Spooked - Deliver Me From Evil

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Marianne is a typical teenager. She’s having growing pains, throwing temper tantrums, and feeling different from all her peers. Except Marianne might actually be very different from everyone around her because she might actually be possessed.Thank you, Marianne, for sharing your story with Spooked!Produced by Chris Hambrick, original score by Ella June Pierson, 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.

Take a bowl. Have a seat. I know you're hungry. Come, let me eat, but please don't ask what's in the stew. That's for me to know. Not you. You're listening to Spooked.

Stay. First of all, you have to understand that I love stories. I love them. I breathe them. Well, my kids are little. every night after a book or two after the last snack after shoots and ladders

after brushing the teeth getting on the PJs after tucking in the bed retucking y'all ready after letting the room grow dark I let everything settle for a moment

then I go in to tell them a story something I make up maybe about Flay the genie and her thousand lamps or Mike the giant monster versus Jack the tiny spider. I dig telling them stories, hearing them squeal, laugh,

hide under the covers. Sometimes they ask for last night's character to meet tonight's creature just to see what happens. Hey, that's a good idea. If my story doesn't quite meet their standards, then they start to hollering. No, no, no, Daddy, that was stupid.

That was stupid, Daddy. You got to tell another one. Shh, aye. But y'all are spoiled rotten, though. And this night, I'm telling them a story about Ruby, the sparrow who flies into the rainbow and finds everything she ever wanted. I see their bright eyes shining in the dark,

looking up at me. What happens next, Daddy? What happens next? I get how stories work, how they tell the truth So I know with absolute certainty that whoever gets everything they want, they do not get to never. And here I am with them in the dark.

And this being here right now with them, this, this is everything I've ever wanted. Spook starts. Mary Ann. Mary Ann is your typical teenager. In eighth grade, she's having her growing pains. her parents figure, giving her own room, might help her through this teenage angst and let her decorate it however she likes.

So my mom, she asked me, okay, you need a theme. So what do you want to decorate your room with? And I was very into those old paintings of like the angels, like the Raphael angels, the ones that are kissing and all that stuff. I really liked it. And my mom, she liked it because she's very religious. And my mom, she went all out. She found lamps.

We found rugs. We found bedding. We found decorations for the walls. We actually started bonding. So it's the first night that I'm sleeping in my room for the first time. And I'm really excited. And I was actually very exhausted. It was the day that we officially set everything up and we put in the furniture and set up the bed.

I was watching TV and all of a sudden I felt the room get extremely hot, not normal hot. You know when you put on a blow dryer, that type of heat, so it felt like a very dry, very deliberate heat. I slept with my cat Lucy and even my cat was not cuddled up next to me because you could tell she was hot too. I get up and I go check the AC and the AC is fine. The AC is blowing cold air. The rest of the house feels fine. So in the morning I tell my dad it was really hot last night and he goes, really? I mean, everything is fine.

And he checks the vents and he checks the AC and it's blowing properly into the room. So my parents get me a fan and it works temporarily, but after a while it stops working and it stopped cooling the room and spinning the heat around. I'm trying to fall asleep. I'm in my room, and my cat Lucy is with me, and I'm laid on my right side. All of a sudden, I hear her growling. Lucy didn't growl.

Lucy was not the type of cat that would growl. She was a good cat. And I hear her growling, a really deep growl, and when I turn and look, because I slept with my door cracked, just enough because it was hot in that room, I see something. I can't describe it as a shadow, but I can describe it as dark.

Like it was a dark mass. And it looked like a child. It looked like a little girl, crouched, like a five-year-old, a six-year-old. It was a small child. You could see the shape of the hair, the head, and the shoulders, the arms, the legs, like the shape of a body, of a little girl. And I turned on my lamp. And it wasn't there.

But Lucy was looking at it. And Lucy was, you know, with her hair on end. And I was like, how was that? You know, I pet my cat. I said, it's okay. And I said, no, I just imagined that. That cannot be real. So I turned the light back off.

And I rolled over and I grabbed my cat and I put her close to me and I went back to sleep. After the first time that I saw it, I would see it every night. I saw it standing on my dresser and I saw it like crouched behind the TV and picking out from behind the TV every single time I saw it I would, it was like um almost like that fighter flight

that hot, sharp feeling you feel in your chest every time I saw it I felt it and then I would kind of breathe and say no that's nothing but I would see it move I didn't want to see that part so I didn't look that long I had mentioned to my mom

mom I'm having these really horrible dreams and so she's like okay you need to pray and when you pray you're going to say you know our father the prayer and at the end when you have to say deliver me from evil I want you to say it and feel it

deliver me from evil deliver me from evil but after I started doing it that, they got worse. I was half asleep. And right when I was like in the cusp of falling asleep, like right in between, you know, sleeping awake, I heard a voice in my ear. It was not male. It was not female. It sounded gravely. And I remember it whispering in my ear in Spanish, which means he won't deliver you. After I heard the voice, I woke up. It snapped me back into being awake. And I thought to myself was that in my head? That sounded really close to my ear, but again, I'm really hard-headed,

and I was very skeptical. So I said, no, like, I had to have imagined that. But after that night, very often, I would hear that same voice. I would always hear it right in my ear, and it was telling me terrible things. I'm bilingual, I speak Spanish and English, but it always spoke in Spanish. It would curse at me. It would growl in my ear. It would growl in my own. ear would make fun of me. It was always like you're ugly. Your mother not you your family

you odia. It's stupid. It was always like, you're ugly, nobody loves you. Everybody hates you. Your mom doesn't love you. You're stupid. Your friends don't like you.

Like it was always very cruel. It would change something at me at that point. I don't know what it wanted, but the only thing that was the only thing, thing that I can compare it to is like a parasite. I was battling with something and I remember feeling it was like something that would grow in my stomach. I felt an anger like my body didn't belong to me. When you say, you know, I'm angry. You're describing an emotion. At that point, when I was angry, I was physically feeling something. And if I didn't do something about it,

Let's say, if I didn't react, to the smallest thing, I would feel like throwing up. Like, I had to lash out to feel better. It did plant that little seed in my head. Like, your friends don't love you. And so sometimes I was really mean to friends. A lot of people in school were all so scared of me. So now many people messed with me because I was so violent. I started getting sick very often.

least once a week, every two weeks, I would get really ill, like with a fever. I didn't know what was happening to me at that point. And I tell my mom, you know, I think I might be going crazy. My mom suggested that I speak to someone, and she booked an appointment with a therapist. The therapist would tell her, no, she's just a teenager, she's lashing out, she's being rebellious. It was not just me being a teenager. It was something else. It was a very oppressive, angry, like violent, even towards my parents, which I was never like that.

I'm not like that. That darkness was not normal. One night, I'm sleeping, and all of a sudden, I get slapped in the face physically. And something cursed at me in Spanish when it slapped me. She's the perfect host. She's the one. I felt it. So the point, it was so hard.

It takes me to the edge of my bed, and I'm disoriented, so I wake up and I fall out of bed. I tumbled out of bed because it literally, like, knocked me, you know, over, really hard. I figured the voice, the shadow, and whatever is attacking me, it's the same thing. But I didn't start connecting everything until it started getting. physical. I couldn't go back to sleep in that room after that. So I ran to my mom and I told my mom, mom, can I sleep here tonight? So my mom's like, is everything okay? And I told my mom, I'm hearing

things in my room. And I think I just got slapped. And my mom's like, what? What are you talking about? And so she's like, all right, grab some cushions from the couch and like make a bed on the floor and sleep on the floor. So I grabbed my cat, the couch. cushions and some pillows. And I slept in an air-conditioned room. And I started doing that a lot. There's always that one person in a Cuban family. That's the spiritual, like, leader.

That's my grandma. So my mom called her. My grandmother has a six-sense. I've never seen anything like it. I guess my mom told her, hey, you know, this is going on. What do you think we should do? My grandmother comes in and she said, I'm going to bless your room.

You want to tell me what's going on? I don't say the full story. I'm just saying, you know, I'm having like really bad dreams. I'm trying to pray every night like you guys told me. So my grandmother, she started the back of the room and then she opens the windows. She leaves the door open and the front door open because she wants to bring everything from the back to the front.

So she's starting to, you know, sprinkle holy water from the back while she's praying. And then she turns to me and she goes, in Spanish. She tells me, and I said, what? It means I see her. And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? And I hadn't mentioned anything yet. And she said, I can see her.

She's all black and small, but I'm going to tell you now she's not a little girl. And I'm like, what are you talking about? She goes, she's not a little girl. She's very serious and she grousing by the shoulders. And she says, which means listen to what I'm going to tell you. Okay, I see a darkness behind you. And I can see that it speaks into your ear

and you respond what it tells you to say. So I need you to be a little stronger because this thing can only use you if you allow it to. You need to pray harder. And you have to ask St. Michael to help you. When my grandmother says something, it's 100%. So it, like, confirmed it. It made me feel, like, freaked out.

Like, it was really scary. And so she taught me how to say the prayer of St. Michael, which, by the way, I still say every night. It's archangelo, San Miguel, defend me in the battle. St. Michael, the archangel, defend us in battle. We are protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, O prince of heavenly host,

by the power of God thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of our souls. But then one night, I was half asleep, and I started choking. But I was, how can I say, I wasn't choking. Something was choking me. I could not breathe. It was physical. I woke up and I'm still choking. Physical where I'm feeling my eyes bulging. You know, that pressure that you feel and I'm trying to catch my breath. I'm sitting up.

I'm grabbing my neck. I'm trying to figure out what's going on. At that point, I started praying again in my head. I couldn't speak. And all of a sudden, it stops. I know if I hadn't had prayed, I probably would not be here. something has to be done because if it can do that,

what's to say it doesn't let go next time. From that moment on, I started sleeping in my parents' room. My mom, she didn't even question it. When I would bring the pillows to her room, I would knock and say, Mom, can I?

And she'd say, yep, go ahead. I felt safe in my parents' room, so I knew that it wasn't going to get me when I was there. I start to get settled to go to sleep and I can hear my parents breathing deeply so I know that they're asleep and then I can hear from the wall that my bedroom shared with my parents' room a scratching coming from the wall. It was deliberate scratching. Like a very slow dragging. It keeps happening

every night. And I knew that I wasn't just imagining it because, number one, I was awake. And number two, Lucy, my cat, would always look at the wall. So I knew that if she's reacting, okay, I'm not imagining it. She's hearing it too. After about almost a year of sleeping in my parents' room, my mom brings up the conversation to me, hey, what can we do to get you sleeping back in your room? Because you're too old to be sleeping on your parents' floor every night. I was adamant. No, Mom, I don't want to sleep in my room. Please don't make me. And eventually I started crying. So she says, well, okay, I have an idea. What if you sleep in your room with the door open? And I'll sleep on the couch. The couch is right in front of your room door. I can see

you clearly. If something does happen, then I'm there. And I'll take you to my room. I laid down and I fell asleep really easily. I was in a deep sleep. I was in a deep sleep. and all of a sudden I wake up with my mother shaking me awake, wake up, get up, get up, let's go, bring your stuff and let's go to the room. And I said, why? What happened? And she goes, grab your stuff, let's go to my room. Come on, run.

So I said, okay, I grab my cat, I grab my blanket, my pillow, and the couch cushions. And my mom closes my bedroom door and we go to her room. I was laying down on the floor on the side of my mom's bed. It was a couple of minutes, and my mom kind of rolls over and looks at me, and then I look at her, and she realizes that I'm awake. I remember looking at her face, and she'd, like, jump back. She looks at me, and she says, my name. She goes, Marianne, like asking me, are you, Marian? And I said, yeah, Mom?

And then after I said that she looked a little relieved, and she goes, go to sleep. And I go, Mommy, did you see something? And she goes, go to sleep. So at that point, I knew that she saw something. The next day I had gone to school, and then that night, I come home from school, and my grandmother is in the house with a priest. My grandma's like, he's going to do an exorcism on your room and on you. And I said an exorcism.

I thought it was funny. I was kind of like mocking it on the inside, but I didn't on the outside. because I knew deep down inside it was serious. It was not an authorized exorcism. He did it because he believed what was going on. The priest explained to me, so this is what's going to happen. I'm going to say some prayers.

I'm going to ask you to repeat some things after me. I'm going to anoint you. He had the holy water. And anybody who's Cuban knows that there's this, like, baby cologne that we use that's made of violence. And so he asked for some of that, and he added it to the water. He blessed the water, he prayed some things over it. And then he began.

He prayed in Spanish. He said some things in Latin. He held my hand in his, and he closed his eyes, and he asked me to repeat some things. He told me in Spanish, now you have all the tools that you need. You don't have to have fear of anything, and he explained to me because God is with you. You have to allow him to fight for you. I felt those words, and I literally was not afraid. I could have been slapped that night,

and I would have rolled back around and fell asleep. I was not afraid anymore. The whole thing took about maybe 40 minutes, and then it was over. I can't say that it was like in the movies. My head didn't spin. You know, I didn't scream profanities. I can't say that any of that happened. But after he was done, I can tell you that I felt again.

I felt lighter. I felt relieved. I said, you know what? I'm going to sleep in my room. My mom was like, okay. I'm going to leave my room open, my door open. If you need anything, I'm in there. I'm asleep in my room.

And as I'm sleeping, I had a dream, but there was a little girl standing in the driveway, scratching at the wall trying to get back in. I've never seen anger like that. But I can't describe how much hatred I saw in her face. It was like almost animalistic. She was clawing at the wall and she was snapping her teeth. She never got back in because she never bothered me again.

When I spoke to my mother, I said, Mom, you know, so I'm going to talk to some people. They want to talk to me about the experience that I had. Do you remember the experience that I had? Her response was Marianne. I had hoped that you had forgotten about it, but there are some things that you don't want to poke. And then there's a saying in Spanish that goes, you don't want to grab the cat by the balls if you don't want to get bit. So that's what she said. She's like, we don't, you know, just let it go.

Talk about it if it helps, but don't linger. And then when she said that, it kind of like, you know what, I don't want to know. I don't want to know. I didn't have the guts to tell her to describe what she saw because I don't want to lose sleep. Did you hear that spokes? understand we need your stories about the darkness we need it Mary Ann

she's a spook listener and she reached out to tell us her terrifying tale we are so grateful if you have a story that we need to hear drop us a line spook at stepjudgment.org original score for that story

was by Ella June Pearson was produced by Chris Hembrick even though we know it's coming we never see it coming. Hey Glenn, you're not even going to believe it, but the craziest, craziest thing happened to me. Really?

Well, let me know. Spooked at stampjudgment.org because the very best thing is a spook story from a spooked listener. And they look hot on these streets, you know. The best way is by sporting some spook gear, the t-shirt of your dreams available right now, Snapjudgment.org.

Remember, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day, subscribe to our amazing sister podcast. Snap Judgment. It's storytelling with a beat. Spook was created by the team that has learned to carry a good luck charm wherever they go, except for Mark Ristich. He just put sand in his pockets. I don't know why.

In assessment, our chief spookster is Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie New Inn, Davy Kim, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Renzio, Tayae Ducott, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Fregno, Greta Weber, Tickin Deliza, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims. This folk theme song is by Pat McNeillan. My name is from Washington. Everyone knows that you can hide things in the dark. And that the bad things, they prefer the shadows, but understand this too. In darkness, it's where we can also hide from ourselves. else. Mass, those things we dare not see, but in darkness secrets festered, metastasized, they grow,

and that is why I implore. I beseech anyone with the foresight to see, anyone blessed with the understanding, they will all tell you to never, ever, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, ever, never, ever.