Spooked - Lady Grim

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Sherry and her husband keep seeing a hooded figure around their farm in Nova Scotia. She isn’t a ghost. She’s there to collect souls. Thank you, Sherry, for sharing your story. Produced by Chris Hambrick, original score by Renzo Gorrio, 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.

If you could know the time of your final hour, would you want to? Listen to spooked. Stay tuned. So, some folk, you know, when trying to determine whether a particular spot is associated with paranormal activity, they want to show up with the thermal cameras, the infrared sensors, the laser EMF meters and such, to get a bead on the goings-on to figure out the daring do of the storm. supernatural world or whatever. And I don't have any problem with any of that.

I don't. I always say, you do you. Instead of technology, we just ask people what happened. And what happened can sometimes fall into two very broad categories. Either somebody had something that they need to say about themselves. their lives, their world, their sorrow, their pain, sometimes their joy, something they left behind. Or sometimes, much, much more rarely. Something's trying to get a message.

My name is from Washington. Your devices cannot save you. Spook starts. Now, and Sherry married David. They were running his father's dairy farm. David worked the land. Sherry raised the kiddos. And one day, David's dream came true.

His dad gave him the farm. And they had to move into the farmhouse. Now, Sherry, Sherry didn't want to move. And she certainly didn't want to move into that big old house. I was not happy to have to move into the farmhouse. It was an old house about a mile from the main road. and the pavement ended out of driveway. The place was pretty much falling apart.

The walls were really dingy. They hadn't been painted for decades. There was tiles on the floor that was lifted. Upstairs, like things were peeling off the walls. It had a really old, outdated bathroom in it. And it was just a dark, dark house. So it was very discouraging to move. into this here place.

When we moved to the farmhouse, we had a daughter. Her name was Teresa, and she was two and a half years old. When we put her to bed, the first night we were there, she got up in the middle of the night and came into our bed and crawled in with us because she said something had woke her.

And I thought at first that she was just settling in and in a week or two that she would settle down and start sleeping through the nights again. But that never would be. happened and when I questioned her why she was waking up she kept saying somebody's poking me somebody's waking me up I was about four months pregnant I couldn't sleep very well I would just look at that door in the bedroom and

keep my eyes on it and then I first it was quite by accident that I thought I seen something going past the door and it was a real dark figure And it was over five feet high. I couldn't quite believe my eyes that something was actually going towards my daughter, Teresa's room. And I jumped up. It scared me. First thing, of course, I ran to her room,

but once I entered her room and looked around, there was nothing there. So I'm thinking, well, it's my imagination. And about 15 or 20 minutes later, it would go by the door again and I'd jump off, it would startle me and I'd go in with my flashlight and shine it all around, check all the rooms, and there would be nothing there.

Every single night, I would see it, and it would go right past my door towards Teresa's room. That really upset me. I thought, there's something here. It's going into her room at night, and it's bothering me. I can handle it, but she's only a little girl. So I told David, I said, I'd want to move her bed to the foot of ours.

And he agreed. He helped me move the bed. And from that night on, she had no problems going to bed and sleeping all night. He was extremely happy. David was when we moved to the farm. And he didn't really take me seriously when I started saying about things were happening in the house. He thought it was my imagination or whatnot because he had, been raised there and he had said he had never experienced anything like that. After I seen that figure, I knew in my heart that there was something in that house.

The longer we were there, the more things I noticed, you could hear the cupboard doors being opened, the drawers being opened and shot. You could hear footsteps in the kitchen. And Dave would always say it's just an old house, but I said, no, it's not. I know what an old house sounds like. I grew up in an old house. We didn't hear cupboard doors opening up and footsteps walking across when you knew there was nobody down there.

So when I didn't get any concrete truth from him, I turned to his mother. One day when she came up to play with Teresa, I said, I have a question for you, Ina, and she said, what's that? And I said, you lived in this house for 40-some years. Is that right?

and she said yes. And I said, did you ever experience anything out of the ordinary? Because there's things happening here that I can't explain. And I've only been here for a couple of months. And so if I'm experienced this, I figured that in 40-some years you must have experienced something. And she looked down, I mean, he said, no, no, nothing. And it was like,

I could tell she was lying. The way that she looked and how quick she said it, I didn't believe her at that time at all. And I figured she was hiding something from me. I asked her again, are you sure there was nothing? And she said, no, nothing. Nothing ever happened up here when I was here. So I couldn't do anything about that.

She was saying nothing happened. So I had to take her out of word, but I didn't believe her. So I just gave up. I just tried to learn to live with it. Well, David started his day very early. He would get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and be out to the barns at 6.30 to milk the cows. He wouldn't get off work until at least 6.30 that evening.

We usually watch TV, and the evening's a couple of hours, and then we all went to bed, and Teresa went to bed at the same time. David and I were with Teresa once. watching the TV show one evening. It was after he had gotten in and got all his chores done. And it had just gotten dark. It was a very dark night.

There was no moon, no stars. And we were sitting there relaxing, having fun, and suddenly heard a great big bang. And David jumped out and said, what the heck was that? And we both went to the door and he opened it and looked out.

and there was a hay wagon that had come out of the workshop and across the yard and right into the cattle barn. It was just like a gunshot had gone off. It was that loud. David had grabbed a flashlight because it was so dark out, and he went out on the sock's feet and stood on the doorstep. And he shone the light around the yard to see what had made that noise. And he was totally confused.

So he started to put on his boots. He said, I'll have to move that wagon because I want to work on it as soon as I milked the cows tomorrow morning. So Trees and I stood there just to watch him do it. And he backed down into where the wagon was. We had a yard light that was much, much brighter than a street light. And as soon as he entered, entered into that circle of light.

We could see him sitting in the tractor, and then as he went a little further, the front of the hay wagon appeared, and I could not leave my eyes. It just totally shocked me that this figure was standing at the very front of the hay wagon. She had one arm raised, as if she had to keep her bounce.

She had a black cape that went right down to her feet, and the hood was like a... an oversized hood. You couldn't see her nose or chin or anything sticking out from it. And she was not transparent. She looked like a real alive person there dressed in that outfit. She was staring straight ahead at the tractor. She never moved her head in either direction. She just stared straight ahead the whole time that they went through that circle of light. and she looked to be a female virgin of the Grim Reaper. That image is burned in my mind until the day I die.

And I could not take my eyes off this figure. And it was like my heart was beating so loud I could hear it in my ears. I had this terrible, terrible fear that coursed through my body. I didn't know what I was seeing or why I was seeing or what was going to happen after that. She seemed to be focusing on David so intently. She never moved her head to the left or the right, just straight ahead the whole time that they were in that circle of light.

And as I stood there blinking my eyes, hoping that it was going to disappear, I said, I kept looking and looking and every time I looked, every time I opened my eyes, she was still there. And as I was looking at it and blinking my eyes and saying, you know, you're seeing things, you've got to be seeing things. And I felt a tug on my top. And when I looked down, Treesa was there and looking at me, and she said, Mommy, who's that woman on the back of Daddy's wagon?

And those words just chilled me to the bone. I literally felt a shock from my head to my toes. And I realized then that I was not hallucinating. She could see it. It was there. I didn't know what to say to her. The first thought that came to my head when I saw that figure was it was the Grim Reaper. They only show themselves when somebody's going to die.

She was on David's wagon, and I thought that she was going to harm David. I thought that she was there to actually take his soul. Well, as soon as David got back into the house, I sent Teresa in to watch TV, and I was still scared. scared. My heart was still beating fast in my chest and I was petrified and I asked him, did you see anything on the back of your wagon? He said, no, why? And I explained to him that there was a woman standing on the back of his wagon when he went underneath the light and he looked at me and I said, it wasn't just me that's seen her. I said, Teresa seen her too. So I said, you know, all these months, strange things have

been happening and you've been trying to brush them away and tell me I'm imagining things or saying there's a logical explanation for it and all this here stuff and I said you can't explain this away I said two people seen that figure on the back of your wagon and it wasn't a live person I said it looked like the grim reaper I described it to a tee to him and I said now you can't explain that one and he looked at me and that's when he confessed that yes, there were things over the years that had happened that none of them could explain, that there were things on that firm that weren't natural.

I was quite upset when he confessed to knowing that there was strange things on that firm and being young and pregnant, and I felt betrayed at first because, like I told him, if I had a known, this place up here was haunted, I would never have left my little house down the road, never in a million years. And he said, I know that.

That's why I didn't want to tell you. And that's why I told my mother not to tell you that there were strange things that had happened while we were growing up. He said, look, I know there's something going on, but I promise that if you just stick with it and put up with it and deal with it, I'll build you a brand new home within five years and we'll tear this house down and I'll put it up on the hill in the pasture there and things should be 100% better. Well, at that point I thought five years is a long time

especially putting up with the everyday occurrences and stuff that we were dealing with but at least it was kind of a relief that he fessed up and actually admit it. that there was something going on in that farm. I was in a place that I couldn't change. I wasn't going to divorce my husband because of a ghost. I figured that five years was a small price to pay for a lifetime or peace and quiet.

I was a little over eight months pregnant. Teresa had just turned three, and I'm thinking, like, the spirit is there for a reason. Is something going to happen to David, and then I'm going to be left alone, a widow, with a little girl and a newborn baby. At the end of September, my second daughter, Sheila, was born. And when she was about eight months old,

she had her own little room upstairs, and in the middle of the night, she would wake up, and there'd be laughing coming from her room. She'd be laughing her head off, as if somebody was tickling her, doing funny things to make her laugh, I would sneak up to the door and throw it open, hoping to catch

whatever it was she was laughing at. And every time I did that, she was sitting in the corner of her crib and her eyes would be staring into one particular corner of that room. And I'd look all around and there was nothing there. She was laughing so hard

that there was actually tears running down her cheeks. And it was just so eerie and I told David I said that gives me the creeps I thought maybe I'll take her crib to that room maybe I'll put her crib in my room and then David said well if she's laughing you know that this here figure doesn't intend to harm her because she's playing with her apparently and I said that creeps me out I don't want her playing with her I don't want to do anything with her I don't want any interactions with her he didn't

not want me to move the crib, so begrudgingly, I left it in the nursery. We finally had the house built on the hill. And it was only a few days after we moved that Dave had hired a backhoe to tear down the farmhouse. And I remember sitting on the doorstep of the new house, watching that backhoe tear down the walls and crushed the roof and all that. And I was so happy, and he laid it to see that place going down under the ground. And I thought, with each push of the backhoe, that that was my problem being solved. Now, this was a very new home.

It was airtight. And it didn't matter if it was summer, spring, fall, winter. I would start hearing noises at night again. So it was like a presence right beside my bed every night blowing in my face. This happened every night If I didn't put the blanket over my head You could feel this here Whiff of air

And it would just keep up And keep up and keep up Just like someone was purposely blowing in your face So I would pull the covers up And then turn towards David And that's how I would sleep But one particular night

That we had just gone to bed And Dave was getting dry Was he ready to go to sleep And suddenly he says Don't do that And I looked at him and I said, don't do what? He said, don't be touching my feet. And I said, David, I'm lying here beside you.

How can I reach your feet? Then he kind of lifted his head up and turned around and looked and everything. And he said, oh, I felt something touching my foot. And I said, well, it wasn't me. For some reason, I had always thought that if you got rid of the house, you got rid of the spirit. And it was then that I realized she didn't just haunt that house. No matter where I went, that spirit could go too.

She just wanted to make her presence known that you might have dosed the house, but you didn't get rid of me. Sheila was always an excitable child, and when any special occasion came around, it would be very hard for her to settle down and go to sleep. So when she was five years old on Christmas Eve, she had woke up after she went to sleep

and excited wanting to see Santa Claus she put her pillow at the end of her bed and put her head on the pillow and covered up with a blanket and was trying to stay awake to see Santa Claus I heard crying and I went into her room and I put the light on and as soon as I did

all I seen was blood there was blood all over her face and dripping down onto her Bajama top, I grab her and I'm asking, what happened? What happened? She kept saying it wasn't Santa Claus, Mommy. It wasn't Santa Claus. Instead of saying Santa Claus, this dark figure appeared in her doorway and scared her so bad, she jumped up trying to get away from the figure. And as she jumped and tried to get out of the way, she hit her mouth onto the bedpost and knock one of her front teeth out. I just tried to get her settled down and I told her we'd drop the tooth up for the tooth fairy and all I seen was blood. That was the first time that this figure had actually harmed a child

and I think that she did it on purpose. That was the first time I was really, really angry and I turned around and I just hollered. I don't care what you do to me but leave my kids alone. They're only little and they're innocent. If you want to do something, pick on me. After that, she seemed to leave the kids alone.

Most of the activity now kind of focused in my bedroom, and she kind of picked on me the most, just anything she could do to irritate me and keep me for getting any type of rest at night. One night, about 3 o'clock in the morning, I felt David crawling back in bed, and I thought that was kind of strange because he usually didn't get up during the night.

So the next morning, when he came in for breakfast, and that's when he told me that he had woken up in the middle of the night, and we always had a nightlight in the hallway. And when he woke, he looked at the doorway and seen that black Cape Brigger outside our bedroom door standing right there looking at him, and he was so upset. He had to get up at 3 o'clock in the morning

and go make himself a coffee to calm his nerves. That was the first time that he had actually seen that same figure that Teresa and I had seen years prior to that. And he said she was exactly like I described her, that she was wearing that cape down to her feet with the big baggy hood in the sleeves that were big and baggy at the ends. And he just could not comprehend that she would actually show herself to him so clearly. After he seen that figure in the hallway,

it started like making them think that she was coming for him, because now he would say this, I think I'm going to die, like four or five times a week. He had a full physical. Everything came back in tip-top shape. There was nothing that showed up on any of the tests. He didn't have to take any pills. The doctor told him, keep on doing what he's doing,

and he knew he was a farmer that he worked seven days a week, and he told him that there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. He was so relieved, and he said, I'm so glad that I went and had those tests and stuff done, because now my mind is easy and I don't have to worry about dying. David had a routine where he would come in about 3.30 every afternoon and get a little bit of a lunch and a glass of milk. And this afternoon he came in and I was sitting there reading this book

and it was so interesting and I was right into that. I wasn't paying attention to what was going on around me. And David was playing with the kids. They were all yelling and he was teasing them and playing with them. and I was just focused on this story. I was reading in the book, and suddenly, out of nowhere, this voice came in my head and said,

what are you going to do without them? I'll never forget those words as long as I live. And it shocked me so much. I dropped the book, and I looked up and I turned around, and I'm saying, where did the voice come from? Like, nobody walked in. Dave is still playing with the kids. So why on earth would that question pop into my mind?

like that. But a week after I heard that voice inside my head, David had been out for the evening with his friends, and I was in bed by the time he came home, and he was feeling bad for one of his friends because his wife had just been diagnosed with an incurable disease. And the last thing he said before he got in bed was, when I die, I just want to go to bed and never wake up. And then he got in bed and went to sleep and early the next morning he just fell onto his back. It wasn't a roll. It was in a natural movement and I shook him and called his name and he didn't respond. So I jump up and I run to the wall and I flick the light on. I look at him. His eyes are staring at the ceiling.

So I screamed at Teresa and get her awake, and I'm over at the bed by now. She comes to the door. I'm doing CPR, and I'm telling her to call 911. So all the time I'm doing CPR, hoping and praying that maybe I can revive them, and I'm not getting no response out of them whatsoever. So Teresa calls 911, and then she comes to the door, and I'm still doing CPR. on David, and she asked me if I want her to call a friend's father that's been trained in first aid, and he just lived down the road. So I said, sure, go ahead, and I'm just working

frantically on David. And this friend comes up, and he said, I'll take over. So I stopped, and he started doing it, and then he did it a couple of times, and he turned to me, and he says, sure, I think he's dead. And I said to him, I said, if you don't keep up with the CPR, then I will until the ambulance gets here. So that man, he started doing it again for another 15 minutes until the ambulance arrived.

So they put him in the ambulance and took him to the hospital, and by the time I got in there, the doctor met me and told me he was dead on arrival. The coroner called me, and he told me that they could not find anything that was really bad enough to cause his death. He said there was a little bit of damage to his heart, but not enough to kill you. So he said it's a mystery that he died as young as he is, and there's really nothing to pin it on.

After David died, I was left running the farm by myself. and that meant I had to milk 120 head of cattle twice a day. I really was so exhausted trying to look after the three children, plus get this farmwork done, that I didn't have time to focus on anything else. And for some reason, I didn't even worry about her anymore. I bought a house down in close to the village, close to the school. When we packed that car for the very last time,

the kids were jumping with Joy for moving down to the new house, and they actually spoke about it, saying that we'll never see that woman again. She'll never scare us again. And I said, that's right. We're leaving her and the farm here, and we start in a new life and our new home, and we never will have to worry about her again.

Thank you, Sherry. for sharing your story, sending you big, big love from all of us that's spooked. That original score was by Renzel Goryo, who's produced by Chris Hambrick. You like amazing storytelling under the light of the sun. Check out the amazing. Snap Judgment podcast, Storytelling with a beat, baby, a beat. Spook was brought to you by the team that always keeps extra batteries for their ghost blasters. I hope they never cross the streams.

Mark Ristich. Anna Sussman, Chief Spookster, Eliza Smith, Lauren Newsom, Chris Hamburg, Annie Nguyen. Renzo, Gorbino, Leon Monimoto, Jacob Winick, Tiffany Delisa, Ann Ford. Eric Yanya, Son-A-Con, Marissa Dodge. The Spook theme song is by Pat Messini Miller. My name is Glen Washington. Protection. That's the name of this game.

Planning ahead. That's why you should always keep some extra water in the trunk in your car. Put some duct tape in your toolbox. Thank me later. But whatever you do. Never, ever, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, ever, ever, ever. Under any circumstances, never.