Spooked - Man On The Mesa

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

When Jayson first arrives at Camp Pendleton, he knows that the military base has quite a history. But he’s about to find out just how active history can be. Thank you, Jayson, for sharing your story with Spooked! Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, 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.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, and I can't wait to sin again. So, if you could forgive my next time, too, then I won't have to bludgeon you. This is a spooked. Stay tuned. Mine in my own business, having a little midnight chocolate snack, just a lick of the frosting. But maybe a tiny bit of the edge, you know, a small. small slice won't hurt, or maybe a bigger, smallest slice. And then sanity tries once more.

No, no, no, no, you're going to eat the whole damn cake. But I hear a voice that sounds like my own. But I watch it early in the morning. Big workday second myself up. Come on now, it's time to get up out of bed. And I'll hear, too sleepy. best to stay here. I've noticed

that the self that answers back to myself is never my best self. No, he's lazy. Sneaky, always looking for shortcuts and ways to get over. And I imagine that's not really me.

That's just residual badness, outside forces, or whatever. But as time passes, spray the children with cold water. I started to wonder if perhaps that voice, people in my way at the store, I hate them. That voice is my real voice, inner gallum.

Because no, it's not my better self, but it is myself all the same. Precious. To first meet him, he's in a shuttle, pulling up the gates of Camp Pendleton, a massive military training base. in the Southern California desert. Massive white arches that go over at the entrance. And in large black block lettering, it says welcome to Camp Pendleton. And there's a bunch of signs for people who have been deployed saying, we wish you luck or welcome home.

And I just remember the feeling of going, oh, I'm not the only one who has had to go through these arches. People from World War II, this is the same gate. that they utilize. It's a very historic base. Jason's first few months at Camp Pendleton went by in a blur. There was a lot to do, a lot to learn, and he was just trying to keep up. Then he got a call that he was being moved to a new barracks in Devil Dock Hall. And so when I walk into Devil Dock Hall, to my left and to my right are these long stretches

of hallways with these polished cement floors going through them. these coffin racks or beds, and they're stacked two on top of each other with some gear lockers on the side. Jason picked out a bed and started putting his stuff away. There was hardly anyone else around. At their fullest, the barracks slept hundreds of people, but most of them hadn't shown up yet. There's a curtain that covers you up when you're going to sleep. So I pull the curtains back and I get in my bed and I'm laying down. It's really dark. Very, very dark.

Then this heavy feeling came over me. Like if I peeled back the curtain right away, somebody would just be right there staring at me. And I get really anxious. I'm pulling it back, expecting to see somebody right there. And there's nobody. But the presence is still there. Just that overwhelming sense of not being alone.

Eventually, I just try to calm my thoughts and just say that this is a new environment. You have no idea what's going on here. And I just slowly start to drift off to sleep. As weeks passed and the barracks started to fill up with more people, Jason felt more at ease. Then he got an assignment to stay up and guard the barracks overnight. The point of the duty is,

to essentially practice what you would do out in the regular Navy, you know, to make sure nobody was going to come into the barracks who was unauthorized, that everything was safe, nobody was messing with each other. I get told that night that I'll be on the midnight to four, duty watch. Wake up time is at six. So I'll only get about two hours of sleep.

We have a big test the next day. So duty's the last thing that, that I need right now is what I'm thinking. That night, I'm sitting there underneath the blue light at the very end of the hallway. And you hear the snoring of all the different sailors that are asleep. Some curtains are open, some curtains are closed,

but nobody's awake. And I go return to my seat and I start to read my book, when all of a sudden out of the top corner of my eye, I see a shadow, a flash, run across the hallway and block out the light at the very end. And at first I think, oh, I'm just exhausted. I need some sleep. And then it happens again. This time, there's just a very faint sound of footsteps.

I'm very well awake at this point. And on high alert, and I wake my other duty member up. he was trying to get some shut-eye. We were taking shifts on and off. I wake him up and I say, hey, there's somebody running at the end of the hallway. We each go to the opposite sides of the room and we walk up the coffin racks.

And this is when I see a shadow figure at the very edge of the hallway. This perfect silhouette shadow of a person. Just standing there. no movement. I absolutely thought it was somebody who had gotten out of their racks and started wandering around.

So I'm shouting out to them, hey, who goes there? Hey, what are you doing up? Quit messing around, get back in your bed. Nothing happens. It just kept standing there in that frozen position and I'm nervous. I'm scared.

what is this, what's going on? And I tell my partner to come over and as soon as he walks over and gets into my position, the figure disappears. The hair is standing up on the back of my neck. I'm sweating a little bit. But I calm myself back down and me and the other duty switch and I lay down in the rack and I fall asleep.

There's just no time in an environment like that. that to slow down and smell the roses. You got to move on to the next thing. Then finally, Jason is assigned to a new training duty, standing guard at the top of the mesa. So the mesa is this flat-topped hill. There was a long winding road, and it's about a mile, so by the time I get up to the hill, I'm really, really exhausted. It's a beautiful, starry night. It's a very clear sky. You can actually see the Milky Way. It's such a clear night sky. It's dark, but the stars are lighting up the surrounding area.

So you do get to see shapes outlined, some mountains or hills in the background. The gravel of the road is very clear. I'm up there for about an hour, hour and a half, just roving around, waiting for the duty to end. And I hear off in the distance footsteps. Then I look down the road and I see there is an older gentleman with a flat top haircut, walking up the road towards me. He was wearing something long and flowy, straps coming off like a trench coat. There's no way for me to make out any other distinct features in the dark.

but the figure appears when it gets closer to be leaning forward. This is an aggressive walk, an intention-filled walk, that he's walking straight towards me, and I panic. There was a man in an aggressive manner walking towards me in the middle of the night. I have no idea what to do. Do I run off the mountain? Do I abandon my post? And so as he's walking forward, he gets closer and closer,

and then about at 100 yards away, he disappears right in front of my eyes. So I go running down the hill. I can't even feel my legs because I am so busy trying to understand what I had just seen. I'm looking and looking and looking for the next watchman, positioned about midway down the hill. I finally come to him

and I asked if anybody had passed by his location in the last hour. Did anybody come up the road to come check on us? And they swore absolutely not. No one had passed by his location

all night. Then I asked, would you be willing to switch with me and go back up on the mountain? There was an emphatic no. You need to go man your post. So being a proud 19-year-old young guy, I swallowed every bit of negative voice that said, do not go back up there.

And I slowly trudged my way back up that mesa to the very top of it. For the next two and a half hours, I just proceeded to think about anything else besides what I had just seen. I don't see anything or anyone for the rest of the night. But the moment that my watch went off and that timer read four o'clock, you cannot get me off the mesa faster.

I must have made it down that road in five minutes. As rattled as he was, Jason didn't talk about that night with anyone else. Training camp was already so busy. There never seemed a right time to bring it up. But one day, he found himself standing around the duty desk with a few other guys. It was a rare afternoon when they had enough time to just talk. And the topic of hauntings and whether or not we believed in them came up.

And that's when, I believe his first name was Brian. He is our instructor. And he begins to tell us a story about, one of his experiences that had happened about a year ago. He was right in the duty desk area that's centrally located when you first walk into the barracks, and he sees an older gentleman in a brown trench coat, shoot into the barracks and make a left right up the stairs to the second floor. The sergeant runs after the old man, gets up the stairs, looks at the duty, and says, where did the old man go?

And the duty desk at the second floor says, I have no idea who you're talking about. He was not willing to say that what he saw was a ghost. But the implication on his face was very clear. I am just absolutely flabbergasted and nervous, excited, because this is affirmation that these things are really happening. And I'm not the only only. only one. The sergeant has told his story at this point. And then one of the sailors chimes in

with a story about photos that he had found within the schoolhouse. The sailor said that he was cleaning out a closet within the schoolhouse and found a plethora of photos from previous classes that had graduated going all the way back to the 60s. When he was looking through the 60s and 70s photos, he noticed that there was a gentleman in the background in a trench coat. This old man in the background was obviously not a part of the group that was supposed to be the focus of the photo. But he was in enough of them in the same exact spot to raise some hairs on the back of the neck of the sailor. And so he walks up to an instructor and shows him all of these photos over the years. And the instructor tells the sailor, there was an instructor during the Vietnam War era that ended up passing away.

And that by all accounts, this must be him. That was heavy and very enlightening. It was this overwhelming realization that the man in the photo, the man on the mesa, and the man in the barracks may all be the same spirit. I was on the fence about the belief in ghosts before I went to Field Medical Training Battalion, and after I left Field Medical Training Battalion, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that ghosts exist. Military bases are full of just tragedy, accidents. You're doing highly dangerous things on sometimes a daily or a weekly basis. And so I think the life.

is very haunted. It also changed the way that I saw death. There were some moments when I was serving with the infantry that I was quite nervous and wasn't quite sure if this was going to work out or make it or not. And there was some comfort almost in the fact that there may be something that lies beyond this. Death is not the end.

is the ultimate conclusion that I came to. Thank you, Jason, for sharing some of your story with the spooked. Jason is our favorite kind of storyteller, a spooked listener. The original score for that piece was by Nicholas Marks. It was produced by Zoe Furigno. Check this out. There are real-life vampires. Right now, this day, look them up.

On the internet, today, old men have young plasma injected into the to extend their lives. And here's the thing you might not know. It works. The rich consume the young, literally. The billionaire set to so many things we can't imagine. People feed off all kinds of things. Blood, plasma.

Some are set to feed off a strong emotions. Of joy. More often than nothing, sorrow. And I'm wondering about these kinds of vampires who feed on something other than food, other than blood, if you have an association with such a person, or dare I even hope that you yourself are such a person, not a gaw, not someone who likes to wear capes, but someone who feeds on the emotions of others. Like people feed on steak and eggs. Well, I promise to keep your secret and only reveal it to the most amazing. amazing community of seekers in the land. Let me know.

Spooked at snapjudgment.org because there's nothing better on the spook story from a spooked listener. And if you haven't heard our sister podcast, Snap Judgment, I don't even know what's wrong with you. What is the problem? Snapjudgment.org

of a team that feels like they're being watched. Except, of course, from Mr. Mark Ristich. In fact, Mark always carries binoculars and a pair of sunglasses wherever he goes. He's looking even now. Now there's David Kim, Zoe Frignell, Ann Ford, Eric Yonnierz, Taylor DeKat, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Yari Bandi, Doug Stewart, Paulina Creeky, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Diti Umatu, and Lulu Jemima. This book theme song.

He's by Pat Macedon Miller. My name is from Washington and you know to look at a person going about their business. They may appear poor. confident, beautiful even. But I assure you, we are all actors hiding secrets. Sure, some are better performers than others, but we're all in the show. For the next time, you see someone about to recite their lines. Take a moment to consider if you might be the person to help them get off script. How?

How to convince someone that you see their uniqueness, that you are present, that you are there, that you are ready to hear their secret truth. And I'll tell you how. It's my favorite trick. Close. To complete strangers. And I'll say to them, but here,

check this out. Ever, never, never, ever.