Spooked - Hush

Episode Date: September 27, 2018

Libby: Jennifer and her daughter Taylor both know their family home is haunted… but they don’t want to share that secret, even with each other No Voy a Tener Nietos: Maria’s mother always wanted a son. And when Maria had a son, of her own, her mother didn’t get enough time with him. So when she died, she made sure to came back to be with her beloved nieto. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Buried it as deep as you wish. Covered with darkness and night and shadows and lies, but some secrets are like seeds. From Snapchat's underground land. You're listening to... I was very, very young. I saw something that no child should ever see, something in fact no person should ever experience.

And I knew as little as I was, I knew almost instantly, but I had to pretend I didn't see what I saw. I had never held a secret because the less I said, the more I saw those images, the more that horrible scene crystallized in my mind, I never told, and my grandmother's eyes burned hot with my lies. Even then, I never said what I saw. I didn't know who I was protected with my silence

or why decades later the only thing is that they didn't deserve it from snap judgment's underground layer my name is gunn Washington keep your own secrets

spook starts you ever heard them say what you don't know can't hurt you well our first story caused me to reconsider such received wisdom You begin with Jennifer.

As a parent, you always want to protect your kids. Looking back, maybe, you know, it is best to just be forthcoming and not try to protect them. When we first bought the house, I was aware that there had been a death at the home because my husband actually went to school with the young lady that passed away there. Libby They were friends and he would go pick her up at her house which became our house

and they were close for a while I did feel a little hesitant to move in because of the story he had told me he was aware that she had passed and there was always something kind of mysterious about her death she died in the barn

behind the home but he did knocked the barn down completely, and he said it's not part of the home. We remodeled the home extensively, so it felt like a new home initially. Taylor, my oldest daughter, was our only child when we purchased the home. We decided because she was so little, I didn't think it would serve a purpose other than scare her if we mentioned anything about the history of the home. We just wouldn't mention it or bring it up. And at first, when Jennifer and her family moved in, things were peaceful, normal, quiet.

But that didn't last too long. One night, after about two years of living in the house, the family was asleep. This is Taylor, Jennifer's daughter. She was about seven at the time. We heard just the loudest crash. Like there was a window shattering. And my father immediately gets up. He grabs his gun because we're in Texas.

And he starts searching the house because he thinks there's an intruder. He thinks someone's breaking in. And he looks around and he can't find a single thing. And the next morning when he wakes up, he notices that a family portrait of ours is missing from the shelf. So he goes over to see where it is. And he sees that our family photo just has fallen face forward. So you couldn't see.

our faces, like someone had just pushed it over, face forward, and it smashed. That's when we were first made aware that something wasn't quite right there. But still, Jennifer and her husband agreed they wouldn't indicate to Taylor that anything was wrong. And when they had another child, Joseph, they decided they would keep the secret from him, too. It was just a normal afternoon. We were just hanging out. And I was not feeling too good. I was napping in our bedroom. That's when Joseph came running into Jennifer's room.

And woke me up and was crying. And he was very shaken and he said, Mommy, mommy, there's a lady in the living room. He said that there was a woman and she had no feet. She had long, blonde, curly hair. And she was just floating

across the house and that she turned her head very sharply and just gazed at him. So he closed his eyes. and started to cry, and when he opened them, she was gone. I felt pretty darn terrified after that, to be honest with you. That did shake me up. So I knew for sure that he was talking about Libby

when he described what he saw in the living room. And he had not heard anything about the situation there. He knew nothing of it. We had never brought it up. But still, Jennifer didn't say anything. She kept quiet, year after year after year. As her kids got older, they felt more and more that something, or someone, was in the house with them. I've heard voices.

I've heard knocking on the wall. Banging on the wall. Like someone was just banging with their fist as hard as they possibly could against the wall. Still, Jennifer didn't tell Taylor and her brother that she was. believe Libby was haunting the place, but she believed that what the kids didn't know couldn't hurt them. And then when Taylor was a teenager, I was laying in my bed and I was facing the wall. And all of the sudden I feel this pressure on top of me. And I was still wide awake. And I feel this pressure and I'm just, I'm terrified. I don't know. I just can sense that something is in the room with

me. And all of a sudden I just hear this deep gas for air. It sounded like, like someone just like dying, like taking their last dying breath. But it just happened once and then I turned my body and I see this black, shadowy smoke-like mask just kind of implode into itself and then it kind of just sucks down into the ground and completely vanishes. This wasn't Casper, your friendly ghost actions. This was A ghost who wanted your intention and so it torments you a little. Taylor decided she would keep this experience to herself. She worried that if she said something, her parents wouldn't believe her.

Or they would just ignore her. They were in the kitchen talking about it, and I had been in the other room watching cartoons. And as I walk in, and I don't think they realized it, they were saying, oh, you know it was a suicide. And Chepis, he knew her. Chepis is my dad. That's his nickname. And I was like, what are you guys talking about?

Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. They're just telling a story. But Taylor was pretty sure her parents weren't just telling a story. They knew something about the house, about the haunting. And then... Middle of the night, dead asleep, and I awoke just suddenly. And she was hovering.

over me, kind of like the way a skydiver hovers as they're descending. And I could see her very vividly. She wasn't in spirit form. She was very much flesh and blood. And she was looking at me very intently. And she had these just locks of very, very dense, curly, blonde. blonde hair, and she was very young-looking, like a very young-looking adolescent, almost childlike. And she was wearing a very flowy, blue-and-white dress, and she was just staring at me.

I felt a piercing look towards me. It wasn't friendly by any means. and I started screaming and my husband turned on the lights and she went away. I was extremely shaken when I told my husband what I saw he was

like he was in shock and that's when he said you just described Libby. Our kids did start to ask questions about who this lady was. As a parent, you mean you always want to protect your kids. You know, there was a part of me that didn't necessarily want them to feel, you know, scared or spooked. I do feel that I was always thinking that truth about why my house was haunted. But, you know, in the end, I mean, the truth usually surfaces anyway, so.

One summer, Taylor had surgery on her leg. and she was lying in bed. Her doctor had put her on bed rest. In my bed all day in this room, alone on the other side of the house from everyone else, I would keep the shutters closed, I was just kind of always in the dark. Lying in the dark,

all Taylor could think about was the ghost in her house. Who was she? Now that she had a lot of time on her hands, she decided she would try to find out. I found a newspaper archive of, newspaper issues from way back in the 60s, and I was spending just hours and hours searching and searching, until finally I got to an obituary page. And I remember seeing her name for the first time, and there was almost this relief to it. I remember it saying, Libby died on this date by fire.

The fire occurred in a storage room. and the back of the property where they kept, they had horses on the property, they kept saddles, they kept feed, they kept different hay, the circumstances surrounding her death were very mysterious. When she was found, she was found with a saddle on top of her body, and there had been a fire around her. And some speculated it was suicide,

and some speculated it was a cover-up that she had overdosed on some sort of drug. It just felt like this one weird piece of the puzzle just fit right in. And I had her name, and I knew that she had died by fire. And I knew that she was the one. That she was the one causing all these problems. That this restlessness and this anger was coming from her.

Taylor held on to this information for three years. She didn't say a thing to her brother, her mom, or her dad. And then one night, at dinner with family friends at their favorite restaurant, she finally had the guts to bring it up. And so she asked. And her dad broke down and told her about Libby, his friend. And about how when he first bought the house, he had knocked down the barn where she died. He felt like he couldn't keep it. He felt like there was too much.

There was just something there that he used. that he didn't want around. So he had them knock down the walls, and he had them take out the slab foundation, cover it with dirt, and he felt like, there, it was done and buried. He didn't have to worry about it. And he felt like that would keep everything at rest.

He felt like that would, that it would kind of cleanse it, but it didn't. It really didn't. I didn't realize that she knew as much as she knew. And did you discover that she knew as much as she knew? When you told me, Just now. I think we're keeping a few secrets here in this family,

but maybe not telling the kids wasn't the best decision. It was, you know, good intentions on our part, but maybe we should have explained to it, you know, on their terms so that it would give them an understanding and a perspective of maybe why things were happening the way they were happening. The family has since put the home up for sale, and they've moved to a different house.

You know, we left a few things there, and it hasn't been sold yet. Just as recently as a few weeks ago, my son Joseph went to the house to get shoes, and he went in, went to grab the shoes, and heard a bang, like somebody just kind of banging on the wall, but light. And then as he was walking through the house,

It just got louder and louder to the point where it was deafening, and he just bolted out of there. So I think whatever's there wants to be left alone. Thank you, Jennifer and Taylor, for sharing your story. Folks, these wonderful women are spooked listeners. We are so grateful they shared their supernatural experience with us because mystery is abound. And if you have a ghost story in your back pocket,

don't keep it to yourself. No, share it with the world. Let us know at Spook Podcast.org. In just a moment, some relatives don't know how to let go. The foster was only three years old. Her family moved to Los Angeles. But Maria grew up listening to those stories all of our mother's childhood

in the Mexican Sierra Mountains. All of her sisters had lots of children. Everybody had six or seven children. My own grandmother had. at 12, for heaven's sakes. My mom only had two girls, and the pressure was always on to have boys and have boys and have boys. And because she did not have boys, then somehow she was minimized.

My father, he always disparaged her for saying, you only gave me women, you know, what good are they? Bejas, he would call them, they only gave me broads. I need sons. My mom, she just couldn't have babies anymore. So then my father moved on. And sure enough, with this next relationship, boom, he has a boy and sends my mother a Polaroid of this boy.

I was 12, and he sends this Polaroid, and Mom shows, look, your father had a son. And she's crying and crying and crying. She's crying in the bedroom. She's crying in the kitchen. She's just crying. And I'm like, well, what the hell am I? What am I chopped liver? We were too poor, so I couldn't have the traditional kinseniera with all the

escorts and dresses and party and what have you. But that's when my mother sat me down, okay, you're 15 now. You are available now to be married. And I'm like, what? I'm in junior high school. What are you talking about? I was supposed to marry a good Mexican man and I was supposed to have children.

That was my duty. More than anything, she wanted to have grandchildren, and more than just children, she wanted to have a boy grandchild. And it must have been eating at her. And so we had a whole bunch of people at a party. I distinctly remember. We were at someone's house. I'm playing guitar.

We're singing. People are singing together. There's food and drinks. And then my mom's sitting in the corner there. And all of a sudden I hear her wail. No, I'll never going to have grandchildren. What? And I'm looking at it.

It was like that moment where the guitar goes untuned and the string brings, What did you say? And she looked at me so forlorn, so sad. I'm like, okay, song's over. I'm out of here. My sister and I were dating, we're going out, we're going dancing, we're going to the clubs, and we'd be getting dressed up to go and do our disco thing, and she'd be sitting on the sofa, all morose.

Nunca will get their nie-n-n-y-n-n-y-n-n-y-tos. There they go again. Or she'd be muttering in the kitchen. Nunca, we'll get-ten-nietos. As she'd be closing in the door. You know, I never will have to have nets. I'm like, oh, my God, what a fixation. I turned 29 and then I just discovered very late on that I was very pregnant.

I was four and a half months pregnant. And I called my mother. I did a who else do I call him in a day? And I go, Mom. Now, she has not seen me in two years, okay? She hasn't seen me since I'm 28 because by now she's moved back to. Mexico and she's living happily ever after over there. And I call her up and go, mom, I'm pregnant. Oh, I knew it. I know it. The last time I saw you, you looked a little heavy. I knew you were

pregnant. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, she's lost her mind. I haven't seen her in two years. How could she possibly know? But she knows there's no talking her out of it. And she's going to tell the whole world. And she did. Oh, Maria's pregnant. Finally, glory, hallelujah. She's pregnant. I thought I would never see the day. I didn't want to know the gender of the baby because I had all of these boy-girl issues. So when the baby was born and I hear the doctor said, it's a boy, I remember saying, oh, thank God.

And then I said, oh, my God, I can't believe I just said that. So, yes, I had a boy, and he's beautiful. Zachary, Zachary James is his name. And as soon as mom could bust through that hospital room door, she did. She lifted her up, not like Simba. in the Lion King, but darn close. She lifted him up. I have a photograph and just looks at him like the most precious thing she's ever laid her eyes on.

She has this angelic glow about her. And it was him and his grandma. I mean, he sang songs about his grandma. He played games with her. And then when she really got sick, her whole thing was, well, tell Zachary that I love him. She was just so young. She was only. 53 when she passed. She only got those three short years with Zach. She didn't see Zach go to his first day of school.

She didn't see Zachary in his Halloween costumes. She wasn't there for any of the Christmases. She just wasn't there. After mom passed, my sister and I would talk on the phone and cry. It was just the two of us. We felt like orphans. And Friday night, she came over. We're having dinner. And it was myself. my sister and my son Zach, and he's still in his high chair because he's only three. I know we served entomatadas. Instead of enchiladas, my mom would make us entomatadas with tomato sauce because we wouldn't eat it. We didn't like chili when we were little. So we just had entomatadas, which was the fried tortilla with the tomato sauce and some pepper

and tons of cheese. So we were remembering mom and we're having entomatadas. And we're eating. And all of a sudden, Zachry says, In Spanish, Nunca will have tenetos. I'm never going to have grandchildren. And we just stopped dead.

I look at my sister, and we look at the baby, and I asked him, what did you say? And he says, Nunca will have tenetos. And I just looked at my sister, and I'm like, who else said that? The baby couldn't have known? He couldn't have known.

I go, who told you that? Oh, my Buela. When did you see your Bela? Oh, in la noche at night. So what does she say? And he extends both his little arms, and he says, she says, Tukutu, no Tuck no Tengas Mado, so I, Buela. Which means Tukukuk is her baby.

Talk to her. He said, Don't be afraid. It's me, Grandma. He's using her words. He's only three. And he's using her language and her genes. gestures the way he's expressing himself and putting out his little arms explaining tuku tuku I love you and then we start to start whispering my sister and I and her eyes were bugging out of her head she stopped

literally she was like taking a piece of food and the baby says no cabuette de nannietos and she stops with a fork halfway to her mouth what should we do I don't know should we have a mass it's Friday night Tony where are we going to get a mask maybe if we get a candle yeah yeah that's a good idea let's get a candle So we pack up the baby, forget the dinner. We go to the supermarket and it's this whole 12-foot section of nothing but the holy candles with Jesus and Mary and Guadalupe. And I happened to like cobald blue glass. So I picked a really beautiful blue glass candle.

And we took it home and we set it not in the dining room table, but I had a little cubby. And so that night when we went to bed, we set our prayers. and then the morning we got up and I look the candle is about 18 inches tall and it's in what about a two-foot little cubbyhole it has fallen over on its side oh my God

how could it knock it? Maybe there was a tremor, maybe there was an earthquake, how could that possibly happen? I'm trying to figure out the physics of the candle falling over on its side. And then I'm realizing, well, if the candle fell over

or what a danger? going to burn the house. We're all going to die in our sleep. You know, I'm already being visited by a good person that said, I hope this isn't an moment. And my mind's racing. So I'm like, okay, so tonight, tonight I'm going to put this thing in water. So we put the candle again in the, in the, this time I put it in the kitchen sink. So I figure if it falls over, at least it'll fall in the water and there's no danger to the house. And then we go to bed and we pray and we pray. I'm praying really ardently now. Oh, dear God, I don't know what's going on. I don't know if that's my mother.

I don't know what's going on. If it's my mother, why is she here? Does she need something? Does she need us to pray for her? You know, help me figure this out because you're scaring me. In the morning, I got up and I went to checking the counter. That was my priority. The thing had exploded into a million pieces.

A million pieces, not like it fell over and cracked into two or three. It exploded. There was glass everywhere. On the sink, on the kitchen counters, on the breakfast counter, on the floor. It was on top of the microwave. It was everywhere. Everywhere. And then I hear my sister coming down.

And she said, what happened? And I'm stuttering. I'm telling her, I don't know. I don't know. It's August. It's hot. The water shouldn't have been cold. The candle heat from the glass, I'm trying to figure out.

the physics of it. It couldn't have caused the explosion. I don't understand. I think her love for that boy child was greater than all the universe. And she left too early. She got really sick very quickly. And she just left before she had time to be with him. And here comes the pitter-patter of Zachary James, ta-tat-tat-tat-ta-ta-ta-tah, coming down the stairs. And he says, my grandma says she doesn't like the light. Oh my God, my heart drops again. She's still here.

I said, why not? She's, no la deja dormit. It doesn't let her sleep. Oh, my God, we've done it wrong. We've done it wrong. I've done something terribly wrong. What else is she said? She said,

Tuku, tuku. I love you, but I can't visit you anymore. Was that it? No. Cueada with the Vidrio, not the Corte's. Careful with the glass.

Don't cut your feet. Thank you, Maria Foster, for sharing your story to spute. Now, Maria is also a spoof listener. We want to hear your stories. Find us online, spookpodcast.org, and let somebody know.

Now, you know, right? You can feel it, huh? Like there's a power, a magic guiding these stories, demanding they be heard. submit to that power. New spook stories every week until all hallowed Eve.

Be afraid. And if you dig amazing storytelling of the non-supernatural variety, get the amazing. Snap Judgment podcast. It will blow your mind. I promise. The keepers of the spook flame

include Mark Ristich, Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Shana Shealy, Jody Colley, Tale DeCott. The original themes song for Spoot. It's by Pat Messidi-Miller. The amazing team that wrote, performed, and produced this original score you're hearing right now for this episode includes Pat McMessi-Miller,

Renzelgoria, and Leah Morimoto. And when you feel that cold wind, when you hear that soft whisper alluring, tempting, beguiling you, promising you not to worry, it'll be okay this time. Just this once We get their lives Never Never, never ever Never ever