Spooked - Borderlands

Episode Date: September 14, 2017

Stories:  "Border Boogeyman" - Rocky Elmore worked as a border patrol agent and out there, in the pitch black, he was never sure if he was completely alone.   "The Seer" - The trouble began in Sri Lanka, when Chandra’s aunt woke up one day and couldn’t move her arms or legs.  The doctors had no answers, but a mysterious priest did.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Spooked. Real stories from real people battling the forces of the night. Be afraid. And all new spook begins in just a moment. Stay. There's this place between light and shadow. Between the side of the mirror we look in and the side where they look back out. We like to imagine these borders is clear and defined with edges and sharp, distinct lines. Sometimes they are. They are. Straight angles on a map. Other times, if you actually look between these spots,

marking territory, separating one place from the other, these places, wow, they have special rules. From the snap judgment, underground layer, you're listening to Spute. My name is them Washington, real stories, from real people battling the forces of the night. No camera tricks, no special effects. Go ahead. Hold on to someone.

hand if you can. It's a spook podcast starts. Our first guest, Rocky Elmore, back in the 90s, he worked as a Border Patrol agent, stationed just east of San Diego, right along the border fence at a place called Othai. When I first got to O Thai Mountain, the place felt different from other places I had been, because it's quite easy as a Border Patrol agent to feel like your top dog. But when I went up to Othai Mountain, it said in that there were predators there. that could kill a human being nearly instantly.

Mountain lions were the top dog up there. Under normal circumstances, a mountain lion attack against a human being would be extremely rare, but the cats that lived up on Otai Mountain lost their fear of man. There wasn't a lot of things up there for them to eat other than rabbits and just a very, very few deer. So people immediately went into the food chain, and it was a pretty easy source for them.

All they had to do was pick out a group, follow it, wait for somebody to get left behind, and that guy was a goner. So we found quite a few bodies, and we found them on a fairly regular basis. Now, as far as I know, none of these kills went on to the official California record. Things that happened down on the border just have a tendency to stay on the border. About four years in, I had a trainee with me. We're working a midnight shift out of the border. at Otai Lakes, a sensor had went off and we responded to it.

Now, I had always carried a revolver previous to this night, but the Border Patrol changed its policy and decided that everyone would carry a semi-automatic handgun. It came with a holster, a different type holster than what I had ever used before, and it fit very, very close to the body. A few minutes went by, and we started to hear very, very slight noise up on the hillside, I noticed my trainee was starting to get pretty excited about it, and then I realized that it was only an animal because it was much too quiet to be people.

So I told him, said, it's probably a deer, let it pass. Within probably five to ten seconds after that, I heard the most terrifying noise I ever heard in my life, and it was a mountain lion screaming. I've always heard it described as the scream of a, of a woman being murdered. But I have never heard a human scream that could come anywhere near

what a mountain lion scream is like. It's something that you just have to hear for yourself to truly understand. So when we heard the scream, both of us turned around. I never moved so fast in my life. And I caught a glimpse of this full-grown mountain lion charging us. I went for my gun, and I could not get the gun out.

It was stuck. And I was ripping and tearing as hard as I could on that pistol. And at the same time, Saul, the cat charging right at us. So I started yelling at the trainee to shoot them, but I didn't hear any gunfire. I don't know that the trainee could not get his gun out or if he was just petrified with fear. And at the very last second, the cat, he darted off to the side. And within a nanosecond, I lost sight of him, and then I heard him hit its true prey, which was the deer. And then the screaming started all over again, and it was worse than the first scream.

It was a combination of the animal he had hit, and then the cat was just tearing it to pieces. But as scary as mountain lions were, they weren't the only thing out there to be afraid of. In early March 1995, I was still on the training unit. We're heading out to Othai Lakes on a midnight shift. Heavy fog had rolled in, and the area had also burned off recently in a wildfire, so the ground and the trees were black with soot, and then the fog was sweeping over that. So we got turned around in the fog and got lost.

So we walked around in vain for several more minutes, trying to find our trail. We couldn't do it, but there was a little tributary feeding the south end of Otey, High Lake, and as we were walking it, we heard a very loud, single splash hit the water. And it sounded as if some exceptionally large object had fallen from the sky, so we knew it wasn't people running across the creek. It was something else. Now, we're always trying to stay quiet on night operations. So everyone looked at the training officer. The training officer just nodded his head toward the creek, and we all started heading that way without speaking a word. As we started to

close in, I noticed the training officer drew his firearm, and I thought this was a little strange, but something had set him off and put him on guard. And I suddenly started to get this sense of dread and doom and intense sadness sweep over me. It was as if something was projecting its emotion onto me. I was starting to mess with my mindset and my feelings, and I knew that knew we're about to see something horrible, and I started trying to mentally prepare myself for that. But after getting up to the creek and noticing there were four or five coyotes, prancing up and down very anxiously along the water's edge, we couldn't see anything. But I could hear something over in that water, as if a person was shuffling their feet very quietly,

going up a little current was there. So at that point, everyone had their guns drawn. The coyotes were staring straight into the middle of the creek, exactly where we were looking, and didn't seem to be bothered one bit that we walked up to them, and it was obvious that they were scared. I was literally standing no more than 18 inches away to a coyote on my right side, and I paid no attention to him, and he paid no attention to me.

We started trying to turn our flashlights on and follow, This sound upstream, but the fog blinded us, shining the lights back in our own eyes, and there were no footprints to be found. The only prints there were tracks for the coyotes and tracks for our own boots. And that was it, nothing else. The coyotes, their tails were tucked and their ears were lowered, and they left. They got out of there. We eventually just gave up, but we knew whatever that was in the water

would eventually walk out in front of the sky. scope that the supervisor set up on the mountain in order to work the mesa below because these scopes picked up on heat. An animal would put off a certain shape and amount of heat. Rocks put off heat. Anything that collected heat through the day would give that heat up through the night. For instance, a person walking, say, a mile or two miles away, they didn't really look like a person at that distance. They looked kind of like an upright coffin. So you had to judge what was giving the heat up. And Jeb was probably the best scope operator in the Border Patrol, so he would be able to see it and call out whatever was over in that water. And about 20 minutes later, we started to hear

bits and pieces of a radio transmission because a couple of agents got in the area, and suddenly Jeb called them off. Now, the agents were a little reluctant to leave because they wanted to finish what they started, and they didn't really understand why they were being called off. it didn't make any sense to them. But Jeb told them again and emphasized a little more strongly that they needed to get in their vehicles and leave the area.

He said, there is a very large predator following the two of you. Now, these guys were totally unaware of it. They couldn't see anything. Nevertheless, they did what Jeb told them to because you didn't question it orders. You just did it.

So that was the talk of the station for the next few days, and people were kind of throwing ideals around. as to what they thought it might be. And, of course, everyone thought probably it was a mountain lion because we spoke informally with the Bureau of Land Management, and they said that one of these cats was about 200 pounds. But time went by.

Jeb got a new job back east somewhere. And before he left, he told a story to a few of the agents that he knew well. And what Jeb told was that on the night in question, of the mountain lion following the two agents that it was not a mountain lion at all. What he actually saw was some creature come up out of the Otai River and it walked upright like a man.

He said, but had the largest heat signature Jeb had ever seen on the night vision scope. The creature was right behind them and it dwarfed them both. Estimated it probably 10 feet. I heard one guy say maybe 12 feet. This was very much like what happened to us at the creek in that it was invisible to their naked eye.

It was only visible to the scope. I never brought the subject up for quite a while after that. I never talked to Jeb. I was a trainee. Trainees did not go up and talk to supervisors, and I never dared question what he saw that night. As time went on, over the next few years, I began to hear several more stories.

These stories involved both agents and people crossing illegally. In every sighting, this beast would chase either the people or would chase the agents and could have easily caught them, but never did. It's like he chased them to scare them off and then gave up the chase. And there would be no sign found, no footprints, no sign of the creature whatsoever. I didn't have any real clues or any real ideal of what all this is. meant. But one night while I was working the mountain on a swing shift, I run into some BLM personnel, and these were environmentalist types. They weren't law enforcement. There was about 10 of them up there,

maybe more, and they were hanging out at Buttewick Canyon, and that was one of our more remote, treacherous areas. I was kind of wondering what had brought them up there. So I pulled up, started talking to them, asked them what they were doing, and they said they'd come up to to look for bear scat, which I thought was a little unusual because I didn't think there was any bears anywhere near Othai Mountain. We'd never found tracks for one, no scat for one. Nobody had ever reported a siding. So toward the end, I said, well, what do you think about some kind of a Sasquatch creature being up here? And then I kind of chuckled after that because I didn't want them to think I was a crazy person.

And none of them laughed or chuckled. and one of them started to talk about the subject said we think there's possibly three of them up here that we think is a family unit to adults and a juvenile so then I kind of thought well you know they might be setting me up they're all going to break out laughing in a minute and say they were just kidding not you know not really we don't believe in that but they never did so what is the real truth what really is out there

goes in search of pure evil, and we find it. The spook podcast continues in just a moment. Stay to your friend. He's a type of person that always sees things from a different perspective because he's had a different kind of life. And one time we spoke well into the night discussing the nature of sin, the presence of evil, is evil absolute? Can a good man turn bad?

Can the fruits of an abomination ever be good? And isn't evil, just a construct. Finally, Mr. Friendly banter, Chandar just looked at me and he said, I know. How do you know? Chandra didn't answer right away, like his eyes peered over the horizon for a while. And then Chandra, he told me a story. This happened in Sri Lanka, a place called

Pategama, which was our family's tea estate up in the mountains. My aunt and my uncle managed it, basically. And one day she was totally fine, you know, running around up there in the mountains. And the next day, she woke up and she could not move. She was paralyzed from the neck down. Paralyzed? Paralyzed. She couldn't move her limbs, and they had no idea why.

About half an hour after she woke up, she had trouble breathing. My uncle had to throw her in the car. They flew down these crazy, windy roads down through the mountain, and went to Colombo, the capital city, and they went straight to a hospital where she was in the ICU right away. Why was she paralyzed? Well, they couldn't tell.

They had no idea. And finally, after three months, they said, look, we have no idea what to do. We don't know what to tell you. But there's this Sri Lankan priest. He's a Catholic priest. He might have some answers for you. Our folks are Hindu.

But they decided, why? Why are they going to this priest? He had a reputation of being able to find an the answer is where no one else could. He told my uncle later on that one day he was just a regular old Catholic priest and running mass, and the next day he had some terrible gift from God, he said, that allowed him to see evil. So my uncle said, all right, we don't have any other choice.

My uncle went and found him. Yeah, he walked to the ICU with my uncle, who is a very, he was a very practical fellow and not totally given to the belief in the occult, like a lot of my relatives. or even myself, for that matter. So he was a little skeptical, but he walked in with this man, and the man just said, I see evil. Evil has been done here. And he was so adamant about it that my uncle had to listen to him.

And then proceeded to follow his direction. What were his directions? He said, look, you and I have to get up back to the T estate right away. So my uncle put him in the car, and they drove back four hours. For what was you looking for? Well, the source of the evil. He said basically my aunt had been cursed. By the time they got there, it was about midnight.

The priest said, look, you and I, we have to walk around the grounds until I can find this. So he spent an hour walking through the lawn and through every single room in the house. It was a big, big, beautiful estate house. And he got to their bedroom, and he looked out the window. And he said, there, I see the curse. And my uncle looked out, and he said, I don't see anything. What are you talking about? He's like, I see it.

It is right there. He's there in the corner of the house. And my uncle said, well, what are we supposed to? to do now. He's like, go find some men, get some shovels, and meet me down there on the corner. So he rounded up a few of the workers who were there, and the man said, well, start digging. Right here, he knew exactly what it did. Yeah. He said he could see it. He could see a glow, an evil blow emanating from underground. And they dug for about half an hour. And then his shovel picked this little metal container,

heard this clang, so he stopped. And the priest said, okay, hold on. And he looked into this little hole, and he said, yeah, it's right there. Please bring that up. My uncle jumped into this little hole that he dug. There was a little tin box. And the priest said, have you ever seen this before? He said, no. And he said, did you put this here?

My uncle said, no, I have no idea what this is. So the priest said, okay, good. He opened up this tin box. What's inside? What's inside? What's inside? What's inside? And inside this little tin box lay this little voodoo doll. It was made out of mud and clay,

and it was wrapped in some kind of cloth. It was in the shape of a human, a little body. And in this little mud figurine, were some needles. Needles in the ankles, needles in the wrists, and one needle right in the throat. And like I had said before, upon entering the ICU, she had to get a tracheotomy because she couldn't breathe.

My uncle was pretty excited and really nervous and a little scared. Actually, really scared, he told me. And the priest said, I need to replenish my energies. And he shut the little tin box and he said, look, go find as much liquor as you can. They got all the whiskey they could collect. They went upstairs back to the bedroom.

And this priest said, all right, you and I are going to drink right now for the next half hour. And these guys finished off a few bottles of whiskey. A few bottles? I think it was like, yeah, two bottles of whiskey that finished off, polished off. Uncle said that was the drunk as he's ever gotten in his life. And he thought, now that we've discovered the voodododal, we can get drunk and sleep and head back in the morning. But instead, the priest said, go get your keys. We're going for a ride.

We have to take this doll to the ocean right away. My uncle said, there's no way we should, you know, we should not do this. This is a suicide trip. And the priest said, I'm really sorry, but, you know, we have to. And this is something that mothers against drunk driving would not be pleased about in the slightest. Yeah, this was some serious drunk driving. And they, this is in the middle of the night, in the middle of through a jungle area? This is in the middle of nowhere.

I mean, this is four hours up a steep incline, not paved. My uncle said there's no way that we should have survived that truth with all the boulders and trees and ruts and bison and buffalo roaming through jackals and comradeo dragons and cobras and tigers well maybe no tigers and all sorts of crazy monsters lurking in those jungles back in the day they make it through they made it through they got to the ocean the priest said all right get out of the car

and they stumbled their way to the ocean to the beach and he took the little voodoo doll out of the tin box and he gave it to my uncle and he said throw it as far as you can so my uncle took it and just threw it off right into the ocean waves and he saw the thing disintegrate and then the priest said all right let's go to the hospital so they got back in the car and they drove right to the hospital to see my aunt

the doctors came to my uncle and said I don't know what just happened but this past few hours something has occurred miraculously somehow or other my aunt said hey guess what in the past hour I'm able to move

there's more feeling in my toes and my fingers and my uncle said I have no idea what happened or what to believe but something crazy happened that night

thanks to this priest what did your uncle owe the priest where did he give the priest to return you know I don't think he gave him anything actually the priest said

this is my duty to humanity this is a gift from God, you know, he said it's also a curse. A curse. Why? Well, because he has this ability now to feel and see and sense evil wherever he goes. So I imagine it wasn't such a pleasant experience for him. Everywhere he went, he saw the bad stuff. Yeah, I guess I think it actually, he saw a little too much of it. Why? Well, I asked my uncle, what happened to this guy? You know, I thought maybe I could go track him down. But my uncle said he's now serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife.

He murdered his wife. He poisoned her to death, yeah. He has a wife as a priest. Why would he poison his wife? I'm not sure. Yeah, it was shocking. And my uncle basically said that the word on the island was this man had stared into the abyss a little too much and it had started to stare back.

And he had fought off all this evil for so long and it started to infuse his soul. You know, he started doing bad eagle things himself. The stories we have for you. We wouldn't hear the stories you have for us. Some snappers have already hit us on the spook line. Let us know your story. Record onto your phone, device, thingy, and send it to spooked at spookpodcast.org.

I just can't wait to find out what happens on the next spook. I can't wait. Well, spooked episodes are released on Tune-in a full three days earlier than they go out to the rest of the universe. Get the tune-in app. Let somebody know. Spookpodcast.org. Hit me on the Twitter, the Instagram, the Facebook. SpookPod.

Big thanks to Rocky Elmore for sharing his border tale. And if you dug it, be sure to check out Rocky's book, Out on Foot, Nightly Patrols, and Ghostly Tales of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. I very much appreciate my man Chandra Shibu Ma for dropping stories on us. Evil can be buried. Explore the world of spooked at spookpodcast.org. This episode was produced by the team of exorcists dwelling at Snap Judgment Underground's studios with special thanks this week to Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Teo de Kott, Nancy to the Lopez, and Jody Colling.

Original music that Pat Massidi Miller, Leon Morimoto, and Renzo Goroel. On the Next Spooked. A young boy finds a new playmate, which is great, except this playmate already has a tombstone. Our three full spooked episodes available for download right now, at spootpodcast.org. Subscribe and don't miss a beat as we release new episodes each week into the spooked Halloween finale.

You hear the door slam and realize there's nowhere left to run. If you feel the cold hand and wonder if you'll ever see the sun, always remember. And don't forget to never, ever, never.