Spooked - Hellevator

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

Just because it looks like you’re all alone… doesn’t mean you are. If someone in the darkness calls out to you, don’t answer them.STORIESHellevatorDan is a cop on the nightshift. When he’s asked to check something out at the deserted senior home, he discovers one resident never left. Thank you, Dan Cope, for sharing your story with us.Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Richard HaigQueen MaryThe Queen Mary is one of the most haunted places in America. But Daniel and his friends don’t take any heed of the history when they’re asked to spend the night aboard the ship. Thank you, Daniel Noah, for sharing another terrifying tale with us. Daniel makes horror films and he also makes podcasts about horror films. Check out his amazing podcast: Visitations.Produced by Eliza Smith, original score by Lauryn NewsonArtwork 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.

What goes up must come down. Right? Right. Stay tuned. Retreat to ritual. We tell each other that the fallen are in a better place. We tell each other we will see them again. We lean on those still standing for strength, for comfort. And these rituals, these ceremonies, they are for those left behind.

They're for us. But I've learned that. that other communities, other cultures, different from my own, Michigan, Midwestern sensibility, they have much different rituals, much older practices that have little to do with those still here and everything to do with leading the departed to the place they need to go. Some will bury money to help their loved ones pay the tolls. Others will attach maps some people. They leave detailed instruction books with advice

on how to defeat the various monsters they will certainly encounter on the dark path to paradise. We do none of that. I have done. None of that. And sometimes I wonder, for those I've lost, I wonder when we give all of our support to the grieving, when we save our embrace for the living,

what happens if we then leave? no aid for the dead. My name's been Washington. Spook starts. Now, some of us are bound by duty to help others, to answer the call in the middle of the night. But what happens when that call, that cry for help,

leads us beyond the veil, Spooked. My name is Danny C-O-P-E, and I'm from Covington, Kentucky. I've been a police officer all my life. We're talking about old Booth Hospital. Booth is a very old building that dates back to the turn of the century. It was near Christmas in the winter of 1980 when this started. They had decommissioned the hospital.

It was no longer being used as a hospital, and everything had been stripped out. They were in the process of demolishing the inside and turning it into an old folks home for people of means. They had a security company guarding the facility. There was no electricity. The security guard would carry a Coleman lantern and a flashlight, and they had a little kerosene heater that they used to keep yourselves warm with.

Maybe three or even four times a night, They would call Covington Police Department and complain of noises that sounded like someone in the building. It's a creepy building, so it was kind of understandable that these guys would get themselves freaked out, so we weren't surprised by it, but it got to be a very bad annoyance. We were a busy police department. We didn't have the time to set and hold their hand, so we would walk in and, listen to their stories for a minute or two and then say, well, listen, they comes back, call us back, and then we'd leave. And sadly, they really did call us back over and over and over again

until it became to a point that something had to happen. At our roll call, which is when they tell you your assignment for the night and give you information what you're supposed to be on the lookout for, all that sort of thing, the sergeant called me off to the side. and said, when this guard starts calling tonight, do something. Hit him in the head. He was being facetious, but a certain amount of sincerity was thrown in there. He wanted the calls to stop. So when the first call came that night, it was late maybe 10 o'clock.

And I went in and I sat and talked to this guy for a little bit, trying to calm him down. What he said he was hearing was a shuffling. It sounded like giggling and running across the floor. floor above him. Spent about 10 minutes with him and nothing happened. We hadn't heard any sounds. So after a few minutes, I left him again. I was confident that I had calmed him down this time. It wasn't an hour till he called again and I was back. And this time I was a little bit rude. Look, bud, this has got to stop. We don't have the manpower to keep coming here.

Well, about an hour later, somewhere shortly after midnight, a nudge. A nudge. neighbor across the street called the dispatcher and told them that there was something wrong with the security guard. He said he's in his car and he's got a hold of the steering wheel and he's just sitting there staring out the window. So they dispatched me again. Sure enough, he was in his car. He's got a grip on the steering wheel with both hands his knuckles are white. I tap on the window and he just totally ignored me. I tapped harder. He still ignored me. He said, I banged a little harder with the nightstick, and he jumped, and he cracked his window about two inches, and he said, I won't go back in there, and you can't make me.

I said, all right, bud, calm down. What's the problem? And then he starts crying. So I had our dispatcher call the security company dispatcher. I explained that their guard had a nervous breakdown or something to that effect, and, and, you know, and they needed to come and get him and bring another guard. The man that they brought was an older fellow, more mature, and I thought, well, things are going to be all right now. And he went in and apologized for the other fellow's problems. He said, I won't bother you all.

It wasn't 20 minutes until he was calling. They sent me back again. I walked in. The man was waiting for me at the front door holding his Coleman lantern. He said, look, I promised I wouldn't call, but I had to. You need to hear this. Can you sit down with me, have a cup of coffee, spend 10 minutes here? I wound up spending about 20 or 25 minutes in there with him.

And then I heard it. It was someone running across the floor and very plainly giggling directly above us. And he said, there, that's what we're hearing. So I said, well, let's go find it. So we got up and we walked to the back of the building. And he was his Coleman Lantern, me with my flashlight. And the very back of the building was two elevators. I said, let's go to the top and work our way down.

So that's what we did. We went to the fifth floor. And as the elevator opened on the fifth floor, it opened to a fully lighted room, bright as could be. In the middle of this room stood an old woman, probably 89, 90 years old. She was wearing a blue bathrobe like a hospital-type bathrobe. She had her back turned to the elevator, and she's looking up at a clock on the wall. It's the old round schoolhouse-type clock, and it was stopped at 213.

I looked at the guard. He looked at me. I said, well, we found our noise. I'm assuming she has walked away from Garrett Street Nursing Home, which is only a block and a half from Booth Hospital. We walked from the elevator straight to this lady, and as we got there, she turned around. She was what I would call a sweet old lady.

She reminded me a great deal of my great-grandmother. When she smiled, she was very sweet-looking. She looked me in the eye, and she laughed. this great big cackle of a laugh, and then stopped and laid her hand on my chest, where my heart would be. And her face just went totally blank. She had no expression, no smile, no frown, no nothing. She shook her head just a little bit, then laughed again, dropped her hand, and took off running toward the exit door. She went through the door where the stairs were.

She opened the door and walked through it And I said well let's get her before she hurts herself So we started after her And I opened the door not really looking But thankfully the guard was paying a lot more attention than I was As I stepped through the door He grabbed me by my gun belt and jerked me back inside the room And I realized that the concrete steps were gone

They had already been demolished and they were in a pile in the basement. At that point, I knew this poor old lady was lying down there dead. So we went running for the elevator. I called for backup to send me an ambulance in the hopes that maybe she was still alive. We got on the elevator and took it all the way to the basement. The elevator door opened under the basement.

It was all dark. We turned to our right and ran down. to where the stairs came into the basement. Concrete everywhere. Covered in dust and debris and dirt with no sign of it having been disturbed. There was no body, no blood, no sign that anybody had been there.

I looked straight up with my flashlight. It's like broad daylight when you use those big flashlights. No stairs, there was no pipes, nothing she could be hanging on. I call for a canine unit. My sergeant shows up. The dog goes in looking for her. She was nowhere to be found. I did have the dispatcher call the nursing home

and make sure they weren't missing anybody, and they weren't. After about 45 minutes of searching, we determined that she was no longer there. We started walking back across the basement floor. My sergeant's asking me, for an explanation. I'm trying to tell him what happened. We realized that we were standing outside of a door that had frosted glass window in it, and in the frosted glass window was the word morgue. I said, well, maybe she's in here. And opened the door and stepped through. There was nobody there.

But there was a freezer there. This is a chest-type freezer, and what they would do is they would put a body in and lay a shelf over the top of them, put another body in another shelf, and they would hold about seven or eight bodies in this one freezer at a time. I opened the door to this freezer when I did. A shelf collapsed down at the bottom. It just crumbled into pieces,

and when it did, we could see another body that they had forgotten. She was lying at the bottom of this freezer and it was an elderly woman in a blue bathroom. She had been there long enough that she'd been mummified. There's no really saying for sure that it was the same face, but I think it was. The clothes were the same,

and at that point the security guard passes out. He falls and hits his head, cracks his head open, we have to send him to the hospital. My sergeant calls the coroner, and the corner comes and takes charge of this body. My sergeant and I stepped outside the door from the morgue to the outside, and the electric feed for the building was right there, and the wire that's about the size of your arm had been cutting two,

and that's why the guard had to use a Coleman lantern. The sergeant said, Dan, he said, didn't you tell me you rode the elevator to the fifth floor? And I said, yes. And that the fifth floor was lighted, yes. He said, how can that be? There's no electricity in the building. And it stunned me.

I hadn't thought about it until that moment. But there should have been no lights. There should have been no elevator. We walked back in and pushed the elevator button and nothing happened. Steped outside and looked up at the fifth floor and it's all dark. No lights. I wrote the police report just the way I told. I didn't call her a ghost, but I lifted a mystery.

Years ago, I had a major heart attack and they were able to save me. And it made me wonder if maybe her hand on my chest was a prediction, or could it have caused it? I don't know. Dan Cope for sharing your story with the spooked. The original score, for that piece was by Richard Hay, by Richard Hay and producing it for us, for the spout.

Our special spute correspondent, and for it, thank you for hunting down that story and making it sing. Our next storyteller, he might sound familiar. Daniel Noah joined us last season to tell us about his terrifying experiences in the hotel where Kubrick filmed his legendary movie

The Shining. And today, Daniel is back and he's taking us to another infamous location. anchor us away, spooksters, because we were about to get on board. The Queen Mary spooked. We were invited as sort of VIP guests to spend a couple of nights on the Queen Mary. And it's a hotel. It's a hotel on the water.

Queen Mary is a ship that is also reported to be extremely haunted. There are all sorts of stories about why it's haunted. It was a crew ship that was recruited by the military to break prisoners. back and forth, many of whom apparently died horrible deaths in the ship. There was a terrible accident where the Queen Mary

made a navigational error and it literally sliced through a smaller ship and killed everyone on that ship. We were talking about potentially making a film set on the Queen Mary. During that time, the people who owned the Queen Mary said, sure, you guys come out,

spend a few nights on the Queen Mary. and, you know, soak up the ambience, and we're going to send our best tour guide to take you on an incredible ghost tour of the ship. That'll be night two. Night one, just relax, have some dinner, enjoy yourself.

So that night, we relaxed, had some dinner, and enjoyed ourselves. And then around one in the morning, we decided, let's take ourselves on our own little ghost tour. Without a great amount of difficulty, we figured out how to get down into like the engine rooms of the ship. And we walked through all the places where they take people on ghost tours.

You're just in these giant rooms filled with shiny black machinery that does, who knows what. I'm certain at some point these rooms were filled with, you know, coal-covered men who were shoveling coal. and, you know, powering these machines. We walked through these rooms, and we read little plaques and things, and then got to the end of it and went, well, let's keep going. So we went beyond the place that you're supposed to go. We found ourselves in sort of like the real engine rooms, the ones that are not for the public, they're not maintained.

And we kept going and going and going and pushing further and forward. further and it was not safe. It was not well kept. There's puddles of water everywhere. And as we moved along, we started to hear this incredibly loud metallic banging. It was so loud that we thought, God, people must be hearing this up in the rooms. It's deafening. We wanted to know what it was. We were curious. So we kept going and we kept going. We kept going. And we got to a part of ship very strangely that was it was a construction project that had been abandoned and it almost looked like they at some point had been trying to turn a part of the ship into like a food court or something but they'd run out of money and so they're like there's like drywall everywhere and like weird

carpeting and but but this banging is clearly coming from here so we we tracked the banging all the way to the end of the line, basically, was a wall. And we could hear and feel the vibration of this banging coming from behind this wall. It sounded like someone had like a giant industrial-sized wrench and was like hitting a furnace. But we then decided, all right, let's go back. And we couldn't find our way back. For some reason, when we turned around to retrace our steps, we found this series of corridors that we couldn't remember if we'd come from the left or the right,

and we were literally lost in the bowels of the Queen Mary. And now we got to a part of the ship that we really shouldn't have been in. I'm pretty sure this was like the last level between us and the ocean, because there was water around, like ocean water around. And this was now, there weren't even catwalks anymore at this point. There were just boards that were laid over. you know, just detritus. And weirdly, there were these bright floodlamps everywhere.

And again, this banging is now even louder. We're getting closer to it. And now I'm getting really scared. I'm starting to get that feeling, that cellular feeling. Something is wrong. And like an animal, all of my instincts are telling me to get out of here. It's not safe. But we're pressing on.

and the banging is getting louder and louder. And we finally come to a kind of a large archway that's leading to some other room. And there's lights on in there. And there's no doubt that the banging is coming from that room. And we hear two men talking. And I realized that it was gibberish. I don't think it was any language that I could recognize. It wasn't German or Italian or it was, I could.

couldn't even mimic it now. It was just gibberish. So we hear the men talking and we enter the room and the second we entered the room, the voices stop. And there's no one in the room. The banging continues and we cannot figure out where it's coming from. I can't explain this to you. Something was so wrong about that room. I didn't want to go in there. And it was again that feeling of the hair is standing up on the back of my neck. There is something unsafe happening here. And unlike the little girl in the Stanley Hotel, this felt nasty.

About 20 feet in the air, there is body, like a replica of a corpse that's strung up with its arms and legs splayed out, hanging off the ceiling, like some demented scarecrow or something.

I have no. I don't. It is one of the most terrifying things that I've ever seen. Now, when we got through that room, there was an opening on the other side that led us back to a way out. We got out. We got back into the lobby of the hotel. And boy, was that a relief? And it was really late. And we were all freaked out and exhausted. And we all went back to our rooms. but that cellular terror feeling was not going away for me and I went back to my room and I felt sick to my stomach with fear

and I tried to put on a little nice music to calm myself down everything felt surreal it felt I felt like I was having a nightmare that I couldn't wake up from and I finally started to settle down to go to sleep And there were three blows on my door that were so definitely loud and angry and violent

that I thought someone's trying to get in here to kill me. And it took me maybe 30 seconds to finally gather up the courage to go to the door and open it. And of course, there was no one there. And then a couple minutes later, my phone started ringing. It was the hotel phone, not my cell phone. And every time I'd answer it, I would just hear static. Until finally, I unplugged the phone. So in the morning, we all met for breakfast, and I said,

hey, guys, very funny. Ha, ha, ha. And they said, what are you talking about? And I was like, I know you were messing with me last night. And they said, no, we weren't. And I went to the front desk, and I said, do you keep a record of calls that happened between rooms? And they said they did.

And I said, can you tell me, someone called me over and over again in the middle of the night. Can you tell me where that came from? And they said there was no record of any room-to-room calls the night before. So the next night, we are brought on the official ghost tour. The official ghost tour compared to our little private ghost tour was kid stuff. But when we got to the very end of the tour,

it was the adjacent to the room where we'd heard the voices. And in fact, the tour ended in the place where we had finally escaped, where we had emerged from that room and figured out how to get back up to the lobby. And the guy who was giving the tour, who was this older gentleman

who had a real creepy vibe about him, I had been chatting with him all night, and I had asked him, and I said, why do you do this? And he told me this story of how when he was a little boy, his parents had brought him on the tour of the Queen Mary. And we were standing in the room at the hall of the ship where it had sliced through the other boat and killed all the people. And he said it was in this room that I felt a hand on. on my shoulder and I turned around and there was no one there. I said to him, well, has anything happened since you had the job? And he said, I wish. No, nothing's, nothing's happened. I keep hoping. But he said, you know, it's funny that you should ask me that tonight because actually last night

something kind of weird did happen. I said, what is it? And he said, well, do you see that room over there? and he pointed at the room where we had been the night before. And he said, that just got opened up for the first time after 20 years because they're doing a construction project. And a bunch of us heard this loud banging coming out of the room that we just couldn't explain. And little does the guy know what actually was going on in that room. I didn't ask him about the weird corpse or I didn't tell them about the voices.

And that was the end of it. Thank you, Daniel, for sharing another of your terrifying tales. I don't know if y'all know this, but Daniel, he makes horror films. Surprise? I don't think so. He also makes podcasts about horror films. You can find his podcast, visitations, wherever you listen. The original score for that story was by Lauren Newsom. It was produced by Eliza Smith.

I get it. I understand. More, more, more. You say more, more darkness, more encounters, more monsters, more stories, more. stories. Be afraid. Be quick. Beware, but be right here. As we walk this dark path, let somebody know if you dare. And if you like storytelling in the bright light of day, check out our sister podcast, Snap Judgment. Storytelling with the beat, Snap Judgment Studios. Spooked was created by the team that never takes the elevator. We always take the stairs. Please believe me, the doorman. At the Spooked Hotel is

None other than Mr. Mark Ristich. Anna Sussman on housekeeping chief spookster is Eliza Smith, Chris Hambry, Aaliyah Yates, Zoy Fregno, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Renzhouer, Jacob Winnick, Teo de Kott, Marissa Dodge, Greta Weber, Sonukhan, Tiffany Delisa, and Ford, Fernando Hernandez walks the Shadow Road. The Spook theme song is by Pat Massini Miller. My name is from Washington. and a lot of situations, not all, but a lot of occurrences, they could be avoided.

If people were simply to follow a simple, a cardinal piece of advice, and write this down if you wish to never, ever, never, ever.