Spooked - Northspur Storm

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

Kathy and her kids leave a busy life in Southern California to live in a little cabin in the woods, without electricity. But then, strange things start happening. It seems Kathy and her children aren���t the only occupants of the cabin. Thank you, Kathy Bolte, for sharing your story with Spooked! Produced by Zoë Ferrigno, original score by Renzo Gorrio, artwork by Teo Ducot Episodes now drop weekly on Fridays. Featuring brand new stories -- along with episodes previously available only by subscription. Listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I built this chair. This chair is mine. Yes, I'll go old and sick in time, but those who sit when I am gone, they will not rise to see the dawn. You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned. There's a park in Berkeley, nearby where I used to live.

It's a quiet neighborhood. Nice, sweet little Willard Park, with a grassy field and at one end in an enclosed playground. For little kids, and it's all sandy so no one can hurt themselves. Got a slide. For many kids, this is their very first playground. And these kids, the kids that come here after their nap,

they're each other's very first playmates. In several afternoons with some snacks, some juice boxes, I'd load up the double stroller. Stop buying the way to get my then three-year-old daughter's friend, Julia. and we roll down to the park with both of them giggling at each other the whole way telling each other their little three-year-old secrets

as soon as we get to the park they jump out and run to the play area top speed to see which of their friends is here today and there's this boy Sandy-haired same age as them his mom must have been on my schedule because he was often bare

at the same time and they'd all give each other little kid hugs and the girls would say hello and he'd say hi right back and he turned and tell the swings that the girls, they're here now

later on he might warn the slide that when he got on it that he didn't want to go too fast because he didn't want to get hurt and one day when the girls asked him to play tag

he said okay and took a coin out of his pocket, placed it carefully on the sand, and told the sand. Sand, don't lose this quarter because my grandmother gave me this quarter, so I'm going to keep it right here now because I'm going to go play tag.

But it better be right here when I get back. On the way home that afternoon in the stroller, the girls, they asked me if things that are not people can hear what they say. What do you think? They look at each other and whispered amongst themselves that Julia, the spokesperson, she says,

we think that maybe stuff can hear us if the stuff has people in it. Hmm, make sense to me. Spook starts. Way back machine. Set to 1977, Kathy Bolta, she thinks she's found the perfect new home for her and her kids.

Great little cabin in the middle the beautiful redwood forest. And to Kathy, it seems like paradise, but you already know better. So I'm living in Southern California and I'm going through a divorce. I have two small children

that I'm trying to learn how to be a single parent to. I'm pretty loaded up with stress, so I'm really wanting a change in my life. My soon-to-be ex, he takes a little trip up to Northern California, California. And when he got back from his vacation, he brought me a little stack of local magazines, local newspapers. I was thumbing through and I came across a little advertisement in the classified section. Cabin in the Redwood Forest, free to family.

with children for reciprocities. I think this is just perfect. I call the number, and this woman named Ethel answers the phone. And she explains to me that her son, she needs someone to help drive him in and out of the forest to go to public school, because Ethel is totally blind.

Ethel tells me that this little cabin, she tells me that it has no electricity. We have to chop our wood, cook on a wood stove. We'll have a little propane refrigerator, but it's really back to the land kind of living. She's a little hesitant, though, to say yes to me because I'm just a single parent with two kids, a four-year-old and an eight-year-old. and she doesn't think that I can handle the task. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I'm up to the task either, but I want this so bad that I talk both myself and her into giving me a chance.

And so she does. We put everything that we were taking with us into the U-Haul, and we drove up to North Spur. It's a really small little cabin, just four rooms. A living room, which is also the kitchen and the dining room, two little bedrooms and a bathroom. And it's surrounded by redwood trees. Because we moved in in the summertime, we had our days and our nights free. My kids and I got to do a lot of walking through the forest.

We have a Dalmatian dog, so we got to take our dog Molly through the forest, through all of these wonderful creeks and streams. There's no sound except the beautiful whisperings of the forest. It seemed like heaven. So there are only about six or eight families that live in this big valley of North Spur. And one of the people that lives there, her name is Mary. I met Mary through Ethel, and she begins to tell me, about Ethel. She told me that Ethel was quite the character, that she was an old hippie

from the Hate Ashbury District in San Francisco. She told me that there was one time when Ethel had a pet aunt eater in her apartment in San Francisco. And she also told me that everyone who knew Ethel knew her to be a very gifted psychic. One afternoon, I'm reading my book, and Molly scratches at the door, and I open the door to let her out, and I just let her play in the forest to her heart's content, and when she's ready to come in, she scratches at the outer side of the door

so that I open the door and let her in. I happen to be in the kitchen at the kitchen sink. I open the door because I'm right there, but Molly is not there. I step out onto the porch and I look around and I see her standing on the other side of the stream which is about oh maybe 200 yards from our front door. She's looking right at me and then she looks immediately to the left

and then she looks back at me and she looks to the left like she was focusing on something and then back to me so quickly she looks back at me again and then she runs as fast as she can to get back into the house. I thought she must be afraid of something. I didn't know what had scratched at the door. And I didn't know if Molly was reacting to some wildlife that was out there or what, but I didn't see anything, so it was really confusing to me.

So even living in the forest, in the middle of the forest, I have to admit I'm a bit of a neat freak. So I like things in their place. I like to be organized because it helps me function in my life, my crazy little life as a single mom. So I always like to have things in their place so that I can find them easily. Well, I start finding things out of place.

I find the brush that I brush my daughter's hair with every morning. in a different room. I find my son's bed slippers in my bedroom. And I've taught my kids to put things back where they belong to. So it seemed unlikely that they were moving things, but we were in a new environment, so I thought, well, you know, maybe things are just being moved around that weren't being moved around before.

So one of our nightly rituals is to read books together. And now that we live here in the Redwood Forest, we have to read these books by the light of kerosene lamps. So we sit down to read our book, and I light the lamp. And I'm reading a story to them, and we're all enjoying the story, and all of a sudden the light goes out. it becomes pitch black.

There are giant redwood trees all around my little cabin. There's no moon that comes through. There's no stars that twinkle through the windows. It's completely dark. And I know I have to light the lamp again, so I do it quickly, and the lamp comes back on. And then after a while, it goes out again. and so I lighted it again.

I've checked the wick, I've checked the oil, everything is fine, it's functioning perfectly well. The room was very still, there was no breeze in the room, no fan, no nothing like that. I don't know why it's going out. So every couple of nights, this happens again. We settle in for our ritual of bedtime and the light goes out again. It's a little frustrating and it's really confusing because I switched out the lamps and every lamp that we light to sit down and read our bedtime stories does the same thing. It's a little bit of a joke to us now. Just like any kid, my kids love ghost stories.

So my kids and I start to joke about having a ghost in the house that's blowing out the lamp. You know, the kids go, it went out again, you know, and we have a little fun like it's Halloween in our bedroom. I'm getting dinner ready one night, and I go to get plates out. We have open cupboards where our plates sit, and the plates are stacked up, and they happen to be a little odd-shaped because they're dinner plates that I made in a ceramics class at college. and I noticed that the plates are making an odd shadow in the cupboard and the shadow that they're making is the shadow of a silhouette of a man it's just his head and it looks just like a real man was standing there

and making a shadow on the wall this man has a rather large sort of protruding forehead and a rather large sort of protruding nose. And then his chin is a little recessed. And he appears to have a bald head. He's very distinctive looking. I thought, hmm, that's interesting. It looks like a man in my cupboard.

I didn't really think much of it. It just seemed like it was a trick of the light or a trick of the shadow. So a little later that evening, I take my kids in and put him in the bath for the evening. to get them all ready for bed. And they're having their fun in the bath, and I'm sitting in there with them. I'm looking around a little bit in the bathroom, and I see the same silhouette of that man

on the wall in the bathroom. This time, it's being made by a stack of towels that's sitting on the cabinet. I think this is really curious. That really seems like the exact. same silhouette that I saw in my kitchen just an hour ago. Over the next days and even weeks, this same silhouette of this same man started appearing in all kinds of places in our cabin. Of course, the first thing I thought was that my eyes were playing tricks on me.

It always seemed to be made by something that was real in the room like a stack of books or some dishes or some towels. But as I kept seeing it, it became harder and harder to convince myself that this was just a coincidence. But I don't say anything to the kids. I don't want to scare them or make them freak out at all. But then one day, I'm in the kitchen, I'm at the kitchen sink, I'm scrubbing some vegetables. And my son says, look, mom, looks like a man on the wall. And I turn around and look at the shadow that's being made by the Franklin stove. This shadow is the exact silhouette that I've been seeing around every part of this cabin.

And I say, oh my gosh, Zachary, it is a man. It is a man on the wall. I don't tell him just then that I've seen it too, but a little later, a few days later, we all started seeing it everywhere, inside of our cabin and outside in the woods, in the shadows that were made by the ferns and the wild iris that grew in the forest.

And that's when I began to realize that it's not just a coincidence. There must be something going on. on in this house. So in the main room, we do have one propane lamp. And that propane lamp is installed on the ceiling. And the way you light a propane lamp is very different than the way you light a kerosene lamp. You have to turn on the propane. You have to put the match to the propane gas and it it ignites, you know, like a little tiny mini explosion. And now the lamp is lit and it creates a bright light, a really bright light in the room.

So one night, it was time for bed. Kids had had their beds. They were in their jammies. They were in their beds. I went to bed. The house is completely black because all the lights are off. And at about 2 o'clock in the morning, I wake up because the house is bright. The main room is bright.

I walk in there and someone has lit the propane lamp. I didn't light it. My kids are too little to light it. They don't know how to light it. And even if they did know how to light it, they would have had to put a chair on top of the table. to reach that lamp. I feel so freaked out. My breath caught in my throat.

I looked around to see if anybody was in there. I was even afraid to walk into my own kids' bedroom, even though I wanted to go in there and make sure that they were okay. I take a deep breath and I walk in to make sure that my kids are okay. I see that there soundest, sleep in their beds, and I kind of look around a little bit in the house wondering, did somebody

come into my house? But we live way deep in the middle of the Wedwood Forest. There's nobody out there. I walked back into the main room, and I turned off the lamp. And then I went back into my own bed, and thoughts were racing 100 miles an hour. What caused this? I was trying to explain it to myself logically. But of course, I couldn't come up with anything that was a logical explanation.

I got up a couple of other times to go in and make sure that the kids were okay. I thought about scooping them up and bringing them into my bed with me. But I didn't want to wake them up. I didn't want to frighten them. And so I just went back to my bed again and didn't really sleep until morning. So when I woke up the next day, I was still a little freaked out, and I decided that I wanted to talk to Ethel about this. I'd heard all these stories about Ethel being so psychic. I thought maybe she could help me figure out what was going on in my little cabin.

So I walk over to her house. It takes me a little while to get there. She invites me into her living room. when we sit down by her big stone fireplace, and I tell her about what's been happening in the cabin. And I tell her, I'm frightened. She tells me that what I'm experiencing and what I'm seeing is Evan, the old logger that used to live in our cabin,

that used to live on this property. Apparently she knew about Evan because she had done some research about the land when she moved into it several years back. She said, this is your space now. And so if you're freaked out by this, you can just ask him to leave.

I'll give you a ritual, and you can ask him to leave. Honestly, it made me feel, I don't know, a little special that The kids and I had this ghost living in the house with us, this ghost of Evan. I don't know that a lot of people get to have this experience. So I decide that I'm not going to ask him to leave. Nothing that he had done so far was too out of line.

As long as he kept it within the same parameters that he was keeping it in now, I was okay with that. Ethel has invited me over to her home anytime I want to. to go to let myself in and play the piano. One afternoon, Ethel and Teter in town with the kids, and I go over to play the piano. And I go into the house, I sit down at the piano. I started playing the Moonlight Sonata. As I'm playing, all of a sudden, I hear this, ding, ding, on the treble end, on the high end of the piano.

And then I hear on the base side of the piano, on the left hand side, I hear this, ding, ding. And I look over and the key's going down and then it's released, just like someone is playing it. Someone's put their finger on it. It's like someone is sitting at the piano with me

interrupting my playing. I pulled my hands away. and put them at my chest and just sat there looking at the keyboard. And all of a sudden, I didn't feel alone anymore. I felt the presence of another person sitting right next to me. I was scared shitless. I had chills from head to toe. It was like adrenaline shot through my body.

I didn't want to wait for anymore. I immediately get up. and I walk over to the door, which is very close to the piano. I open the door. I step out onto the porch and I pull the door to close it and it won't close behind me. It's as though someone is blocking the door. I try to close it several times

and it's like there's a body in the door blocking the door and it won't close, but I can't see anything there. Finally, at about the fourth or fifth try, it closes, and I jammed back to my little cabin. And I don't even look behind me to see if there's anyone following me. I just want to get out of there. This felt scarier than the other things that we'd been through because everything else was distant, you know. It wasn't something that was potentially sitting right next to me, potentially touching me. Maybe Evan knew that I was instructed to have him leave the cabin and I chose not to.

Maybe he's choosing to escalate what he's doing. It just felt like it was getting closer and more intimate and a little more scary. I decide I want to get a pony for my daughter because she had a pony when we lived in Southern California and she was a good little writer and I wanted to get her another pony. So I looked in the classified and I found a pony, a little Welsh pony named Scruffy. So we bring Scruffy back to the property, back to the land, back to the valley, and we need to build a corral for Scruffy. So we get the wood together and we build the corral.

And then I realized that we need to build a gate for the corral. and that's a little bit more complicated. But I remember that we have a gate in the back of the property, in the back behind our cabin. And this gate isn't attached to anything. It looks very old, very ancient. It's got ferns and moss growing on it. It looks like it had something certainly attached to it many years ago,

but right now it's just a gate standing out, in the middle of nowhere. So I think this is perfect. So my friends and I dig the gate up. We take it to the corral. We attach it to the corral. And now Scruffy has a proper place for him to call home. So we're all done building the corral, moving the gate. We feel very satisfied. My friends go home. My kids and I go back into the cabin. You know, we take our baths. We get snugged in. and ready for bed and all of a sudden then we start to hear a lot of wind, a lot of really heavy, loud wind. And the rain starts. It had not been a rainy day before.

It had been a little overcast, but there was really no sign of rain. And it got heavier and heavier and heavier. And the rain got so heavy that it started knocking branches off of the water. the big redwoods and the branches were crashing down on the ground and there was thunder we even saw lightning down in the depths of the forest where it was usually really black and we were all pretty frightened and we were huddled together because we were just afraid it sounded like a big redwood could come crashing through the bedroom window at any moment so we were of up most of the night and in the wee hours of the morning, the storm begins to die down and goes away.

And we get a little bit of sleep when it finally gets quiet. So the next morning we're eager to go outside and see what's happened out there. So with my kids following behind, I walk out and I walk out. over to where we built the corral. Thank goodness Scruffy was just fine. He actually didn't want to go into the corral the night before. So he huddled in next to the kitchen where he liked to sleep. So he actually walked with us down to look at the corral. I see that there are big tree branches that have fallen down. And when I get to the corral, I see that it's completely destroyed.

The trees, the branches have fallen on all of the corral, and it's smashed to smithereens. There's nothing left of it. But the only thing that's still standing is the gate. The gate is perfectly intact. it hasn't been hit by anything and as I'm standing there looking at this destruction Ethel and Ted drive up the driveway Ethel and Ted had been out of the valleys for the weekend

they had gone into the city, into San Francisco to spend the weekend and now they come back they drive up into the land and Ethel gets out of the truck and walks directly over to me and she says Kathy, did you move the gate?

I was so shocked. How would she know that I moved the gate? She's blind. She couldn't have seen that I moved the gate. Nor could Ted have seen that I moved the gate because the view was blocked by the redwood trees. And yet she knew. And I said, yeah, I moved the gate. She said, you have to put it back immediately.

That was Evans Gate, and he did not like it, that you moved it. We put the gate back. We build a new gate. We build a new corral But now I'm afraid of Evan After the storm I begin to realize what Evan is capable of I began to think that there could be a possibility

That someone could get hurt So within the next day or two The kids were off with Ethel and Ted At school in town I was alone in the valley again So I sit down in the middle of our main room And I put each of these ten candles in a circle around me And I light them all

And I begin to talk to Evan And I say to him Evan I realize that this was once your physical space But it's my physical space now It's my space and the space of my children and for a while it was okay to share this space with you but now you're beginning to scare us a little bit and so I need to ask you to leave

we didn't have any occurrences after that day our kerosene lamps are no longer being blown out we don't see evans face on our walls anymore the things that we're looking for haven't been moved. I felt like there was a big weight that had been lifted from my shoulders. It felt safe in our house again. So when I moved out into this redwood forest, I really wanted to learn more independence.

And I learned how to be my own plumber. And I learned how to chop wood. I learned how to grow vegetables. And all of that was empowering. But none of it was as empowering as it was when I was able to ask Evan to leave. And he actually did. One day, I'm in my bathroom and I'm brushing my teeth. And I'm looking out the window kind of space, doing my morning routine.

And I see those ferns on the forest forest. floor being depressed as though there's something, someone walking through them, like there are footsteps depressing the ferns. And I'm safe in my cabin, but I'm looking out at this and I'm thinking, that's Evan. I was glad to see what I thought was Evan, still kind of hanging around, but not bothering us. It's almost like, okay, We have an understanding now. You can still hang around the property. Just don't come in my home.

Thank you, Kathy Bolta, for sharing your story with the spooked. Kathy is our favorite kind of storyteller. She's a listener, and you too can share your own stories with us, spooked at Snap Judgment.org. The original score for that story was by Renzo Goryo. It was produced by Zoe Furno. Let the dark winds blow we walk this path. Together.

If you have your own story of a battle against the darkness, I want to know all about it. Let me know, spooked at snapjudgment.org because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spook listener. Yeah, we got swag. Snapjudgment.org and remember,

if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day, get the amazing. The stupendous Snap Judgment podcast, it's storyteller. with the three. The spook was created by the team that speaks to everyone who will listen.

Ever listen from Mark Ristich. He talks to everyone who will not listen. There's Anna Sussman. Our chief spooksters Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick. Andy Nguyen Nguyen Wynne. Lauren Newsom. Leon Morimoto,

Rindso Goriot, Davey Kim, Versa Dodge, Zoe Frigno, Tiffany DeLiza, and Ford, and Doug Stewart. The spook theme song, It's by Pat McCabe Miller.

My name is in Washington, and people think that it's quaint. The little place out there off the grid, no electricity, rustic. And you know what? All of that is fine. You don't need power generators or cell towers, underground cables.

We don't need any of it. The one thing I would advise if you're going to cut cords and you bring nothing else out to those woods. Remember to at least pack a candle and a match so that you'll never

ever never ever never ever never never never never never ever