Spooked - Dod

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Arin is living with his parents and siblings in Washington state when some of his long-forgotten childhood memories start coming back to him. BIG thanks to, Arin and Mallory, for sharing your story with us here at Spooked! Produced by Chris Hambrick, original score by Richard Haig, 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.

Stella called the Raven trickster, because the trickster was he. Now, you can turn to a horse or a boat or a tree, but can you turn to bacon? And the raven said, why not? Then Stella shoved him in a sack, and she threw him in the pot. You're listening to Spoot. Sted. I didn't go to the funeral when Sal died. I was a kid.

I didn't know about stuff like that. I wanted to say goodbye, though. Our parents, they didn't know Sal or his wife married, but we lived just a few blocks away. One day, Sal told me to stop my bike and come put some oil in the chamber because I make too much goddamn noise. If you take care of these things, he said,

could last forever. Later, he tightened my brakes and adjusted my seat higher. You're a growing boy! And this shaggy, gray and black mustache It took up most of Sal's face, no beard, but a mustache like out of the movies, exploded under his nose, spilled down his cheeks. He tinkered in his garage all day, arguing with Mary, who shouted warnings from inside the house.

Leave that boy alone. She said, he didn't want to talk to old people about cars. He came here by himself, he knows what he's doing. Well, give him something to eat. You're standing in the kitchen, make him a sandwich. One for me, too. What do I look like? Like someone who knows how to make a sandwich.

Oh, you. And all this, it sounds bad it does, but they were smiling the whole time. Performance, I think, for an audience of me. Because when Mary looked at him, she glowed. Like, he was the lost treasure at the end of the story. Like he was the hero who won the big fight. And one day, his feet sticking out from underneath the Winnebago, the Winnebago that never moved. Sal told me, ah, you know, we never had kids.

Why not? Well, some things you don't work out the way you're playing. He's a poor trouble for. We're just talking woman, for the love of God. And later, the garage door stayed closed for a while. A long while. Then he was gone. I picked some flowers and knocked on the door.

And this enormous sheep dog I'd never seen before comes bound and barking as Mary struggles with the doorknob. Settle down. Settle down. Hey, sister, she says I need a dog now. I don't know. I can't deal with a puppy. I really can't. So here we are. Me and him. Um, yeah, Sal, Sal was real nice to me.

Yeah, he was real nice to me too. The dog kind of cocks his head toward her. What am I going to do with the dog? Later, I visited her from time to time. Not as much as with Sal, because I'm young and I'm an idiot, but I do see her. And the dialogue, it started back up. But instead of talking to Sal,

She talks to the dog Who comes running towards me, ears flopping, Oh, he didn't want anything to do with you. You're half as big as he is. Or, if you take those shoes out to the kitchen one more time, I'm going to lose my mind.

She even asked the dog stuff like, Who keeps calling this number and hanging up? Who does this? The dog kind of rolls his eyes and looks at me as if to say, can you believe this? Can you believe it? This big huge sheep dog

with this big sow mustache and these big sow eyes and I swear I swear I'm not saying that Sal came back of the sheep dog I'm not saying that because that's crazy it would be insane to make that kind of definitive statement I'm just saying that

100% absolutely certain that Sal didn't come back as a sheep dog. You never really know who is there. Aaron Gustafson, he's living with his parents and his siblings in Washington State and some long-forgotten childhood memories start coming back to him. Spooked. I was somewhere around 11 and I was just sitting in my room and I randomly remember Dodd.

I got up and I went to my mom and I asked her, I just was like, do you remember Dodd? And the look she gave me was just like utter surprise. I'm Mallory Gustafson. I'm Aaron's mother. Aaron was smart, entirely too smart, really well behaved actually better than most kids actually i started noticing differences

and i said okay what is going on with this child i would hear him say you know like okay or uh-huh you know just responses as if someone was talking to erin like who are you talking to and he would reply Dodd, like it was no big deal. But I noticed around the age of two, I think is when it actually started. I just figured he was part of my family. Dodd was roughly my own height, about a foot and a half tall, and like pure white, not like fuzzy. He didn't really have a face.

he just had little indents where his eyes would be he looked kind of like a gummy bear he had like a little muzzle but it didn't have like a noticeable nose or mouth just a little white bear with no face at first my parents were kind of confused they thought that especially since I was

you know just a toddler oh are you talking about your dad And I would say, no, I'm talking about Dodd. And they'd say, you mean, like, the word God? And I would say, no, Dod. And every time I would say, no, Dodd, until they finally gave in, they're like, okay, you're just talking about Dodd. I have no idea what that means. But apparently that's what you mean.

I spoke to the pediatrician at the time. And he thought it was a little strange that he would have an imagine. imaginary friend, considering he has lots of children to play with. But he said not to worry it. Maybe he'll just grow out of it, you know, not to make a big deal of it. So that's what we did. I had to constantly tell them that Dodd's hungry. Dodd wants to go outside.

Like, you can't just leave Dodd at home when we go places. So when my parents would start saying he's not real, anything like that, that, it mostly just frustrated me, um, because he's right there. I can see him. Why aren't you understanding that he's just as real as we are? I would just wake up in the morning and I would slip out of bed. I'd walk down the hall and I would just open the little gate and go down the and I would sit on the floor. We had an old, like, CRT TV, and I would sit there and Dodd would be next to me, and I would turn on what Dodd wanted to watch. I never was big into most cartoons outside of Pokemon and Ben 10, but Dodd would have me turn on like Ed Ed and Eddie.

I would say things out loud, but I would just know what he said or what he meant or what he wanted. That's kind of how Dodd and I spoke. It was sometimes frustrating, but when you have a child, you love the child, so you'll do whatever, you know, you need to do to keep that child happy. Do you have to drop other things to be able to buckle that person that I can't see in the car to make an extra plate, to buy extra McDonald's? You figure it's a phase. And I figured, you know, I'll just play along, if you will, and do what I need to do to get this child through the day. All of my brothers, we would go to a store and we'd each get to pick out a toy, and I go into the toy aisle, and Dodd is there with me,

and he wants this toy just up on the top shelf, I can't reach it. And so I have to bring my mom in, and I'm just... just saying, like, I need this toy on the top. Dodd wants this one. And so my mom grabs this toy off the top shelf. She's telling me, you're never going to play with this. You don't need this toy. Dodd's right here. I don't know what you're not understanding. This isn't my toy. It's for Dodd. About the age of four, it started to feel more than imaginary because it got more than just make room for Dodd. Felt like it wasn't a phase after a year, maybe two,

because the doctor was telling me, usually the child will forget, or it'll just stop, and it didn't. Aaron described Dodd as being short, and not having a face really sticks out to me. That kind of freaked me out. And then later learned that it was a bear. very short there.

I didn't think he was making this up. So I was like, okay, I got to find out what it is because I know he's not having some kind of breakdown. It's not anything wrong with the child. So I thought, maybe there's something to this, and that's what led me to try to investigate it. First, I started telling my brother, who lived with me at the time, you know,

we would discuss Dodd and how Aaron was reacting. and I looked on the internet and said, are there any happenings in our area maybe that had a person named Dodd? And I spelled it out. And there was a story about a small, I believe they said he was eight years old, a boy, his last name was Dodd.

He had been burned so badly that he was unrecognizable and had died in a fire in our area. So I told my brother, I said, do you think that that's what maybe this child's seeing? He was a little bit scared at first. He was like, oh my goodness, what if this child is seeing a ghost? What if your house is haunted?

I'm inside and I'm just with all of my brothers. My dad is at work. My mom's just in the kitchen cleaning dishes. But I get the sense that Dodd has something that he wants to show me. And so I'm following Dodd, and he leads me all the way through the house to the front door, and I open the door, I leave the house. It's the middle of summer, super bright, beautiful day.

And we go down the steps of the porch, and we take a left from the porch, which curves around the right side of our house. And right along the ground, it's what I can only describe as like a small door in the side of the house. It's probably two feet by two feet, a little square, and it's closed by like a little hook latch that you just set. down into a little hoop. That was somewhere that I didn't know existed. And I just know that Dodd wanted me to check it out. I swing the little door open and there's only about a third of the little area that I can see. It has a concrete floor and one little wall. I climb in inside of this little area and I put my knees up against my chest and I set my arms on

them and I'm sitting just inside the door. It's a very low ceiling only a few inches above my head when I'm curled up and I sit there and I look to my side and I can't see anything other than a little bit of light that's reflecting off of a very small, old-looking like a classic tricycle, like the cartoonish looking, little red one with white riding, little tiny wheels. And I'm sitting next to that. I looked at my left, and just outside the little area I just crawled into, I can see the door, I can see a little bit of the grass, and Dodd, who's just standing there,

and he's just looking at me. It felt really calm inside, almost otherworldly. It was so quiet and separate from everything else. Wow, you know, that is insane. I don't know how to wrap my head around that. Must have been a reason. He was lonely, maybe lost. When you figure there's probably a spirit,

then as a person, I respect that person. as well, so I respect their friendship. I didn't have an opinion. Either it was or it wasn't. I couldn't prove it. Aaron didn't seem to be harmed or unhappy or depressed or any of those things. So I just let it be. We had lived in the same house since I was born, but when I was six years old, we started to gradually move into a new house that was quite a ways away.

The day that we actually finally moved out of the house, we had already been making trips to the new house with furniture, things like that. This day was the final day. We were not coming back. We turned into keys. Normally, he would be right next to me all the time. And suddenly now

he's just watching everything happen. When we're going for that final trip and he's still over by the house when I'm in the car and we're all leaving for the last time, I think that's really when it just hit that he can't leave. So all the boys got into the truck where the furniture and the bikes and so on, so forth was.

Aaron and I decided to get in the car that I would be driving. Normally, Aaron will sit in a booster seat, and there will be another booster seat, which was always been reserved for Dodd. I always was really good about, you know, allowing Dodd. And this is after getting used to it for a couple years. I ask Aaron, is Dodd coming with us in the car? Aaron says, no. Okay, so I say, is Dodd riding with Daddy in the truck? No.

Okay, so Aaron climbs into the car seat or the booster seat, and I think, well, if Dodd's not coming in the car, I pick up the car seat, the little booster seat thing, and I pitch it to the back of the car. Aaron sits in the car kind of stubbed like you know with a grim face like rar like you know like anger and I felt bad like I'm sorry you know but this time I was first hey is Dodd gonna ride with us

and I just got snapped at by Aaron so I thought well I'll just leave it at that I mean I personally was asking you know myself and my brother and my husband do you think Dodd's coming and they're like shh let's not, you know, so we decided not to say anything and let Aaron do all the talking, you know, and just leave it alone. Actually, the first couple nights, I kind of waited to see if Aaron would say anything.

I literally forgot about it for a while. We had a lot going on, so, you know, I was busy doing that and unpacking, cleaning. But after a couple days when the dust settled, so to speak, I wondered, but I didn't bring it up. It almost felt like leaving one of my brothers behind. I just wanted to forget about it instead of just hurting myself from having to think about it over and over. She didn't tell me about the fact that she researched Dodd until probably like two years ago. She had gone to the library, and they had those things where you can go through old newspapers. And it had an article about the kid named David Dodd, and he was holding a teddy bear.

I was kind of baffled when she told me that, because it felt almost... I don't know how to describe it other than, like, too good to be true. Like, it all just came into place in a way that I never would have guessed. Like, his last name being Dodd, his face was injured, and he was holding a bear. I don't know. I still don't know what to think about it. It just seems so strange to think that someone that I grew up with, someone I viewed as basically another brother,

could just be the spirit of a little boy. I believe that he was tied to that first house some way. When I was 12 and I went trick-or-treating, I happened to stop at that house. And it was just a brief moment of they opened the door. And I looked inside and it felt like home. I was so excited. And the guy told me,

we don't have any more candy, and he shut the door. I wanted with all of my heart to, um, to just look in and see Dodd standing there on the back of the room. But unfortunately, I didn't see him. Aaron, thank you, Mallory, for sharing your story of the spooked. The original score for this story was by Richard Haig. It was produced by Chris Hamrick. Where are spook stories come from? It is not a secret.

Spook listeners. People have had their own brush with the dark side. And I'm not talking. Granny saw a ghost. Everybody's granny saw a ghost. I'm talking about stories from real people who have lived with. Inhabited. Seem, something that doesn't fit with our traditional map of how this world works.

If that person is you, if you've ever tracked a monster, displayed a power, foretold a situation. If you've walked this lonely path, we want to hear from you and maybe then it won't be so lonely anymore. Let me know spooked at Snap Judgment that ORG because the best spook

stories come from spooked listeners spooked as a community the best way to let folk know you're on the inside track is by sporting some spook gear, the t-shirt of your dreams available right now at Snap Judgment. That ORG and remember

if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day Subscribe to our amazing sister podcast, Snap Judgment. It's storytelling. Spook was created by the team that never leaves the house without making sure they are properly lotion, except for Mark Ristich, who will forever remain ashy. There's Anna Sussman.

Our chief spookster is Eliza Smith, Greta Weber, Chris Hamburg, Annie Nguyen Nguyen, Davy Kim, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Renzel Goryo, Teo Deo, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Ferrigno, Tiffany Delisa, and Anne Ford. The spook theme song is by Pat McShee Miller. My name is in Washington.

You can spend your entire life. Keeping dark forces at bay, seeing them only in the periphery, through the sideways glance, but often we don't get to decide when the damn breaks. So as a simple precaution, I often defies those who will listen. Never. Ever. Never ever, never, never, ever, never, never.