Spooked - D-E-B-R-A

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

After the birth of her second child, Elijah, Sabrina starts to wonder if she’s brought home more from the hospital than just her new baby. Thank you, Sabrina, for sharing your story with Spooked! Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, original score by Yari Bundy, 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.

Run run as fast as you can. You can't catch me. I'm the gingerbread man. But what he didn't know is I can run real fast. So I caught him up quick and took a bite of him. He listened to Spooked. Stayed. I just started a new job at this big accounting firm.

The biggest, baddest accounting firm on the planet. Ernst & Young, E.Y. One small problem. I don't know anything about accounting. Nothing whatsoever. My new boss man says, Don't you worry. I'm going to teach you the right way to do it.

He says he's got a project that's just your speed. Fantastic. He sweeps me into a large, empty conference room with a long oaken table. On this table, he unfurls a gigantic, blanket-sized piece of accounting paper. with lots of rows and squares and columns, and he hands me a calculator and a number two pencil.

He tells me that the entire field of accounting is built around something called a T-chart. Okay, numbers on one side, got to equal the numbers on the other side. Right? Then he sets a scenario. It tells me to write down the numbers. Then he's like, I'll be back.

And when I get back, the numbers on this side better equal the numbers on that side. No problem, boss man, I got this. Gotta get the job done, professional. Scratch out numbers and columns and rows, just like you told me. And in the middle of my flurry of activity, another boss. The boss lady comes in. I've got a lot of bosses.

She looks at my scene, my pencils, my calculator, my big piece of paper. Her face goes very pale. She says, what are you? doing? Well, I'm working, you know, on the accounting solutions. Eyes blazing. She starts ripping up my big piece of paper into tiny little bitch. What do you think? We gave you a computer loaded with accounting software for. If I catch you like this again, you're fired. And she storms out. When the gossip spreads through my department, some of the co-workers gathered around to console me. One's like, that's crazy.

Tough break, but seriously, where did you even find this piece of paper? Yeah, you time portal back to the 1950s, what the hell? And they're trying to help me pick up leftover pieces of the confetti storm, and one holds up a sliver of paper into the light. It's like, whoa, this doesn't even say Ernst & Young. This says Ernst and Winnie, the old name for the firm back 2030 years. years ago. Like, what the hell, dude? What the hell? And you said some old guy

told you to do this? Now, I'm not saying a crazy codger from out of the past showed up to make me write nonsense on some accounting ghost paper. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is do your own research. Spook stop.

Now, to the Gulf Coast of Florida. To meet some Sabrina. Sabrina is young and in love with their fiancé Bill. She can't wait to see what the future brings, but Sabrina's about to learn that sometimes that you have to watch out for. Spooked. After Sabrina and Bill get married, they don't waste time starting a family. Sabrina has always known that she wants to be a mom. First, they have a son, Billy. In less than a year later, Sabrina gets pregnant again with Elijah. It was so amazing when Elijah was born. They were so chubby and pink-cheeked. The nurse put Elijah on top of me.

It was belly to belly. Immediately the army crawled up, and they latched on and started nursing. Elijah's energy, it was, I'm here. And, like, I'm the boss of this. Nurses come in, and they do different tests. The first test that they did was the hearing test where they're going to put headphones on and their scene of sound goes in and out of the eardrum.

Elijah failed the hearing test. They were like, we'll test it again the next day. And so the next day, they did the hearing test again. No sound. I was so grateful to have this healthy, vibrant baby. The fact that they didn't pass the hearing test, I didn't care. They were alive. They were well. We'll figure it out. Sabrina and Bill bring baby Elijah home from the hospital, and they start settling into life as a family of four.

In the beginning, Elijah sleeps in a bassinet next to Sabrina's side of the bed. The rest of the baby stuff, like the changing table and diaper genie, or in the nursery. Sabrina had spent the last couple months of her pregnancy getting the room ready for Elijah. She'd found these awesome baby linens with cartoons by John Lennon on them, and she's really excited to start using the space. So it's been a few days since we got home from the hospital, and I'm starting to get back to the normal schedule, doing laundry. So I have their laundry, and I'm bringing it into their nursery, into the room. I open up the door and I walk in.

I don't know why, but it feels very cold and sterile in here. It's weird. I was used to that room being really warm because we're in Florida and it's like facing the sun. And then as I'm setting down the pile of onesies, I just washed, it just feels like I'm being watched. I stand up straight and I look around and there's no one there. All of a sudden, I have this cold sweat anxiety of, I'm not supposed to be in here. This isn't my room. I felt like I was an intruder.

I just hurry up and get out. Sabrina doesn't have time to dwell on the weird feeling she'd gotten in the room. She's busy caring for two-year-old Billy and baby Elijah. Then, late one night, she's back in the nursery with Elijah, changing their diaper. I started hearing these whispers in my head. It was just like this quiet mumble at first. My brain can't understand the words. And then as it gets louder, and it just keeps building.

They're not going to fall off. But I couldn't stop hearing it. The baby's going to fall off. I'm nervous. My heart beats increasing. So then I'm working. faster to like button up their little feeties and swoop them up. And then it was, I didn't understand where all of this was coming from.

It was not my thoughts. It was not how I felt. And then we ran out of the room and shut the door. That was when I knew, okay, okay, there is something happening in this room. After that night, when Sabrina needs to nurse or change Elijah, she avoids the nursery and goes to the living room instead. But she tries to talk herself out of believing that there could actually be something in the nursery. Like, okay, like this is in your head and you're, you know, you're making this up. You need to start using this room soon and look like this is a bedroom.

Just clean the room. I was sweeping and I'm sweeping things out the doorframe and I had the windows open. And I kept thinking, oh, it's going to feel great. It's going to feel so good in here. And instead, it still feels exactly the same. It still feels cold. And then I would walk through the door, and it would be like a different house. I never felt it in any other space of the house.

Fast forward about six months. Elijah has been diagnosed as profoundly deaf in both ears. Also, Billy was diagnosed on the spectrum for autism seven days after Elijah was diagnosed with their profound hearing loss. I was just in this moment of feeling like I was the most inadequate to be a good mother to these two children who had a lot more needs than I had prepared for. We have 12 therapy sessions a week.

I sign up to take an American Sign Language class at USF, which is like the local college. And Bill and I are going to a deaf sign night together to meet some deaf adults. I had my mom come over and babysit, and it was the first time we had left both the kids since bringing Elijah home. We come home

and I notice right away when I pull up that music is blasting. We walk in and every light is on. All the lights in the house are on. The baby is totally happy to sleep but my two-year-old is having the underwear dance party of his life

with his grandmother. I'm a little confused but also not surprised. My mom, I love to call her undomesticated. So I'm not overly surprised that it's 10 o'clock at night and that she's having a dance party with my kids when I asked bedtime to be an hour ago. Phil just kind of laughed and was like,

that's your mom. I turned out of music. And I'm like, hey, because she didn't hear me coming because the music was so loud. And she just stops and looks at me. Her look was as if I was a kid coming home late. Like, that mom. on look of what are you up to? What are you doing? What have you gotten yourself into? And she says,

I'm never going in that room again. I moved everything out. So then I start looking around the room. And there's all of these furniture pieces from the nursery. And as I'm looking around, she's just going in telling me about, I don't know why you didn't tell me that there was something going on in that room. And I'm like, what, what do you mean? What's going on? My mom starts slowing down, and she just was like, look, get me a beer, and I'll tell you. She said that she tried to put the baby to bed in there.

But they're not going to bed. You know, they were up, and they're babbling, and they're talking. So she walks in to check on Elijah, because she's been hearing them on the monitor. And she said that the moment she opened the door, she immediately starts hearing screaming. She said it was so loud, and it was a woman, and the woman was just yelling at her. It wasn't words as much as just, like, a scream of anger and, like, pain.

And she's telling me the story of the room. She's so serious in the face. She was really, like, spooked. My mom, her mom, my great-grandmother, they're all very spiritual. She's also very practical and skeptical. So she's like, I don't know what's going on here, but I don't think you should be going in there. To be very honest, it just felt a little validating. I didn't feel like I had anything figured out, but I'm feeling relieved that someone else.

was experiencing something, it wasn't me. And then she finished her beer, my mom being who she was, once she finished that beer and we had the talk, she didn't want to talk about it again. For a while, Sabrina does her best to stay out of the room. But over time, not going into the nursery stops being an option. Villanized relationship, it kind of hit a point where we both just knew we couldn't give each other like a marriage anymore.

The only time I talked to Bill at this time, it was reporting what was going on with the kids' therapies. With that, I started sleeping in the nursery. She puts the futon in the room, and each night she would cuddle up in there with Billy and Elijah. I just was like, we're going to play by the rules of this room. And the rules of this room are, as long as we're just sleeping, and we get out,

then it's okay. In the morning, you know, when I'm waking up, it's this awareness of, I'll get out of your room. I'll get out of your room. And then the room would be shut the rest of the day. One morning, we're kind of doing our normal day-to-day stuff. Babies on the floor are getting belly time. I'm about to put some clean laundry in their room, so I opened the door. And I just see that the chair was knocked over.

I just thought, okay, the chair, got flipped over, Billy must have done it. And so I put the clothes where they belonged, put the chair back upright, closed the door. It's been about a week, and I'm going in there. So I walk in, and the first thing I see is that the chair slipped over again. So I'm picking up the chair and adjusting it to put it back. And it just felt like I was being watched directly from one. one spot in the room.

And then it just built more and more. My rebellious nature is to not be scared and to not let this be real and to get it out of my head. But then there is like a quiet intuition of you're being watched. Billy's not doing this. And you know exactly how this chair got flipped over. As uneasy as Sabrina feels in the nursery, the kid. kids seem fine, and sometimes she even lets them nap in there during the day.

So I'm going to pick up Elijah, and as I'm reaching over the crib rails to get them, I'm feeling these thoughts and feelings up until I pick up Elijah louder and louder. As I'm picking them up and bringing them to my chest to rock them, that's when it slowly gets quieter. I had to be so present and focused on Elijah. otherwise I felt the presence stronger and stronger. It felt like just being pecked at, but it was like mothering things. I definitely surrendered in the way that I didn't even try to have control or fight it

or pretend it wasn't there. It's just stronger than me. Sabrina keeps what she's feeling in the room a secret. She spends so much of her time explaining her kids' needs, trying to make people. understand. She doesn't want to have to explain this too, even to her husband. Bill is very black and white thinking. So things that aren't logical or really grounded are really hard for him. So for me to have to convince Bill of anything, I couldn't do it. I didn't have it in me. I didn't really talk to anybody about it because I didn't want anyone to tell me it wasn't happening because I couldn't

handle it. One day, we're about to run out the door. Billy is in the air-conditioned car in his car seat. And so the last thing is, just go grab the baby and then head out. So I run to their room and I dip to pick up the baby, put them on my right hip. All of a sudden, on that same right side, someone is screaming down at me. The scream is this woman's voice filled with hateful things. I can hear everything, but all of it is so loud and mixed together that it just sounds like a screech. My first feeling is panic, and I'm not going to panic. believing that I've done something terribly wrong. I'm holding Elijah and I close my eyes because

it's so loud. It was so loud and visceral. And I think that's when I really heard for the first time what they were saying. In that moment, I could understand it in all of my body that you think this is your baby. That's why you're angry. And then the fight kicks. And so I just shouted, This isn't your baby. This isn't your baby. Leave me alone. This is not your baby.

And the screaming stops. We went out the front door, got in the car, and I sat in the driveway for probably five minutes, just crying. It was this feeling of like sadness and loss. and it took me over. I feel like I lost the baby, but I hadn't. Hours later, when Sabrina and the kids get back from their therapy appointment,

she expects to be greeted by that same heavy, angry feeling. She walks into the house and opens the door to the nursery. When I went into that room, it didn't take me over. I felt more in control. It feels different. There was a level of peace and almost acceptance. And I was like, okay, that's over. Elijah is almost three.

Their signing skills are really good, but they're age-appropriate. They've got three or four words to a sentence, which is awesome. So they would say, like, want cookie, please thank you. At this point, Sabrina is getting ready to move out of the house. It's one of her last night's there, and she's putting Elijah to bed. I'm tucking them in, and I'm singing and signing. One of our favorite songs. I wish I had a little red box to put my...

And then I like, you know, you put the kid's name. So I'd be like, baby in. I'd take them out and... And then you like pretend to tickle and kill. kiss them, and then you put them back in the box. They want to do the song again, and they keep saying, song again, song again. I'm like, no, so I'm signing back. No, sleep time, sleep time, like, good night, I love you.

And then they grab me, and they go, I picked you. They look at me and their hands on me and they say, I picked you. Mommy, I picked you. And they're signing this. Mommy, I picked you. And they just keep saying, Mommy, I picked you. And they just keep saying, Mommy, I picked you. And I go, okay, sure, good night. I start trying to leave.

And they really desperately looked at me and just said, no. They're signing. No. I picked you. A long time ago, when they start in this sentence, is when I really start recognizing, I've never seen these signs. I've never seen them have this type of cohesive.

with their language. So they say, a long, long, long time ago, my other mother, and they go, no, I'm your mommy. They just with desperation really looked at me and said no.

And then they said the sentence again and signed it. My other mother, and then they finger spell D, E, R. My jaw kind of drops. They knew the alphabet, but they were not doing any words over three letters. And usually that was the word toy, wow.

I'm trying to figure out as they're telling me, how do they know how to sign all this? And I've never heard the name Deborah. We don't have any Debra's in our life. I just look at them, and they continue. My other mother, Deborah, and I were driving, and it was a dark night, and they were going to get ice cream, and we're driving at night. And then the car, and they show what looks like the sign for a car having an accident, which is, boom, boom, boom.

They're rolling their hands, and they're showing. showing that there's a car driving and then it rolls over. Boom, boom, boom. And then they showed the sign for sitting and then they pushed it above their head. And they said, I was sitting and then waiting and waiting and looking for you. And as they're pointing and showing the looking sign, they're looking from above and they're looking down. And then they showed the sign for spotted, which is like you're pointing to the ground.

And they point to the ground. And then they pick me up with their pick sign. And they say, and I picked you. Picked you up. And now you're my mommy. I understood at that moment, oh, oh. That was who was in the room.

I was a little shaken. But I didn't want to alarm Elijah, so I tried to just give them back whatever the energy was that was, oh, this is a, yeah, this is normal. And this is just another time you told me about your other mother, Deborah, and I'm going to go now. I took those blankets, tucked the kid in, and left the room with a door open. The next morning, Elijah doesn't mention Deborah. They're back to signing like a three-year-old. To this day, Sabrina isn't sure what happened that night. I don't understand it.

I don't need to know how it works. When Elijah told me that they picked me, and they really just kept telling me, like, no, I picked you. I remember holding on to that for a really long time because I think I needed to know that they would have picked me if they could. And that I am good enough to be their parent. As a mother, I was consistently feeling inadequate. So I think that I'm just really grateful for them.

Like, out of all of this, if my kid picked me instead of any other person in the world to be their parent, then I'll take it. Like, that's the best. Bringing up for sharing your story with the spooked. That original score was by Yari Bundy. It was produced by Zoe Frigno. Spooked is a road we walk together. It's too dangerous alone. If you have a story, the world needs to hear, please, please, please, please, please, please, let me know.

Spooked at snapjudgment.org. There's nothing better than a spook story for a spout listener. Spook at snapjudgment.org. Now, there's someone special in the world want a present, a gift, to let the world know they walk this dark path. Well, Spook Gear is available right now at Snap Judgment. That O'RG. And remember, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day,

get the amazing, stupendous sister podcast, Snap Judgment. It's storytelling. Thook was created by the team that tries to travel light and leave no trace. So this course of Mark Ristich, he travels heavy on the corn chips and candyball wrap give away exactly where he's been. There's David Kim. Chris Hamburg, Leon Moimoto. Tail de Kott, Marissa Dodge.

Zoe Ferrigno, Ann Ford. Eric Gagnez, Cody Harjo. Lola Abrera, Miles Lassie. Yari Bundy, Doug Stewart. The Spook theme song is by Pat Messini Miller. My name is in Washington. I know a woman. I've known her for a long time who can do an extraordinary piece

of magic. She does it instantly. I've never seen anything like it. She looks at a person and sees not the person they present themselves as, but instead she sees their burden. Sometimes she even sees their monster.

The thing they think is invisible. And that isn't even all what she will do when she sees someone carrying a load that looks too hard, to bear, she'll stop them. Often with a touch, a stranger, she'll stop them

and she'll ask them. Can I help you? This is a sorcery of the highest order and she is a magician made of light and I've seen her make this genuine offer and often I've seen people collapse into her arms. Sobbing, eager to speak with someone

who understands them. But I've also seen people reject her off. I've seen them hold their burden even closer to themselves and scamper off, afraid to put it down for even a moment. I've seen the darkness win such that I wonder about the terrible toll her gift extracts from her. How can it be to see the shadow's work and still be powerless to help? And when I say this out loud, she laughs. She calls me American. Says because I'm American, I want easy fixes for even the eternal struggle and I laugh back with her.

Grateful I get to walk with. Talk with, argue with, learn from someone. Someone who will never ever, never, ever.