Spooked - Hidden in Plain Sight

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Sometimes we don’t need to look under the bed, or inside of the closet. Sometimes, the monster isn’t hidden at all.STORIES Come Play with MeWhen Paulette’s daughter starts talking to an imaginary friend, she thinks it’s normal a childhood rite until the day she hears the friend talk back. Thank you, Paulette, for sharing your story with Spooked! Produced by Eliza Smith, original score by Leon MorimotoThe Hotel BeaumontDave Beilfuss works in mortuaries and retirement homes, but he doesn’t believe in ghosts. But he starts to question everything when he moves into an old-age home and a hospice center called the Hotel Beaumont. Thank you, Dave Beilfuss and Holly Evans for sharing your story with us. Produced by Liz Mak, original score by Leon MorimotoArtwork 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.

When you're a little kid playing hide and go see, you discover that sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight. Listening to spooked, stay. When I was little and my grandmother had lost most of her sight, she would sometimes call to me and I would come, sit with her, read to her. from her Bible, from the church bulletin from the Detroit Free Press. Other times, I tell her

what her characters were wearing on all my children and who looked like they were up to no good. She told me she could only see motion mostly. Sometimes the light and the dark,

but mostly just the dark. And although she could no longer see, She turned toward me When I spoke my eyes And I can see her eyes Alert Searching knowing

Blind eyes Once she called me And I did not come I watched her instead Watched her Call me to her And I sat Silent on the stairs

Not moving Not even breathing as she waited and waited, and I did not come. Tasted, such terror as when she casually turned her head toward mine, and those blind eyes look directly at me. In Snap Judgment's underground layer, my name was from Flint Washington. You can see whatever you want to see. Stoog starts.

Paulette's little daughter, she has an imaginary friend, you know, like the kids do. What could possibly go wrong? I was working on the house in the front room, pulling up carpet, and she was in the backyard. And I heard her talking to somebody. I remember Jesse saying, I'm four years old. What do you do? And then she'd say, yeah, I like to play. And then, you know, it would just be silence on the other end.

And then I would hear Jesse say, well, what do you like to do? where do you go? Now I didn't hear anybody else, I just heard her. So I walked up to her and asked her, Jessie, who are you talking to? And she said, Lisa, and she pointed in the air. And I looked at her and I said, oh, Lisa, huh? And she says, yeah, Lisa. She has really long hair and she's very nice and she's wearing this dress, and I said, wow, that's very descriptive. And I kind of left it alone at the time because I figured, okay, we're moving to a new place, we were going to start another school. I thought maybe there's a possibility that she was making up a friend. But then it started to get to the point where they were playing

games together. She had this little thing of pickup sticks. She would sit on the carpet. And she would be whispering, like mumbling. Jessie was like, oh, you have to go and where are you going? And Jesse started to get upset. And she was like looking at me. And I didn't know what was happening exactly, but she was like, oh, okay. And Jesse backed off and walked over to me and kind of sat down. It was upsetting Jesse, but I was upsetting Jesse, but I was.

I couldn't tell you what, you know, Lisa was saying. She started becoming more frightened because Lisa was being more gruff with her, I guess. Anytime that something was happening that was upsetting her, Jesse would just come to me. Like, Jesse would walk to me. And I said, what's going on? Oh, Lisa's upset because I have to get ready for bed. Lisa's upset because I can't be with her. So that was mostly, like, it was just that there was a separation thing.

anytime that Jesse needed to do something away from Lisa, Lisa would get upset. This little girl wasn't always nice, and she wasn't always, you know, she wasn't always friendly to Jesse. And so that's when it started to take a turn for me because I thought, if this is a real imaginary friend, wouldn't they just be playing together? It wouldn't be, hey, she doesn't want to talk to me today, or she's angry at me because I wouldn't, I didn't, I, didn't want to play with her a certain way. But I really didn't know what to really do about it. Jessie, she was like a light. She was very young. So in my mind, I'm thinking that when you're younger, you see things, you witness things that as older people, we get more callous, we get more cold, we don't want to see it, we close that door. And as a little girl, that door is wide open.

So I was working on the house and I was decorating Jesse's room. And I bought this border that had a sticky back on it and it had unicorns and little castles. And it was really cute. And I thought this would be perfect. So I put the border up and we left. And in the morning when we came back, the whole border was laying on the ground. And I thought that's the weirdest thing. It stayed up all day.

but okay. And I thought maybe it was moisture or wasn't stuck on well enough. So then I went ahead and put it back up on the wall. And then we went home that night. And I remember coming in around 7 in the morning to get started working. And I walked directly to that room.

And not only was it on the ground, but it was crumpled up. Like someone had grabbed it with their fist and just ripped it off of the wall. I did not think that there was a person in the house coming and pulling the thing off because the doors were locked. There was nobody could get in the house. I had no idea what it was, but it scared me.

I just wanted them, whatever it was, whatever that negative thing was, to just leave us alone. One night, when I was ready to go to bed and had put the kids down, and I went to my room, I actually started hearing footsteps in the house. Running back and forth through the house on the wood floor, thump, thumb, thumb, thumb. And I thought, that sounds like a little kid running back and forth from my bedroom up to Jesse's bed, bedroom, like back and forth, back and forth. And I thought, is Jesse awake? Is Dylan awake? So I got up to check, and I went down through the kitchen, and there were no footsteps. there was nothing. So then I came back to bed and laid back down and then I started hearing the

footsteps again. So I got up and looked again and there was nothing. Well this started happening over and over again. It just, it was a continuous thing. So I finally went back to bed and I laid down. And moments later, I look up and Jesse's in my doorway. And she came to me and said, oh Lisa Lisa's really upset with me because I didn't want to play with her so I said well you know let's just put you in bed she says no but mom she's really upset and I said it'll be okay it'll be okay

but I honestly didn't have a whole lot of answers for her because I really wasn't sure what was going on myself so I go and put her in bed and I had gone to my room And five minutes later, I hear Jesse scream and cry. Go to run to her room and her little lamp that was like off on the side of her bed had smacked her right in her forehead and left a little well like it was starting to bleed a little bit.

And I said, what happened? She says, I don't know. I don't know. And she was so scared. And the way that the lamp was situated. I knew it couldn't have just, like, you know, fell on her. It had to have been moved and hit her. And so that scared me.

It was something that was in the house that was on that property. It was actual something really happening there. I was scared because Jessica was so frightened. And when this thing hit her in the head, it was almost like, okay, what next? What do you do about something that you can't see? You couldn't stop it if it was going to do harm to your children. One day, we walked into the house after school, and we heard this buzzing.

And I told my daughters, what is that? And Jesse ran over to my room. She said, it's coming from your bedroom, Mom. So we walk into my bedroom, and we still. can't pinpoint it, but the buzzing is getting louder and louder and louder. And I start to walk to my bathroom. I had a small bathroom in my bedroom, and the buzzing was coming from there, and it was so loud. So I opened up the door, and inside the bathroom was about 100, 200 horseflies, freaking horseflies buzzing around the room. It scared me. It really scared me. It scared me. It scared me. It scared me,

bad that I fell down on my butt when I opened the door. And the girls were crying. And Jesse was so freaked out. And Dylan had to take her out of the room. And then I went and got raid and started spraying raid all over. Oh, my gosh. It was horrible. I just remember talking to them saying, yes, there's something going on in the house.

If something happens that scares you, tell it to stop and come find me. I think the horseflies really was the time where I would say that it really started being a target for all of us, because all of us were there. We all witnessed it. I mean, the only time I've ever seen flies and stuff is in scary movies when they're on windows and there's something evil happening. So that was my first inclination. This is something different. This is something darker. Like a sinister entity.

that was living in our house besides us. It's a form of a little girl to my daughter, but it's not a little girl. It's something else. It's something different. There was definitely something in there that felt like it was living and breathing and consuming and watching.

There was one day that we were hearing like knockings in the house at first, like when we walked into the house, we could hear it like near my bedroom door, like a knocking on the other side of the door. And you would go to look and there was no and nothing there. And then the knocking would happen towards, you know, Jesse's room. And we'd run over there. And of course, there's nothing there. So we all came back into the living room. And I said, that's it. We are done. No more. I'm done with this. You've got to go. And as soon as I said, that directly where my kids were standing on this dining room floor it sounded like right under

their right under their feet from under the house almost like someone took a stick and was ramming it into the floor from underneath the house Dylan and Jesse jumped so high and jumped into the other room. Jesse was crying, Dylan was crying, I was upset, and because I didn't know what to do. It was messing with us. It was taunting us. And, you know, when I was asking it to leave that I was done, it just gave it right back to me and said, no, well, I don't care if you're scared. This is what I can do. You can see what I can do. And where I'm not leaving. The way that we ended up staying in the house, I figure that we're going to have to live here for a while. This is our reality.

And so we became a stronger unit. Anytime that something freaky was happening in the house, we would all huddle. Like we would go to the bed and all sit together and just kind of wait for whatever was happening to calm down. I think that was the thing that got us through it is the fact that we all as a whole protected each other. I had to find a place that I could buy on my own. So I did. And right before we left, I went and talked to the man

who was a fire captain that lived next door to us. And I asked him, the people that lived here before, did they ever talk about this house being haunted? and he says, oh, you're talking about the little girl. And I looked at him and I said, uh, yeah. And he says, we saw her. We saw her when that house was empty because the house was empty for about three years before you moved in. And my son came running in from the backyard because their house looked directly into the kitchen.

And his son saw this little girl running back and forth from, the bedroom to where Jesse's room would have been, back and forth, from the bedroom to the kitchen to Jesse's room. So they thought someone had broken in. So he and his son went over there and checked out the house and nobody was there. Not only did they see stuff in our house, but things that were going on in their house as well. The kids were seeing a man in, like in their doorway and they actually had a priest come to their house and actually bless it. I did feel validated that we weren't just some crazy people that were seeing shit. He's seeing stuff too and he's a grown man and it was kind of freaking him out too and I'm

thinking, okay, great, you know, here I am a single mom with two kids. What am I going to do against whatever this energy is? I'm happy we're leaving because I think we can start a new life without the oppression of something hovering over us like a heavy blanket. It was nice. It felt different. The air felt clear, if that makes sense. It felt open like you could breathe. So listeners, Mama Bear Paulette got her two cubs, Dylan and Jesse, and got the heck out of Dodge.

But right before they left, right before they left. I was home alone, and I felt a little uneasy. And so I decided to call my friend Laura, and I was laying on my bed, and all the lights were off except for a light from the kitchen. And so I got on the phone with Laura, and we were just talking, and I was telling her about the stuff that was going on in the house and how uneasy I had been. And while I was talking to her,

the phone started making this weird static sound where I couldn't hear her all the way and she couldn't hear me. And I'm laying there and I'm looking and at the foot of my bed in the doorway is this little girl. And I could see her hair cascading down around her. I could see her arms.

They were holding something near her chest, but I couldn't see what it was. And her face was nothing. It was just black. There were no features. There were no eyes, no nose, no mouth. All I could see was black, where her eyes would have been.

Where her nose would have been. It was just completely just, pitch black and I could see her illuminated through the doorway just looking at me and I told Laura I see her I see her and I could kind of hear what Laura was saying like what do you see I said I see Lisa and I slowly was reaching out my hand to turn on the light and it felt like hours before I could get to the light and by the time I flicked it on she was gone

you Paulette for sharing your story with spooked and get this Paulette is a spooked just like you and she reached out to tell us this terrifying tale and we are so glad that she did

listeners don't forget to share your stories with spooked drop us a line spooked at snapjudgment dot o'RJ okay so you've heard this story before. First you start to notice things moving around the house.

Keys aren't where you left them, can't find your wallet. And maybe. Maybe your picture frames start falling off the shelves. And you can write that off. You can. You can. But for Dave and Holly, they couldn't write it off. Because after finding that first picture frame lying in the middle of the floor,

Things only got stranger. Here's Holly. And then the longer we lived there, it kept happening. It would be one picture frame at a time. And there was really no logical explanation because it didn't happen when the kids were jumping around the house, being rambunctious. And that's not when it happened.

It would happen when I'd leave and come back. And it didn't really. occurred to me until it started kind of damaging a couple of the frames. And what I'd started noticing was that it was only pictures of family. Holly put Velcro on the back of the frames, and she wired the frames to the nail so that they wouldn't fall off accidentally. And that seemed to be fine. But then one Christmas, we had decorated the Christmas tree, and the kids were down for a nap, and Holly and I were sitting on the couch. So it was the middle of the afternoon,

and the picture came off the wall. But it didn't just fall off the wall. It flew off the wall and went end over end across the carpet in front of us. I remember looking at Holly, and she looked at me, and our eyes got really big. And we looked at the frame,

and it was just shock. And that's when I remembered the tapes. When I first moved into the house, I had found a box of tapes in the garage. And there were, gosh, there were probably 40 tapes, all of these sessions. And it turned out to be the woman who lived in the home, talking to, I believe it was her daughter, along with a psychic. The woman who lived in the house had lived there her whole life. Her husband had died a few years earlier.

You could tell that she really missed her husband and wanted to talk badly. The voice had such passion in it. This person really believed that she was talking to her dead husband. I felt like I was eavesdropping on something that I probably should be listening to. I told Holly that I had found those tapes in the garage, and we knew that the lady who'd lived there had died in that room. And I remember talking to her and saying, Holly, this kind of reminds me of the Hotel Beaumont.

So growing up, I actually got my master's degree in gerontology, and my goal was to work in a nursing home or retirement community. And about that time, I ended up at the retirement home, the Hotel Beaumont. The Hotel Beaumont was a converted hotel. I remember walking in the hotel, yeah. And it certainly had seen its years, but had a beautiful two-story lobby. And in its day, I'm sure it was gorgeous. It was a large 12-story brick building.

It had a giant ballroom on the ground. floor. And I've always liked sort of the early 30s and 40s, and this building sort of had that vibe to it. You sort of walked in and you knew that you were in a piece of history. I thought it was pretty cool because I actually got to live where I worked. I had a room in the hotel. My commute was an elevator ride. I do remember the first time I was shown my room, my quarters, if you will. My apartment was unique in the fact that the walls were floor to ceiling smoked glass. It was kind of cool for a young guy. You had beautiful views all across Texas from the windows.

So I started to get my routine at the Hotel Beaumont and meeting the residents and getting to know the staff. So, I mean, this was a retirement community. And, you know, most of the folks there were on the last few years of their life. they were, you know, anywhere from from 65 to 95 or 105. And we'd had somebody who would die, you know, at least every couple weeks, and, you know, they would leave and we'd get a new resident. And evidently, you know, as the staff felt, sometimes residents never left. When I had visited, I'd heard people talk about some of the things that had gone on in the hotel.

a co-worker who lived across the hall and they kind of started telling us a couple of things that were going on in their apartment and just the way they talked about it it wasn't like a fun story to tell they weren't enjoying it she said have I ever told you the story about my daughters and their television

and that's when she told me the story of how she had walked into their daughter's room to turn off the television and walked out and it turned it back on. It would constantly go on or off when nobody was around, or even sometimes when the kids were watching it. She was kind of looking at me, and I couldn't tell if she was trying to get a reaction from me. I remember just sort of giggling about it, and that's when she told me that there are definitely people in this hotel that we can't see.

I think the other staff members took things very seriously. and whether they felt someone cold looking over their shoulder or they saw something move, they had a lot of respect for whatever was going on. There was a real kind of a genuine fear of what they might see or hear. And I had no respect for it, no fear of it, and I think I just thought they were silly. So there was a person named chef that we called him. He was our cook, and I had a lot of respect for him. and he and I kind of struck up a friendship.

It was one night after dinner, and we had just cleaned the dining room, and everybody had, most people had gone home, and it was just chef in the kitchen. And he just invited me in as he saw me walk by and said, hey, Dave, you know, come on and have a sit. And so I obliged. I just kind of came in and sat down and talked with him for a bit.

And we were talking about a few things, and I had made a comment to him about the television and made fun of the fact that it could, be anything of a ghost. And he looked at me and his eyes got kind of big. And his demeanor had changed. But with the light in his eyes and the shine off his skin, I can still see it. And he said very clearly to me, you better respect them or they're going to show you. The next few days, you know, when I saw an image or something move out of the corner of my eye, I would stare a longer. Sometimes I felt like there would be somebody in the elevator with you and you'd actually

look over your shoulder. I would look in those smoke glass mirrors full on and there's only one of you, but out of the corner of your eye, I could have sworn I saw too. I was taking a nap and I heard the elevator open and it was somebody that was probably on the floor by mistake again. A lot of the folks who lived there either were a little bit compromised mentally or could just be confused and would often unfortunately get off on the wrong floor in the elevator. We'd hear them and we'd know that someone was on the wrong floor and we'd guide them back to the elevator and push the right button so that they could find their floor. You know, it happened a couple times a week. So I heard the elevator open. I kind of grogily got up and I went to my door and opened the door

to guide them back to the elevator. But there was nobody there. And I looked. and looked twice. Nobody there. And I looked down at the carpet. It had nice tan plush carpeting in it. I saw the carpet squished down just as if

somebody was walking on it. Just one foot after another. It almost felt like the hair rising up on the back of my head. Just small feet walking back over towards the elevator. When I look back, I can tell that some of this stuff

was trying to get my attention. but I just wasn't letting it. So when I was usually done with my day, and I'd go up to my room and usually watch some TV for a while until I got sleepy, sometimes I'd fall asleep on the couch. And I'm a very sound sleeper. But this night I woke up,

and I physically felt somebody put their hands around my ankles and yank me towards the end of the bed. I felt the sensation of sheets running, behind my back. But my door was locked and there was nobody there. And I sat up and realized I was at the end of my bed and my feet were on the floor.

My sheets were all down like a V. They all sort of came with me, but they were still tucked in on the sides. And I remember starting to shake. My heart beating incredibly fast. It felt like I was having a panic attack. Oh my God, what the

hell was that? I had nobody there at 2 a.m. I called my girlfriend, Holly. You're not going to believe what just happened. He was clearly upset and started telling me what had happened. And he didn't want to get off the phone, and he certainly didn't want to go back to sleep. Just the tone of his voice was different.

And I think I took it so seriously because he picked up the phone in the middle of the night to tell me about it. it. I mean, he just, he doesn't get rattled easily. She said, you know, just keep the phone with you. We'll keep the line open. I don't remember how I got through the rest of the night. You know, the day after, I felt like maybe my eyes were opened a little bit. I remember sharing that story with a few people and nobody was surprised.

They just sort of looked at me and said, see, told you. Now that I sort of understood what was going on, just decided that I didn't want to work around retirement homes and older folks as much as I thought I did. It was only a couple weeks after my girlfriend drove down, we packed up the van, and I moved to Kansas City. It was a creepy place. I can remember being relieved that I wasn't going to need to live there.

That was a good feeling to say goodbye to that place. After we left there, Holly and I didn't think about it. We ended up marrying and we had two kids and, like, completely changed industries. That took us out to California where we moved. I just kind of forgot it. So we didn't talk much about the event at the hotel until about 10 years later when we were sitting on the couch. We sat and looked at each other for, it seems like, a long time. I looked back at what chef had told me and said, you better should.

chose some respect or they'll show you. And I talked to her about the tapes I had found in the garage. I remember Holly looking at me and saying, oh my God. And Holly just in her calm way said, well, maybe we should just talk to her. And we knew that the woman who lived in the house was Jewish and practiced her religion very wholeheartedly. And we had just put up a Christmas tree. and we wondered if we were offending her. We didn't get up immediately and pick up the frame.

We just kind of sat there looking at it. So I just began saying, hello? It felt ridiculous. I remember kind of looking around the living room and, yeah, you know, looking at the tree and saying, thank you, thank you for letting us have the Christmas tree here. You know, happy Hanukkah. Thank you for letting us live in the house.

Our kids are so happy here. They love the yard. They love the neighborhood. We're just, we're really happy here. We didn't have any events after we talked to the old homeowner. It just all kind of stopped. The pictures stayed on the shelf. I think the event, it sort of was sort of the icing on the cake that said,

all right, any of those little seeds of doubt in your mind, make them go away. There's something more to this world. Things can happen without you seeing it. Sometimes I wonder if whatever is out there said, okay, we got this one. He believes now. Thank you Dave Belfus and Holly Evan for confronting the ghost. Who knew?

Folks, Dave and Holly, they're spook listeners who reach out to us to tell us their story. And these stories, these truths, as we draw our line in the sand, know, but if you have your own story, the world needs to hear, hook us up. Let us know on the spute line, spooked at snapjudgment.org. I feel like stories without darkness. Check out our sister podcast, Snap Judgment.

Amazing, true life tales with the beat. Spook was produced by the cold wind out of nowhere. And by Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Liz Mack, Jacob Winnick, The original soundscapes by none other than Leon to the Mortimoto. Our original theme song was by Pat with C.D. Miller. And understand, they will look you in the face. They will tell you otherwise. So always go and prepare with this knowledge.

Forget the sweets, the drinks, whatever else they put on the table. Just remember no matter how much they wheedle, no matter what they promise. Just remember to never. Ever, never, never, ever, ever, never turn out the lights.