Spooked - A Murder of Crows

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Birds talk to each other about everything -- where to find food, where to roost, when to migrate. What messages might they have for us? STORIES The Head We all know the old wives’ tales: don’t walk under a ladder or you’ll have bad luck; don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mama’s back. Dan is about to discover another, more sinister omen… with deadly consequences. Thanks, Dan, for sharing your story with us! Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Maryam Qudus A Murder of Crows Mike is pretty sure he’s going crazy. Every time he sees a crow, it seems like it’s trying to tell him something: to watch out, to beware. What are they trying to warn him of? Thanks, Mike, for sharing your story with us! Produced by Alyia Yates, original score by Lauryn Newson 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.

My mother had a birdie. The birdie she could talk. She told my mother's secret. So now she's in the pot. Ha ha, ha, ha, ha. You're listening to Spoot. Stay. To.

Lake married in Oakland, an urban lake. Beautiful veneer hiding decades of industrial runoff. Abandoned vehicles, bodies. It still manages to support a variety of wildlife. Duck, kees, pelicans. gulls, hungry scavenger birds. They'll eat anything.

Digging through trash next to the rats, they snatch snacks and juice boxes from screaming kids. They huddle at night, though. Next to homeless people. As if tamed by this city, as if domesticated, but twice a day, at dusk and at dawn, these birds, they do more than scavenge. They hunt Soar over the lake

Searching, then dive Straight down Piercing the water gone And they emerge More often than not Something wriggling held fast in their beaks What do they catch in this leg I'm not at all sure but there it is

There it is they feast Expressionless Not surprised they are provided for Not triumphant not sad even here in this place surrounded by skyscrapers and tourists and municipal buses and taco sands

even here the hunter finds her rhythm boot starts we begin with a veteran storyteller his name is Dan Cope and we heard from Dan a while back in season 4

when he came face to face with the fallen well guess what Dan's back I was a young rookie policeman working in Claremont County. This particular day, I got a call and the dispatcher said Code 1, which is no lights and no siren, but get there in a hurry. I went to the address. Nice house, huge front yard, one great big giant hickory tree in the front yard facing the river.

And I knocked on the door and an elderly lady. my age now, 60s probably, come to the door. She reached in and grabbed me by the shirt, drug me into the house and said, please help me, please help me. It took a minute to calm her down to find out what was going on.

All the excitement was over a bird in the house. It was just a little sparrow, and what was important to her was that we got this sparrow out of her house without hurting it. it would be a terribly bad thing if we hurt this bird. A bird in the house means someone who's in jeopardy, and if that bird dies, it means that person is either dead or is going to die.

It's a superstition. I wouldn't say I believed it, but I had hurt it, and I thought it was odd. Anyone that lives in small places along the river, They had their own set of superstitions And some of them have to do with the river And some of them don't It took me a while But I used a broom and my hat

At the time we wore the cowboy-style hat Like a sheriff would wear You know, we finally scooped this bird Toward the front door Once I got the bird moving toward the door She calmed down quite a bit And I was just talking in my ear talking rapidly right over my shoulder.

Be careful, don't hurt it. We had this green door standing open, and I got the bird out of the door, but it flew out the door and flew straight into the hickory tree that was in the front yard and hit the tree and dropped dead. This poor old lady was just beside herself because it was killed going out of the house. It was just as bad as being killed in the house.

I had to comfort her for a few minutes and calm her down. After a few minutes, I left, and I told the dispatcher, and she gave me another call, which was a dump truck sitting in the middle of the road on the four-lane highway in front of the power station. So I went down there as fast as I could. When I got beside it, I could tell that it was an accident. and there was debris laying around it. I dodged something in the road bigger than a breadbox.

Wasn't sure what it was. It could be anything. Could be a lump of coal. I just went around it. I remember thinking, I had to sweep that out of the road. Got up behind a dump truck and got out. And as I walked up to the driver, he's hysterical. And it took me a minute to calm him down.

And he's pointing under his truck, so I had to get down on a knee and look under the truck, and you could see the remnants of a corvette. A corvette had come up behind him, and for whatever reason didn't touch his brakes and ran directly under the dump truck. It clicked in my head. I know what I just dodged. I could have run over again very easily. I went back to pick up the debris. It was the head of the driver, which had been smashed about two-thirds of the way flat and was laying in the middle of the road.

I got the driver calmed down, got him out of the road. He was wanting to help and couldn't. He was shaking and very upset. White is a ghost. You could tell nothing like that had ever happened to him before. Once he realized that there was no one alive under that. He just sat down in the grass with his back to me and just sat there. I retrieved the head and I got it out of the roadway for the corner.

It's not like today. You didn't carry rubber gloves. You use what you had. If you had a piece of cardboard, that's what you would use. But I didn't. So it was a matter of under the neck and the hair. We had the Corvette pulled out from underneath. I ran the license plate number,

and I found the driver's license for the man. It was the same address I just left. It was this lady's youngest son from the bird incident. I drove back to the house, and she was standing in the front yard as though she were waiting for me. And when I pulled up, I started toward her, and she kind of held her hand up, like, don't make me wait any long. I said, it was Billy, ma'am.

She just nodded her head, turned around, went to the house, and went in and closed the door. I did knock on the door a time or two, but she wouldn't answer her. She was done with me. I'd done my job, so I left. That was my first journey into superstition, except it didn't feel superstitious. It felt natural. By some method of nature, she had knowledge.

It didn't feel strange at all. Thank you, Dan, for sharing your story with the spooked. Now, the original score for that story was by Miriam Caduce. It was produced by Anne Ford. Next up, Mike. Now, Mike has just arrived in Santa Fe. Why is he in Santa Fe? because he and his wife, they're taking some time apart.

I know what that means. Mike's about to move to that one bedroom apartment, that small one bedroom apartment. And he's feeling lonely. But I'm going to let Mike take it from here. I'm feeling pretty bummed about it, actually. I'm not feeling hopeless, but some of the crummy parts about moving, like bringing boxes up and everything like that.

It didn't really prepare me for the emotional state of being alone. for the first time in a long time. So I am feeling lonely. Before I even get up the stairs, I hear a voice that says, Hi, Mike. And I turn around, and it's someone I know. It's Becky and her mom, Susan. Becky is a woman that I had worked with when I lived in Albuquerque.

Becky had some health conditions from birth, and she had been in a wheelchair pretty much her entire life. She wasn't supposed to live beyond five years old, but here she is. Susan says, oh, are you living here? And I say, yeah, I'm up here at the top of these stairs. And she says, well, that's crazy. I'm at the foot of these stairs. And I'm just like, huh.

Before I even get the first box up, I have some friends who live, like, literally right next door. It totally lifts my spirits. We're standing there and we're talking. And Susan says that she's actually. taken some time off of work to be able to spend more time with Becky. I have a box in my hands, so the conversation doesn't last very long. They go on their way. I carry the box upstairs. I open the door and I just see a big, empty apartment. It doesn't feel particularly warm and inviting, but I realize I still have a lot to do as far as unpacking goes and as far as getting

settled goes. By the end of the day, around 10.30 or 11 o'clock, I'm just exhausted. I don't even make the bed. I just plop down onto the mattress and go to sleep. One of the things that's really nice about living in this apartment is that Becky and Susan are there and it's really nice to, you know, just see a friendly face. I come down the stairs one day and Becky is sitting outside. She and I strike up a conversation. I say hi, she says hi. She had just got back from visiting the fire station south of town, and she's telling me about one fireman in particular who she has the biggest crush on. It just, it just makes me smile. It's cool to hear about someone who has some interests that are cool and kind of innocent. I definitely feel like I'm a better person for having Becky in my life.

Her mom has pulled me aside and told me about how Becky's health is going downhill. So I want to keep things light and happy. One day I'm coming down the stairs and I see Becky sitting out in the plaza and I go over to say hi and she just reaches out to give me the biggest hug. It's the kind that if I tried to pull away from, there's no way to pull away from it. she knows that it's the end and I know that it's the end and I'd like for it not to be but this was the last time we saw each other she died not two or three days later after the service Becky's mom I think she has a lot of memories in that apartment complex and so she packs up her things and moves about an hour south of Santa Fe and that night I have the weirdest

dream. It's a nice crisp fall day. I'm jogging. I remember the leaves crunching under my feet. I remember feeling the breeze on my face. And a crow lands on my shoulder. I can feel its claws, and I can feel its feathers brushing up against my cheek. And eventually, I say to the crow, okay, time to go. And I try to brush the crow away. And that's when the crow just digs in harder. When I wake up, I can still feel the claws from the crow on my shoulder. But I look over and there's nothing on my shoulder. So it just feels wrong. I look over and I see that my dog is just sitting by the bed trembling.

He's an older dog at this point. So part of me thinks that he has to go to the bathroom. I get up and he just bolts to the door and we go outside. It's just past dawn, which is about the time I get up anyway. It's a beautiful morning. There's a tree outside my apartment, and it's a songbird tree. It's a tree that the songbirds have nests in, and you can hear them chirping throughout the day, and the dog just wants to get away from this.

We're walking along the trail, and we come along a coyote fence. And sitting on this fence, there are crows. and they're sitting there and they're just looking at us. And I've never seen them in a group this big before. It's not uncommon for crows to sit in a row. Like, they will sit in groups, but what seems weird is they're all staring at me. They're not focused on anything else. They're not looking for a new place to fly or they're not like squawking at each other.

all these crows are looking directly at me. I'm not sure what's going on. And the crow in the middle just kind of turns and starts squawking at us. And that's when my dog runs away from the crows. I don't know why he's all of a sudden scared of this crow squawking at him. We spend the next hour pacing. The dog comes to the base of the stairs to the apartment, puts maybe one paw on there, and he won't go up any further.

I'm able to coax him to come back up to the apartment and he doesn't leave my side the entire morning. After that morning, the crows take over that songbird tree. So the chirping within the span of a couple hours gets taken over by crows squawking. Now that I'm working from home, I'm starting to notice that these birds are everywhere. They're squawking.

They're yelling. Like, even the neighbors are noticing the door. And I see a neighbor from across the way in a bathrobe just yelling at the birds. Just like, quiet down, you damn, you damn birds. Just quiet down. It takes some getting used to, but I like working from home. One day, I noticed that the vibe in the apartment gets weirder, and it doesn't feel friendly.

I'm working at the computer at home, and I have a picture of my parents on a bookshop. shelf and the picture just flies across the room. My first thought is, well, that's weird. I wonder if there's a draft here or something. And as I'm thinking about this, I hear a crash outside. I go to open the door and I see that the light fixture outside my front porch has just shattered. There is glass all over the place. I go to get a broom to sweep it, and I get a call from our IT guy at my office. And he says, he doesn't know what I was doing,

but whatever it was caused this huge surge that basically shut down our entire system throughout the state. I feel like, you know, maybe I'm cracking up. It's just these things around this place. I can't make sense of it anymore. So a couple of months after this experience, it's about 10 at night,

and I get a phone call. I answer the phone, and it's this, like, disembodied voice. It's a female's voice, and it's just saying, hello, hello. It sounds like the voice is talking through a fog. and I'm trying to talk to it, but after a couple of minutes, I say, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to hang up. I put my head back on the pillow, and I hear a crash.

I assume that the dog has tried to break into his dog food, and so I roll over to get out of bed. He's sitting at the bed right next to me, and he's looking kind of confused. He kind of looks at me and tilts his head. My heart's going a mile a minute. I'm terrified. I walk down the hall, I make the turn into the kitchen. All of my cupboards are wide open, and all of the pots and pans that are hanging

are just swaying back and forth. They're just rattling. I'm freaked out at this point. I close the cupboards, put my hands on the pots and pans to stop them from swaying. And I'm thinking, ever since I've moved into this place, it's been weird with weird dreams,

with the crows, with things being thrown across the room. And then every time, every time, I'm somehow able to convince myself that this place is normal and that I can make this work. A couple of days later, I get a knock at the door, and I go and open the door, and it's Becky's mom. She had just showed up out of the blue. The last time we spoke was shortly after the door,

funeral, but we hadn't really talked face to face since then. She said she was in town running some errands, and she felt this need to come see me. She sits down, and she tells me that she's been having the hardest time sleeping. She keeps having dreams about Becky being surrounded by birds. She says, I know it's going to sound weird, but I think Becky is trying to be. to communicate to her through birds. She tells me a story about one of Becky's friends. She's trying to cross the street one day.

And all of a sudden, she puts a foot out, and then a bird smacks her in the cheek. She has one foot out in the road, and as she's looking at the bird, a car zooms past. The bird had kind of saved the friend's life. It doesn't all make sense. It doesn't all add up to me yet,

up to me yet, but everything with the crows started after Becky died. Eventually, Becky's mom, gets up to leave and heads back home. And I hear the crows outside. So I open my apartment door, I look out at the tree, and I see the crow standing there eating a rabbit cactus. And I decide, my camera's right there. So I just reach over and grab the camera. and take the shot. I just post it to social media. It just says, crow outside my apartment,

eating a rabbit carcass. Some likes start rolling in, people start liking the picture. I get some comments that say, you gross, or wow. And I get a comment from a friend who I hadn't talked to since grade school. They said I needed to talk to them.

I sent her a message and said, hey, what's up? She says that she can communicate with the other side now and that my apartment has competing spirits. I would have been really skeptical if a friend I haven't talked to in 30 years comes out of the woodwork and says that they can communicate with the other side now. But after everything I've been through, I'm just blindly accepting. She says that I have a good thing. good spirit and a bad one, and she says that she gets kind of a female vibe from both of them.

The good spirit just needs some help going to the light. The bad spirit was old, like an ancient spirit. I don't think it sounds sane, but I think it makes as much sense as any other explanation I've heard. And so I do all the things that my friend suggests that night. My friend gives me two rituals. The first ritual is to help the good spirit, who I'm thinking, as Becky, pass into the light. And so I find a quiet place in my apartment and I sit and I start to pray. I pray to St. Michael and thank him for protecting Becky. And I ask to help guide Becky to the light. I encourage Becky to turn her attention to the light. And after a time, I just open my eyes. My hope was that the house would feel different and that I would see this light

and that there would be this pressure or this weight lifted. The reality is different. I'm disappointed because I wanted to feel something different, but everything feels mostly the same as before. I wake up the next day. I go about my day and then after a few minutes, I start to notice the quiet even more and I realize there are no crows. If there wasn't really a doubt in my mind before that the crows and Becky were somehow connected

this just drove it home for me. This made it feel real. The next ritual that my friend gives me is to help purge my house of the bad spirit and this one is more involved. I go to to the cathedral in Santa Fe, where Becky's funeral was, and I get some holy water.

And I go to a local store and buy a bundle of sage. I bring these home, and I begin the incantation. I say, protect my house from evil spirits, fill my heart with light and love. And I say that over and over and over again. I shake the sage all throughout the house and just keep repeating, fill my heart with light and love, fill my heart with light and love, fill my heart with light and love. And then when that's done, I take the holy water and I do the same thing. It's hard to describe, but the atmosphere of the house does feel a little different

after I'm done with all of this. The best I can describe it is it feels like a pressure has been lifted. I think the rituals worked. I think that I have purged my house. of whatever evil spirit was haunting this place. So the next morning, I message my friend, and she says that I need to go through the same ritual again the next day. And that it might take more than one time to do this. And so I do it again. I do this for two weeks.

For the next six months, there's nothing. The house is peaceful. The house is quiet. I'm able to sleep at night. There's no nightmares. My dog dies, which is really sad, but there's nothing going on that's scary or unexplainable in the house. I decide I don't even need to look for another apartment and I just re-sign the lease. About a week or two after I signed the lease, I go to bed early.

I'm in that near-sleep state, the one where you're not quite awake and you're not quite asleep, all of a sudden I hear this very clear, calm voice say, If you want to see what's haunting your house, you should open your eyes now. And so I open my eyes and I see my alarm clock. And it says it's 12.35 in the morning. And so I roll over and I see hovering over my bed a giant smoky bat. It has a wingspan of seven feet. It's huge.

staring at me. I'm terrified. I roll over the bed, under the bat. I can kind of feel the smoke on top of me. And I crawl outside. I'm sitting out on that porch for hours. I feel scared because this is the first time that there's been something that's scary enough to make me leave the house. I never wanted to go into that house again.

But then I look down, I realize that my feet are bare. I don't have my shoes on. I don't even have my keys to lock the door, so I have to go back inside. So I finally build up the courage to go back in, and I turn on every light in the house. And I realize whatever was there that woke me up is gone. I don't go back to sleep that night. I have a new neighbor who had moved into the apartment after. after Becky died and after Susan moved out.

I tell the neighbor the story of everything that's been going on in the apartment. And she says that she's had some experiences of her own, not in this apartment, but before. And she says she has a shaman friend who she'll hook me up with. I talk to the shaman, and he doesn't sound surprised by anything that I'm going through. He basically says that whatever is living in the house is an old. old spirit. It's something ancient, and he describes it as kind of a, kind of a sticky spirit, and it likes my energy, particularly when I'm scared. And at this point, everything seems to click with me. One was protecting me. That was Becky. The rest of it feels like everything that I couldn't

explain by that good spirit, I could totally explain by a spirit that's trying to scare me. I walk into the house and the pressure is back. And so I start the smudging and praying process all over again. That night, I go to bed and I wake up and it smells like shit is smeared all over my walls. It was up in my nose, like my eyes were watering. It was foul. It was overwhelming. I get up to open a window. and I know that the smudging and the prayers and the incantations in the holy water,

I know that all of this is working and that I'm making it mad. I don't even need to talk to the shaman again because what I'm doing is working. So I just keep doing this ritual over and over and over again every day. Then two weeks later, it just stops entirely. I decide to end the lease and I'm packing. the last of the boxes to go to my car and I look up and there are two crows hanging out at that tree by my apartment. They come flying towards me and they keep flying towards me and flying towards me and they get so close that I have to jump out of the way. I drop the box, I pick it up and I almost

have to like laugh to myself a little bit because it does really seem like what happened to Becky's friend when it was trying to protect or save, but I don't know what to make of it now. On the one hand, it's very comforting because Becky and I were friends, and we got to tell each other's stories, we got to share some laughs, you know, those little kindnesses and those, like, those genuine moments, like they make a difference. But on the other hand, it's a little frightening just because we need protection from things we can't entirely explain. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike, for sharing your story to spout. Understand, Mike is a spute listener. We love, love, love to hear from our listeners. That story, the original score was by Lauren News. It was produced by Aaliyah Yates. Oh, yes. Yes, it's that time, that time out of no time making our march toward all Halloween spooksters be afraid and understand. We are in search of monsters. You have more than just a close encounter.

We're looking for a relationship, something that changed you. We want to know about it. Aliens, Bigfoot, werewolds, spectres, if your neighbor has powers that are not of this world and you have to tell somebody, tell us. Spook at snapjudgment.org. And if you like your storytelling under the bright light of the sun,

subscribe to the amazing Snap Judgment podcast because it might just change your life. are the team that never eats chicken not after this episode everybody except for Mark Rissage he's at KFC right now Anna Sussman our chief spookster is Eliza Smith

Chris Hamburg Annie Nguyen to win Lauren Newsom Leon Morimoto Renzo Goroio Tate Marissa Dodge Leah Yates Zoe Frigno

Greta Weber Jacob Winick Seneca Kahn Tiffin Ulyza and Ford Fernando Hernandez and Flo Wiley The Spook theme song

It's by Pat McSeedy Miller. My name is in Washington, and there is a time for almost everything, almost. But remember, whatever time it happens to be where you are, never, ever, ever, ever, never, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, never. Turn out.