Spooked - Creepy Crawly

Episode Date: August 23, 2018

The Birds: As a little boy in Richmond Virginia, raising pigeons, Ray Christian made a friend with the same hobby. But there was something mysterious about Ray’s new pal. The Taxidermist: When Tracey started doing taxidermy, she assumed all her subjects would be dead. Until she met a squirrel who didn't seem quite right. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Did you ever see your dog, your cat, stop, look directly into empty space, then turn and run as if death chased? The question is simple. What does she see that we don't? From step judgment's underground layer, listening to Spoot, Stay, too. I try to pretend that I don't hear the skittering. The squeaks from behind the walls That is just my imagination Just the house settling

Then I see them Huge fat Running from the unseemed corner Across my clean kitchen floor Mocking It claws into my stores of beans Of meat, cheese Leaves behind its foul discharge

Last from behind my own walls I cannot sleep every sound a mockery and one night eyes pressed tight I feel it touched my outstretched hand as it runs by

I scream but next day I find one of the old traps the grandmama traps steel jaw bone crushing on the tiny plate I smear the

oily viscous peanut Then I pulled a spring tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, careful. Careful now. Place it gently, gently, so gently behind my tower of food stuff. Pull my hand away. And wait all night long the same chittering, the chuckling, the dancing behind the wall. Then I hear the sniff

The circling the curiosity Close Snap slammed shut like a rifle shot And silence Until That skittering, scratching sound From inside the wall Right next to my bed

Angry sounds And I know That whatever I called It was not alone From snap judgment's underground lair The name is from Washington, know this. They were here before we were. And they were to hear long after.

Starts. Fear friend of mine, Raymond Christian, he used to spend his Richmond, Virginia childhood summers running those alleyways between the row houses with his crew, seeking adventure, playing kickball, and generally finding trouble. And this is where our story begins. Spook. A group of us changed frequently, different combination of boys, let's say, of about six or seven different guys. And it was pretty typical in the summertime when we didn't go to school.

All of us just kind of roamed. Our parents were blue-collar workers. It would be oppressively hot in the summertime. The heat would be radiating off the asphalt. You'd have tar stuck to the bottom of your shoe. And none of us had air conditioning. One sanctuary for us because we lived directly behind the biggest black funeral home in the city. And this place had air conditioning in it.

To walk inside the funeral home, all of us damp from sweat, it was like you would cool off immediately. Now, such was the community. People often went inside the funeral home to see people they barely knew or they just heard about. or maybe they were infamous in some way. That's the person who got killed robbing something. That's the kid that got ran over on his bike in front of the funeral home. So people often just went in to see people. They didn't have to know them.

That was real common in the community. And the people who ran the funeral home, the funeral owners, they knew that a lot of times we would come here just to get out of the heat. But they had one kind of unwritten rules. You couldn't come in unless you were in a viewing room. Couldn't just be hanging. You could go into viewing room, which meant that we had to sit and look at a body. We would do it.

We wouldn't want to. But we had all done it so many times. We knew with the rules of the game. I'm about 12 years old when this story takes place. And it was the late summer, and it was hot as hell, probably one of the hottest days that I could actually remember. And we all piled into the funeral home and our usual fact. We had just finished playing kickball outside. And what was unusual about that is I kicked the ball

and it went way across the street toward this fence where it's like crazy dog glibbed, who would snap and snarl if anything got near that fence. Oh, my God, it's going to go in the yard. And all of a sudden, this kid just came out of nowhere and slapped the ball down, and he saved a day. And none of us. had seen him before.

In the moment that that happened, not a one of us even said, who is this dude? It's because he looked like us, but this particular kid, he was with none of us. And that's when we first met him. We had all went inside in a funeral home and were sitting on the road like we normally would do. And he was sitting with us.

And he didn't speak and we weren't speaking because we weren't supposed to. So his being unusually quiet, was just par for the course. But when we got up and we left, a couple of us were saying, he could play good. What's his name? I think he's, who is he?

So this boy started turning up all the time when we were playing. None of us could remember him ever being there when we would start a game. When we were trying to meet to get together, it would always be in the heat of the game. when all of us were thinking about nothing but the game, kicking the ball, throwing the ball, chasing each other, being on our bikes, racing around the corner, there'd be one more of us. He was skinny, brown skin, I'd say a two-inch afro,

not much of a fro. He wore short-sleeved shirt, not button at all, nothing underneath it, cut off pants, tennis shoes, and no socks. He didn't speak, but I would see. say something like, do you want to go up the street or do you want to stay here? I would give him possible options. He would nod or shoulder shrug or have an expression on his face. The reason why none of us went into great depth about why he didn't speak is because in our community,

there were several kids and adults who had this kind of disability. This was an era where people with developmental delays, they didn't get treated at all. I saw lots of kids coming out of the country who didn't speak or couldn't speak, who were mute. That wasn't so uncommon. I probably knew a half a dozen kids like that. One day me and the kid was hanging out in the alley, and I was looking at pigeons flying around the funeral home, and he looked up, and I had the sensation that he was saying,

I like pigeons. I like pigeons. So I took them to my house to see my pigeons. I got introduced to pigeons, raising pigeons, when I was maybe 10 years old. You put them on your arm or something, you'd give them a grain of corn, and they were cool and they relaxed. You could rub their back, and they would squat down, raise their feathers up, pull their wings up in the air, and spread them, and they wouldn't fly off. And to be able to walk out into the street with them and toss them up in the air, and walk them. watch them just sail in the distance, and it comes back to you?

That was the magic. You made a bird come back to you. So I was raising pigeons in a makeshift coop I built in the back of our house, where I lived with my mama and my stepdad. And like most of the kids, we didn't have any real formal coops. We'd make them out of pieces of plywood and old signs and posters, even old television sets. There's one type of pigeon called rollers.

The rollers are different in that they have this habit of flipping in the air. We call it rolling, but what they're really doing is flipping. The effect of that is the pigeon would be flying, and it would be like he stopped flying in mid-air and start falling out of the sky. That's what it looks like. And they flip and flip. The better ones will do that almost until they hit the ground and come back up. It's marvelous thing to see.

And we would jump up and down and scream and holler and clap our hands to encourage them to roll. And it'd be a bunch of us standing around, flipping, scream, and holler. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, clapping our hands together. Come on, come on, come on. All of us had different calls for our pigeons, and we would do that. These pigeons were all financially out of our means. We're all poor kids. A pigeon like that would probably cost $6.

in 1972, 73. We were okay with any birds you could get, but if you had a roller, you know, up to that point, I hadn't had any rollers. We're in the backyard, and he's really excited and he's comfortable with pigeons, you know.

He knew how to hold them the right way, the way he smiled with them, the way he touched them and spread their wings, how they were comfortable with him, the way he walked around the coop and pulled at my wire and looked at my nails, and he smiled at me, and we walked around, and he looked to see what I was feeding him.

But the one thing I couldn't get from him then was, where are you from? Where you stay at, man? Who your folks is? Who you relate to? What school are you go to? who you is, you know? And he would give me nothing.

We would hang out more and more. We'd do more walking through the back alleys. We'd spend more time in my backyard. And one thing in particular happened. We were walking through the alley. And a lot of the alleys were dominated by dogs. Some old street dog did we just take over an alley? And this was one of those cases.

And we both just took off. And we ran and we ran. and I didn't look back to see what the dog was doing. And I got about two blocks away and I was out of breath. And we got away. We did it. We're together. We're boys.

We bonded, right? We're friends now. Bet over and I was heaving and breathing hard. But he wasn't there. He wasn't with me. I didn't see him again until the next day. For the first time, I was starting to feel funny about him. That didn't make sense.

It was scary. It's like you disenfranchise. disappeared, there was no place to go. I wanted to see him so badly the next day, he appeared. I was in the backyard with the pigeons. I turned around, and there he was. And he went to the coop like he normally would do. And I had to ask him, wait, for we do anything else, for we play, what happened to you yesterday? Where'd you go? And he gave me nothing. When I mentioned to my mother about this boy who would come and go and disappear and he wouldn't speak

My mother immediately told me stay away from him She just said stay away from him She was afraid I didn't want to give him up I didn't want to It wasn't like I had a lot of friends Whatever it was, it was good to me He was my friend

I'm going to say it was a month later So we're probably in August now And we were taking our usual walk through the back alleys behind the funeral home. And we've been walking for a couple of blocks. But we started going, he was lead me in a direction that we had never went before. This was the first time he had ever wanted to show me something. I'm still feeling funny about him, and we walked about four or five more blocks,

and we stopped in front of his house. It had previously been burned, and it was partially burned down. and it was falling apart and weeds and trees were growing up in the yard and that doesn't mean anything. It's been burned for it. I'm thinking you must live somewhere near or around. What is it?

Is it a building here? But as I'm standing there and I look at the house, I immediately remember, this is the house where a kid died in a fire. Now my heart's really starting to beat fast. And he gives me the impression that he wants me to to go inside the house. And I don't want to.

I want to leave. But for whatever reason, I couldn't move. I don't mean like I was paralyzed or anything. I felt compelled to stay right there. I see it through. But I was scared. I mean, I was getting those bumps. I was breathing hard.

And then I started crying. Not boo-hooing, but the kind of fear of crying, tears just roll down your face. And I'm breathing hard and I'm looking at him and I'm thinking, you ain't that kid got killed in the fire? I ain't believe in that. I mean, what am I thinking?

Okay, I'm on the wrong track with this, right? But it seems like he's, I'm getting this data. Why, I can't move like a kid killed in the fire? I felt compelled to walk inside the house. But the kid wasn't walking with me. He stayed outside. I was having that feeling that I needed to go forward inside the house. And then the steps are falling apart and the ceilings collapse.

The boards are wobbly and they're making creaky sounds. And the building is so unstable. But when I get up the steps, the way the light came in from the ceiling, I see the pigeons. And I know immediately these are rollers. These are rollers. They're rollers of here. And I'm not afraid anymore.

And not only are there rollers, this is a couple, and they've got squabs or baby pigeons. I get the pigeons, babies and all, which was quite difficult. Because they were flapping like crazy. And, you know, I'm 12 years old. I'm trying to press them to my chest. I started cooing at them, cool, cool, which is something we would do to try to calm pigeons down, and it worked.

And they stopped trying to flap and struggle with me. When I come outside of the house, with the pigeons pressed against my chest, you know, they're flapping, going crazy. I want him to see this. This is amazing. And he's not there when I come out. What he wanted me to have was those,

knew I spoke about rollers all the time when we talked about pigeons if I had rollers. I never saw him again. When his babies were ready to be passed knowing he was ready to pass on, those were my first rollers. And I kept, I probably kept six, seven generations of them. All right until I left home to join the army? Sorry about that. I ended up trading him off to another boy, which was the tradition.

In just a moment, when Tracy started doing tax germany, she assumed all her subjects would be dead. Tracy was almost right. When spooked, the creepy crawley episode continues. Stay two. When you see Roadkill on the side of the road, you probably avert your gaze. You probably don't stop to look.

I'm even going to go out on a limb here and say, you probably don't take whatever you see home with you. Tracy Barrow, she isn't like us. I was walking home one day, and I found a dead bird on the side of the road. All I wanted was like a bitch-in bird skull necklace, just something that I could show off. And that's what it all started.

I was hooked. I started picking up dead animals on the side of the road and putting them in our freezer or keeping parts of them on my back porch. When I saw a piece of roadkill on the side of the street, I would just think to myself, ooh, what could I do with that? I was really only looking at roadkill as art supplies, basically. My boyfriend, Nate, he just didn't like it at all. It got to the point where he kind of asked me, when are you? you going to stop this? And I basically told him never. The first squirrel that I ever did, I named him Mr. January because I found him in the gutter on New Year's Eve. The second squirrel I ever did, Valentina, is my favorite. I found her close to Valentine's Day. You know, I've got a

squirrel that has wings. Kind of the fan favorite is actually the Boy Scout Raccoon. By this time, I had been getting wrist-deep in roadkill for years, I could probably stuff a squirrel in my sleep. Until one day, my mom texted me, hey, I found a new squirrel. It's tied up in a dog-dew bag in the freezer. So after work, I rushed home, and I was really glad that I did because the bag, it was actually just sitting there open, which doesn't bother me, but Nate would have flipped. So I put it in my workstation out on the back porch. The way I always start with a mount, I get a good, hard look at the animal. I kind of wait for them to speak to me, in lack of a better word, and see what is unique about them. It was gorgeous as far as roadkill goes.

It didn't have any broken bones. It didn't have blood. It didn't have fleas and maggots and flies and ants in it. it was really in good shape. It had really nice brown fur, and the whole thing was kind of golden brown, but the tip of its tail was white. Normally, a specimen that's perfect is a home run, but there was something about this particular squirrel that looking at it just made my skin crawl. And I couldn't exactly explain why I felt uncomfortable. I just, it was almost like I had this no, no, no, no, no, kind of drowning it out.

It felt more like being screamed at, honestly. It was frozen solid, but it almost looked like it could hop up and run up the tree. As I was looking at the squirrel, I was just struck with these horrible intrusive thoughts. You're disgusting. What are you doing? What are you thinking? Stop this right now. How dare you? So I had been struggling with these thoughts and I picked up the squirrel and I picked up the Xacto knife and I always start the incision right between the shoulder blades, you know, below at the base of its neck and then you go from the shoulder blades down to the tailbone.

As soon as I pressed the tip of the Xacto into the skin. I felt it go in, that tiny bit. The fur twitched. It was just a fraction of a second, but I definitely saw it. That quick little flick, that little shiver, and it startled me, so I dropped the squirrel and the knife, and I expected it to jump up and run away. I poked it and convinced myself that it, was a dead squirrel. Like, I mean, obviously it was a dead squirrel. So I steeled myself,

picked the squirrel back up, got the Xacto blade, and like ripping off a band-aid, I just, I stuck the knife in and dragged it down the spine line. I worked my hands and the blade, got it to the point where I can get my hands around its stomach in between the skin and the body. And then I started working its little arms by just popping them backwards through the skin and got it skinned out. So it was almost like it was wearing a onesie of its own skin. And the final part was cutting the lip. I suddenly had a really sharp pain underneath the knuckle of the pinky on my right hand.

I dropped the squirrel, I dropped the blade, and I dropped the blade. and I look at my hand, the glove had actually been torn open, and underneath it, there were four short scratch marks on my skin, all really close together. So I took off the damaged glove, and as I was doing that, I noticed a little tiny bit of movement in my peripheral vision, so I looked back up at the squirrel and it was lying on the table and I saw the four fingers on its paw slowly curl up into a little fist, hold for a second, and then really slowly relax. Yeah, that fucked me up. I just, I panicked. Having these feelings, seeing the firm move, I can explain that. Whatever. That's just my own brain being a dick.

Having a squirrel paw wound on my hand was much harder to explain away. Maybe I put too much pressure on the brain and that sent a signal through the dead muscles to make the paw flick and it caught my glove just right. That has to be it because the only other explanation is that I just skinned this squirrel, alive. It did occur to me several times to just stop. It felt like I was going to be cursed from that point on to never have another good experience with taxidermy, which would be devastating. Like, what if I'm done? What if it's going to be like this with every animal from now on? I got as far as picking everything up to throw it out. But if I had

given up, it would have been a huge step backwards. I popped on a new glove, clipped the wrists and the ankles out off the carcass. I buried it in a plastic tub under about 10 pounds of salt so that it could dehydrate and put it on the shelf underneath my bedroom window and went to bed. I could barely sleep that night because The scratch just was throbbing, and every time it throbbed, I thought about the squirrel.

The next morning, I woke up, and all I had to do was change the salt. It can't possibly get as weird as it was yesterday. I took the big bag of salt outside. When I opened the tub that had the skin inside, the skin was sitting up halfway out of the salt. as if it had burrowed up for air, like a zombie, getting up from its grave. It was just sitting there, just staring at me with these empty islands. Those little paws kind of sticking up, reaching out. There's no way this dead hollow squirrel had pushed its way up through 10 pounds of salt.

There was also no way that anybody had touched it, because they all think it's disgusting. I just dumped out the salt. buried it again, put it on the shelf, and walked away from it for, I expected it to be a very long time. One morning while I was finishing my coffee, I heard a squirrel start barking, and I, for a second, I froze because I'm thinking, oh my God, it's back, it wants revenge. But it was just another squirrel outside. I just felt sad thinking that, you know, well, damn. this squirrel that I was so afraid of. It also used to nibble and caper and skitter and bark and, um, bearing nuts.

And it just kind of, it just kind of all hit me that this was a living thing. And it had, I don't know, dignity. I went back to the salt tub. and the pelt was actually still in there. It hadn't tried to escape again. But I just opened it up. I felt like I owed it an apology, and I started talking to it.

So I said, look, I'm sorry. I didn't listen because I think that you were telling me to stop before I even started. The only thing that I want to do is preserve you and make you last forever. So the next morning, I woke up and I walked out onto the porch. I looked up in the big oak tree that's right over the fence. I saw a brown squirrel about medium size, really bushy tail with a white tip.

A pelt that was identical to the one, I mean, you know, currently mummifying under 10 pounds of salt and a tub a few feet away from me. How common is it to have like identical pelts? Is that like a common thing? They're like snowflakes, you know. I just wanted to see what would happen. So I took an almond between my thumb and finger, and I just held it out.

And sure enough, the squirrel jumped from the tree onto the railing of my balcony and hopped along the railing until it got to my head. hand. I mean, my hand was shaking like crazy. This squirrel sniffed me so close that I felt its nose on my fingertip. And then it grabbed the almond in its teeth, turned around, hopped over to the other end of the fence, jumped to the tree, climbed up back to that branch, and looked at me again. and we just made eye contact for another couple seconds, and it just dashed back up into the tree. It just, it was like it disappeared before even reached the top of the branches.

So I was just completely re-energized, and I was finally, I finally knew what I was going to do with the squirrel pelt. So show me. Well, here I've got to take the pins out of its face. It's all dry now. It's been dry for ages. Yeah, so he's going to be holding his own little skull. How are you feeling about doing that? Are you a little bit more apprehensive now?

Yeah, to be fair, I am still kind of expecting it to move one of these days. Tracy Margaret Barrow is still doing taxidermy, And none of her recent projects have tried to escape yet. Check out her work. We'll have a link on our website, spookedpodcast.org. Now the spooked, Monster Team includes Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Jodi Kali, and Jasmine Aguilera, the original soundtrack by Pat McSidi-Miller, Renzogiorio, and Leah Mortimoto.

There are more. Full episodes of Spooked, download or screen the show, right where you got this one, spookpodcast.org. As we count down to all-hallowed Eve, be afraid. And if you like the real stories from real people without the Lucifer aspect, subscribe to the amazing Snap Judgment podcast. I know that terrible testimony from the spook listeners attacked in their own beds by rats, by mice, by creepy, crawly vermin.

Something horrible this way comes. It's terrible. Decrease your chances of befalling a similar fate. Just remember to never.