Spooked - Cliffhanger

Episode Date: September 25, 2021

Bill is home from college, on his way to meet his girlfriend, when his car swerves off the road… Thank you, Bill Love, for sharing your story with us! Produced by Annie Nguyen, original score by Leon Morimoto 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.

Every fall, when it would rain. The creature, she woke up again to stretch her wings, to sniff the air and see who they left, struggling there. You're listening to Spooked. Stay. It was maybe the happiest I've ever been. Hold my brand new baby boy. You couldn't tell me nothing. Joy, joy, joy, joy.

And I'm thinking I have a little girl. And now I have this baby boy, both of them, perfect, created in love. Everything I've always wanted. And this bliss, it followed a few moments later by the most horrifying time in my life. When we realize that something is wrong, I can't tell you that story right now. Not right ever. I can't. I will tell you that a few.

days later, exhausted, spent terrified for my little man, I'm leaving the neonatal intensive care unit to NICU. Meeting for a moment to go home to hug up my baby girl, maybe shower, eat something before returning to the hospital. My father's at my house for some reason. I don't know why it's all a fog to me. What I do recall is that he says, son, no we don't share the same beliefs,

but I want you to know that I'm praying Jesus. I'm praying on Jesus for you both and I'm praying on Jesus for that baby. My father and I, we don't share the same beliefs, but I can't recall telling him, Pops, if you have any prayer, any God, any faith, any magic, any healing, any power that you can send to my little boy right now,

whatever you have to do. And he does. Bows his head to his God right there, and I bow my head too, to a force I had long ago stopped believing in. They say there are no atheists in

foxholes. There are no apis at the neonatal intensive care unit either. Crystals, magic lamps, amulets, give me all of it. I don't care. Just help my baby boy. Help him. And a few weeks later,

pushing that stroller out of that place with that boy before. And Popsie asked me later, isn't his God good? And I don't know who did what. The prayers, the gods, the nurses, the doctors, the faith, the angels. I don't know who let us depart from that place as if escaping a tomb. I do not know.

Spookstar. Now, you never know from whence the power comes. We're going to begin with Bill. Now Bill's headed home from college for the holidays, driving to see his high school sweetheart, but first, he's got to make it through the Appalachian Mountains. Now, Bill, he's driven these twisty, curvy roads many times before, many times. It's kind of a rainy, misty Sunday morning. I'm driving through an area that there are trees on the left, trees on the right,

and I'm going down a hill. And it kind of swerves back and forth, back and forth, you know, like a snake. But my father used to say, you know, going around these curves, we can almost look out the car window and see the back of the car. But, you know, I was going to see my girlfriend. So it's all worth it. The road makes a big swing to the left right there. And on the right hand side is this big muddy gully. And when I tried to make that curve into the left, I slid off the road into the gullet.

But I gunned the motor trying to get out of the ditch and back on the road like you do. And when the tires were spinning really fast and they caught, I sped up. And when I got on the road, I started to slide diagonally across the road over this cliff. And I realized at one point there, I'm not going to stop. This car is not going to stop. And then once I left the road and started going down that crevice, I don't remember that part.

The next thing I knew, the car was right side up down at the bottom of that hill, sitting in a little creek bed, which had some water in it because it'd been raining. And there I was sitting in the car, still inside. and I looked down and I had little pieces of broken glass in my arms. And it had just started to bleed. So I figured, well, I haven't been here very long. You know, I just blacked out there for a second as I came down and here I am. So I got out of the car and this is the strangest thing.

I locked it and then realized this car was a total loss. The windows were all broken. The engine was almost out. It had been disillaged, and I thought, well, I'm going to have to get out of here and get some help, and what am I going to tell my father? So I looked to where I was, and I realized that I'm over a cliff out in the middle of nowhere. Anybody driving down that road, even if somebody does come down the road, they don't know I'm down here. They're not going to be able to see me. And it's raining, and I really thought about this, too.

they're going to have their windows up because it's raining. So I can yell all I want to, and nobody's going to know I'm down here. There's not going to be any help. If I make it, I'm going to have to get out of here myself. The cliff was very steep. There was a light rain happening at the time. So all of the leaves and the little saplings and everything, everything was wet. And I looked up at the saplings, and I thought, well, you know,

maybe I can grab a hold of them, you know, and pull myself up, and maybe put my foot on some of them, and maybe I can actually get up there. And I tried to do it, and when I leaned over, and something wet and sticky ran over the front of my face, what in the world is this? And I reached my hand up, wiped it off my face, and it was blood. And I put my hand up to my head, and I could feel my scalp,

because my scalp had been cut from ear to ear and flipped backwards. So my hand is on my bare skull. So I grabbed my skin and pulled it back over like a little flap. Then reached back again to grab a sapling. But I was losing a lot of blood. I mean, a lot. Because now I'm covered. Covered in it.

My pants, my shirt, everything's bloody. and that's when I got really scared. And I tried to pull myself up, and I got up a little bit, and I was able to get one of my feet on a rock to try to push myself up a little further. And I looked up the cliff, and I realized it's almost straight up. Then I reached up to try to grab another sapling. I just didn't have the strength.

I didn't feel like I could do it. Up. about another 40 feet or so, I felt somebody looking at me, up to the right. And there's a guy sitting on the front porch of this house, wearing a fedora hat, slacks in a shirt, sitting on the edge of the porch, and he had one leg propped up. And he was smoking a cigarette.

But from where I was down in that creek bed, the house was, it would have been a tough, a tough walk up to that house. When our eyes met, then he took a cigarette and flipped it on the ground and walked over and got in his car and started backing out that driveway. And when he came to the end of that driveway, I lost sight of him. I couldn't see that part right there where his car came to the main road. and then all of a sudden he kind of appears up above me. So he's up on the main road, and I could see him from maybe the shoulders up. And he still had on his fedora.

He stuck his head out the window, and he said, Hey, buddy, if you can get up this hill, I'll take you in town to the hospital. Yes, when he made his offer to me, I was still pretty far down that cliff, and it was almost straight up. So that's when I started climbing up the hill. there were enough of those little tree saplings about the size of your wrist. They were about that size.

That I could grab one, pull myself up, and then put my foot on that one, and reach up and grab another one. And, you know, it seemed like I had, I don't know, when I first tried to do it before I noticed him, I couldn't do it. But when I knew he was up there, suddenly I just,

I don't know. It was like I had some kind of superpower. I could hoist to myself up that cliff. I was surprised that I did it before I knew it. I was at the top. When I got to the top of the little cliff and I reached up and I grabbed his door handle and opened the door

and I got in. I'm really bloody. I mean, I'm going to make a mess. His car was kind of an older car probably from the late 40s. It seemed like his entire car, the clothes he was wearing, the house and everything had no color to it. There was no red, there was no, everything was gray and brown.

And he drives maybe a quarter of a mile or so. And he had this jacket kind of wadded up in the seat between the two of us. He picked up his jacket and without looking at me, looking straight ahead, handed it over to me and said, you know, buddy, I was in the war and I've seen people hurt like this. And if you don't do something about it, you're going to die. Take my jacket, put it on your head and hold it real tight. I took the jacket from him and when he handed it to me, I recognized it immediately because my father had one exactly like it. His jacket was a military jacket, an old waist-length jacket with kind of stretchy sleeves and a stretchy bottom and zipped up the front.

But I just took it to the top of my... I do remember reaching up and making sure that my little piece of skin was in the correct place there, my scalp. And I put the jacket down on the top of my head and held it really firm, and I held it there all the way to town. When we got close to my hometown of Painesville, he said, which hospital do you want to go to? And I said, well, my mom used to work at the clinic, so let's go to that one. So in about a minute or two, we're at the clinic, which was on Main Street, he pulled up in front and he said, I can't get out of the car. Can you, are you okay?

Can you make it? And I said, yeah, I think I'm going to be okay. I was really weak, but I opened the door, got out, and it was only like three steps that I had to step up. And he drove off. So he turned to the left and drove back in the same direction we had come in. You know, I can't really remember much. I had lost a lot of blood. When I got into the hospital, somehow I got upstairs to where the operating room was.

the next thing I realized that I was lying on an operating table and somebody had a kind of a bowl underneath the back of my head and they're sewing me up. They had called my mother. She came there and she was saying, are you okay? And I'm like, yeah, I'm all right. I'm fine. And she said, yeah, they gave you 55 stitches.

You've got a cut all the way across the back of your head. you know, thank goodness you got here, and who was the guy that brought you? And I said, I have no idea. After I got out of the hospital, after about three days, I believe, my father said, why don't we go back out there and talk to that guy and talk to him about cleaning his car up because you evidently bled in it a lot. So we drove out to the scene where this happened. We just pulled out right there, and he said, you know, right down there's where you went,

went over and you could see the place where the car slid over and you could see the place in the gully that I had made on the right-hand side and you could see on the left-hand side of the road where I had gone over the cliff and where I'd hit this rock and there was glass and stuff still down at the bottom of that little ravine. When we went out there, we pulled up to that little driveway. We just pulled out right there and he said, there's no way you could have been in that driveway. that little road that led from the main road, Highway 40, over to his house, was grown up with weeds. Weeds like waist high, some of them really big weeds. And there was no way a car could have been parked between that road and that house.

We're talking about three or four days. There's no way those weeds could have grown up in just three or four days. Now, I know I just had a traumatic accident. You know, I got hit in the head, so maybe I don't remember things correctly, but I distinctly remember his car sitting in the driveway and him walking out and getting in that car. So I ask, you know, my girlfriend's mom and dad and other people that lived around there, who is this guy? They said, nobody has lived in that old house for a long time.

So whoever he was, he doesn't live there. You know, at the time, yeah, I was only 19 years old. I was just happy to be alive and healing up and back to school, get on with my life. But as time has gone by, I think about this. I don't think I'm special or, you know, that somebody saved me for something. but I've always wondered if maybe there's something I'm supposed to have done or have done. Maybe I've already done it. Or maybe I haven't done it yet.

Have you ever heard the story about the little old lady who is, car has broken down, and a guy comes along and stops and helps her? And she says, thank you very much. Can I pay you? He goes, no, no, no, you don't want me anything. Just the chain of love continues. She goes in a little restaurant for a bite to eat, and a waitress who's pregnant comes over,

and the lady says, I'll pay it forward, and leaves her a big tip of like hundreds of dollars. And then that night, the waitress is home with her husband and says, a lady gave me this big tip, and her husband is the guy, the guy that helped the old lady. I believe in that. Ten years later, almost exactly ten years later, it was Christmas Eve 1971.

I was driving home to see my mother in Paintsville, Kentucky, and in the middle of the exit ramp was a car upside down. And I had heard that sometimes people do block exit. And when you get out to help, you know, they weigh-lay you. So I parked on up the exit ramp. So I was, I don't know, 50 feet away or something like that. I opened my trunk and got my tire iron. Big metal iron out.

And I kind of held it behind my leg as I walked down there. Well, I realized pretty soon that this really was a wreck. And the two guys that were standing there, evidently had come by next, and they were both drunk, they didn't know what to do. And I came up, and I said, you know, what's going on? They said, you know, this guy's wrecked, and we can see him in there. And the car started burning a little bit. It was upside down.

And when the hot gas hit the muffler, it started to flame. And this thing is going to burn up pretty soon. So one of the guys said, you know, we need to break that window. I happened to have that tire arm in my hand. You know, we mashed the window out, broke all the glass out, and one of those guys pulled this guy out of his car. And one of his Christmas gifts. One gift out of his car, and he had it full.

I mean, he was surrounded by, and these were all wrapped packages with ribbons, and they were all around it. He must have had the whole back of that car full of gifts for his family. When the car caught on fire, they all burned up, burst into flame, and we gave him the one gift that we've been able to save out of the car. In the meantime, they called the local fire department. They were putting out the fire, and I drove on home to see Mother. But I just wondered, maybe that was it. It happened almost exactly 10 years later.

Or maybe it hasn't happened yet. Let this be reminded to you. Always take extra care when rounding those tight curves. you never know who's going to be nearby watching over you. A big thank you to Bill Love for sharing your story with the Spooked. The original score. Before that piece was by Leon Morimoto. It was produced by Annie Nguyen.

We walk this dark path together. Spook Season 6. And if you possess an inexplicable power of which no one will believe, tell me about it. Tell me all about it. Email us your story, spooked at stampjudgment.org. because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener spooked at snapjudgment.org

can let the dark side know you spook with some spook gear, the t-shirt of your dreams available right now at snapjudgment.org and remember if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day get the amazing, stupendous

Snap Judgment podcast, it might change your life because it's storytelling. Stook was created by the team that walks under the light of the full moon, except, of course, for Mark Ristich, because we can't get those roller skates off him. There's an assessment. Our chief spookster is Eliza Smith.

Chris Hamburg, Annie Nguyen & Win, Lauren Newsom, David Kim, Leon Morimoto, Renzo Goriot, Renzo Goria, Tayae DeCott, Marissa Dach, Zori Friano, Tiffany Delisa, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims. The spook theme song is by Pat McSeed-Millet. My name is from Washington. and know that people tend to hide things most dear to them in the darkness

in the underground in their shadow and the first mistake is to fail to consider from whom you are hiding your sequence from as for me everything I hold dear

I like to keep it close which means that I will never ever ever ever never ever never ever ever turn out the lights.