Spooked - Monster Spray

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

Jennie and her family love their new house. If only the screaming would stop.Thank you, Jennie + fam, for sharing your story with us!Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Nichk 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.

Little Jackie Horner was locked in the corner because he did a horrible thing. As he screamed from the chair, they whispered their prayers, for they knew what the nighttime would bring. When I was a kid, going to stay overnight at my friends' houses, after basketball, after splashing in the pool, before nice mommies called us for nice dinners. You might go to their bedrooms, they play video games, to read up their comic books.

And because all poor kids are actors, I never let them see me marvel at the posters on the wall, chairs under desk, the beds, full beds with sheets and duvays and covers and linens, like you see on the TV shows. But at home, we. My brothers, my sister and I. Moving to a different place every year, we sleep on the floor. On a mattress, lights, busted, walls, bare.

You never decorate a room you don't plan to stay in. Best believe, I was certainly not inviting anyone to my house for dinner. No way. And I must be thinking about this. recollecting the other day waking up from a deep sleep in my grown man bed big big a California king bed big

and maybe because I'm still in that dream state for the first time I noticed how low my bed is set to the ground no box spring no frame like just the matches really on the ground

minimal. In fact, my bedroom is austere. No art on the walls, no outside light, set up almost like I'm planning to flee any moment. Though I've lived right here for years, and I know that I want light. I know I deserve color. And no one, no thing is stopping me.

I need to do better. I'm going to do better, but looking around and wonder and a fear, perhaps there are some things, some patterns that you can't run away from. Spookstar, a nice new, lots of spruce. The first day that we moved in, the kids were excited.

Rosemary was only in first grade. Gabriel was in preschool. They were busy just running around all over the place and investigating all the different rooms. There's a cathedral ceiling in the main room of the house. They're just like, this is huge. Look, I can see all the way up to the sky. Rosie got the larger room.

Gabe got the smaller room that was directly above our bedroom. Just made more sense to have him closer. He was only five. It was green and white wallpaper, very old, and wood floor. The first thing that I did was put them to bed. Maybe 10, 11 o'clock at night. Gabriel, he just starts screaming.

He was crying. He says he couldn't sleep. He doesn't want to be there. He's scared. I went upstairs. I gave him a drink of water, had him go to the bathroom, told him if he flipped his pillow, then everything was going to be okay, and rubbed his back.

And I stayed with him until he fell asleep. I thought he had had a nightmare, and so I said, okay, we're going to try again tomorrow. It's a change. He's five years old. He's in a new space. We just need to take time and get used to it. But Gabe's yelling in the night became a very common, almost a nightly occurrence. This was new behavior.

We didn't see this in the old house with him. Ed, my husband, his approach, was saying, oh, you got this, buddy. You're tough. You don't scared of anything. You can handle this. It didn't work. We had probably been in here for about three, four weeks. I go to bed and I hear Gabe screaming,

saying, he's squishing me, he's squishing me, he's trying to sit on my bed. I was like, is there somebody in here? But if there had been anybody else in the house, the dog would have alerted us. We would have found them. None of it made any sense. I was just very confused. I said to Gabe, there's nobody in your room. There's nobody here.

I don't see anybody, you're having a bad dream, you had a bad dream. But he insisted, he says, No, no, he's squishing me. I had remembered a trick that I had used when I was babysitting in college. Monster spray. I made the monster spray by taking one of those spray bottle dispensers and putting some water in it and a little essential oils. He liked the way it smelled.

And before I tucked him into bed, I had him watch me spray, the spray under his bed and around the windows. And then I tucked him into bed and I read him a story. He was really excited. If mom says this is monster spray, then it's got to work. It didn't do anything. Gabe kept screaming in the night. The days were hard because all day long, I'd be thinking, okay, what's going to happen tonight?

How is this going to go tonight? Ed has more of a easygoing attitude about it. I'm more like, okay, so this is a problem, and we have to fix it. After we'd been here about a month, well, no, longer than a month, because it was Halloween, I decided to throw a kid-friendly party. I wanted everybody to have fun, but mostly I wanted Gabe to have fun. I thought that might be a nice way of making the house seem less scary. It took some time to plan this party out, to make it a...

Halloween party, but make it very light and fun and sweet, so that the kids would see that we could be spooky, but good and fun spooky. There wasn't going to be any scary costume, so it was like a princess or a pirate. We put together child-friendly games, like pin the nose on the ghost. We were making caramel apples. We got small pumpkins that the children could paint and then take home. I thought that this plan was going to work and it was really going to be the turning point for Gabe.

I was really relieved to see that Gabe was relaxed and enjoying the house and enjoying his friends here during the party. Towards the end of the night, we planned a spooky walk through the house. There was different things that we had put in the house for them to look at. Like, oh, look, here's the black cat. So we were walking through the house. Most of us are up on the landing. One of my friends, I knew Gabe was saying he was seeing somebody in his room.

She made a comment that sometimes our imaginations make us feel like something that's not real is real. I think she thought she was doing a good thing by reinforcing the messages that I was giving him. out of the blue Rosie punched my friend in the stomach and said, he's real, he's real, Gabe's not lying. My friend gasped

and said, okay, so we're leaving. And she took her kids and left. Gabe just stood there with his eyes really wide, waiting to see what was going to happen next. I was shocked, I was embarrassed. I grabbed Rosemary and said, You don't do that. You don't ever hit somebody.

And then I put her in her room. And that's where she stayed until everybody was gone. That had the night end on an awkward note. She just stuck to her guns. She wouldn't retract what she had said, and she was clear she wasn't going to apologize either. I didn't know what to do. It was a couple weeks after the Halloween party.

Rosie and I were cooking together just the two of us. She says to me, you know, Mommy, Gabe's not lying. He's real. And I kind of went, oh, okay, what is this all about? So I said, do you see him? She says, he doesn't look at me. And then she's quiet for a second, and she says, he's not bad.

He just wants to play. Gabe doesn't like him, but he's okay. I said, oh, oh, okay. And then we continued cooking, but this was becoming a bigger deal than just some little kid having nightmares. One night, about a week after the party, I go to bed and I hear Gabe screaming.

this was not like his other screams. This scream was of a child in absolute terror. I couldn't get up the stairs fast enough. We find Gabe in the middle of the landing, clutching his blanket, just trembling, sweating. We couldn't make sense out of anything that he was trying to say for a couple of minutes. I wasn't sure at that point that he hadn't hurt himself, So I was checking him to see.

He looked okay. Then Ed says to me, you sleep with Gabe and I'm going to sleep in his room. He was just like, yeah, I'm going to sleep there. And then I'm going to tell Gabe everything's fine and we'll figure it out. The next morning, Ed comes downstairs and into the kitchen. The expression on Ed's face was really stoic and stony. And he says, Gabe doesn't have to sleep in that room again. He really wouldn't go into it.

He just said, there is something in that room, it's not good, no one's sleeping in that room. So, yeah, yeah. That's when I moved, Gabe out. He had his own room on the other side of the house. He settled right back into very much the same personality, funny, happy, easygoing, creative, playful.

And he'd sleep through the next. And I was so relieved that there seemed to be some peace in the house. I just tried not to think about it and not do anything with the room. It was about a year and a half later. I was pregnant with my third child. It was about 11 o'clock at night. Ed had already gone to bed. I had laid down, getting ready to go to sleep.

And I heard a kid playing on the upstairs landing. I heard their feet pattering upstairs. I heard things being moved around. It's most likely Gabe, who's running around. So I yell out, Gabe, get back to bed. Everything stops for a minute. I'm like, okay, good. Then I hear a door shut,

and I figured, okay, that's just Gabe going back to his part of the house. A couple minutes later, I hear what sounds like the rug sliding across the floor upstairs. So I'm getting really mad. And then I hear a kid on the stairway. You know, when a child goes down the stairs and it's one at a time, so it's a thump, a thump, a thump. And I'm thinking, oh, Gabe, you are in so much trouble.

You are in so much trouble. I did not want to give Gabe the satisfaction of knowing that I was going to pay attention to him. So I'm keeping my eyes close I'm going to sleep and you're going to bed Hear him come into the bedroom I hear his little footsteps And then I feel him staring over me in the bed

I say Gabe you need to get up to your bed right now He doesn't move I sit up in bed and I look at him The way that mothers do when they're really angry at a kid And all of a sudden all the air goes right out of me. My eyes are wide open,

and I am not looking at Gabe. It was not Gabe. It's him. He might be eight, ten years old. He has nightdress like they might have worn in the 1800s. A little page boy haircut. What struck me was the expression on his face. He had his head tilted a little bit,

and he's looking at me. me. And he looked lost and sad. He had this questioning expression. He had his head tilted and he was looking at me like if he could speak. He'd be asking me where he was or where his mom was. I wanted to cry. I felt so bad for this little child. I'm staring at him and he's staring at me and I can't get any words out. I back into the headboard. And I don't say anything. We were staring at each other for quite some time. It felt like minutes, but I know it had to have been seconds.

And then he walked around the side of the bed and into the bathroom with his head down. Pushed into Ed, and I'm like, I just saw a ghost child. And Ed's like, oh, okay. I'm like, no, no, I really did. And I get up out of the bed and I check out the bathroom. There's nobody there. go upstairs to check on the kids and both of them are sound asleep.

I'm just sitting on a stairwell going, what did I just see? What did I just see? This is real. This is not like on TV. This really happened. And then I'm thinking, okay, what can I do? I had seen things on television

or read things in books and figured that if you're going to speak to a spirit, you need to light a candle. So I did that, thinking, okay, well, this is what you're supposed to do. I felt ridiculous. I really did. I went upstairs on the upstairs landing. I took this little white tea light candle, and I just sat up there.

I started talking to whatever was in the house, and I said, I'm sorry if you're lost or confused. My job is to take care of this house and my children, and I need you to understand that. I wanted them to feel heard, and I also wanted them to understand that being disruptive or scary wasn't helpful or necessary. We could coexist. As I was speaking, the house became very still, and all the little noises that a house makes quieted. I felt as though I was being heard. I sat quietly for a while, and then the flame just went out. In the days following seeing the little boy, I thought about him a lot. I still think about him, but I've never had an opportunity to see him again.

I didn't tell the kids that I saw the boy. Not until much later, because I didn't want to scare them. Lily was born in 2004. One day, Lily was in her room. She was probably about four years old. And she had these two little toys, Big Bear and Jelly Cat. Lily was on the floor and she was playing a game with the two stuffed animals, but she's acting like there's another little friend in the room.

She's saying things like, no, it's your turn. No, you give me that. And she's just saying that to the air. I was trying to humor her and asked her about her little friend as I'm putting the sheets on the bed. And she says, it's a little boy. It's the little boy that lives in my room. I was like, oh, no. But Lily wasn't scared of him.

It was almost like she just accepted that, oh, here's this person. Sometimes I could hear her yelling at night, like, leave me alone. Go to bed. He's rolling a ball. She would complain about him keeping her up at night. By the time she was like 12, she didn't talk about him anymore. The little boy hasn't shown up for quite some time.

But now I have a grandson. I'm hoping he doesn't make an appearance. It's unsettling. And also, I have a certain amount of compassion for this little ghost if he's still lost and doesn't know where he's going and making friends with little human children. I would much rather have him be at peace than playing with my kids. Do you know there is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener? Congrats on the new grandbaby Jenny. please let us know if that little boy shows up again. I mean, please don't let me know.

I don't want any parts of it, but someone here has spooked, I'm sure, would be glad to provide any assistance that they can. The original score for that piece was by Nicholas Marks is produced by Anne Ford. To ask you about the nighttime, because maybe you, like me, have practiced your lucid dreaming. I know there are whole teams of scientists that study sleepers that control their own dream narrative.

They create characters, environments where they can fly, breathe underwater, explore outer space. Once or twice, I've touched this. And it's wondrous. Running through my own imagination and some say they can use this lucid state as the first step to walking away from the body altogether. Astro projection. Leaving themselves to experience another aspect of the world. There are also traditions, sploosters. Will you leave your dream?

They're going to someone else's dream. Maybe even force yourself into someone else's dream. Someone else's mind. Dreamwalkers. And spooksters, if you know about this practice, if you have experienced this, or if someone has crashed against a person, door of your dreamscape.

Please, please, please, please. It's stampjudgment.org because there's nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Spokes is brought to you by the team that listens with undivided attention each and every time. A little kid says there's a monster in the closet. Except, of course, from Mark Ristich, who just before bed tells little kids that there's a monster in the closet. There's David Kim, Zoe Ferrigno, Ann Ford, Eric Yannes, Teo de Kott, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Yari Bundy, Doug Stewart, Paulina Kriki, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Adity Umatu, and Lulu, Jemima. Spook theme song is by Pat Mussini Miller. My name is from Washington. And I have a friend who believes that she receives visitations from her auntie Ali Pearl. and in these visions

Ali Pearl gone all these many years she gives my friend suspect advice tells her to abandon a loving husband the man she bet all her money on the ponies

juggled knives when my friend asked the rest of her family about these thoughts no one doubts that Ali Pearl is stopping by now that's accepted but they also don't think for one moment she should be listened to.

What? Ali Pearl said crazy stuff when she was here. How's she going to be different when she did? That's a good question. Do we give the fallen more authority after they're gone? I've never met Ali Pearl, and this is not an invocation if she's listening, but no.

It seems like if someone's going to make the journey travel all this way, you might want to at least hear them out still. to be on the safe side and cover all the bases. If you do agree to have this little family reunion, as far as me and mine, I would take very special care to never, ever, never, never, never, never, never, ever, ever, ever, ever.