the trees, but, you know, I don't know whether any of that was just what you expect in a situation like that.

Then we went back to the house and had tea. That was the last anybody saw of Thomas. He didn't come back. Big thanks to Shane Dunphy for sharing the story with the spout. Got to know, there's so much more to this piece, so much more. We'll have a link to Shane's book, The Boy They Tried to Hide, at spookpodcast.org.

That's the story we have for you. We want to hear the stories you have for us. Some spooksters have already hit us on the spook line. Let us know your story. Record onto your phone device thingy. Send it to spooked at snapjudgment.org. The spook Ghost Hunter Squad includes Mark Ristage, Nancy Lopez, Eliza Smith, Anna Sussman,

Jasmine Aguilera, and Tail Decott. Original music by Pat Massidi Miller. If it's close to midnight, and something's evil lurking in the dark. And under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart. Always remember and don't forget to never, ever.