Spooked - Hello from the Other Side

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Some ghosts roam space and time. Some just want a friend. Others hope you'll cross over to the other side.This episode contains strong language. Sensitive listeners, please be advised.STORIESUnbothered HauntingSome ghosts want to roam space and time. Some just want to watch The Weather Channel.Thank you, Ingrid, for sharing your story with us!Produced by Anne Ford. Original score by Clay Xavier. Hello from the Other SideOutside of Mumbai, in the middle of nowhere, is a beautiful river. One side of the river is cursed. But which side is which?Produced by Anne Ford. Original score by Nicholas Marks. 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.

Chim Chimmy, Chimity, Chimmydy, Chim Chooley, I'll pick the cards to show your destiny. Chimimimidi, Chimmyty, Choo, there's no turning back because there's not you can do. So I'll tell your mom's see. You'll catch her too. You've forced so dispute, isn't it? Stay Friday. I get off the bar train. In the bad old days, downtown Oakland near city halls, deserted.

Nothing but boarded up windows. Locked doors. And with four women, three guys, friends walk and huddle close for safety. Head on a swivel. Don't want no funny business. Like from a fairy story. We hear the peels. Who knows?

Maybe there's some underground Scottish thing going on. Let's maybe check it out. This music Pied Piper's us along And there Between two dark buildings Warm light spills onto the sidewalk An open door

And there are people Old people, young people Mothers holding babies Men hugging old friends Laughing, shout and singing Grandmothers Dancing to the backpiper Throwing back

Tiny glasses of something that looks alcoholic in the window. A small handwritten sign reads, Bulgaria at night. We peek in like wild-eyed refugees and if we're greeted with smiles with slaps on the back. Hey man, what's going on with the bagpipes? There's some kind of Scottish, there are bagpipes. Our Bulgarians, don't you know? Scott stole the bagpipe from Bulgaria. It's a our national instrument. Then he's pressing the cups of something called rocker into our hands.

One sip. And I almost go blind. Some kind of crazy balking moonshine. They laugh. As I stagger. Pour another. There's food. Thick blood red sausages.

A woman shoves spiced beef into my mouth. Cabbage rolls and cubes of cheese that don't comes from a cow in the corner. A couple saying operatic accompaniment to the bagpiper. A guy hands me a baby to hold

while he dances. More moonshine. Hey, tell a story. Alcohol gives me courage. My tail makes him laugh and pour more moonshine. At a table, an old man slams my buddy's wrist down at arm wrestling.

Everybody else is dancing, dancing, dancing, eating, dancing, dancing, laughing, drinking, dancing, spinning, we finally stagger away from Eastern Europe, back onto the streets of Oakland. Four in the morning, smiles on our faces, songs in our heart, 50 brand new best friends, and I know exactly where I'm spending every weekend for the rest of my life with my people, the Bulgarians, when I return for next night. There's no warm light, no sign, no bagpipes, nothing.

And I know it was right here. I know it. My friends over days we did search empty. I even look online, Bulgaria at night. Scarce brief mentions, a few broken links. What? And this was years ago. Every once in a while I see one of us who walked into the light that night.

One of us who was there. We looked at each other in the eyes. That happened, right? We were there, right? Right? Here's the thing. Every once in a while I still go by that spot. I'm still looking for that sign.

Believe me. This time, if I hear bagpipes, if I'm coming back, magic doors. Sometimes it feels like the universe is having a laugh. Ingrid Johnson, she just escaped the bad marriage. She's broke. She needs every bit of rest so she can get on to take care of herself and her baby boy. So England's really, really relieved to get into a brand new apartment. The apartment was very small.

I found it on Craigslist. It was obviously at one time a building. that was one unit, and the owner had split it up. No washing machine, no dishwasher, no parking, basically a studio that happened to have a door on the bedroom. It didn't feel like a permanent place. It felt like a place just to crash and then start over from. I lost a lot of friends in the divorce.

I wasn't leaving the house. that I wasn't dating. In the beginning, I had three jobs. I worked from 3.30 in the morning until 8 in the morning, opening a juice bar. Then I would change into my business attire,

and I would go to a job where I was working as a recruiter for an agency downtown from 8 to 5. And then on the nights that I had, help with my son, I would pick up shifts at restaurants until 10, 30, or 11 at night. I don't know how I did it. You just do. One night, a few months after we moved in, I came home, I hit the pillow and fell asleep.

A noise shocked me out of sleep at one in the morning. It sounds like the grumbling of a crowd. My son sleeps like the dead. So he didn't wake up. I blinked a little bit, and I saw a blue light coming from the living room. And I went, I didn't leave the TV on. Or did I? I walked out into the living room, and the TV was on full volume.

It was on the weather channel, something that I don't watch. I turned off the TV. I thought that's weird. And then I went back to bed. About three days later, I was having a night that I couldn't sleep. I was really worried about the reality of the situation that I was in, how I'm going to do daycare, how I'm going to do babysitting. All of a sudden, the TV was on.

And it was blasting. It was so loud. I got up, I went out to the living room. It's on the weather channel again. Volume 50 out of 50. I turned it off and I went to bed. But this time I was thinking, wait a minute, I turned that off.

What the hell? After that second time, it just started happening all the time. Always at night. Always super loud. and there were only two channels that it would come on, the weather channel and HDTV, which I thought was really funny because I did not have a home or garden,

but at the same time it made me really angry. I was exhausted. I was barely making it through the day. And then my TV's going to come on at full volume and wake me up. What a cruel joke. I figured, okay, there's something about this technology that I don't know anything about. I looked on YouTube and I watched some videos about it and then I googled TV wiring. Should I change the plug to somewhere else?

Do we need one of those big breaker plugins that protect it from a power surge? I ran all these things by by stepdad who is the home builder. and he does electric work. He just said there's nothing possibly wrong with your wiring that could cause that. Just unplug it. I was so tired I hadn't even thought about it. It felt like a birthday present.

I said, that's a great idea. Thanks, Dad. I'm going to do that. That night, I unplug the TV, and it did not come back on. The next night, I unplugged it again, did not come back on. I had fixed it. And then the third night, I was asleep.

And then the TV is blasting again. This time it's the Weather Channel. I got up and I stormed out to the living room. The TV was plugged back in. I remembered specifically unplugging the TV right before I got into bed. My son was only three. and I wouldn't even have let him play with a plug. I knew that I wasn't hallucinating about the TV being on.

I knew that I didn't watch the Weather Channel if it wasn't me and it wasn't my son. It had to be a ghost. That's the only thing that I could think of. And I said, what do you want from me? What do you want? Stop it. And I turned it off, unplugged it.

went back to bed. But things ramped up. Like, I was in a relationship with this awful roommate. Instead of the TV coming on once every three nights, it would come on every night. The volume was so loud that earplugs or anything like that would have done nothing. I would cuss this ghost out. You...

Are you serious right now? I was so tired. And I didn't understand why this was happening to me. About a year into my living at this apartment, I had a light bulb moment. I'd been watching a documentary, and it was in French. So I was reading closed captions. And then my mind was like, holy shit, I can do this for the ghost. If I'm reading closed captions on this documentary, maybe the ghost will read the close captions if I leave the TV on.

and then I can sleep. I said in the living room out loud to the ghost, if I put on the closed captions, will you stop turning the volume up? Nobody said anything back to me, but I felt like it was a compromise. I didn't know if this idea was going to work, but I did my best to sound confident that it would.

So at night, instead of turning the TV off, I muted the volume on the TV and I put the closed captions on. Even switched to the Weather Channel. When I woke up in the morning, I was like, holy shit, it worked. From that point on, I never woke up again to the blasting volume of the TV. I eventually quit working three jobs, figured out that I could start my own recruit. agency at home and make money. My son was going to regular daycare. We had our bills paid and we had food in the fridge.

I had money in the bank. I was sleeping. We were living in peace. Eventually, I hired someone who was going to work in operations, billing and invoicing and computer systems and all sorts of stuff like that. I hired a gal from Texas who I had met. on LinkedIn. I flew her out to Seattle to meet her face-to-face.

We were going to go out to dinner, and I wanted to have her drop her files and her briefcase and her laptop at my house, so she didn't have to lug it with her to the restaurant. We walked into the building. We walked up the stairs. I opened the door. She paused in the door and turned white.

And I said, are you okay? She just looked at me and she said, You have a ghost in your house. Her name is Christine. I didn't need her to tell me I had a ghost in the house because I already knew. But it was the name of the ghost that was brand new. It was almost like solving a murderer mystery.

Like, I got you. It's Christine. You're the one. And I said, you can tell Christine. It's time to cut. That ghost has just really pissed me off. She didn't really know how to take that. She looked shocked.

I don't blame her. For dinner, I took her to a really nice restaurant in Seattle on the water, and we just talked about work. It wasn't until later on during the dinner that I started asking, how do you see ghosts? She was pretty reticent to talk about it after a glass of wine. She told me, yeah, I've seen them my whole. life. It wasn't something that she was proud of. It was almost like, I'm sorry. I told her all the things

that had been happening for over a year at this point. And then she told me a little bit about the ghost. She said that she was wearing a dress and she had brown hair in a bun. She said this particular ghost was a recluse in life, almost to the point where she was. was agoraphobic, and she never left the house. And she was really shy. She said, I think she likes you because she thinks that you're also a recluse and that you also don't leave the house. And she's comfortable with you.

And I was like, well, I hope she's not because I hate her. And I never want to see her again. I went home. my son was with my mom that night, so the house was empty. I turned the TV on, closed captioning. I just left it on something my son was watching, the Disney Channel, and I went to bed. I woke up the next morning, and the TV was not on HGTV or the Weather Channel. It was on the Disney Channel, which is what I had left it on.

It was the first time ever. I was like, oh my God. As the days went on and it didn't come back on, it went from having a day-to-day roommate who I interacted with and had some kind of peace with to nothing. It made me feel really alone. I started regretting the way that I had reacted to finding out that my ghost's name was Christine.

I started thinking, that was rude. And I was mean. That was the only time that she had made an effort to show me who she really was. She wanted me to know her name. I had never been nice to this ghost. I was frustrated with this ghost every day. I learned her name and I snapped at her. I felt very guilty.

I reached out to the gal who flew out from Texas and I said, Hey, I think that ghost is gone. she told me put a feather on a piece of paper write yes or no on the piece of paper and then you can ask a question and in the morning

the feather will be either on yes or no I wrote yes and no when I put the feather in the middle I said are you still here Christine are you still here and I went to bed I came out in the morning the feather hadn't

moved either way. She was gone. Six years later, I turn on the weather channel from time to time and leave it on. Just while I'm doing dishes, laundry, I just leave it on. It's comforting to me. Their son, Rex, they don't live in that apartment anymore.

But they are loyal, spook listeners. Thank you, Ingrid, for keeping the lights on. The original score for that piece was by Clay Exha. Xavier was produced by Ann Ford. Our next storyteller comes to us from India. About a year ago, he wanted to get some space to himself in Mumbai. He thought he'd find some peace and quiet down by the riverside. What he discovered instead, well, he's still trying to figure out.

I went on this trip with three of my friends because we were bored. Just a weekend get away. We started early. We left our city, we took a long drive towards the countryside. We are joking, we are laughing. We're there by 11, 12 during the day. This was right in the middle of nowhere. Remote village kind of a place and I could see a very small, beautiful lake out there.

And over this side, we have just a small trailer where we can get our farm. food. Also there was small tents to sleep on and a small bonfire place. That's it, nothing much. I was like, that's fine, I can spend two days here very comfortably. The host wasn't available that day. There was only the cook who would just help us out in whatever we need. We went down to the lake, sat on the rocks, put our feasts in the water, and just sat around listening to the sound of water crashing the rocks. Very silent. It was a peaceful place.

Took some pictures. Came back up, had some tea. And then we lost the daylight. And you can hear the night. Some animal sounds, some birds sounds. We knew that the biggest animal here could be a fox. So nothing much to worry about. My friends prepared are a chicken.

on the bonfire, helping the cook do the barbecue. You basically hang it over the fire and I wanted to take a smoke break. Across the lake is some mountains and on my right-hand side there is a small river. I went to that spot by the river side. It's not very far. Like what, 15, 20 steps. They could see me from the tent. It's that close.

I light up a smoke. It's very dark. There was birds and noises. I could hear the sound of water and puffing in the cigarette. All of a sudden, I hear a slight sound of someone's presence there. I turned to my right. I see a man standing on the other side of the river. Not very far.

It's just a small jump and you're on the other side. I cannot see his actual face because it's not. dark, but I can see a silhouette of him. He just looked like a normal guy to me. He says hi. I say hi. I was like, how is this place? I'm here for the first time.

He's like, oh, so you don't know much about this place. I'm like, okay, enlighten me. This cook interrupted me saying, Sir, please come up. I don't know why he was calling me, but I just ignored him and I continued my conversation. The guy who was talking to me is like, so the thing is, probably you are on the wrong side. I'm like, what do you mean by wrong sight?

And he goes, something really bad happened very, very, very long ago. There was an angry god who cut that land into half and passed a river through it. Because that side is banished and that side is cursed. the story of this place is that there's one side of the river that's completely fine to go to and the other side of the river is where you're not supposed to step into it's said to be a very haunted place

now that you're here be very careful the first reaction that I had was a random person is trying to bully me or you're trying to scare the Dinoffi okay fine I'm not going to buy it I was like okay it's nice meeting you

I need to go back now and I left while I walked I'm like look at this place what do I have to worry about here in such a nice place I walk back up to the tent and just sit back with my friends

and start chilling again listening to music having barbecue talk about random things chicken is delicious I did not mention to anyone that I met someone. It just slipped my mind. I'm talking to my friend who came along with us.

He's the guy who always researches on everything. As he tells me, this place has a story to it. I'm like, yeah, what's the story? Very seriously, he tells us. There is a side of the river that is gust. You're not supposed to go there. If you go towards that side, you'll never come back.

Before I could utter a word, he goes on and saying, if you hear anybody from that side, you're not supposed to respond. I'm like, oh, what happens if I respond? Then he goes. The story goes, someone tries to call you on his side. then the moment you jump the riverbank and go towards that side is the time that you're not coming back. Now a little fear does come into me.

What is happening? Why is someone telling me something like this? I kept on thinking in the back of my head. Am I on the wrong side? Are they on the wrong side? I tried to go back to my tent and take a small nap. One hour past I cannot fall asleep I was like

You know what let me just go back to the riverbank And see if I can see someone again And I go back to the river side again Now when we were kids The thing that we were told about paranormal things Or ghost and stuff Was light up any sort of fire The ghost will never come near

So I am lighting a cigarette Because I know I have fire in my hand Nothing's gonna go wrong I'm standing there listening to the silence of the river and then I again hear someone's presence and I see his silhouette again the guy is sitting there I can see his back

this time I'm a little scared and I'm also very curious I want answers now so I say can I continue the conversation with you last time you were saying something about me being on the wrong side. I'm a little curious because the information I am coming with says that I'm on the right side and the side that you are on is the side that is cursed.

He's like, I am not meaning to scare you, but your side is really small. There are not good stories of people coming back from that side. All of a sudden, my cook comes and calls me and he's like, Sir, what are you doing? Come up. Can, can, please just come. And I'm like, I'm having a cigarette. Why is this guy calling me up at 4 o'clock in the night?

Every time I come down, this guy calls me up. And suddenly, my friend in the tent screams at the top of her voice. I run back, I'm like, what happened to you? And she said, I thought something came and touched me. I tried to calm her down. He was okay. I get inside my tent I take a small nap

get up in the morning 7, 8 o'clock I get out of my 10th and I tell my friend why did you scream last night and she says when did I scream and like last night

I was smoking on the riverbank you screamed at the top of your voice you said and you felt like something touched you say like no I don't remember screaming I'm like, okay, you must have forgotten. We said we'll leave around 10, 10, 30, 11 o'clock in the morning. And in that two, three hours, we again took a small bath in the river,

took some pictures, packed our stuff. I'm like, you want to just tell the cook we are leaving. He's like, what cook are you trying to talk about? I'm like, the guy who was making the chicken barbecue for us on the bonfire. He's like, yeah, I did it. I'm like, okay, I saw you there, but there was a cook there. Both of them are looking at me. It's surprises.

Are you trying to mess with us early in the morning? We haven't had a coffee yet. There's a small shiver in me. I have goosebumps, and I'm a little scared. I'm like, guys, please do not mess with me. We had a cook. I spoke to him every time I would go to the riverbank for having a cigarette. He would call me and I would tell him I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming.

One of my friends told me, listen guys, let's get out of this place. Let's just get out of here. Let's start walking back to our car. There was silence for some time until we hit the main road highway. The moment we hit the highway, we started talking about it again. I'm like, guys, I saw the cook. I spoke to the cook. I saw you helping him do the barbecue.

He's like, there was no cook there. And then he says, you know what else was weird? Every time you're going on the river side, we hear you talking to someone. Why were you talking out loud to yourself? I'm like, I'm not talking out loud to myself. I was talking to someone on the other side. And he's like, all we know is we would overhear you.

you talking out loud. Why were you shouting? I'm coming, I'm coming again and again. I was like, that cook was calling me. They're like, there was no cook. So the story is left to a big question mark. Who was this cook? What side I was at?

And who was the guy I spoke to on the other side? We never know the reality of anything. Could be that the guy who says, you were on the wrong side, he was on the wrong side. Maybe the cook was my savior. Maybe the guy was my savior. I can tell you for sure. Something was trying to get me on the other side.

To our storyteller, coming back to tell his tale, the original scores by Nicholas Marx was produced by Anne Ford. 1726, Mary Toff, a woman in Surrey, England, begins experiencing, and contractions. Bent over in pain, Mary starts giving birth to parts of animals, including what looks like a rabbit.

The local doctor, John Howard, is called an astonished as Mary keeps delivering more and more animal parts, including whole rabbit heads, legs, intestines. Witnessing a medical miracle. A good doctor notifies other physicians, even send specimens to King George's court. At once, the king's personal physician comes to see the marvel for himself

and see it he does. Mary births, more rabbits in front of his eyes. The story becomes national news. Newspapers scream. Mary gives birth to rabbits. Unfortunately, spooksters, under examination, this little story unravels, Mary has to come clean, spend some time in jail.

Every doctor that signed off on this farce has a reputation's ruin forever. Horrible stuff. Terrible shame the biggest tragedy. It's far crazier than rabbits. The shadowlands are so strange, so fantastic, so weird, you don't need to make things up. That's why we appreciate so much the best listeners in the world reveal what really happened. And if you have a story, I would surely love to hear about it. Spute at snapjudgment.org because there's nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener.

Spook is brought to you of the team that always turns the other cheek, except for Mark Ristich. Those are the wrong cheeks, Mark. Put on some pants. Nobody wants to see that. There's Davey Kim. Zoe Frigno, Ann Ford, Eric Yanez, Taylor DeCotte,

Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Paulina Creaky, Lizzie Z. Pardue, Adityamatu, and Lulu Jemima. The spook theme song

is by Pat McSeedie Miller. My name's in Washington. And there's been so many times. sitting right next to a person, a person I love, when we experience the same moment completely differently, the same words, same place, the same scene. And if you ask us both what happened, the answers, it's like we weren't even in the same universe.

And I wonder, if someone so close, can be so far. Is it possible that someone so far can be close? Do we sense echoes of others, echoes of ourselves, are the spaces between us both enormous and small at the same time? And if so, what is the glue holding us all together? Maybe. Maybe we're not as far away from each other as it might seem, and if we're trying to maintain a connection in this vast darkness,

perhaps the best thing you can do, It's never, never ever