Spooked - Mirror Image

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

When Jenny’s family moves into a rundown house outside Philadelphia, she’s excited to have the whole third floor to herself. She finally has privacy to become who she’s always been. But up there, she’s not the only one wanting to be seen.  Thanks, Jenny, for sharing your story with us! You can read more about Jenny’s experiences growing up in her memoir: I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted. Find more of Jenny’s books on her website. Produced by Erick Yáñez, scouted by Elliot Lightfoot, 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.

mirror on the wall? Who is the fairest of them all? The mirror laughed and then she said, Don't you know that you're a long day? We've crossed over to Spooked. Okay, so I'm going to tell you about a mistake. The mistake I made in high school, and I mentioned here on Spook that I explored hypnosis back in high school. It was fun, exciting, stage stuff. Had folk shouting out strange new languages, others jumping up to translate. I started out using my brothers as test subjects. Had them both barking like dogs, hilarious. Later, friends volunteered.

We'd laugh, watching them suddenly hold their nose, thinking they are smelling the worst thing ever. Good stuff, fun. I'm recoil now. I had no idea of what I was. playing at. He was barking like a dog, that's all well and good. That's chuckles and laughs.

But one day, I told Alex that he was going back in time. Back in time to when he was 10, 8, 4 years old. And I gave him a pen. And I asked him to write his name and then suddenly four year Alex. He says, I don't know how to spell my name. People gasp, and I was lucky. Everybody had a great time, even Alex. I should have left it alone, but now I had to push.

I want to be the man. So next session, I tell Tammy, when I'm setting up the induction, I tell her that we too, we're going to go back in time again, way back in time. But before we go, Timmy, I want you to know, whenever I say the word popsicle, you're going to immediately collapse

to the most beautiful dream of chocolate waterfalls and gumdrops and magic rainbows, okay? Okay, okay. Now, every sound you hear, every breath you take, you'll go deeper and deeper into this state. We're calling it hypnosis, right?

Deeper and deeper and deeper. Now come with me. Deeper through time. Deeper, you're 12 years old. Deeper, you're 10 years old. Deeper. Five. Three, deeper. Two, you're floating in between space.

And some people, Tammy, who have passed through this plan before, they recall that they once had an other life, a full life they lived before this one. And now, Tammy, to the life you had before, okay? Now go there, go into that life. Go into that body. And as soon as you're there, open your eyes. And tell me what you see. Everybody all around, they crowd around in anticipation.

This is the big showstopper, the wow moment, the thing everybody at school is going to talk about. Tammy opens her eyes and I see. Her head lulls to the side. Her breathing resumes deep and rhythmic. And all I know is that my little show? This show is over. That this game, this is not a game.

And I am worse than a fraud. See, it does not take evil intent to do harm. And I will be forever grateful that this time, for the first time, before putting someone under my ridiculous child's concept of hipism. No, since this time I told her about the safe place. I told her where to hide because truthfully, it's the 70s and her family is moving into a run-down house outside of Philadelphia. And in this place, the shadows know how to keep secrets, but sometimes those same secrets have a way of spilling over. in early August of 1972.

My parents, my sister, and I walk into this house with our three Dalmatians, and instantly it is clear that the previous owner of the house fancied himself an amateur interior decorator. This elegant living room was black, rooms painted crazy colors, The family room had these like wagon wheel chandelier things hanging from the ceiling

and zebra-striped paneling on the walls. The reason my parents could afford it, though, was that it was in such crazy bad condition. My father said, let's go upstairs so you can choose your rooms. Second floor was even darker than the first floor. My sister immediately chose her room. My father picked the room next to it, which was, I guess it was the master bedroom. I went into the last room on the second floor, and I see this room that looks like a girl's bedroom with these kind of frilly curtains on the wall.

I loved that room. And I said, is this going to be mine? My mother said, no, we thought you'd like to be up on the third floor. That's where the boys of the previous family. like the hunts had lived. I went up there and looked around and thought, yikes. It had this just kind of creepy vibe. There was an absolutely creepy vibe in there.

It was dark. And it also had this kind of creepy yellow wallpaper that featured what looked like sheet music. And then there was this bathroom with marks on the ceiling where the rain leaked through the roof. And I said, oh I have to be up there but you're all going to be down here and one of my parents said well you can have your own empire so I was like okay I guess I'm going to have my own empire one night my parents went out and I was determined to scrape off the

wallpaper in my bedroom I had this can of paint It was this kind of, you know, electric hippie blue. And I started tearing up the wallpaper, just ripping it down, left and right. While I was scraping off this wallpaper, I felt something was watching me. Something. I felt it so, so strongly. One part of me is just aware of what I'm feeling. And the other part of me is saying, The way you would.

There are no such things as ghosts. Don't be an idiot. I kept slicing the paper, and that's why I noticed something. Underneath the wallpaper were all of these scribbles and drawings. Right there, at shoulder level, there was a line that said, In this room in the year 1898 lived Dorothy Cummins, who was not of sound mind and drowned. pulled off this big chunk of wallpaper.

And I noticed below knee level, there were a bunch of children's drawings, as if a kid had been drawing on the wall and scribble. There were some wavy lines that might have been the ocean, a sun, a moon, and there was a face. There was a face of a woman with this long hair. It wasn't a great drawing, and it had been underneath wallpaper for a long time.

I put two and two together, so there was someone in this room who was not of sound mind, and now here are these drawings. So I just assumed that it had been that woman in the drawing, the one who had drowned. That's the story I assembled in my mind. It was creepy. And, you know, I'd painted over. and all those drawings disappeared. Living in that house was a very big change for us,

but also I was about to enter ninth grade, and that was really scary. I went to this all-boys school. It was a place where, you know, we had to wear coats, we had to wear ties. Everything was about football. I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to be a musician.

When I was home, I'd spend most of my time in my room by myself. It was a place of quiet. It was a place of peace. And on the third floor, there was this storeroom. In that room, of course, went all the garment bags and the clothes of my mother and my sister. As a kid, I'd play this game. called Girl Planet, in which I believed I was an astronaut who had crashed on a, you know, an alien planet.

But here's the deal. In that place, that girl planet, the atmosphere changed you into a girl. It just happened. And your clothes changed to a girl's clothes too. Bang. So, you know, on the third floor, there's nobody up there. every day I come home from school. I go in there, I grab one of the dresses, and I slip it on and go into my room and pull the deadbolt and sit down and do my homework. And then when I was done, when I signed me to go to sleep, I put them back.

There was one night. I woke up at like two in the morning, and I noticed that my dog was growling. My dog was called sausage. She was this kind of fat, Dalmatian dog and I love that dog like

crazy suddenly I hear a creek out in the hallway another creek so I got up to check things out and then I noticed the door to the bathroom was open

and I went into the bathroom and there over my shoulder I saw for a second in the mirror this old woman She was not terribly old, but she was old enough.

And she had long blonde hair. She had green eyes. She had like a long white nightgown. And I noticed that her hair seemed wet. I turned around and there was no one there. So I'm freaking out and I run back to my room. I lock the door and I get into bed and I'm just like, nope. That didn't happen.

I just lay down there, waiting to fall asleep. On that third floor, that feeling I had that I was being watched, I always had that feeling. Sometimes I'd find the bathroom door open, and I don't remember it being open. Had my mother been up there? Had my sister been up there? Had I just not closed it?

I don't think my sister or my parents ever felt any of this. One time I remember asking my mother, Mom, do you ever feel scared in this house? Do you ever feel, do you ever get the creeps? And she said, oh, of course not. It made me sad because it meant that I couldn't explain to her the thing I was feeling. But, you know, I couldn't talk about a lot of things. It had been another typical night for me.

I'd come home from school and managed to sneak into my sister's bedroom. My desire was to grab some stuff from her hamper. you know that's where she'd throw out her blouse and her skirt at the end of the school day so i go in there there was a green paisley skirt and a blue blouse and the little blue blouse it had these little mirrors in it i ran back into my room of course and hold the deadbolt i did the switcheroo at that moment i got that weird feeling again i felt the eyes watching me I did my homework, I did the switcheroo back, and it was time to go to bed, but I needed to put everything back where it was. I went down the creaking stairs, and I stuffed them back in the hamper.

And while I was in there, I thought, oh no, what if they hear me doing this? So I went into the bathroom, and I flushed the toilet to make it seem less suspicious. I went back up the stairs to the third floor. Got in bed. I went to sleep. Somewhere around 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock in the morning, I heard my mother screaming. I turned on the light by my bed, the light didn't go on. There's this kind of roaring sound. Like we're in the middle of a storm or something, and my mother is screaming from downstairs.

And I opened the door and walked down the stairs. to find this waterfall, ankle deep, on the second floor, pouring down the stairs and pouring through the rungs on the banister. My sister is in the hallway, and she's pointing to the bathroom, the one that I'd used before when I grabbed the clothes out of that happer. And now I see that the toilet in that bathroom is overflowing, water just pouring like a fountain. So my mother and my sister and I are walking around, and there's just water pouring everywhere. Now we hear this giant crash from downstairs. We all go down the main staircase and into the living room, and that's when we saw it. The kitchen ceiling just collapses, crashes onto the floor, the plaster is everywhere.

Here comes sausage coming down the stairs, and we go out into the front. hallway and at that moment the living room ceiling burst. Plaster, wood, it just rains down on us. My sister went to the front door, swings it open, and this water just gushes out onto the porch. So now our house was wrecked. I mean, it like really, really wrecked. They spent like the next week pumping water out. My first thought was, this is all my fault. This is because I flushed that toilet. But I remember thinking, what was that girl, Dorothy Cumman?

She was of unsound mind and drowned. And the last time I'd seen her, her hair was wet. And now here's my house. What does that mean? It began in earnest the process of changing that house from what it had been into what it was going to become. New wood flooring went down. The living room which had been black,

was finally painted a tasteful off-white. Down came all the old scary wallpaper, and in a year or two, that house was almost unrecognizable from the place that we moved into. It was the beginning of kind of the next part of my family's life, but when I got out of college, I moved to New York City,

and I forgot everything about Dorothy Cumman. I would visit my mother pretty regularly. My mother loved that house, and she'd lived in that house all that time. Just around when I turned 40, I think it was 2001. We were in what had once been the room with the wagon wheel chandeliers and the zebra-striped wallpaper. Now, of course, it was an elegant family room.

My father was long dead by then. I poured her a gin and tonic. Her favorite. On a Sunday night. And I said, Mom, there's something I have to tell you. And so I told her as trance, I'm sorry, I never told you when I was a child

because I was afraid you wouldn't love me anymore. And that's when I began to cry and shake. And just sob. But my mother reached out to me. She said, I would never turn my back on my child in my mother's last week or two of life. We had home health care nurses looking out for her. But one night, one of the home health care nurses quit.

She'd gone into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and in the mirror behind her, she saw the face of an old woman. She turned around and there was no one there. So there was still something up there, something still living in that house. In 2011, my mother died at the age of 94. You know, we did the thing people do. My sister and I selected the things of my parents we wanted to keep. The rest went off to auction.

There was one day when, you know, moving vans came, and I was just kind of overseeing the whole business. I was there by myself in the house. And I climbed the stairs, and I sat down in what had been that room with the yellow wallpaper. And I started weeping and crying. I felt the passage of the years and the loss of my parents, whom I really loved. And also, I remembered how much I had carried something that I just didn't have the language to talk about. Eventually, I got up and I went to the...

the bathroom. And I looked in the mirror and there was that old woman looking at me again. But I realized it wasn't a ghost. It was me. Age 55. It was the woman that I'd grown up to be. So much, Jenny, for sharing your story with the spooked. Jennifer Finney Boylan, she's the author of 19 books, including I'm Looking Through You, Growing Up Haunted, where you can read more about her experiences living in that house. Also, her new memoir, Cleavage. Men, Women, and the Space Between Us is out now. We'll have links to Jenny's books in the episode description.

That story was scouted by Elliot Lightfoot. The original scores by Nicholas Marks was produced by Eric Yannes. Done this before. Did you ever watch a child's sleep? Innocent, peaceful. Bruce Livinger is to watch his son sleep. Little James, just two years old, perfect, perfect little boy. Until one night, the screaming stops.

Airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out. Bruce would rush in to sue this little boy. Tell me everything that's going to be high. But night after night, 2 a.m., 3 a.m., this baby boy, he wakes thrash and kicking like he's trapped inside something. man can't get out. When I does mama holds him close and asks,

who's this little man? James looks up at her, terrified, and says, me, little James had never seen a war movie. Just two years old, he watches Barney, plays with blocks. He starts saying things. Specific things, this plane got shot down that the Japanese did it. says he flew off a boat called the Natoma.

Natoma? Bruce's pops. He thinks this crazy nonsense, but for some reason. Bruce searches anyway. Goes through old records, old books. Then he finds it. The USS Natoma Bay.

It's real. An escort carrier in the Pacific. And Benny learns it. One of his pilots was killed at. He would just. His name was James Huston Jr. And here, Bruce has to shut down his own little research project for a little bit. He'll understand Bruce, who's raised Baptist?

And his reincarnation is not part of his worldview, but his little boy keeps talking. Little James says he has a friend named Jack Larson. And it turns out there was a Jack Larson, who flew with Hudson under Toma Bay. Little James says His plane got hit in the engine Eyewitnesses saw Hudson's plane take a direct hit to the engine before it exploded and plunged into the sea

Little James draws pictures of aerial combat of explosions, signs of James 3 Why 3? Because I'm the third James. James Hudson, Jr. was James Hudson

the second. After many more hours of research, Many more deep family conversations, Andrea, James' mother, learns that Hudson's sister, Anne, she's still alive. James Hudson's baby sister, 84 years old and still grieving, and Anvia sets up a phone call. And so a boy can speaking to a woman he'd never met. Calls her Annie. Only James Hudson Jr. ever called her that. He knew their father drank

He knew he had to go away He knew their mother painted Anne's portrait When she was a little girl Private things Family things Things not in any book After they put down the phones Anne sends a package of young James

Along with a letter She includes her brother's belongings Family heirlooms gifted Is that they are his own birthright Model plane Bust of George Washington, she starts calling him James III. He calls her sister. When James 3 turns 11, his parents take him to Japan.

There they traveled to Tiji Jima. The small island nearest to where Hudson's plane went down. They motored out in a rented fishing boat to the exact spot. And there, James drops flowers into the water. Himself, for himself, from himself. this story. It's from the most extensively documented cases of past life recollection ever. I want to thank the family for the rafts of interviews, writings, even publishing the book Soul Survivor, The Reincarnation of a War II fighter pilot by Bruce and Andrea Littinger,

with Ken Gross. I also want to thank Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia, who documented this case extensively in his research on children's past life memories. And if you have a a story for spooked. Please let me know. Spooked at snapjudgment.org because it is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener. Be careful because Spook Studios is sneaking up behind you right this moment.

Don't look back. Don't look back. Even if you can't see it, you can feel it. Don't seek to find it. Let's it seek to find you. Take you in San Francisco is where we hide the secret. We've got the special incantations from Spook Legal Reading

that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning, or AI systems without prior written permission on Team Spooked. The union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL, CIL, Local 51, and Spooks is brought to you by the team that does not trust Mears.

Especially Mark Whistidge, he refuses to believe that's what he looks like. There's David Kim. Zoli Frigno, Eric Yanges, Elliot Lightfoot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Teo de Kott, Regina Bediaco, Polyne Creek, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Lithium Matu, Lidu, Leroulo Jemima, Doug Stewart, Nicholas Marks, the spook theme song. It's by Pat Messingney Miller. My name's from Washington. And I'm pretty sure that this is my first.

first time through this world, my first pass. I could be wrong, but I can't remember anything else, and I hope that when my time here is done, I don't feel the need to return. But I know right now I'm unfinished. Apologies must first be made, must be righted, wines, tasted, art, seen, hugs given, stories shared, so, so much to do. instead of rushing to do it. I find myself doom scrolling.

Their latest outrage on my phone. What a gift. What an amazing gift it would be to take that final rest and feel complete. Like, okay, I did that. Let us laugh together one last time, but to make that happen, I must first get very, very, very lucky. And then, I must get very, very busy and murder this electronic thief of dreams because I know absolute certainty.

Real horror?